JOHN CORBIN (continued 4)

V

THE ORIGIN OF THE MODERN UNDERGRADUATE

If the tutors of New College were epoch-making, the amplitude and splendor of its social life were no less so. Its original buildings are in such perfect preservation that it is hard to believe that they are almost the oldest in Oxford, and that the New College quadrangle is the father of all quads. The establishment of the "head" was of similar dignity. The master of Balliol received forty shillings yearly; the warden of New College, forty pounds. In the statutes of an old Cambridge college we find it required that since it would be "indecent" for the master to go afoot, and "scandalous" to the college for him to "conducere hackeneye," he might be allowed one horse. The warden of New College had a coach and six. As century followed century the value of the endowments increased, and the scale of living was proportionately raised. The colleges in general became the home of comfort, and sometimes of a very positive luxury.

In the colleges of the Middle Ages the students were the socii, and were maintained by the endowment. These are the dons and foundationers, or scholarship men, of to-day. But the comfort and order of the life in the colleges were very attractive, and the sons of the rich were early welcomed as "gentlemen commoners," precursors of the modern "commoners." The statutes of Magdalen make the first clear provision for receiving and teaching such "non-foundation" students. They permit the admission of twenty filii nobilium as commensales, or commoners, in the vernacular. At first these were few and unimportant; in the centuries during which the numbers of the university were at an ebb, they could easily be accommodated within the depleted colleges. When the university increased under Elizabeth, the idea of living in halls in the mediæval fashion, as we have seen, was obsolescent, so that the result of the increase was to enlarge the colleges. Thus, largely as a matter of chance, the commoners of to-day, the characteristic and by far the larger part of the undergraduate body, live under a régime invented for the endowed scholars of the Middle Ages, and the democratic license of the mediæval undergraduate at large has given way to a democratic rule of commoners in colleges. Though the commoner is no longer called a gentleman commoner, he is more than likely to come from a family of position and means, for the comfort of life in the colleges is expensive. All this has transformed Oxford from a mediæval guild of masters and apprenticed students, a free mart of available knowledge, into a closely organized anteroom to social and professional life.

VI

THE INSIGNIFICANCE OF THE MODERN UNIVERSITY

Though the university as a teaching body pined before the rising colleges, and for centuries lay in a swoon, it was not dead. It was kept alive by certain endowments for lecturers. But so thoroughly did the college tutors supply all undergraduate needs that, unless walls indeed have ears, the lectures were never heard. The professors gradually abandoned the university schools and gave the unattended lectures in their own houses. Such lectures were known as "study lectures." Even these gave way to silence. An odd situation was caused by the fact that there were also salaries paid to university proctors, a part of whose duty it was to see that the professorial lectures were properly given. When a proctor appeared, the learned professor would snatch up his manuscript and read until his auditor got tired and left. This was one case in which a thief was not the person to catch a thief; such energy on the part of the proctor was unusual, and was regarded as in extremely bad form. The abuse proceeded so far that in some cases, when hearers appeared at the appointed hour, the professors refused point blank to read their lectures. The climax of the farce was that at graduation students were fined for having cut these lectures that had never been given. When Samuel Johnson was fined for neglecting a college lecture to go "sliding on Christ Church Meadow," he exclaimed, "Sir, you have fined me twopence for missing a lecture that was not worth a penny!" His untimely departure from Oxford has lamentably left us to conjecture what he would have said upon paying the university fines at graduation for cutting lectures that had never been given.

Even the university examinations became farcical. Under the Laudian statutes the very examiners became corrupt. Instead of a feast of reason and a flow of soul, the wary student provided his examiner with good meat and wine; and the two, with what company they bade in, got gloriously drunk together. B. A. meant Bacchanal of Arts. Even when the forms of examination were held to, the farce was only less obvious. A writer in Terræ Filius, March 24, 1721, tells us that the examination consisted in "a formal repetition of a set of syllogisms upon some ridiculous question in logick, which the candidates get by rote, or perhaps read out of their caps, which lie before them." These commodious sets of syllogisms were called strings, and descended from undergraduate to undergraduate in a regular succession like themes and mechanical drawings in an American club or fraternity. "I have in my custody a book of strings upon most or all of the questions discussed in a certain college noted for its ratiocinative faculty; on the first leaf of which are these words: Ex dono Richardi P—— e primæ classi benefactoris munificentissimi." Lord Eldon took his degree at University College by an examination that consisted of two questions: "What is the meaning of Golgotha?" and "Who founded University College?" It was, no doubt, the bearers of degrees thus achieved who owned those marvelous libraries of the eighteenth century, which consisted of pasteboard boxes exquisitely backed in tooled calf, and labeled with the names of the standard Greek and Latin classics.

The decline of the university teaching and examination did not result in a corresponding rise in the colleges. Each of the dozen and more institutions was supposed, as I have said, to keep a separate faculty in arts, and often in law and theology as well. If there had been any incentive to ambition, the colleges might have vied with one another in their impossible task, or at least have gone far enough to bring about a reform. But they were rich and did not care. The wealth of collegiate endowments, that had begun by ruining the university, ended by ruining the colleges. There were still earnest teachers and students at Oxford, but they were not the rule. The chief energies of the tutors were spent in increasing their salaries by a careful management of the estates, and in evading their pupils. In "the splendid foppery of a well-turned period" Gibbon thus pictures the dons of Magdalen in 1752: "Their deep and dull potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth." Only one result was possible. In 1821 T. J. Hogg, Shelley's college-mate at University College, referred to Oxford as a seat of learning. "Why do you call it so?" Shelley cried indignantly. "Because," Hogg replied, "it is a place in which learning sits very comfortably, well thrown back as in an easy chair, and sleeps so soundly that neither you nor I nor anybody else can wake her." Permanent endowments had transferred the seat of learning from a nobly indigent university to the colleges, and the deep and dull potations of endowed tutors had put it asleep on the common-room chairs.

The nineteenth century did not altogether arouse it. "The studies of the university," according to the testimony of the Oxford Commission of 1850, "were first raised from their abject state by a statute passed in 1800." Heretofore all students had pursued the same studies, and there was no distinction to be gained at graduation except the mere fact of becoming a Bachelor of Arts. The statute of 1800 provided that such students as chose might distinguish themselves from the rest by taking honors; and for both passman and honor man it provided a dignified and quite undebauchable university examining board. At first the subjects studied were, roughly speaking, the same for passman and honor man; the difference was made by raising the standard of the honor examination. The examination followed the mediæval custom in being mainly oral; and though it soon came to be written, it still preserves the tradition of the mediæval disputation by including a viva voce which is open to the attendance of the public. Throughout the nineteenth century the development consisted mainly in adding a few minor schools.

The good and bad features of the English college system as a whole should not be hard to distinguish. In all social aspects the colleges are as nearly perfect as human institutions are capable of becoming, and they are the foundation of an unequaled athletic life. Educationally, their qualities are mixed. For the purpose of common or garden English gentlemen, nothing could be better than a happy combination of tutorial instruction and university examining. For the purposes of scholarly instruction in general, and of instruction in the modern sciences and mechanic arts in particular, few things could be worse than the system as at present construed.

To exult over the superiority of American institutions in so many of the things that make up a modern university would not be a very profitable proceeding. Let us neglect the imperfections of Oxford. It is of much greater profit to consider the extraordinary social advantages that arise from the division of the university into colleges, and the educational advantages of the honor schools. These are points with regard to which we are as poor as Oxford is poor in the scope of university instruction.

The point will perhaps be clearer for a brief review of the manner in which our college system grew out of the English. The development is the reverse of what we have just been considering. In England, the colleges overshadowed the university and sapped its life. With us, the university has overshadowed the college and is bidding fair to annihilate it.

VII

THE COLLEGE IN AMERICA

In 1636 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed an act to establish a "schoole or colledge," and set apart a tract of land in "New Towne" as its seat, which they called Cambridge. Our Puritan forefathers had carried from the English university the conviction that "sound learning" is the "root of true religion," and were resolved, in their own vigorous phrase, that it should not be "buried in the graves of the fathers." In 1638 a master of arts of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, John Harvard, bequeathed to the new institution his library and half his fortune, some £780. A timber building was erected and a corporation formed which bore the donor's name. From the regulations in force in 1655 it is evident that in its manner of life, its laws of government, the studies taught, and the manner of granting the degree, Harvard College was a close counterpart of the English college of the early seventeenth century, its very phraseology including such terms as "disputing," "proceeding," "determining." It was the first institution of higher education in British America. Until the founding of the first state university, the University of Virginia, in 1819, the constitution afforded the principal model for subsequent foundations, and to-day colleges of the Harvard type are perhaps the strongest factor in American education. Harvard thus transplanted to American soil the full measure of the traditions of the Middle Ages, many of which exist in a modified form to-day.

In "Harvard College by an Oxonian" Dr. George Birkbeck Hill suggests that John Harvard expected others to found similar institutions which collectively were to reproduce the University of Cambridge in New England. The supposition is by no means impossible, and the manuscript records in the Harvard Library would perhaps reward research. But whatever the intention, it is abundantly clear that in the full English sense of the word no second college was established at Cambridge. The first constitution was in all essentials the same as that of to-day. Hutchinson's "History of Massachusetts" records (1676): "There are but four fellowships, the two seniors have each 30l. per ann. and the two juniors 15l., but no diet is allowed: There are tutors to all such as are admitted students.... The government of these colledges is in the governor and magistrates of Massachusetts and the president of the colledge, together with the teaching elders of the six adjacent towns." The fellows are the forbears of the modern corporation, the tutors of the faculty; and though the institution has been separated from the state, the "teaching elders" are the earliest overseers. Furthermore, the endowment of Harvard has remained undivided; and generations elapsed before the present very un-English division was made by which the teaching force is separated into independent faculties for arts and the various professions. From the first the "college" was a "university" in that it granted degrees; and less than twenty years after its founding the two terms are used as synonymous; an appendix to what is called the charter of Harvard "College" calls the institution a "University." This confusion of terms still persists, and is found at most other American institutions, the constitutions of which were largely modeled after that of Harvard. For generations the endowments and the teaching force of the American college and university were identical. Thus as regards its constitution the typical American university is a single English college writ large.

Almost from the outset, however, there were, in one sense of the word, several colleges. In "An Inventory of the whole Estate of Harv^d Colledge taken by the President & Fellows as they find the same to be Decemb. 10, 1654," the first two items are as follows:—

"Imp^rs. The building called the old colledge, conteyning a Hall, Kitchen, Buttery, Cellar, Turrett & 5 Studeys & therin 7 chambers for students in them. A Pantry & small corne Chamber. A library & Books therin, vallued at 400^lb.

"It. Another house called Goffes colledge, & was purchased of Edw: Goffe. conteyning five chambers. 18 studyes. a kitchen cellar & 3 garretts."[3]

It is to be noted that "Old Colledge," which was Harvard's building, had a kitchen, buttery, and cellar, a pantry and a small corn chamber, and was thus primitively modeled after an English hall or college. Presumably the inmates, like their cousins across the water, dined in the hall. As for "Goffe's colledge," granting that the punctuation of the inventory is intentional, it had a kitchen cellar, which would seem to imply a kitchen; and it is not impossible that there should be a comma after "kitchen." No hall is mentioned, and it is hardly likely that there could have been so imposing a room in what was built for a private house; but it would have been possible and natural to serve meals in the largest of the five "chambers." A third building Hutchinson's history describes as "a small brick building called the Indian Colledge, where some few Indians did study, but now it is a printing house," the first printing house in British America. The two earliest buildings at Harvard would thus be the abodes of separate communities, and though I can find no intimation as to the Indian College, it can scarcely be doubted that since it was established for the separate use of the redskins, it contained a separate living-plant. A later record shows that there was a separate kitchen in the first Stoughton Hall.

These early "colledges" at Harvard are more properly termed halls, and such as survived are now so called. They had probably little in common with the democratic English halls of the Middle Ages. Both at Oxford and at Cambridge the halls of the seventeenth century were, as I have said, mere pendants of the colleges; they must have had a separate character as a social community and a certain independence; but if they had separate endowments, they did not manage them, and each of them depended for its instruction mainly on the college to which it was affiliated. The printed records of the early American halls are too meagre to warrant definite conclusions; but they seem to show that the halls were conceived in the spirit of the English hall of the seventeenth century, in that they provided for separate social and residential communities without separate endowment or teaching force. If the increase of students at Harvard had been rapid, it is not unlikely that many new halls would have been established, each the home of a complete community; but for half a century the number fluctuated between fifteen and thirty. If we take the English estimate of two hundred and fifty as the largest feasible size for a single community, the limit was not reached until as late as 1840. By 1676 the timber "colledge" built at the charge of Mr. Harvard, which bore his name, had been superseded by the first Harvard Hall, which Hutchinson describes as "a fair pile of brick building covered with tiles by reason of the late Indian warre not yet finished.... It contains twenty chambers for students, two in a chamber, a large hall which serves for a chapel; over that a convenient library." In these ample accommodations it was found that the student body could be most conveniently and cheaply fed as a single community. Thus, like the idea of a group of colleges with separate finances and teaching bodies, the idea of separate residential halls must have passed away with the generation of divines educated in England. The American college and the American university remained identical, not only educationally and in their finances, but as a social organization. This fact has caused a curious reversion in America toward the mediæval type of university, both socially and educationally.

As the university has expanded, it has declined socially: to-day the residential life is only a degree better than that in the ancient chamberdekyns. Educationally, the reversion has been fortunate: the university is alive to the needs of the life about it. If it here resembles the modern German universities, this is largely due to the fact that both have more faithfully preserved the system and the spirit of the Middle Ages: the resemblance is quite as much a matter of native growth in America as of foreign imitation. In England, the mediæval idea of a multiplicity of residential bodies has survived, and the educational idea of the mediæval university has perished. In Germany, the educational idea has survived, and the old community life has perished. In America, the two ideas have survived by virtue of their identity. But for the same reason both are in a rudimentary and very imperfect state of development.

V

THE PROBLEMS OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

I

THE SOCIAL AND ATHLETIC PROBLEM

The imperfection of the modern American university in its social organization has been stated with the utmost clearness and authority, at least as regards Harvard. The "Harvard Graduates' Magazine" for September, 1894, published posthumously an article by Frank Bolles, late secretary of the college, entitled "The Administrative Problem." "In the present state of affairs," says Mr. Bolles, "student social life is stunted and distorted.... There is something very ugly in the possibility of a young man's coming to Cambridge, and while here sleeping and studying alone in a cheerless lodging, eating alone in a dismal restaurant, feeling himself unknown, and so alone in his lectures, his chapel, and his recreations, and not even having the privilege of seeing his administrative officers, who know most of his record, without having to explain to them at each visit who he is and what he is, before they can be made to remember that he is a living, hoping, or despairing part of Harvard College."

Some of these men who fail to find a place in the social community meet their isolation grimly and are embittered against life. Others, after a few months or a year of lonesomeness and neglect, give up their university career broken-hearted, and by so doing perhaps take the first step in a life of failures. One man of whom I happened to know confided to his daily themes a depth of misery of which it can only be hoped that it was hysterical. At night when he heard a step on his staircase he prayed that it might be some one coming to see him. The tide of undergraduate life and of joy in living flowed all about him and left him thirsting. If a man finds sweetness in the uses of such adversity, it can only be by virtue of the firmest and calmest of tempers. Sometimes fellows starve physically without a friend with whom to share their hardship, living perhaps on bread, milk, and oatmeal, which they cook over the study lamp. Occasionally one hears disquieting rumors that such short rations have resulted in disease and even death before the authorities were aware. If this be so, the hardships of life in the earliest mediæval university, though far enough removed from us to be picturesque, could hardly have been more real.

The sickness of the body politic has been portrayed with artistic sympathy and veracity by Mr. C. M. Flandrau, in his "Harvard Episodes," the wittiest and most searching of studies of undergraduate life. It is no doubt for this reason that the book is both read and resented by the healthy and unthinking college man.

To dwell on such individual instances would be unpleasant. The point of importance is to show how the social chaos affects the health of the community as a whole. As it happens, we have a barometer. For better or for worse, the moving passion of the undergraduate body, aside from studies, is athletic success. If athletics prosper, it is because the life of the college finds an easy and natural expression; if athletics languish, there is pretty sure to be some check on wholesome functioning.

The causes of Harvard's abundant failures and the remedies have been a fertile theme of discussion. One cause is obvious. The rivals with distressing frequency have produced better teams. Every one knows that what Cambridge chooses to call Yale luck is nine parts Yale pluck; and the quality is well developed at Princeton, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. But why is it developed at these places more than at Harvard? The explanations are legion. The first cry was bad coaching. This was repeated until the fault was corrected, at least in part, and until every one was wholly tired of hearing the explanation. Then came the cry of bad physical training. This in turn was repeated until it brought partial remedy and total weariness of the agitation. By and by, all other complaints having been worn threadbare, Harvard's defeat was attributed to the fog on Soldier's Field. It is not unlikely that the fog will be dissipated and the athletes duly benefited. Yet it is far from certain that this will make the athletic body sound.

The fault lies deeper than Yale pluck—or even the fog on Soldier's Field. It is to be found in the conditions, social, administrative, and even educational, which are at the basis of the life of the university. If these conditions were peculiar to Harvard, it would decidedly not be worth while to discuss them publicly. But they are inherent in the type of university of which Harvard is the earliest and most developed example, and are destined to crop out in every American institution of learning in proportion as it grows, as Harvard has grown, from the English college of a few decades ago into the Teutonized university of the present and of the future. In considering the causes, it is necessary to speak concretely of our one eminent example; but the main fact brought out will be applicable in greater or less degree to the present or future of any American college.

The sources of Harvard's weakness are mainly social. When the college was small, it had its share of victory; but almost from the year when it began to outgrow its rivals, its prowess declined. Forty years ago, and even less, the undergraduate constitution of American institutions was, roughly speaking, that of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge: a freshman was measurably sure of falling into easy relationship with the fellows of his class and of other classes, and thus of finding his level or his pinnacle in athletic teams and in clubs. Considered as a machine for developing good fellows and good sportsmen, it was well adjusted and well oiled; it worked. But it was not capable of expansion. Two or three hundred fellows can live and even dine together with comfort and an increase of mutual understanding; they soon become an organized community. When a thousand or two live as a single community and dine at one board (let us call it dining), the social bond relaxes. Next door neighbors are unknown to one another, having no common ground of meeting, and even the college commons fail to bring them together. The relaxing influence of the hour spent at table and in the subsequent conversation, during which social intercourse should most freely flourish, is quite lost. The undergraduate body is a mob, or at best an aggregation of shifting cliques. If men live in crowds or in cliques, their life is that of crowds or of cliques, and is unprofitable both to themselves and to the community that should prosper by their loyal activity.

It is true that there are societies and clubs, but these also to a certain degree have been swamped in the rising tide of undergraduates. With freshman classes as large as those of to-day, the old social machinery becomes incapable of sifting the clubable from the less clubable, those who deserve recognition in the body of undergraduates from those who do not. The evil is increased by the fact that as a rule in America the social life is organized early in the undergraduate course, so that the men who fail of election in the first year or two have failed for good. There are, to be sure, cases in which men who have later developed signal merit have been taken into the all-important societies and clubs of the upper classmen, and sometimes these societies make a special and most creditable effort thus to remedy the failures of the system; but the men who are thus elected are an exception, and an exception of the kind that proves the rule. Unless a man has been prominent in one of the large preparatory schools, or becomes prominent in athletics in the first year or so, there is only one way to make sure of meeting such fellows as he wishes to know, and that is both to choose friends and to avoid them with an eye to social chances, a method which is scarcely to be commended. As the incoming classes grow larger, there is an increasingly large proportion of undergraduates who fail to qualify in the first year or two in any of these ways. Throughout their course they neither receive benefit from the general life of the university nor contribute to it. They are often of loyal and disinterested character, and they not infrequently develop into men of exceptional ability in all of the paths of undergraduate life; not a few of them have been 'varsity captains. But instead of exerting the influence on the welfare of the university which such men might and should exert, they find it impossible to get into the main currents, and revolve impotently on the outside, each in the particular eddy where fate has thrust him.

At Harvard, where the evil has long been recognized, a remedy has been sought in increasing the membership of the great sophomore and senior societies, the Institute of 1770 and the Hasty Pudding Club. The result has been the reverse of what was intended. The larger the club the less compact its life and its influence,—what a few men have gained the club has lost. The tendency toward disintegration is confirmed by a peculiarity of the organization of the societies. The first half of the members of the Institute form a separate club, the D. K. E., or Dickey. From this the second half are excluded, becoming a sort of social fringe; they often form a part of the mob that dines at Memorial or of the cliques that dine in boarding-houses, and are only a shade less excluded than the rest from the centres of the college life. If this inner club, the Dickey, were the instrument of a united and efficient public spirit, the case would not be so bad, but its members in turn are split into a number of small clubs; as a social organization the Dickey is mainly a name. If now these small clubs took a strong part in the general life of the college, the case would still not be so bad; but each spends its main strength in struggling with the others to secure as many members as possible from the first ten of the Dickey. They are scarcely to be regarded as engines of public spirit.

The same is true of the great senior society, the Hasty Pudding. Its most prominent members belong to the few small clubs of upper classmen; the rest are as much a social fringe as the later tens of the Institute. And the senior clubs, like the clubs of the under classmen, are more interested in their private politics than in the policy of the college as a whole. At Yale the senior societies still exert a strong and generally wholesome influence, but at Harvard they have long ceased to do so, if they ever did. In proportion as a man is successful in the social world the system lifts him out of the body of undergraduate life. The reward of athletic distinction or of good-fellowship is a sort of pool pocket, upon getting into which a man is definitely out of the game. The leaders in the college life, social and athletic, are chosen on the superficial tests of the freshman year, and are not truly representative; and the organization of which they become a part is calculated only to suppress general and efficient public spirit. The outer layers are dead wood and the kernels sterile. This is at least one reason why Harvard does not oftener win.

In all this there is no place for a philosophy of despair. The spirit of the undergraduate, clubbed and unclubbed, is normal and sound. The efforts which the clubs themselves make from time to time to become representative are admirably public spirited; and there is no less desire on the part of the outsiders to live for the best interests of the college. On the day of an athletic contest the university is behind the team, heart and lungs; and when defeat comes it is felt alike by all conditions of men. From time to time ancient athletes journey to Cambridge to exhort the undergraduate body to pull together; and it is a poor orator indeed who cannot set in motion strong currents of enthusiasm. Half an hour of earnest talk on the strenuous life from Theodore Roosevelt has often been known to raise a passion of aspiration that has positively lasted for weeks. But the social system cannot be galvanized into life and functioning. The undergraduates aspire and strive, but every effort is throttled by a Little Old Man of the Sea. When all is said and done, the mob and the cliques remain mob and cliques; with discord within and exclusive without, there is small hope of organized efficiency.

At Yale the oligarchic spirit of the senior societies is compact and operative where that of the Harvard clubs is not; but Yale also is being swamped. The vast and increasing mob of the unaffiliated has several times within the last decade shown a shocking disrespect for the sacred authority of the captains; and the non-representative character of the sophomore societies, from which the senior societies are recruited, has been a public scandal. One result of this disorder is that the ancient athletic prestige is slipping away, or is so far in abeyance that it is again a question whether Harvard or Yale has—shall we say the worse team? The case of the older universities is typical. Other institutions are expanding as fast or faster, and it is only a question of time when the increase of numbers will swamp the social system.

That there is something rotten in the state of Denmark has of late been officially recognized, at least at Harvard. In order to create a general social and athletic life in the community a Union has been established, modeled on the Oxford Union. It would be pleasant to picture the College House of the future shaking hands with Claverly, the Phi Beta Kappa linking elbows with the Porcellian, and the fellows who now, in spite of a desire to be sociable, have lived through four years of solitary confinement each in his petty circle, enjoying the bosom friendship of all the men they may desire to know. It would be pleasant but perhaps not altogether warrantable, when one considers the essential nature of the Union.

The Oxford Union of celebrity, as has been pointed out in an earlier chapter, is a thing of the past. It was an exclusive institution, in which no attempt was made to foster universal brotherhood. When it was thrown open to the entire undergraduate world, it lost caste and authority. The elect flocked by themselves each in his own exclusive club. If the Harvard Union had been modeled on the old exclusive Oxford Union, it might perhaps have been equally efficient in bringing together a broadly representative body of men. But it was modeled on the modern democratic Union. Here is a plain case: When the Oxford Union ceased to be exclusive, its best elements flocked by themselves, and the result is a growth of small exclusive clubs. At Harvard the exclusive clubs and societies are both ancient and honorable, and, moreover, very comfortable, and it hardly seems likely that their members will rout themselves out of their cosy corners to join the merry rout at the Harvard Union.

This is not to cast a gloomy eye upon the new university club; it is rather by way of emphasizing the importance of the work it has to do, and will succeed in doing. Hitherto the lounging grounds of the unaffiliated (alas! that in such an alma mater so many are forever unaffiliated!) have been public billiard-rooms and tobacco shops. For the solace of a midnight supper one had to go to the locally familiar straw-hatted genius of the sandwich, and for the luxury of a late breakfast to John of the Holly Tree. And John the Orange Man! Great worthies these, ancient and most honorable. But even in the enchantment of retrospect they somehow or other explain why so many fellows choose to live, for the most part, in small cliques in one another's rooms and cultivate the deadly chafing-dish. For the unaffiliated—by far the larger part of each class—the new club-house will be a Godsend. It is much more fun to cut a nine-o'clock lecture if you are sure of a comfortable chair at breakfast and a real napkin; and even in the brutal gladness of youth, it is pleasant at a midnight supper to be seated. And then, after that athletic dinner at Memorial, a place to loaf quietly over a pipe with whatever congenial spirit one finds, and listen to the clicking of billiard-balls! It is also proposed that the 'varsity athletes have their training tables at the new Union, so that any fellow may come to know them clothed and in their right minds. I fancy that the new club will leave those old worthies a trifle lonesome, and will banish the chafing-dish forever.

The spirit of an old graduate somehow takes kindly to the idea of a place like that. How the spirit of Bishop Brooks, for instance, would enjoy slipping in of an evening for the cigar they have denied him in the house erected in his memory! And for the graduate in the flesh the club-house will be no less welcome, especially if he is unlucky enough not to have a club of his own to go back to. To love one's alma mater it is, of course, not necessary to have a club; but it somehow interferes with the sentiment of a home-coming to be obliged to go back to Boston by trolley for luncheon and dinner, and to eat it among aliens. In the new Union it will even be possible to put up for the night. A long step has been made in advance of the old unhappy order. Yet the new Union leaves the vital evil in the community life as far as ever from solution.

What the authorities have failed to do consciously may, according to present indications, be accomplished, in some manner at least, by an unconscious growth. When Memorial became inadequate to the mere demand for seating-room, new dining-halls were established. In the future it is possible that these new halls may be kept within the line where community life becomes impossible and mob life begins. If they could be, the problem would be at least one step nearer solution. But to gain the highest effect of community organization, it is necessary that the men who dine in the same hall shall live near one another. Under the present system this rarely happens, and when it does, it does not even follow that they know one another by sight. Until the halls represent some real division in undergraduate life—separate and organized communities—they must remain the resort of a student mob.

Fortunately, another movement is discernible in the direction of separate residential organization. Already certain of the dormitories in American universities are governed democratically by the inmates: no student is admitted except by order of a committee of the members. The fraternity houses so widely diffused in America offer a still better example, almost a counterpart, of the halls of the golden age of the mediæval university. Any considerable development of hall or fraternity life in the great universities would result in a dual organization of the kind that has proved of such advantage in England, so that a man would have his residence in a small democratic community, and satisfy his more special interests in the exclusive clubs of the university. In such an arrangement the hall would profit by the clubman as the clubman would gain influence through the hall. All undergraduates would thus be united in the general university life in a way which is now undreamed of, and which is unlikely, as I think, even in the new Harvard Union.

The tendency toward division in the dining-halls and the dormitories is evident also in athletics; but here it is very far from unconscious. The division by classes long ago ceased to be an adequate means of developing material for the 'varsity teams, and when the English rowing coach, Mr. R. C. Lehmann, was in charge of the Harvard oarsmen, he outlined a plan for developing separate crews not unlike the college crews of England. This system has since been effected with excellent results. Separate boating clubs have been established, each of which has races among its own crews and races with the crews of its rivals. Only one thing has prevented the complete success of the system. The division into clubs is factitious, representing no real rivalry such as exists among English colleges. To supply this rivalry, it is only necessary that each boat club shall represent a hall. The same division would of course be equally of benefit in all branches of sport. The various teams within the university would then represent a real social rivalry, such as has long ceased to exist. This could scarcely fail to produce the effect that has been so remarkable at the English universities. As in England, a multiplication of contests would on the one hand develop far better university material, and on the other hand it would lessen rather than exaggerate the excessive importance of intercollegiate contests.

II

THE ADMINISTRATIVE PROBLEM

The administrative evil of the American university, as typified in Harvard, Mr. Bolles described even more vividly than the social evil. The bare fact of the problem he stated as follows: "In 1840 the college contained 250 students; in 1850, 300; in 1860, 450; in 1870, 600; in 1880, 800; in 1890, 1300; in 1894, 1600." He then pointed out that the only means the authorities have found for meeting this increasing demand on the administrative office is, not to divide the students into separate small bodies each under a single administrator, but to divide the duties of administration among several officers. Thus each of the added officers is required to perform his duty toward the entire student body. It is apparently assumed that he can discharge one duty toward two or three thousand students as intelligently as in former years he could discharge two or three duties toward two or three hundred. By this arrangement the most valuable factor in administration is eliminated—personal knowledge and personal contact between the administrator and his charges. It is said that the members of the administrative board of the college—professors whose time is of extreme value to the university and to the world, and who receive no pay as administrators—sit three hours a night three nights in the week deciding the cases that come before them, not from personal knowledge of the undergraduates concerned, but from oral and documentary reports. "It is only by a fiction that the Recorder [or the Dean, or the member of the administrative board] can be assumed to have any personal knowledge of even a half of the men whose absences he counts, whose petitions he acts upon, and against whose delinquencies he remonstrates; yet the fiction is maintained while its absurdity keeps on growing.... If the rate of growth and our present administrative system are maintained, the Dean and Recorder of Harvard College will [in 1950] be personally caring for 6500 individuals, with all of whom they will be presumed to have an intelligent acquaintance."

Mr. Bolles lived through the period in which a brilliant band of German-trained American professors, having made over our educational system as far as possible on German lines, were endeavoring to substitute German discipline, or lack of it, for the traditional system of collegiate residence which aims to make the college a well-regulated social community. At one time these reformers rejoiced in the fact that Harvard students attended the ice carnival at Montreal or basked in the Bermudan sun while the faculty had no means of knowing where they were and no responsibility for the success of their college work. The Overseers, however, were not in sympathy with the Teutonized faculty, and soon put an end to this; but the reformers were, and perhaps still are, only waiting the opportunity to establish again the Teutonic license. "It is sometimes said," Mr. Bolles continues, "that Harvard may eventually free itself from all its remaining parental responsibility and leave students' habits, health, and morals to their individual care, confining itself to teaching, research, and the granting of degrees. Before it can do this, it must be freed from dormitories. As long as fifteen hundred of its students live in monastic quarters provided or approved by the university, so long must the university be held responsible by the city, by parents, and by society at large, for the sanitary and moral condition of such quarters. The dormitory system implies and necessitates oversight of health and morals. The trouble to-day is that the administrative machinery in use is not capable of doing all that is and ought to be expected of it.... If it be determined openly that the health and morals of Harvard undergraduates are not to occupy the attention of the Dean and Board of the college, then the present system may be perpetuated, but if this determination is not reached, then either the system must be changed or the present attempt to accomplish the impossible will go on until something snaps."

Since Mr. Bolles's day there has been much earnest effort to solve the administrative problem; but the difficulties have increased rather than diminished. The duties of the Dean are still much the same as when the freshman class numbered one hundred instead of five. Only the Dean has been improved. He is at least five times as human and five times as earnest as any other Dean; but the freshman class keeps on growing, and when he has satisfied his very exacting conscience and retires (or, not having satisfied his conscience, perishes), no man knows where his better is to be found. Of the Secretary and the Recorder and his assistants Mr. Bolles has spoken. A Regent has among other duties a general charge of the rooms the fellows live in, and usually makes each room and its occupant a yearly visit—which the occupant, in the perversity of undergraduate nature, regards as a visitation. Then there is the physician. So large a proportion of the undergraduates were found to be isolated and unhappy in their circumstances, and remote from the knowledge of the authorities, that it became necessary to appoint some one to whom they might appeal in need. Thus the details as to each undergraduate's residence are in the hands of seven different officials, each of whom, in order to attain the best results, requires a personal acquaintance with the thousands of undergraduates. Furthermore the entire body of undergraduates changes every four years. If every administrator had the commodity of lives commonly attributed to the cat, the duties of their offices would still be infinitely beyond them.

Mr. Bolles suggested a solution of the administrative problem: "If the college is too large for its dean and administrative board to manage in the way most certain to benefit its students, it should be divided, using as a divisor the number ... which experts may agree in thinking is the number of young men whom one dean and board should be expected to know and govern effectively."

When Mr. Bolles wrote, one class of administrative officer and one only was limited in his duties to a single small community: in each building in which students lived, a proctor resided who was supposed to see that the Regent's orders were enforced. Since then another step has been taken in the same direction; a board of advisers has been established, each member of which is supposed to have a helpful care of twenty-five freshmen. These two officials, it will be seen, divide the administrative duties of an English tutor. That they represent a step toward Mr. Bolles's solution of the administrative difficulty has probably never occurred to the authorities; and as yet it must be admitted the step is mainly theoretical. The position of both, as I know from sad personal experience, is such that their duties, like those of all other administrators, resolve into a mere matter of police regulation. The men are apt to resist all friendly advances. In the end, a proctor's activities usually consist in preventing them of a Sunday from shouting too loud over games of indoor football, and at other times from blowing holes through the cornice with shotguns. The case of the freshman adviser is much the same. His first duty is to expound to his charges the mysteries of the elective system, and to help each student choose his courses. According to the original intention, he was to exert as far as possible a beneficial personal influence on newcomers; but the result seldom follows the intention. Beyond the visit which each freshman is obliged to make to his adviser in order to have his list of electives duly signed, there is nothing except misdemeanor to bring the two within the same horizon. When the adviser takes pains to proffer hospitality, the freshman's first thought is that he is to be disciplined. When, as often happens, a proctor is also a freshman adviser, he unites the two administrative duties of an English tutor; but his position is much less favorable in that his duties are performed toward two distinct bodies of men. With time, tact, and labor, he might conceivably force himself into personal relationship with his fifty-odd charges; but the inevitable ground of meeting, such as the English tutor finds in his teaching, is lacking. An attempt to become acquainted is very apt to appear gratuitous. In point of fact, such acquaintance is scarcely expected by the university, and is certainly not paid for. What little an administrator earns is apt to be so much an hour (and not so very much) for teaching. A gratuitous office is so difficult that one hesitates to perform it gratuitously. If the young instructor is bent on making himself unnecessary trouble, there is plenty of opportunity in connection with his teaching; and here, of course, owing to the characteristic lack of organic coördination, he has to deal with a body of men who, except by rare accident, are quite distinct both from those whom he advises and those whom he proctorizes. The system at Harvard may be different in detail from that at other American universities; but wherever a large body of undergraduates are living under a single administrative system, it can scarcely be different in kind.

Enough has been said to show that the only office which an administrator can perform is a police office. Where the college and the university are identical, the element of personal influence is necessarily eliminated. But if the college were divided into separate administrative units, the situation would be very different. The seven general and two special offices I have indicated might be discharged, as regards each undergraduate, by a dean and a few proctor-advisers; and as the students and their officers would be living in the same building, personal knowledge and influence might become the controlling force. The solution of the administrative problem is identical with the solution of the social and athletic problem, and in both cases a movement toward it is begun. If the student body is eventually divided into residential halls of the early mediæval type, much good will result, and probably nothing but good, even if the tutorial function proper is absent. As to the addition of the tutorial function, that is a question of extreme complexity and uncertainty, in order to grasp which it is necessary to review the peculiar educational institutions of American universities.

III

THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM

As regards the American teaching system, the fact that the college so long remained identical with the university has caused little else than good. At Oxford and Cambridge, when a demand arose for instruction in new fields, the university could not meet it because it had little or no wealth and had surrendered its teaching function; and the score of richly endowed colleges, by force of their inertia, collectively resisted the demand. The enlargement in the scope of instruction has been of the slowest. In America, each new demand instantly created its supply. The moment the students in theology required more than a single professor, their tuition fees as well as other funds could be applied to the creation of a divinity school; and the professorships in law, medicine, and the technical professions were likewise organized into schools, each fully equipped under a separate faculty for the pursuit of its special aim. Thus the ancient college was developed by segregation into a fully organized modern university. American institutions are composed of a reduplication, not of similar colleges, but of distinct schools, each with its special subject to teach. This fact makes possible a far higher standard of instruction. The virtue of the administrative and social organization in the English university, as has been pointed out, results from division of the university into separate communities,—distinct organs, each with its separate activity. The virtue of the American university in its teaching functions results from a precisely similar cause.

In the case of the college, one or two details have lately been the occasion of criticism. In the educational as in the social and administrative functions, the machinery is apparently overgrown. Until well into the nineteenth century, the body of instruction offered was much the same as in the English colleges of the seventeenth century, or in the pass schools of to-day,—a modified version of the mediæval trivium and quadrivium. When a new world of intellectual life was opened, most academic leaders regarded it with abhorrence. The old studies were the only studies to develop the manners and the mind; the new studies were barbarous, and dwarfed the understanding. All learning had been contained in a pint-pot, and must continue to be so. If the old curriculum had prevailed, the old system might have continued to serve, in spite of the enormous increase of students; but it did not. Discussions of the educational value of the new learning are still allowed to consume paper and ink; but the cause of the old pint-pot was lost decades ago. All branches are taught, and are open to all students.

The live question to-day both in England and America is not whether we shall recognize the new subjects, but how and in what proportion we shall teach them. In England, where the colleges and the university are separate, the teaching and the examining are separate. The student prepares in college for an examination by the university. It is as a result of this that the subjects of instruction have been divided and organized into honor schools; and here again the division and organization have resulted in sounder and more efficient functioning. In America, such a division has never been made: the teaching and the degree-granting offices have remained identical. The professor in each "course" is also the examiner, and the freedom of choice of necessity goes not by groups of related studies but by small disconnected courses. As the field of recognized knowledge developed, new courses were added, and the student was granted a greater range of choice. Whereas of old all the instruction of the college might and had to be taken in four years, the modern courses could scarcely be exhausted in a full century. This American system, earliest advocated at Harvard, is called the elective system, and has made its way, in a more or less developed form, into all American universities worthy of the name. Its primary work was that of the Oxford honor schools—the shattering of the old pint-pot. It has done this work; but it is now in train to become no less a superstition than the older system, and is thus no less a menace to the cause of education.

It is perhaps only natural, though it was scarcely to be expected, that the university which in late years has most severely criticised the elective system is that which a quarter of a century ago deliberately advocated it, and in the face of almost universal opposition justified it in the eyes of American educators. There has evidently been a miscalculation. Yet though Harvard has cautiously acknowledged its failure in the persons of no less authorities than Professor Münsterberg and Dean Briggs, the element of error has not yet been clearly stated, nor has the remedy been proposed. Many things have been said against the elective system, but they may all be summed up in one phrase: it is not elective. This is no specious paradox. It is the offer of free election that is specious.

No offer could seem fairer. The student is at liberty to choose as he will. He may specialize microscopically or scatter his attention over the universe; he may elect the most ancient subjects or the most modern, the hardest or the easiest. No offer, I repeat, could seem fairer. But experience disillusions. Some day or other a serious student wakes up to the fact that he is the victim of—shall we say a thimble-rigging game? For example, let us take the case of a serious specialist. Of all the world's knowledge the serious specialist values only one little plot. A multitude of courses is listed in the catalogue, fairly exhausting his field. Delightful! Clearly he can see which walnut-shell covers the pea. He chooses for his first year's study four courses—the very best possible selection, the only selection, to open up his field. One moment: on closer scrutiny he finds that two of the four courses are given at the same hour, and that, therefore, he cannot take them in the same year. Still, there are at his command other courses, not so well adapted to his purposes, but sooner or later necessary. He chooses one. Hold again! On closer inspection he finds that appended to the course is a Roman numeral, and that the same numeral is against one of his other courses. After half an hour's search in the catalogue he finds that, though the two courses are given at different hours, and indeed on different days of the week, the mid-year and final examinations in both take place on the same days. Obviously these two cannot be taken in the same year. With dampened spirits his eye lights on a second substitute. He could easily deny himself this course; but it is vastly interesting, if not important, and he must arrange a year's work. Behold, this most interesting course was given last year, and will be given next year, but neither love nor money nor the void of a soul hungering for knowledge could induce the professor who gives it to deliver one sentence of one lecture; he is busy and more than busy with another course which will not be given next year. The specialist is at last forced to elect a course he does not really want. One entanglement as to hours of which the present deponent had knowledge forced a specialist in Elizabethan literature to elect—and, being a candidate for a degree with distinction, to get a high grade in—a course in the history of finance legislation in the United States. This was a tragic waste, for so many and so minute are the courses offered that the years at the student's disposal are all too few to cover even a comparatively narrow field. The specialist may well ruminate on the philosophy of Alice and her Wonderland jam. Yesterday he could elect anything, and to-morrow anything; but how empty is to-day!

Highly as the modern university regards the serious specialist, a more general sympathy will probably be given to the man who is seeking a liberal education. Such a man knows that in four years at his disposal he cannot gain any real scientific knowledge even of the studies of the old-fashioned college curriculum. As taught now, at Harvard, they would occupy, according to President Eliot's report for 1894-95, twice four years. But by choosing a single group of closely related subjects, and taking honors in it, he hopes to master a considerable plot of the field of knowledge. I will not say that he chooses the ancient classics, for—though they are admirably taught in a general way in the great Oxford Honor School of Literæ Humaniores—the American student may be held to require, even in studying the classics, a larger element of scientific culture, which would take more time than is to be had. For the same reason I will not say that he chooses the modern languages and literatures, though such a choice might be defended. Let us say that he chooses a single modern language and literature—his own.[4] Surely this is not too large a field for four years' study. Of classics, mathematics, science, and history he has supposedly been given a working knowledge in the preparatory school. For the rest he relies on the elective system.

Even in the beginning, like the specialist, he is unable to choose the courses he most wants, because of the conflict of the hours of instruction and examination; and this difficulty pursues him year by year, increasing as the subjects to be taken grow fewer and fewer. But let us dismiss this as an incidental annoyance. His fate is foreshadowed when he finds that the multitude of courses by which alone he could cover the entire field of English literature would fill twice the time at his disposal. Already he has discovered that the elective system is not so very elective. He sadly omits Icelandic and Gothic, and all but one half course is Anglo-Saxon. Some day he means to cover the ground by means of a history of literature and translations; but in point of fact, as the subjects are not at all necessary for his degree, and as he is overburdened with other work, he never does. He sticks to his last, and is the more willing to do so because, being wise beyond the wont of undergraduates, he knows that it will be well to fortify his knowledge of the English language and literature with a complementary knowledge of the history of the English people, and of the history and literature of the neighboring Germans and French.

Having barely time for a rapid survey of these complementary subjects, he elects only the introductory courses. In the aggregate they require many precious hours, and to take them he is obliged to omit outright English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but he knows that it is better to neglect a finial or two than the buttresses of the edifice he is building. Again he has miscalculated. After his complementary courses are begun, and it is too late to withdraw from them, he discovers even more clearly than the specialist how very unelective the elective system can be. It is the same old question of the thimble and the pea. These introductory courses are intended to introduce him to the study of history and of literature, not to complement his studies of English. What he wanted to know in English history was the social and the political movements, the vital and picturesque aspect; what he is taught is the sources and constitutions—the dry bones. In German and French he wanted to know the epochs of literature; he is taught the language, considered scientifically, or, at most, certain haphazard authors in whom he has only a casual interest. If he is studying for honors, he is obliged to waste enough time on these disappointing courses to reach a high grade in each. The system of free election is mighty, for he is a slave to it.

This difficulty is typical. Thus a student of history or of German who wants to study Elizabethan literature for its bearing on his subject is obliged to spend one full course—a quarter of a year's work—on the language of four or five plays of Shakespeare before he is permitted to take a half course on Shakespeare as a dramatist; and even then all the rest of the Elizabethan period is untouched.

Let us suppose that our student of English is wary as well as wise, preternaturally wary, and leaves all complementary subjects to private reading—for which he has no time. He is then able to devote himself to the three or four most important epochs in English literature. He has to leave out much that is of importance, so that he cannot hope to gain a synoptic view of the field as a whole; but of his few subjects he will at least be master. Here at last is the thimble that covers the pea. Not yet! In four courses out of five of those devoted to the greatest writers, the teacher's attention is directed primarily to a very special and scientific study of the language; the examination consists in explaining linguistic cruxes. Literary criticism, even of the most sober kind, is quite neglected. If the student learns only what is taught, he may attain the highest grades and the highest honors without being able in the end to distinguish accurately the spirit of Chaucer from that of Elizabethan literature.

Furthermore, not every student is sufficiently well advised to know precisely what courses he requires to attain his end. For example, to gain an understanding of the verse forms and even the spirit of Middle English and Elizabethan English, it is necessary to know the older French and Italian; but, as it happened, our student was not aware of the fact until he broke his shins against it, and it was nobody's business to tell him of it. And even if he had been aware of it, he could not have taken those subjects without leaving great gaps in his English studies. He has graduated summa cum laude and with highest honors in English; but he has not even a correct outline knowledge of his subject. His education is a thing of shreds and patches.

Whatever may be the aim of the serious student, the elective system is similarly fatal to it. I must be content with a single instance more. The signal merit of the old-fashioned curriculum was that its insistence on the classics and mathematics insured a mental culture and discipline of a very high order, and of a kind that is impossible where the student elects only purely scientific courses, or courses in which he happens to be especially interested. Let us suppose that the serious student wishes to elect his courses so as to receive this discipline. His plight is indicated in "Some Old-fashioned Doubts about New-fashioned Education" which have lately been divulged[5] by the Dean of Harvard College, Professor Le B. R. Briggs. The undergraduate "may choose the old studies but not the old instruction. Instruction under an elective system is aimed at the specialist. In elective mathematics, for example, the non-mathematical student who takes the study for self-discipline finds the instruction too high for him; indeed, he finds no encouragement for electing mathematics at all." The same is true of the classics.

One kind of student, to be quite candid, profits vastly by the elective system, namely, the student whose artistic instinct makes him ambitious of gaining the maximum effect, an A.B., with the minimum expenditure of means. History D is a good course: the lectures do not come until eleven o'clock, and no thought of them blunts the edge of the evening before. Semitic C is another good course—only two lectures a week, and you can pass it with a few evenings of cramming. If such a man is fortunate enough to have learned foreign languages in the nursery or in traveling abroad, he elects all the general courses in French and German. This sort of man is regarded by Dean Briggs with unwonted impatience; but he has one great claim to our admiration. Of all possible kinds of students, he alone has found the pea. For him the elective system is elective.

The men who developed the elective system, it is quite unnecessary to say, had no sinister intention. They were pioneers of educational progress who revolted against the narrowness of the old curriculum. The nearest means of reform was suggested to them by the German plan, and they sought to naturalize this in toto without regard to native needs and conditions. But the pioneer work of the elective system has been done, and the men who now uphold it in its entirety are clogging the wheels of progress no less than those who fought it at the outset. The logic of circumstances early forced them to the theory that all knowledge is of equal importance, provided only that it is scientifically pursued, and this position in effect they still maintain. You may elect to study Shakespeare and end by studying American finance legislation; but so long as you are compelled to study scientifically, bless you, you are free.

The serenity of these men must of late have been somewhat clouded. Professor Hugo Münsterberg, as an editorial writer in "Scribner's Magazine" lately remarked, "has been explaining, gently but firmly, ostensibly to the teachers in secondary schools, but really to his colleagues in the Harvard faculty, that they are not imitating the German method successfully." In no way is the American college man in the same case as the German undergraduate. His preparatory schooling is likely to be three years in arrears, and, in any case, what he seeks is usually culture, not science. "The new notion of scholarship," this writer continues, "by which the degree means so much Latin and Greek, or the equivalent of them in botany or blacksmithing, finds no favor at all in what is supposed to be the native soil of the 'elective system.'" Dr. Münsterberg's own words, guarded as they are, are not without point: "Even in the college two thirds of the elections are haphazard, controlled by accidental motives; election, of course, demands a wide view and broad knowledge of the whole field.... A helter-skelter chase of the unknown is no election." The writer in "Scribner's" concludes: "It is not desirable that a man should sell his birthright for a mess of pottage, even if he gets the pottage. If he does not get it, as Dr. Münsterberg intimates, of course his state is even worse."

Rough as the elective system is upon the student who aspires to be merely a scholar, it is rougher on the undergraduate who only wants to train his mind and to equip it for business and professional life. To him a purely scientific training is usually a positive detriment. Scrupulous exactitude and a sense of the elusiveness of all knowledge are an excellent and indispensable part of the bringing up of a scholar; but few things are more fitted, if pursued exclusively, to check the self-confidence of a normal man and to blight his will. Poor Richard had a formula for the case: "A handsaw is a very good thing, but not to shave with." Before taking a vigorous hold on the affairs of Wall Street or of Washington, our recent graduate has first to get away from most of the standards that obtain in the university, or at least to supplement them by a host of others which he should have learned there. In another passage in the article already quoted, Dean Briggs has touched the vital spot. He is speaking of the value, to teachers especially, of the peculiar fetich of Teutonized university instruction, the thesis, and of its liability to be of fictitious value. "Such theses, I suspect, have more than once been accepted for higher degrees; yet higher degrees won through them leave the winner farther from the best qualities of a teacher, remote from men and still more remote from boys. It was a relief the other day to hear a head-master say, 'I am looking for an under-teacher. I want first a man, and next a man to teach.'" What is true of teaching is even more obviously true of the great world of business and of politics. What it wants is men.

The cause of the break-down of the elective system, as at present constituted, is to be found in the machinery of instruction. The office of the teacher has become inextricably mixed up with a totally alien office—university discipline. Attendance at lectures is the only means of recording a student's presence in the university, and success in the examination in lecture courses is the only basis for judging of his diligence. At the tolling of a bell the student leaves all other affairs to report at a certain place. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, lectures were of necessity the main means of instruction. Books were rare and their prices prohibitive. The master read and the student copied. To-day, there are tens of thousands of books in every college library. Only in the higher courses are lectures necessary or profitable. But still instruction is carried on, even in the most general courses, by means of professorial lectures. Where great periods are covered by leaps and bounds, freshness or individuality of treatment is quite impossible. The tolling of the college bell dooms hundreds of students to hear a necessarily hurried and inarticulate statement of knowledge which has been carefully handled in printed form by the most brilliant writers, and to which a tutor might refer the student in a few minutes' conference. Modify the lecture system? It is the foundation of the police regulation. The boasted freedom in elective studies simmers down to this, that it enables the student to choose in what courses he shall be made the unwilling ally of the administrative officer. The lectures waste the time of the student and exhaust the energy of the teacher; but unless the lecturers give them and the studious attend, how can the university know that the shiftless stay away?

It is necessary, moreover, for the administrator to judge of the student's success as well as of his diligence. Twice every year the professors hold an examination lasting for three hours in each of their several courses. Of late years an ingenious means has been devised for making the examination system an even more perfect ally of the police. In the middle of each term an examination of one hour is held to insure that the student has not only attended lectures but studied outside; and, in order to expose the procrastinator, it has become the custom for the examination to be given without warning. Like the lecture system, the examination system throws the onus of discipline on the studious and the teachers. Two thousand students write yearly 32,000 examination books. Quite obviously the most advanced of the professors cannot spare time for the herculean task of reading and duly grading their share of these books. They give over most of them to underpaid assistants. The logical result of such a system is that the examinations tend to be regarded merely as statements of fact, and the reading of the books merely as clerical labor. If academic distinctions are disprized in America, both in college and out of it, this is amply explained by the fact that they attest a student's diligence rather than his ability. They are awarded, like a Sunday-school prize, in return for a certain number of good-conduct checks.

It is not enough that the machinery of instruction wastes the time of the student and debases the office of the examiner; it is, as I have said, the cause of the break-down of the elective system. As long as each student is required to pursue every study under the eye of the disciplinarian, the decision as to what he shall study rests not with his desires or his needs, but with an elaborate schedule of lectures and examinations. So excessive are the evils of the present system that no less a man than Professor William James has advocated the abolition of the examinations.

This remedy is perhaps extreme; but the only alternative is almost as radical. It is to enable the student, at least the more serious student, to slip the trammels of the elective system, and to study rationally, and to be rationally examined in, the subject or group of subjects which he prefers. In a word, the remedy is to divide and organize our courses of instruction for the more serious students into groups corresponding in some measure to what the English call honor schools.

It may be objected that already it is possible to read for honors. The objection will scarcely convince any one who has taken the examination. It is oral, and occupies an hour or two. The men who conduct it are leading men in the department, and are often of world-wide reputation. They are so great that they understand the nature of the farce they are playing. No candidate is expected to have covered the field of his honor subject even in the broadest outlines. When the astute student is not sure of an answer, he candidly admits the fact and receives credit for knowing that he does not know—a cardinal virtue to the scientific mind. If I may be allowed a personal instance, I went up for the examination in English literature in complete ignorance as to all but a single brief movement. When my ignorances were laid bare, the examiners most considerately confined their questions to my period. We had much pleasant conversation. Each of the examiners had imparted in his courses his latest rays of new light, and each in turn gave me the privilege of reflecting these rays to the others. For a brief but happy hour my importance was no less than that of the most eminent publication of the learned world. It need scarcely be said that such examinations are not supposed to have much weight in judging of the candidate's fitness. A more important test is a thesis studied from original sources, and the most important is good-conduct marks in a certain arbitrary number of set lecture courses. The policeman's examination is supreme.

IV

THE AMERICAN HALL

The college has shown a tendency, as I have indicated, to divide in its social life into separate organizations for the purposes of residence, dining, and athletics. In the administrative life, at least the proctors and the freshman advisers are each in charge of separate bodies of undergraduates. In the educational life, a similar tendency is noticeable. Year by year there has been an increasing disposition to supplement lectures or to substitute them by what is in effect tutorial instruction. In the history courses, for example, the lectures and examinations have for some time been supplemented by private personal conferences. If the student is proceeding properly, he is encouraged; if not, he is given the necessary guidance and assistance. I do not know what the result has been in the teaching of history; but in the teaching of English composition, where the conferences have largely supplanted lectures, it has been an almost unmixed benefit. The instructor's comments are given a directness and a personal interest impossible either in the lecture-room or by means of written correction and criticism; and the students are usually eager to discuss their work and the means for bettering it. As the lecture system proves more and more inadequate, the tutorial instruction must necessarily continue to increase, and is not unlikely to afford the basis for a more sensibly devised scheme of honor schools.

If the American college were organized into separate halls, it would be necessary and proper, as Mr. Bolles suggested, to place in each a Dean and administrative board; and the most economical plan of administration, as he pointed out, would be to give each administrator as many duties as possible toward a single set of pupils. Thus the proctor on each staircase of the hall would be the adviser of the men who roomed on it. It would be only a logical extension of the principle to give the proctor-adviser a tutorial office. All this indicates a reversion toward the golden age of the mediæval hall.

Here is where the gain would lie: The administration of the hall would make it no longer necessary to rely on the lecture courses for police duty, and the wise guidance of a tutor would in some measure remove the necessity of the recurrent police examinations. Thus the student would be able to elect such courses only as the competent adviser might judge best for him; and if the faculty were relieved of the labor of unnecessary instruction and examination it would be possible, with less expense than the present system involves, to offer a well-considered honor examination, and to provide that the examination books should be graded not with mere clerical intelligence, but with the highest available critical appreciation. Thus and only thus can the American honor degree be given that value as an asset which the English honor degree has possessed for almost a century.

It would by no means be necessary as at Oxford to make the honor examination the only basis for granting the degree. The fewer lecture courses which the student found available would be those in which the instruction is more advanced—the "university" courses properly speaking; and his examinations in these would be a criterion, such as Oxford is very much in need of, for correcting the evidence of the honor examination. Furthermore, in connection with one or more of these courses it would be easy for the student to prepare an honor thesis studied from the original sources under the constant advice of a university professor. Such an arrangement might be made to combine in any desired proportion the merits of the English honor schools with the merits of advanced instruction in America. With the introduction of the tutor, the American hall would be the complete counterpart of the mediæval hall of the golden age, and would solve the educational as well as the social and administrative problem.

As to the details of the new system, experience would be the final teacher; but for a first experiment, the English arrangement is in its main outline suggestive. An American pass degree might be taken by electing, as all students now elect, a certain number of courses at random. For the increasing number of those who can afford only three years' study, a pass degree would probably prove of the greatest advantage. It was by making this sharp distinction between the pass degree and the honor degree that the English universities long ago solved the question, much agitated still in America, of the three years' course. For the honor men[6] two general examinations would probably suffice. For his second year honor examination (the English "Moderations") a student might select from three or four general groups. This examination would necessarily offer precisely that opportunity for mental culture the lack of which Dean Briggs laments as the worst feature of the elective system as at present conducted. Furthermore, it would be easy to arrange the second year honor groups so as to include only such subjects as are serviceable both for the purposes of a general education and to lead up to the subjects the student is likely to elect for final honors. For the final honor examination the student might choose from a dozen or more honor groups, in any one of which he would receive scientific culture of the most advanced type, while at the same time, by means of private reading under his tutor, he might fill in very pleasantly the outlines of his subject. It is probable that such a system would even facilitate the efforts of those who are endeavoring to transplant German standards. According to Professor Münsterberg, the student who specializes in the German university is a good two years or more in advance of the American freshman. The spirit of German instruction would thus require that the period of general culture be extended at least to the middle of the undergraduate course.

Some such reorganization of our methods of teaching and examining, and I fear only this, would enable an undergraduate to choose what he wants and to pursue it with a fair chance of success. It would make the elective system elective.

A concrete plan for an American hall will perhaps make the project clearer. The poorer students at Harvard have for some years had a separate dining-hall, Foxcroft, where the fare and the system of paying for it are adapted to the slenderest of purses. They have also lived mainly in certain primitive dormitories in which the rooms are cheapest. More than any other set of men except the clubmen they are a united body, or are capable of being made so. When next a bequest is received, might not the University erect a building in which a hundred or two of these men could live in common? The quadrangle would insure privacy, the first requisite of community life; the kitchen and dining-hall would insure the maximum comfort and convenience with the minimum expense. Nothing could contribute more to the self-respect and the general standing of the poorer students than a comfortable and well-ordered place and way of living, if only because nothing could more surely correct the idiosyncrasies in manners and appearance which are fostered by their present discomfort and isolation.

The life of the hall would not of course be as strictly regulated as the life in an English college—perhaps no more strictly than in any other American college building. If in the hope of creating a closer community feeling stricter rules were adopted, they should be adopted, as in a mediæval hall, only by consent of the undergraduates.

Such a hall would develop athletic teams of its own, and would produce university athletes. Under the present arrangement, when the poorer students are members of university teams, they may, and often do, become honorary members of the university clubs; but their lack of means and sometimes of the manner of the world make it difficult for them to be at home in the clubs; their social life is usually limited to a small circle of friends. If they had first been trained in the life of a hall, they would more easily fall in with the broader life outside; and instead of being isolated as at present, they would exert no small influence both in their hall and in the university. Few things could be better for the general life of the undergraduate than the coöperation of such men, and few things could be better for the members of a hall than to be brought by means of its leading members into close connection with the life of the university.

If such a hall were successful, it could not fail to attract serious students of all sorts and conditions. At Oxford, Balliol has for generations been known as in the main unfashionable and scholarly; but it is seldom without a blue or two, and its eight has often been at the head of the river. As a result of all this, it never ceases to attract the more serious men from the aristocracy and even the nobility. In America, the success of one residential hall would probably lead to the establishment of others, so that in the end the life of the university might be given all the advantages of a dual organization.

No change could be more far reaching and beneficial. The American institutions of the present are usually divided into two classes, the university, or "large college," and the "small college." The merit of the large colleges is that those fortunately placed in them gain greater familiarity with the ways of the world and of men, while for those who wish it, they offer more advanced instruction—the instruction characteristic of German universities. But to the increasing number of undergraduates who are not fortunately placed, their very size is the source of unhappiness; and for those undergraduates who wish anything else than scientific instruction, their virtues become merely a detriment. It is for this reason that many wise parents still prefer to intrust the education of their sons to the small colleges. These small colleges possess many of the virtues of the English universities; they train the mind and cultivate it, and at the same time develop the social man. If now the American university were to divide its undergraduate department into organized residential halls, it would combine the advantages of the two types of American institution, which are the two types of instruction the world over. Already our college life at its best is as happy as the college life in England; and the educational advantages of the four or five of our leading universities are rapidly becoming equal to those of the four or five leading universities in Germany. A combination of the residential hall and the teaching university would reproduce the highest type of the university of the Middle Ages; and in proportion as life and knowledge have been bettered in six hundred years, it would better that type. England has lost the educational virtues of the mediæval university, while Germany, in losing the residential halls, has lost its peculiar social virtues. When the American university combines the old social life with the new instruction, it will be the most perfect educational instruction in the history of civilization.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

I. ATHLETIC TRAINING IN ENGLAND

In one or two particulars it seemed to me that we might learn from the English methods of training. On the Oxford team we took long walks every other day instead of track work. Our instructions were to climb all the hills in our way. This was in order to bring into play new muscles as far as possible, so as to rest those used in running. Though similar walks are sometimes given in America as a preliminary "seasoning," our training, for months before a meeting, is confined to the track. This is not unwise as long as a runner's stride needs developing; and in the heat of our summers such walks as the English take might sometimes prove exhausting. Yet my personal observations convinced me that for distance runners—and for sprinters, too, perhaps—the English method is far better. Under our training the muscles often seem overpowered by nervous lassitude; at the start of a race I have often felt it an effort to stand. In England there was little or none of this; we felt, as the bottle-holders are fond of putting it, "like a magnum of champagne."

This idea of long walks, which the English have arrived at empirically, has been curiously approved in America by scientific discovery. It has been shown that after muscles appear too stiff from exhaustion to move, they can be excited to action by electric currents; while the motor nerves on being examined after such fatigue are found to be shrunken and empty, as in extreme old age. The limit of muscular exertion is thus clearly determined by the limit of the energy of the motor nerve. Now in a perfectly trained runner, the heart and lung must obviously reach their prime simultaneously with the motor nerves used in running; but since these organs are ordained to supply the entire system with fuel, they will usually require a longer time to reach prime condition than any single set of nerves. Thus continual track work is likely to develop the running nerves to the utmost before the heart and lungs are at prime. Conversely stated, if the development of the running nerves is retarded so as to keep pace with the development of the heart and lungs, the total result is likely to be higher. All this amounts to what any good English trainer will tell you—that you must take long walks on up and down grades in order to rest your running muscles and at the same time give your heart and lungs plenty of work—that is, in order to keep from getting "track stale."

The amount of work we did from day to day will best be understood, perhaps, by quoting one or two of the training-cards. For the hundred yards the training during the final ten days was as follows: Monday and Tuesday, sprints (three or four dashes of sixty yards at top speed); Wednesday, a fast 120 yards at the Queen's Club grounds; Thursday, walk; Friday, sprints; Saturday, 100 yards trial at Queen's Club; Sunday, walk; Monday, light work at Queen's Club; Tuesday, easy walk; Wednesday, inter-varsity sports. The man for whom this card was written happened to be over weight and short of training, or he would have had less track work. If he had been training for the quarter in addition to the hundred, he would have had fewer sprints, and, instead of the fast 120, a trial quarter a week before the sports, with perhaps a fast 200 on the following Friday. For the mile, the following is a characteristic week's work, ending with a trial: Sunday, walk; Monday, one lap (¹⁄₃ mile); Tuesday, two laps, fast-ish; Wednesday, walk; Thursday, easy mile; Friday, walk; Saturday, a two lap trial (at the rate of 4.30 for the mile). For the three miles, the following is a schedule of the first ten days (the walks are unusually frequent because the "first string" had a bruise on the ball of his foot): Monday, walk; Tuesday, walk; Wednesday, two slow laps at the Queen's Club; Thursday, walk; Friday, walk; Saturday, a long run at the Queen's Club; Sunday, walk; Monday, four laps, fast-ish, at the Queen's Club; Tuesday, walk; Wednesday, inter-varsity sports. The chief difference between this work and what we should give in America is in the matter of walking.

II. CLIMATE AND INTERNATIONAL ATHLETICS

The value of international contests as a basis for comparing English and American training is impaired by the fact that the visiting team is pretty sure to be under the weather, as may be indicated by summarizing the history of international contests. The first representatives we sent abroad, the Harvard four-oared crew of 1869, became so overtrained on the Thames on work which would have been only sufficient at home, that two of the four men had to be substituted. The substitutes were taken from the "second" crew, which had just come over from the race at Worcester. The men in this crew had been so inferior as oarsmen that they had been allowed to compete against Yale only after vigorous protest; but in the race against Oxford, owing probably to the brevity of their training in England, the substitutes pulled the strongest oars in the boat. The crew got off very well, but when the time came for the final effort, the two original members had not the nervous stamina to respond.

The experience of the Yale athletes who competed against Oxford in 1894 was much the same. Their performances in the games were so far below their American form that they won only the events in which they literally outclassed their opponents—the hammer, shot, and broad jump. They were sportsmen enough not to explain their poor showing, and perhaps they never quite realized how the soft and genial English summer had unnerved them; but several competent observers who had watched their practice told me that they lost form from day to day. Their downfall was doubtless aided by the fact that instead of training at Brighton or elsewhere on the coast, they trained in the Thames valley and at Oxford.

The experience of the Cornell crew, of which I got full and frank information while crossing the Atlantic with them after the race, was along the same lines. Before leaving Ithaca, they rowed over the equivalent of the Henley course in time that was well under seven minutes, and not far from the Henley record of six minutes, fifty-one seconds. At Henley they rowed their first trial in seven minutes and three seconds, if my memory serves, and in consequence were generally expected to win. From that day they grew worse and worse. Certain of the eight went stale and had to be substituted. In the race the crew, like the earlier Harvard crew, went to pieces when they were called on for a spurt—the test of nerve force in reserve—and were beaten in wretchedly slow time. They had gone hopelessly stale on work which would have been none too much in America.

The experience of the Yale crew in the year after was similar to that of Harvard and Cornell. The crew went to pieces and lost the race for the lack of precisely that burst of energy for which American athletes, and Yale in particular, are remarkable.