Why go to College?

The American college was recently defined by one of our public men as a “place where an extra clever boy may go and still amount to something.”

This is indeed faint praise both for our institutions of higher learning and for our undergraduates; but judging from certain presentations of student life, we may infer that it represents a sentiment more or less common and wide-spread. Our institutions are criticized for their tendency toward practical and progressive education; for the views of their professors; for their success in securing gifts of wealth, which some people think ought to go in other directions; and for the lack of seriousness or the dissipation of the students themselves. Even with many persons who have not developed any definite or extreme opinions concerning American undergraduate life, the college is often viewed in the light in which Matthew Arnold said certain people regarded Oxford:

Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! There are our young barbarians, all at play!

Indeed, to people of the outside world, the American undergraduate presents an enigma. He appears to be not exactly a boy, certainly not a man, an interesting species, a kind of “Exhibit X,” permitted because he is customary; as Carlyle might say, a creature “run by galvanism and possessed by the devil.”

The mystifying part of this lies in the fact that the college man seems determined to keep up this illusion of his partial or total depravity. He reveals no unchastened eagerness to be thought good. Indeed, he usually “plays up” his desperate wickedness. He revels in his unmitigated lawlessness, he basks in the glory of fooling folks. As Owen Johnson describes Dink Stover, he seems to possess a “diabolical imagination.” He chuckles exuberantly as he reads in the papers of his picturesque public appearances: of the janitor’s cow hoisted into the chapel belfry; of the statue of the sedate founder of the college painted red on the campus; of the good townspeople selecting their gates from a pile of property erected on the college green; or as in graphic cartoons he sees himself returning from foot-ball victories, accompanied by a few hundred other young hooligans, marching wildly through the streets and cars to the martial strain,

There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night!

In other words, the American student is partly responsible for the attitude of town toward gown. He endeavors in every possible way to conceal his real identity. He positively refuses to be accurately photographed or to reveal real seriousness about anything. He is the last person to be held up and examined as to his interior moral decorations. He would appear to take no thought for the morrow, but to be drifting along upon a glorious tide of indolence or exuberant play. He would make you believe that to him life is just a great frolic, a long, huge joke, an unconditioned holiday. The wild young heart of him enjoys the shock, the offense, the startled pang, which his restless escapades engender in the stunned and unsympathetic multitude.

This perversity of the American undergraduate is as fascinating to the student of his real character as it is baffling to a chance beholder, for the American collegian is not the most obvious thing in the world. He is not discovered by a superficial glance, and surely not by the sweeping accusations of uninformed theoretical critics who have never lived on a college campus, but have gained their information in second-hand fashion from question-naires or from newspaper-accounts of the youthful escapades of students.

We must find out what the undergraduate really means by his whimsicalities and picturesque attitudinizing. We must find out what he is thinking about, what he reads, what he admires. He seems to live in two distinct worlds, and his inner life is securely shut off from his outer life. If we would learn the college student, we must catch him off guard, away from the “fellows,” with his intimate friend, in the chapter-house, or in his own quiet room, where he has no reputation for devilment to live up to. For college life is not epitomized in a story of athletic records or curriculum catalogues. The actual student is not read up in a Baedeker. His spirit is caught by hints and flashes; it is felt as an inspiration, a commingled and mystic intimacy of work and play, not fixed, but passing quickly through hours unsaddened by the cares and burdens of the world--

No fears to beat away--no strife to heal, The past unsighed for, and the future sure.

It is with such sympathetic imagination that the most profitable approach can be made to the American undergraduate. To see him as he really is, one needs to follow him into his laboratory or lecture-room, where he engages with genuine enthusiasm in those labors through which he expresses his temperament, his inmost ideals, his life’s choice. Indeed, to one who knows that to sympathize is to learn, the soul windows of this inarticulate, immature, and intangible personality will sometimes be flung wide. On some long, vague walk at night beneath the stars, when the great deeps of his life’s loyalties are suddenly broken up, one will discover the motive of the undergraduate, and below specious attempts at concealment, the self-absorbed, graceful, winsome spirit. Here one is held by the subtle charm of youth lost in a sense of its own significance, moving about in a mysterious paradise all his own, “full of dumb emotion, undefined longing, and with a deep sense of the romantic possibilities of life.”

In this portrait one sees the real drift of American undergraduate life--the life that engaged last year in North American institutions of higher learning 349,566 young men, among whom were many of America’s choicest sons. Thousands of American and Canadian fathers and mothers, some for reasons of culture, others for social prestige, still others for revenue only, are ambitious to keep these students in the college world. Many of these parents, whose hard-working lives have always spelled duty, choose each year to beat their way against rigid economy, penury, and bitter loss, that their sons may possess what they themselves never had, a college education. And when we have found, below all his boyish pranks, dissimulations, and masqueradings, the true undergraduate, we may also discern some of the pervasive influences which are to-day shaping life upon this Western Continent; for the undergraduate is a true glass to give back to the nation its own image.