“We want place for men who, whether as fellows or lecturers, shall, in connection with our universities, be free to pursue original investigation and to give themselves to profound study, untrammelled by the petty cares, the irksome round, the small anxieties, which are sooner or later the death of aspiration, and fatal obstacles to inspiration. It is with processes of thought as it is with processes of nature—crystallization demands stillness, equanimity, repose. And so the great truths which are to be the seed of forces that shall new create our civilization must have a chance first of all to reveal themselves. Some mount of vision there must be for the scholar; and those whose are the material treasures out of which came those wonderful endowments and foundations which have lent to England’s universities some elements of their chiefest glory must see that they have this mount of vision.”
Higher education does not require that college discipline, direction and supervision should be abated; on the contrary, it demands more active exercise of all these functions. Some quite good and earnest men go to college only to read; their proper place is a large library in a city. Others, taking advantage of “elective” studies, want to plunge into a groove and remain there. Elective studies have their advantages, but young men are seldom fit to select for themselves. Says President Bartlett, of Dartmouth:
“From the fact that he has not been over the field, the youth is incompetent to judge what is the best drill and culture for him. And while diversity of ultimate aim may modify the latter part of the basal education, specialism comes soon enough when the special training begins. And those institutions seem to me wisest which reserve their electives till the last half of the college course, then introduce them sparingly, and not miscellaneously, but by coherent courses. A general and predominant introduction of electives is fruitful of evils. It perplexes the faithful student in his inexperience. It tempts and helps the average student to turn away from the studies which by reason of his deficiencies he most needs. It gives opportunity to the lazy student to indulge his indolence in the selection of ‘soft’ electives.”
Fortunately discipline is not so hard to maintain in American colleges as in European universities. There are some “hard boys” at Harvard, and the Yale Cubs often make night hideous at New Haven, nevertheless the American student is generally more respectable and law-abiding than his foreign brother. Says President Eliot, of Harvard:
“The habitual abstinence from alcohol as a daily beverage, which the great majority of American students observe, explains in some degree the absence in American institutions of all measures to prevent students from passing the night away from their college rooms or lodgings. The college halls at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton stand open all night; while at Oxford and Cambridge locked doors and gates, and barred and shuttered windows, enforce the student’s presence in his room after 10 P.M., but are most ineffectual to restrain him from any vice to which he may be seriously inclined. There is more drunkenness and licentiousness at Oxford and Cambridge than among an equal number of American students; but this fact is due rather to national temperament, and to the characteristics of the social class to which English students generally belong, than to anything in university organization or discipline. Among manly virtues, purity and temperance have a lower place in English estimation than in American.”
So sensible are the mass of American students that when the question of undergraduate participation in college management was raised at Dartmouth the college societies reported adversely on the plan, and the college paper, edited by students, manfully asserted, after a plea for strong government, “What our colleges really need is more of West Point.”
Between proper government and amateur police work, however, there is a wide difference. Ex-President McCosh, of Princeton, who was a studious, quiet man, whom no one could have suspected of sympathy with wild hilarity, said:
“There may be colleges, but they are few, which are over-governed by masters who look as wise as Solomon, but whose judgments are not just so wise as his were. In some places there may be a harsh repression of natural impulses, and an intermeddling with joyousness and playfulness. I have known ministerial professors denounce infidelity till they made their best students infidel. The most effective means of making young men skeptics is for dull men to attack Darwin and Spencer, Huxley and Tyndall, without knowing the branches which these men have been turning to their own uses. There are grave professors who cannot draw the distinction between the immorality of drinking and snowballing. It is true that we have two eyes given us that we may see, but we have also two eyelids to cover them up; and those who have oversight of young men should know when to open and when to close these organs of observation. I have seen a band of students dragging a horse, which had entered the campus, without matriculating, into a goody-student’s room, and a professor with the scene before him determinedly turning his head now to the one side and now to the other that he might not possibly see it. I have witnessed a student coming out of a recitation-room, leaping into a wagon, whose driver had villanously disappeared, and careering along the road, while the president turned back from his walk that his eyes might not alight on so profane a scene.”
But between mere fun and out-and-out brutality Dr. McCosh drew the line sharply when he said:
“It is certain that there are old college customs still lingering in our country which people generally are now anxious to be rid of. Some of them are offsets of the abominable practices of old English schools, and have come down from colonial days, through successive generations. Thus American hazing is a modification of English fagging. It seems that there are still some who defend or palliate the crime—for such it is. They say that it stirs up courage and promotes manliness. But I should like to know what courage there is in a crowd, in masks at the dead of night, attacking a single youth who is gagged and is defenceless! It is not a fair and open fight in which both parties expose themselves to danger. The deed, so far from being courageous, is about the lowest form of cowardice. The preparations made and the deeds done are in all cases mean and dastardly, and in some horrid. I have seen the apparatus. There are masks for concealment, and gags to stop the mouth and ears; there is a razor and there are scissors, there are ropes to bind, and in some cases whips or boards to inflict blows; there are commonly filthy applications ready, and in all cases unmanly insults more difficult to be borne by a youth of spirit than any beating. The practice, so far from being humanizing, is simply brutalizing in its influence on all engaged in it. It does not form the brave man, but the bully. The youth exposed to the indignity this year is prepared to revenge it on another next year. A gentleman who knows American colleges well tells me that in those in which hazing is common in the younger classes the very look of the students is rowdyish. It is astonishing that the American people, firm enough when they are roused, should have allowed this barbarity to linger in our colleges, great and small, down to the last quarter of the nineteenth century of the religion of purity and love.”