The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

CHAPTER IV

COLLEGE LIFE

I passed my examination and resumed my place in the class, but I never tried district school-teaching again. Entering upon my junior year I had a room in the north college. Each of the upper buildings—which properly should have been called halls—was divided into five sections, in effect separate residences, each being under the custody of one of the professors or tutors, who was responsible for order in the same, the two end sections of each of the colleges being an official residence for one of the senior professors with families. The rule required the students to be in their rooms after supper, but it was almost as much honored in the breach as in the observance, and, though the skylarking which resulted from the former often brought the section officer up, those who had any tact avoided too close an insistence on the regulations, so that the students in the same sections commonly visited each other in the evenings, and not infrequently those from the other sections came in.

Our quarters were of the simplest,—one room for two students, with one wide bed,—and there we lived and studied. At half-past five the bell rang to wake us, and half an hour later for prayers, the sleepy ones returning to sleep after the waking bell, and thrusting themselves into their clothes as they ran when the prayer-bell rang, to get to prayers before the roll-call was over. From prayers again we dispersed to the recitation rooms for the morning recitations, and then to breakfast, mostly in town. There were two boarding-houses, one at each end of the college walk, known as "North" and "South" halls and forming part of the architectural scheme of the institution, and here board was provided at somewhat lower terms than at the private boarding-houses in town, and of very much inferior quality. The price at the halls was, if I remember correctly, $1.25 a week for three meals a day, that in the town ranging from $1.50 to $1.75. Furnished rooms in the town cost 75 cents per week more, and a few favored or wealthier students had permission to room in them, but as a rule the undergraduates of Union were men of very limited means, on which account the president and founder of the college, Dr. Nott, had planned its regulations to facilitate the attendance of that class of students, and the rules were such as closely to restrict the students from any participation in the social life of the towns-people. The visits of the section officers to the rooms of the students were irregular, and the inquisition into the causes of absence so thorough, that few, not of the most reckless, cared to risk a visit to the town, half a mile from the upper buildings; and the old doctor's police was too good for men to escape detection in any serious indulgence in irregular hours.

Union was, at this epoch, and during the active life of the doctor, the third university of the United States, coming, in the general estimation and the number of its graduates, immediately after Yale, Harvard being then, as always, the first; and it owed its character and peculiar reputation to the strong and singular personality of its first president. I have, in the course of my life, become more or less acquainted with many able men, and Dr. Nott was the most remarkable of all the teachers I have ever known, considering the limitation of his position and profession,—that of a Presbyterian clergyman in a time when sectarian differences ran high, and his sect had no lead in public opinion. He had attained his position by the force of his character assisted by his extraordinary tact and eloquence, but unaided by patronage, and this at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a time when institutions were forming and nothing was settled in the character of society. The manual of public speakers which we used to draw on for the speeches in class recitations included, as one of the most brilliant examples, the doctor's oration on the death of Alexander Hamilton, killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, one of the earliest and the most prominent of the demagogues of America. I have not read the oration for fifty years; but, as I remember it, it was, in the fashion of the day, one of the most eloquent of all our readings.

As I was a favorite of the doctor in the last year of my course and for years after, and as no one has ever in my estimation done him justice, it is to me a debt of gratitude, as well as a matter of justice, to repair as best I may this neglect. No one but a pupil could ever have fairly estimated his force of character, and no pupil whose intercourse with him was not carried into the post-graduate years could measure the ability with which he advised, especially in political matters, with his old pupils. In the days of his activity, no institution in the country furnished so large an element to the practical statesmanship of the United States as did Union. Seward was one of his favorite pupils, and it is well known that, up to the period of the American Civil War, he never took a step in politics without the advice of the doctor. Having had a struggle with poverty in his own early life, Dr. Nott sympathized heartily with the poorer students, and a practical education was more easily gained at Union than was then possible at Yale or Harvard. Men were allowed to defer payment of the fees till later life when their means had increased; and, though there were no scholarships, there were many students whose burdens were so far alleviated by the regulations that an earnest man who was determined to take his degree and work his way if he must, needed never leave college unsatisfied.

The doctor's reading of character and detective powers were barely short of the miraculous, and his management of refractory students became so well known that many who had been expelled from the other universities were sent to Union and graduated with credit, so that the college acquired the nickname of "Botany Bay." There came to him once for admission a student expelled from Yale for persistent violation of the regulations, and naturally without the letter which by general usage was required from the president of one university to another, certifying the good standing of the student. The president of Yale wrote to the doctor to ask "if he meant to take that scoundrel into his college." The doctor, who had made a rapid examination of the man, replied, "Yes, and make a man of him." In one of my post-graduate years, when I was staying with the doctor, he told me the story of this man. He had estimated his character at a glance correctly, and saw in him a mismanaged student. He was admitted unconditionally, as if he had come with the best of characters, and for a time he justified the confidence reposed in him. But the uneasy nature one day broke out, and he committed a gross violation of the rules. The discipline of the doctor began always with a friendly conversation, and with some men ended with it, for he knew so well how to paint the consequences of expulsion that it sufficed; but on the entry of this student into his library, he saw on looking at him that he "had the devil in his eye." He had, in fact, said to his roommate on getting the summons to the interview, "If the doctor thinks he is going to break me in he'll find himself mistaken." The doctor had a curious kind of vision which made it impossible to say which of the persons in the room he was looking at, and when, while seeming to be engaged on his book, he had looked into the eyes of the student, and saw that the light of battle was kindled in them, he waited for a little, and then, as if preoccupied, said to him in his most kindly tone, "I am very much occupied at this moment, my son; won't you come in to-morrow evening?" The young man went back to his room already half conquered by the affectionate manner, but the important point gained in the doctor's tactics was that the psychological moment of combat in the student had been reached and could not be kept up for a day, and when on the next evening the interview took place, his combativeness had given place to perplexity and complete demoralization. In this state the doctor gave him a paternal lesson on the consequences to his future life of the rebellion against necessary discipline and of persistent disorderly conduct, but without any actual reproof or mention of his offense, and all in his invariably kindly tone as if it were a talk on generalities, and then dismissed him to think it over. He had established cordial relations with the rebel, and from that day had no trouble with him, and he graduated at the head of his class.

And the doctor understood men so well that he never wasted his trouble on those who had nothing in them, but let them drift through the course unnoted. Expulsions were very rare, and the secret police of the university was so competent that the almost absolute certainty of detection generally deterred the men from serious infractions of the rules. The government seemed to be based on the policy of giving an earnest man all the advantages to be got out of the institution, and getting the indifferent through the course with the least discredit. In a state of society in which the collegiate standing was of importance to a man's career, this condition of things would have been a grave objection to the college, but in our western world the degree had very little importance, and the honors no effect on the future position. Most of the prominent men of our past had not even been through any university, and in politics it was often rather an obstacle than a recommendation that a man was a "college man." What the doctor tried to do, then, was to make a man when he found the material for one, and to ignore the futile intellects. This was the scheme of the education at Union when I was there, and it rarely failed to find the best men in the class and bring them forward.

Our college life may have been to the men of sufficient means more largely supplied with the elements of excitement, but for the poorer students there was little romance in it. Now and then a demonstration against an unpopular professor, a "bolt," i.e. abstention en masse from a recitation; or a rarer invasion of the town and hostile demonstration gave us a fillip, but the doctor had so well policed the college and so completely brought under his moral influence the town, that no serious row ever took place in my time. Later he told me how he managed one of the worst early conflicts, in which the students on one side of the college road, and the town boys on the other, were arrayed in battle order, determined to fight out the question who were the better men. The doctor had early notice of the imminent row, and, fetching a circuit behind the "town," encouraged the boys on that side with assurances of his impartiality and even his satisfaction with a little punishment of the students, if they were aggressive. "But," said he, "don't begin the fight and put yourselves in the wrong. If my boys come over, thrash them well, but let them strike the first blow." Having put them in the strongest defensive attitude, believing that they had the doctor with them, he went round to the students and applied the same inducements to the defensive, leaving them under the persuasion that he entirely approved their fighting, and then he went home and left them to their conclusions. As time passed and neither took the offensive, they all cooled off and went home.

The tact with which he dealt with the occasional outbreaks in the college was very interesting. If it was a case of wanton defiance of the habitual order, there was a very slight probability of its being overlooked. A favorite prank of the stealing of the college bell was invariably punished, first by having a hand-bell rung a little earlier than regulation hours all through the sections; and, when his secret police had discovered the offenders, they were punished according to custom, never very severely, but sufficiently so to make them feel humiliated. But the mystery of his police was never explained, and we were always at a loss to conjecture how he discovered the most elaborately concealed combinations, so that suddenly, even weeks after, when the culprits thought they had finally escaped detection, he would announce at prayers that they were to come to his study to explain. If the outbreak, however, had been in any way justified by an arbitrary or unwise act of discipline by any of the professors, he used to ignore it altogether.