But the student is an object of perplexity and wonder to the professor, who generally ends by taking very seriously, very literally, as something that cannot be changed, his attitude towards athletics and the social life of the college. Starting from such an assumption, the professor becomes shy of teaching; that is, he keeps for himself whatever true intellectual and spiritual interests he may have, and deals out to the students in the classroom rations of knowledge, which go up to form a complicated system of units and credits symbolizing the process of education. There is, to my mind, no more tragic misunderstanding in American life.
My own experience (and I give it for what it is worth) tells me that athletics and the social life are vicarious satisfactions for much deeper spiritual and intellectual needs. The student receives from the common American tradition a desire for spiritual values; from his individual reaction to that tradition, a craving for intellectual clarity. But he is handicapped by his scholastic unpreparedness, and disillusioned by the aloofness of the professor, by the intricacies and aridity of the curriculum: by the fact, only too evident to him, that what he is given is not science or thought, but their scholastic version. Whenever a man stands before him, and without trying to “put himself at his level,” talks to him as one talks to a man, thinking for him as one thinks for oneself, there is no more ready and enthusiastic response to be had than from the American student. He is not afraid of the difficulties or dangers, but he must trust his guide, and know that his guide trusts him. There is evidence for this in the cases which are too frequent to be called mere exceptions, of those American professors who are truly popular in the colleges and universities. But until many more of them realize what splendid material is in their hands, what big thirst there is for them to quench, and go back to their work with this new faith, the gulf will not be bridged, and young America will have to attempt to solve her own problems without the help of the spiritual experience of the centuries.
* * * * *
This condition in the institutions of higher learning is a symbol and a mirror of the condition of the country. With an impoverished religious tradition, with an imperfect knowledge of the power of intellect, America is starving for religious and intellectual truth. No other country in the world has, as the phrase goes, a heart more full of service: a heart that is constantly quaerens quem amet. With the war, and after the war, America has wished to dedicate herself to the world, and has only withdrawn from action when she has felt that she could not trust her leaders, what was supposed to be her mind.
In a few years, the children of the recent millions of immigrants from all regions of Europe will come forward in American life and ask for their share in the common inheritance of American tradition, in the common work of American civilization. They will not have much to contribute directly from their original cultures, but they will add an unexampled variety of bloods, of intellectual and moral temperaments, to the population of America. Their Americanization, in habits and language and manners, is a natural process which, left to itself, invariably takes place in the second generation. America must clarify and intensify her tradition, the moral discipline of the Puritan, the moral enthusiasm of the Discoverers and Pioneers, for them, and they will gladly embrace her heritage; but this clarification and intensification is only possible through the revision of the original values in the light of the central humanistic tradition of European thought.
The dreams of the European founders of this Commonwealth of Utopia may yet come true, in the way in which human dreams come true, by becoming the active, all-pervading motive of spiritual effort, the substance of life. Exiles, voluntary or forced, from England and Ireland, from Russia and Italy, from Germany and Israel, children of one mother, unified in America as they will not be unified for centuries to come in Europe, will thus have a chance to anticipate, in the civilitas americana, the future developments of the humana civilitas.
And if this generation needs a motto, I would suggest one line of Dante:
luce intellettual piena d’amore:
the light of intellect, in the fulness of love.
Raffaello Piccoli