Not long ago, I spent some time with the graduate students at an Eastern university. Their conversation at dinner gave no evidence of common intellectual interests. They appeared to talk of little but football games.
On a visit to a Southern state university, I found the women's dormitory in confusion. The matron excused the noise and disorder on the ground that a big football game was pending and it seemed impossible for the girls to think of anything else.
'The big game comes to-morrow?' I asked.
'Oh, no, next week,' she said.
Last spring, at a large university on the Pacific Coast, I met one young woman of the freshman class who had already been to thirty-one dances that year. At a state university of the Middle West, I found that the students had decided to have their big football game on Friday instead of Saturday, in order to wrench one more day from the loose grip of the curriculum. When the faculty protested, the students painted on the walks, 'Friday is a holiday'—and it was.
Intellectual enthusiasm is rare in American colleges, and is likely to be rarer still if social and athletic affairs continue to overshadow all other interests. Their dominance has given many a college faculty its characteristic attitude in matters of government. They assume that boys and girls will come to college for anything but studies. They tell new students just how many lectures in each course they may escape. A penalty of unsatisfactory work is the obligation to attend all the meetings on their schedule, and the usual reward for faithful conduct is the privilege of 'cutting' more lectures without a summons from the dean. Always the aim of students appears to be to escape as much as possible of the college life provided by the faculty, in order to indulge in more of the college life provided by themselves. Their inventive powers are marvelous; they bring forth an endless procession of devices for evading the opportunities for the sake of which (according to old-fashioned notions) students seek admission to college. The complacent acceptance of this condition by college faculties—the pervasive assumption that students have no genuine intellectual enthusiasm—tends to stagnation. In the realm of thought some appear to have discovered the secret of petrified motion.
The pronounced tendencies in higher education aggravate the disease. Feeble palliatives are resorted to from time to time,—the baseball schedule in one college, after six hours of debate by the faculty, was cut down from twenty-four games to twenty-two,—but the bold and necessary surgeon seldom gets in his good work. When he does operate, he is hung in effigy or elected President of the United States.
Concerning the policy of no intercollegiate games at Clark College, President Sanford says: 'Our experience with this plan has been absolutely satisfactory and no change of policy would be considered. Doubtless some of the less intellectually serious among the students might like to see intercollegiate sports introduced. It is generally understood that in a three-year college there is not time for such extras.' The faculty appear to be unanimously in favor of no intercollegiate games, since the course at Clark College takes only three years. Intercollegiate contests appear to be ruled out chiefly on the ground that, in a three-year course, students cannot afford to waste time. But why is it worse for a young man to waste parts of three years of his student life than to waste parts of four years of it?
The educational effect of our exaggerated emphasis on intercollegiate athletics is shown in the attitude of alumni. It is difficult to arouse the interest of a large proportion of graduates in anything else. At one of the best of our small colleges, in the Mississippi Valley, I saw a massive concrete grandstand. This valiant emulation of the Harvard stadium seemed to me to typify the indifference of alumni to the crying needs of their alma mater. For these graduates who contributed costly concrete seats, to be used by the student body in lieu of exercise, showed no concern over the fact that the college was worrying along with scientific laboratories inferior to those of the majority of modern high schools. 'What could I do?' the president asked. 'They would give the stadium, and they would not give the laboratories.'