The American College

IN his memorable study of American civilization Mr. Bryce called especial attention to the ardor and industry of our college instructors, and ventured to affirm that, “ of all the institutions of the country, the colleges are those which seem to be at this moment making the swiftest progress, and to have the brightest promise for the future. They are supplying exactly those things which European critics have hitherto found lacking in America, and they are contributing to her political as well as to her contemplative life elements of inestimable worth.” To one who overlooks the whole field the facts are indeed impressive and significant. The zeal for learning on the part of the people, the enthusiasm for research on the part of the scholars, remind one of the brilliant days of the Italian renaissance. Our colleges are increasing in size with astonishing rapidity, and, though they constantly plead poverty, some of them have princely endowments. New institutions appear in the twinkling of an eye; universities spring forth fully equipped; boys of the humblest origin and the slightest means struggle for an education and gain it; grown men devote to the abstract loyalties of the intellect the time, the strength, and the ambition which one would not expect to find given over, in a country where moneymaking is supposed to be the chief object, to anything but the pursuit of wealth. Not only is the American classical college increasing in strength, but its young rival is growing apace, — that curious mongrel creation of ours, the collegiate scientific school, an institution by which raw boys are supposed to obtain a technical education directly, without the timewasting diversions of a college training. That such schools should arise in America is not to be wondered at. The natural trend of the national genius is in that direction. We are eager to prepare for that life of action which competition and environment force early on most of us, anxious to learn clever and successful ways of handling tangible objects, and impatient of all that delays professional advancement and worldly progress. So strong is the popular tendency towards a rapid “scientific” education, so noble appears the ideal thus evoked, that, with a really large endowment, it would not be hard to build up among us an institution that would surpass in numbers, and perhaps eventually in influence, our largest and strongest colleges. Unless severe measures are taken to preserve the dignity of some of the technical professions, indeed, we may soon see them largely filled with men narrowly and slightly trained for their work. Irrespective, however, of the real value of our recent movement toward popular scientific education, it is evident that, under present conditions, a so-called higher course of study is practically open to all able-bodied and able-minded youth. An American who cannot, if he chooses, go through a college or a scientific school is either lazy or weak, for any bright boy, unless he has others dependent upon him, can undoubtedly earn money enough for his three or four years of study without extraordinary loss of time or opportunity. Nor are interest and ambition confined to the young student. It is astonishing to notice the increasing ardor with which the great body of teachers discuss theories and principles of education. Indeed, there lies our safety from the dangers to which almost absolute freedom in such matters lays us open. Every college and almost every school can give the amount and kind of instruction which it chooses. But colleges and schools are voluntarily coöperating; school-teachers and school superintendents flock to conventions and conferences; chairs of pedagogy are established, educational magazines are founded, and the younger generation is being experimented on by its instructors in a fashion that ought eventually to lead to sound current ideas in regard to the principles and practice of the art of teaching.

Meanwhile, the reputation of our colleges at home and abroad is steadily growing. Harvard, for instance, has just been honored by having a book written about her by an accomplished and distinguished Englishman who recently spent a few weeks in Cambridge.¹ Such a publication is significant. The parent element in all our older systems of college education was the English university ideal of culture. It was for that the impressionable Yankee boy yearned, thrilling as he read of Matthew Arnold’s Oxford, “ steeped in sentiment,” spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages,” “ calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—* to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side.” With us college has never been widely conceived of as a resort merely of learning. Education taught how to live, aroused the sluggish taste, tempered the rough character, revealed new and keen enjoyments, forced men to know men, built up a lasting interest in things of the spirit and the intellect, encouraged fine ideals, and laid the foundation of abiding friendships. To be a Harvard man or a Yale man was something more than to have mastered certain arts and sciences : in the one case, it was to have attained a flexible, intelligent, and gracious culture; in the other, to have learned how to live with dignity and success under fierce competition and rigorous training among a host of one’s peers. Dr. Hill’s book will encourage the old tradition. The Oxonian has scarcely grasped the wider significance of what he heard and saw in Cambridge on the Charles; at least he has made no attempt to distinguish the elements that Harvard has contributed to American civilization, or to measure the progress of our oldest and largest college toward its double goal of wisdom and culture. But he has done us the new honor of writing about Harvard as he would have written of the university at Prague, at Bologna, or at Oxford, as an interesting institution around which for centuries historic associations have gathered fast, and will still gather. The old Harvard was a power in Massachusetts, in New England, and finally in the United States. We can see now, and rejoice in seeing, that she, and others like her, may be a power in the whole world of scholarship and culture, — a monument of the past, a record of the present, a foundation stone of the future.

But another ideal has been for a generation troubling the minds of American students. It is not enough that we should strive for English culture; we must attain, after the German fashion, supremacy in learning. “ To develop youth into men of independence, of independence in thought and purpose, and fully conscious of their own responsibility,” — that, according to Professor Paulsen, is the real purpose of the German university. This, perhaps, might be recognized as the aim of higher education in any country, if we were to interpret the words loosely, but the German ideal of university instruction does not apparently allow a great principle to be loosely interpreted. From the beginning to the end of Professor Paulsen’s admirable historical and theoretical account of higher education in Germany,² for instance, we are kept face to face with the ideal that the young man, on completing his university course, should have not only the equipment of a sound general education, but that of a sound special training in a certain field of knowledge. He must, furthermore, not only have mastered the known facts of that field, but have shown himself capable of advancing one step beyond his predecessors, and adding new facts to the mass of knowledge previously existing in his department. Once admitted to the university, the youth may study what he pleases, — Lernfreiheit ; once authorized as an instructor, a man may teach what dogmas or doctrines he pleases, — Lehrfreiheit; but teacher and pupil have alike the same aim in view, — not personal culture or the spreading abroad of culture through the acquisition of learning, but the extending of the bounds of human knowledge. It needs only a glance at the facts of the last twenty years to appreciate how strong has been our ambition to walk in the German path. It is with such aims that universities have been founded at Chicago and at Worcester, and that Harvard and Columbia, to mention only prominent examples, have been reconstructed. Learning for learning’s sake is the university motto of the hour.

Judging by appearances alone, we have been making extraordinary headway. Judging, on the other hand, by Professor Butler’s calm and shrewd estimate of the situation, much of our progress has been imaginary. If from the thousands of students which the university catalogues proudly chronicle we subtract, first, the members of the college pure and simple ; second, the men or boys learning how to get a livelihood by the various moneymaking professions, we shall not in any case have more than a few hundreds — or perhaps scores — of men who are supposed to be giving up their time to the acquisition of abstract knowledge and to the furtherance of research. We shall get a clearer idea of the elements of which our university work really consists if we analyze the residuum still farther. Subtract, third, those members of the schools of philosophy (which Professor Butler rightly calls the core of the university) who are merely prolonging slightly their college course of culture-giving studies in candidacy for an A. M.; subtract, fourth, those who are living near by, and take a course or two during a year or two for reasons rather of propinquity than of passion ; subtract, fifth, students who are attracted by fellowships and scholarships, — the old device of the theological seminaries for filling their thinned ranks ; subtract, sixth, the men who did n’t get a fellowship this year, but are keeping themselves en évidence for the next competition : how many institutions in the land are there in which the remainder is worth seriously considering ? The plain truth of the matter is that our colleges are still colleges, and none too good ones at that, with numerous and prominent technological attachments. But it is easy to see why we are so anxious to call ourselves universities. First, we were submerged by a great wave of influence from Germany. Young men and maidens flocked thither, and returned, after a becoming interval, with wise faces, and generally with an impression that they had previously not sufficiently appreciated the value of home products. The elect, a few rare spirits, came back transformed, after years of absence, into such scholars as the Continent knows how to breed, — keen investigators, sturdy thinkers, men really wise, but prone to think that the multitude of Americans must be fed only with German loaves and fishes. Then began the second period of foreign influence, under which we are now trying to work, — that of adopted systems and remodeled institutions. We are informed that our colleges are in reality merely gymnasia, and boys are taught that glory begins only with a Ph. D. and the right to wrap one’s self in a parti-colored academic gown. Through the tangles of native growth and imitative acquisition it is sometimes hard to see the light ahead, but it will be strange if our period of foreign subjugation continues long unbroken. We are slowly coming to see that real character and actual attainment cannot always be expressed in terms of degrees. There is no need, after all, of such elaborate systems of nomenclature for the slight amount of higher work we are doing. The college is the institution native to us, and most valuable to us. The better we make it, the more we keep our professional schools decently in the background, the better we shall be serving our country and our times. What researchwork we do can be properly called by shorter names, done with less blowing of trumpets, and less extensively advertised.

Dr. Hill looks with interest and approbation on one of our colleges. Professor Paulsen scarcely gives them all a chance reference. Our opinion of our own institutions, however, is not dependent upon adventitious praise or blame, but on experience and judgment. American ideas in regard to American colleges are singularly divergent, depending largely upon the class of the community to which the critic belongs. The business man sometimes asserts that college gradnates are spoiled for life, so far as the actual conduct of affairs goes, sometimes admits in them a certain superiority of training. Almost always, on the whole, he regards their youthful folly or their comradeship of later years with something like envy, and regrets in his heart that he could not have ordered otherwise his life. The artists and their kin grudge the colleges their prominence, and insist that such education is likely to warp the taste and spoil the senses : how could it be otherwise, they ask, when art is taught either as history or as dogma ? Of those actually within the college borders, the undergraduate is perhaps too closely bound by the ideals imposed upon him by tradition or instruction to express an unbiased judgment. When, nevertheless, he speaks his mind out frankly, it is oftenest the mind of a young barbarian at play, as possibly it should be. He studies with more docility, on the whole, than he gets credit for; he is good humored and usually well bred, but, as a rule, much excited over matters not of the spirit, and honestly convinced that an instructor who conditions a “ man ” on the crew should be instantly called before a committee of investigation. The college teacher —let us do him the honor of taking him at his best — is a harmless, hard-working, scantily paid person, a little afraid of being unpopular with his students, and not fond of imagining himself unapproved of by those higher than himself in power or influence ; too busy for more than dreaming of original research ; giving freely to his pupils of his best time and strength, and squandering the residue in endless committees and consultations. He is grieved when his classes are inattentive ; honestly proud at some rare word of praise or appreciation ; glad, domestic and conservative creature that he is, when lecture-making and lecture-giving are over for the day, of a quiet hour with his wife and babies.

To all college men, however, old or young, the college tradition is more or less sacred, the college ideal one that compels loyalty. Something of this simple faith and affection is evident in a little collection of essays on Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia, to which the publishers have given the somewhat grandiose title of Four American Universities.³ For though the authors lay some stress on university apparatus, all of them have instinctively shown that It is of the colleges proper that they speak most willingly. Each essay has its characteristic manner : Harvard is politely oblivious of any institution save “ the oldest and chief seat of learning ” in America ; Yale, like a younger sister at her elder’s wedding, explains with somewhat unnecessary elaboration why she is what she is; Princeton is proud of her ancestry and her isolation; Columbia exhibits her fresh and beautiful organization. And each college has its chosen ideal, sacred by tradition : to Harvard belongs manifold scholarship and cosmopolitan culture ; to Yale, wellearned success over all competitors in physical, social, and commercial honors, — an ideal so powerful, so human, so democratic, so American, that even the alien heart warms with it; to Princeton, the strength and self-control of men rigorously trained in seclusion, and strong for the battle of life; to Columbia, brilliant facility and tact, the art of planning, organizing, and administering all things, be they spiritual or temporal, scientific or literary, political or commercial. Each ideal is a force scarcely to be estimated, and only to be expressed, if at all, in terms of the enthusiastic devotion of large bodies of graduates,— men who, not bewildered professors or immature students, see what part in their training their college work and life have had, and value it accordingly. The German universities feed the learned professions and lead the van of research. Inseparable from our colleges, on the contrary, is the glory of a closer connection with the manifold and active life of the country to which they belong, and of which they are the loyal servants. Famous schools of higher learning we shall doubtless have in the end, places of pilgrimage for the searcher after minute and remote truth. We should rather, however, now hold fast to that which we have than rashly stretch out hands for that for which we are not yet ripe. In what we have there is still a wide field for ambition; for our colleges, freshly conscious of their task and its dignity, are in many ways sorely tempted to forsake the paths that made them famous. They yearn, like shopkeepers, for a large patronage ; they advertise themselves incessantly, and with little modesty or discrimination ; they accept gladly bureaucratic methods of government and instruction, forgetting the older and nobler ideals, which cared little, perhaps, for the “ higher ” learning, but much for the dignity of the institution, the power of the teacher, and the quiet growth of the student in individuality, in culture, and in real knowledge.