Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 100, April, 1876

by Various

He was gone. The sailors also had disappeared.

And there, as I sat in that open boat, midst of the Sunderbunds, at my domestic antipodes, happened to me the most wondrous transformation which the tricksy stage-carpenters and scene-shifters of the brain have ever devised. For this same far-stretching horizon, which had just been alluring my soul into the depths of the creative period, suddenly contracted itself four-square into the somewhat yellowed walls of a certain apartment which I need not now further designate, and the sun and his flaming clouds became no more nor less than a certain half dozen of commonplace pictures upon these same yellowish walls; and the boat wherefrom I was about to view the birth of continents degraded itself into a certain—or, I had more accurately said, a very uncertain—cane chair, wherein I sit writing these lines and mourning for my lost Bhima Gandharva.

THE COLLEGE STUDENT.

The most marked trait in American college life is its spirit of caste. This same spirit, it is true, manifests itself in other lands—in England, France and Germany. In fact, it reached its extreme development in the last-named country: the very term Philistia is of German coinage. The causes that originated and kept alive this spirit in Europe are obvious. During the Middle Ages students enjoyed privileges such as made them, in the strictest legal sense, a distinct class. Thus, they had the right to wear side-arms, and had their own courts of justice. Some of these privileges have survived, in England and Germany at least, to the present day. Yet even in Germany the old student spirit is evidently on the wane, and is doomed to extinction at a day not far distant. In America, on the contrary, where like causes have never operated, the spirit exists in force. It is due to peculiar causes—to college life, to locality and to the mode of teaching.

The tendency to monkish seclusion lingers in England and America, the lands that have led the van in political and social progress. The motives that urged the monks of the olden time to turn their backs upon the world and bury themselves in cloisters were praiseworthy: but for such havens of peace, letters might have perished. When the Reformation was carried out in England, and the sequestration of Church property left immense convents idle, it was only natural that the newly-established colleges and halls should convert the buildings to their own uses. The dormitory system of Oxford and Cambridge, accordingly, has an historic right of being; and, growing by natural laws, it has become so rooted in the national life that nothing short of a political revolution, greater even than that of the seventeenth century, could eradicate it. The founders of our earliest colleges were governed by the desire to make them conform as closely as might be to the English model. There is scarcely the trace of a disposition to look to the institutions of continental Europe for guidance. This was a matter of course. The founders of our colleges and the men whom they selected to be teachers were Englishmen by descent or by education, trained after the English fashion—seeking freedom in America, yet at heart sympathizing with English thought, English habits and English prejudices. Hence the establishment of our dormitory system—not at once nor in all the fullness of a system. The colleges were at first little more than schools. The scholars boarded with the professors: there were no funds for the erection of separate buildings. But soon we see the evidences of a persistent effort to make each college an embryonic Oxford or Cambridge. Harvard, Yale and Princeton before completing the first half century of existence were committed to the dormitory system. Other colleges have followed the example thus set. The exceptions are too few to need enumeration.

The mildest judgment that can be passed upon the system is that it has cost us dear. Were all the figures accurately ascertained and summed up, were we able to see at a glance all the money that has been expended for land and brick and mortar by the hundreds of colleges between Maine and California, even such an aggregate, startling enough in itself, would fail to reveal the whole truth. We should have to go behind the figures—to consider what might have been effected by a more judicious investment of those millions—how many professorships might have been permanently established, how many small colleges, now dragging out a sickly existence, too poor to live, too good to die, might have become vigorous branches in the tree of knowledge. What have we in return for the outlay? A series of structures concerning which the most ardent friend of the system cannot but admit that they are inelegant, uninspiring and unpractical. Some of the newer dormitories at Harvard and Yale, it is true, are decided improvements. They are well built and supplied with many conveniences that will serve to make student life less heathenish. But they can scarcely be called beautiful, and they certainly are not inspiring. The heart of the student or the visitor at Oxford swells within him at the sight of the grand architecture, the brilliant windows, the velvet turf. It is pardonable in us to wish for ourselves a like refining beauty. But is it not becoming in us to confess, without repining, that we cannot realize the wish? Oxford is not merely the growth of ages: it is the product of certain peculiar ages which have gone. Men build now for practical purposes, not for the glorification of architecture. The spirit of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance will probably never return, or, if it should, it will come as a folk-spirit, neither springing from nor governed by the colleges, but carrying them along with it. Hence, our colleges may content themselves with playing a less ostentatious part, and the most zealous alumnus need not think less of his alma mater for observing her limitations.

We are not concerned with the dormitory system in all its bearings, but only in so far as it directly affects the student. The fact is significant that a large majority of our collegians pass their term of four years, vacations excepted, in practical seclusion. They are gathered in large numbers in dingy and untidy caravanseries, where the youthful spirit is unchecked by the usual obligations to respect private property and individual quiet. President Porter, in his work on The American Colleges, endeavors to prove that the dormitory system is, upon the whole, favorable to discipline. The facts are against his argument. The evils of student life are two—vice and disorder. So far as the former is concerned, no system has succeeded, or will ever succeed, in extirpating it. Vice may be punished, but it is too deeply rooted in human nature to be wholly cured. Its predominating forms are drinking and gambling, neither of which is checked by the dormitory system. At Oxford, for instance, both these vices prevail despite the most elaborate system of gates and night-patrols. Our college faculties must perforce content themselves with detecting vice, and punishing it when detected. The most satisfactory and appropriate means of detection is to watch closely the way in which the student performs his college duties. No man can waste his time over cards or the bottle without betraying his dissipation in the recitation-room. Here, and not in the dormitory, is the professor's hold upon the student. The dormitory system, so far from restraining, rather tends to diffuse vice and render its practice easy.

Disorder is different from vice. The latter, the doing of things wrong in themselves or made wrong by force of opinion, shuns observation: the former courts it. The disorderly act is in many instances harmless enough in itself, and the evil lies in doing it in an improper place and at an improper time. Hence it is that good students, who would scorn to stoop to vice, so often suffer themselves to be led to the commission of an act of disorder. We may even go to the extent of admitting that occasionally college disorder is not without a certain color of reason. It is the youthful way of resenting a real or an imaginary grievance. When a class discovers that it or some of its members have been treated too severely, according to its standard, by a certain professor, what more natural than to create a disturbance in the recitation-room or in public? In itself considered, the act is a youthful ebullition, and we might be tempted at first to look upon it as something venial and pass it by in silence. Reflection, however, should lead us to the opposite conclusion. There is nothing that a college faculty cannot afford to pardon sooner than disorder. The reason is almost self-evident. There is nothing that ruins so effectually the general tone of the college and demoralizes all the students, good and bad. Vice moves in rather narrow circles—much more narrow than those in authority are apt to perceive. It does not affect the great body of students, who are filled with robust life, and whose very faults are conceits and extravagances rather than misdeeds. But disorder spreads from one to another: originating with the morally perverse, it gathers sufficient volume and momentum to overpower at times even the very best. To protect the better class of students, then, were there no other reason, the faculty is bound to interfere energetically and in season. Its position is not unlike that of the commander of a regiment. The colonel will not unfrequently wink at a certain amount of dissipation among the officers, and even among the privates. He may say to himself that the offence is one hard to prove, that perhaps it will wear itself out in time, that perhaps it is best not to draw the reigns too tightly. But no commanding officer can afford to tolerate for an instant the slightest movement of insubordination. He must put it down on the spot, without regard to consequences, and without stopping to inquire into abstract questions of right and wrong. No one, of course, will assert that the head of a college is to act according to the military code. The differences between soldier life and college life are fundamental. Yet there are certain resemblances which prompt and justify the wish that a touch at least of the military spirit might be infused into our colleges. The spirit, be it carefully observed, and not the forms, for the incompatibility between the military and the literary-scientific methods has been demonstrated repeatedly, the most recent evidence being furnished by those colleges that have attempted to combine, under the terms of the Congressional land-grant, agriculture, the mechanic arts, classical studies and military tactics. But a touch of the military spirit would be possible and beneficial in many ways. It would make the relationship between professor and student more tolerable for both parties. The mental drill and substantial information acquired through the college course are undoubtedly great. Still greater is the formative influence exercised by the body of students upon the individual member. But the greatest lesson of the course—and the one which seems to have escaped the otherwise close observation of President Porter—should be the lesson of deference to position and authority. This deference to one's superiors in age and position, this respect due to the professor simply because he is a professor, and aside from any consideration of his personal character or attainments, should be the first thing to impress itself upon the student's mind, the last to forsake it. For it is a high moral gain, a controlling principle that will stand the graduate in good stead through all the vicissitudes of after-life. Unless it be acquired we may say with propriety that the college course has fallen short of its highest aim. For the acquisition of this spirit of respect, military training is superior to civil. One officer salutes another, the private salutes his officer, simply because the person saluted is an officer. It may be that he is disagreeable or boorish in manners, or even notoriously incompetent. This matters not: so long as he wears the epaulettes he is entitled to an officer's salute. Honor is shown, not to the transient owner of the title, but to the title itself.

The inculcation of a kindred spirit in all our colleges is devoutly to be wished. It exists already in some of the older ones, especially in the New England States, and in not a few of the very recently-established ones. But even where it does exist it has not full sway: it does not set, as it should set, the keynote to college life in all its variations. And in very many colleges it is unable to establish itself because of gross disorder. Should this opinion seem harsh and sweeping, the reader, if a student or a graduate, has only to recall to mind the instances that he himself must have observed of discontent and disorder growing out of trifling causes and culminating perhaps in a "class-strike." Let him consider the waste of time, the ill-temper, the censorious, invidious spirit engendered by this fermentation, the loss of faith in the conduct, and even the honesty, of the faculty. Can he conceive of anything more likely to frustrate all the aims of college study? Yet in nine-tenths of the cases of public disorder it will be safe to assume that the dormitory system lies at the base of the evil. Where it does not occasion the grievance, it furnishes at least the machinery for carrying matters to a direct issue. Community of life suggests of itself community of action. The inmates of a dormitory acquire insensibly the habit of standing by one another. This is so evident that it needs no proof. But an illustration of the workings of the dormitory system and its opposite in one and the same place will not come amiss. When the Cornell University was founded, some of the trustees opposed the erection of dormitories. Others, assuming that the people of Ithaca, to whom a college was a novelty, could not or would not furnish sufficient accommodation, argued that dormitories were an absolute necessity. They carried the point: the Cascadilla was converted into a large boarding-house for both professors and students, and the greater part of South University was laid out in student-rooms. Both buildings were full. This state of affairs lasted during the first year and part of the second. Disturbances of various kinds were not infrequent; and although no one of them was very serious, yet in the aggregate they were a severe tax upon the faculty's time and patience. But before the end of the second year many of the students discovered that life in town was more comfortable, and accordingly they gave up their university rooms. At the opening of the academic year 1870-1871 perhaps three-fourths, certainly two-thirds, were lodged in town. The change was significant. During the entire year, although individual students were disciplined for individual offences, the faculty was not once forced to punish public disorder. This phenomenon will appear still more remarkable when we consider that meanwhile the so-called "class-feeling" had sprung up, and that students admitted from other colleges had endeavored to introduce certain traditional practices. The year 1870-1871 was perhaps too good to be repeated. The next year witnessed at least one discouraging exhibition of student-manners, and since then there have been explosions from time to time. For all that, the general tone at Cornell is excellent. The transitory disturbances seem to leave behind them no abiding ill-will, and there is certainly less friction between faculty and students than at any like institution. Nowhere in this country is college life more free from petty annoyance, dislike and mistrust, and hereditary prejudices. It should be added, that those students who now reside in the university buildings belong almost exclusively to what is known as the working corps. They are type-setters in the printing-office, or are engaged upon the university farm, or in the workshops connected with the department of the mechanic arts. Their time is too valuable to them to be wasted. The experience of the Sheffield Scientific School resembles that of Cornell. In one respect it is even better. This school has never had a dormitory system. Its managers, imbued thoroughly with the German and French spirit of study, have resisted successfully from the outset every inducement to follow the usual college system. Although growing up in the shadow of one of the oldest colleges in the country, and exposed to formidable competition, and still more formidable criticism, the Sheffield Scientific has adhered strictly to its self-appointed mission. It has regarded instruction in science as its sole object. Whatever tended to this object has been adopted: everything else has been rejected as irrelevant. We are not concerned in this place with the general reputation of the Sheffield Scientific at home and abroad. Singling out only one of its many merits, we can point to it with pride as the first institution to solve effectually the knotty problem of discipline. The means of its success are anything but occult. It has made its pupils feel from the moment of entrance that they were young men, and must act as such. It has refused to encumber itself with expensive and useless dormitories, and the faculty has in the main left the students to themselves. But whenever interference became necessary, it has acted promptly, without undue haste or severity, and also without vacillation. Here, at least, we do not find the ruinous practice of suspending a student one week, only to take him back the next. The mere existence, then, of the Sheffield Scientific—to say nothing of its success—by the side of the powerful corporation of Yale College is fatal to every argument in favor of the dormitory system.