Of course, undergraduate athletics and undergraduate athletes persist—it would be a tragedy if they did not—but the type of youth that has been rather effectively denominated the "rah-rah boy" is increasingly difficult to find. His place has been taken, not by the "grind," the plodding, prematurely old student, caring only for his books and his scholastic record, but by a normal young man, aware that the campus is not the most important place in the world; aware, in fact, that the university is not the universe.
This young man knows about class politics, but also about international politics; about baseball, but also about contemporary literature. He is much more a citizen than his predecessor of ten years since, less provincial, less aristocratic. And he not only enjoys literature, but actually desires to create it.
The chief enthusiasm at Harvard seems to be the drama; indeed, the Brown of Harvard to-day must be represented not as a crimson-sweatered gladiator but as a cross between Strindberg and George M. Cohan. At Columbia—I have Prof. John Erskine's word for it—there has lately developed a genuine interest in—what do you suppose? Poetry!
I interviewed the bulletin-board outside Hamilton Hall before I interviewed Professor Erskine, and it, too, surprised me. It was not the bulletin-board of my not altogether remote undergraduate days. It bore notices telling of a meeting of the "Forum for Religious Discussion," of an anti-militaristic mass-meeting, of a rehearsal of an Elizabethan drama. It was a sign of the times.
Professor Erskine said that undergraduate ideals had greatly changed during the last few years. I asked him how this had come to pass.
"Well," he replied, "I think that college life reflects the ordinary life of the world more closely than is usually believed. This is a day of general cultural and spiritual awakening. The college student is waking, just as everybody else is waking; like everybody else, he is becoming more interested in the great things of life. There is no reason why the college walls should shut him in from the hopes, ambitions, and problems of the rest of humanity.
"It isn't only the boys that have changed—the parents have changed too. Time was when the father and mother wanted their son to go to college so that he could join a group of pleasant, nice-mannered boys of good family. Now they have a definite idea of the practical value of a college education, they send their son to college intelligently.
"Also, the whole theory of teaching has changed. The purely Germanic system has been superseded by something more humane. The old idea of scholarship for its own sake is no longer insisted upon. Instead, the subjects taught are treated in their relation to life, the only way in which they can be of real interest to the students.
"You will look in vain in the modern university for the old type of absent-minded, dry-as-dust professor. He has been superseded by the professor who is a man as well as a scholar. And naturally he approaches his subject and his classes in a different spirit from that of his predecessor.
"We have a new sort of teacher of English. He is not now (as was once often the case) a retired clergyman, or a specialist recruited from some unliterary field. He is, in many cases, a creative artist, a dramatist, a novelist, or a poet.