THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 Bo 
 GUY POTTER BENTON 
 
 President of Miami University 
 
 One of the Memorial Volumes issued in 
 connection with the exercises attendant 
 upon the celebration of the one hundredth 
 anniversary of the founding of the Miami 
 University— A REAL COLLEGE. 
 
 Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham 
 New York: Eaton and Mains 
 

 Copyrghl. 1909. 
 By Jennings and Graham 
 
Who has never lost faith in her son, and 
 whose heroic sacrifices and persistent ambi- 
 tion for him have made it possible for him to 
 breathe, for twenty- five years, as student and 
 teacher, the atmosphere of The Real College. 
 
 530<K>* 
 
 '-* A 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The Place of the Small College, The Mission 
 of the Small College, and kindred topics, are 
 among the most prominent and frequent on the 
 programs of latter-day college associations and 
 educational conventions. 
 
 There is no place or mission for the " smair 
 college. Ours is a day of big things. The ad- 
 jective small used to qualify anything is suggest- 
 ive of insignificance and begets contempt An 
 educational institution may be large in financial 
 resources and equipment and great in the lofty 
 purpose of its existence, but because it is, by 
 choice, limited in the size of its student body 
 alone, it is wrongly called small. It is to correct 
 this persisting misconception that this little volume 
 is given to the Public. 
 
 It is worth while to distinguish clearly the 
 efficient from the inefficient The Peal College is 
 never a small college. The small college is never 
 a Peal College. Years of experience and ob- 
 servation have convinced the writer that the insti- 
 
 7 
 
PEEFACE 
 
 tution small in enrollment may be truly great, and 
 that a large attendance mag be registered in an 
 exceedingly small institution. First of all, then, 
 a definition of the Real College is attempted. 
 After that the president of the Real College, the 
 students of the Real College, and the faculty of 
 the Real College are studied in the order named 
 Last of all, a picture of The Real College Man is 
 attempted. 
 
 If in this Centennial year of the founding of a 
 Real College, so small a memorial book shall, in 
 any way, quicken in its readers their appreciation 
 of the worth of the Real College, the object of its 
 author's labor of love will have been accom- 
 plished 
 
 GUY POTTER BENTON. 
 
 Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 
 The First of June, Nine- 
 teen Hundred and 
 Nine. 
 
 8 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE DEFINED 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE DEFINED 
 
 Precedent is sacred in England. In 
 America it is a convenience. A Court de- 
 cision is accepted by ns as binding so long 
 as it supports our contention or until it runs 
 contrary to our wishes and we convince a 
 succeeding Court of its fallacy. If tradi- 
 tion in the New World but bore the seal of 
 value it wears across the seas, we had never 
 been so hopelessly lost in our attempt to 
 find proper definitions for the names ap- 
 plied to our various educational institutions. 
 In the British Isles, and on the Continent, 
 the use of the word " college" is so univer- 
 sally accepted as meaning but one thing that 
 it is at once clearly differentiated from the 
 university, which every one understands to 
 be an institution of another class. In this 
 country we use college, academy, seminary, 
 and university as satisfactory synonyms with 
 such profane disregard for the customs of 
 the centuries that, after an institution has 
 
 11 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 been given its name, several explanatory 
 sentences inevitably follow to make plain the 
 field of intellectual endeavor it is supposed 
 to cover. In every State of the Union we 
 have had institutions with but one little build- 
 ing, a half-dozen teachers, a half-hundred 
 students, a diminutive library, and a paucity 
 of apparatus, each wearing the name of uni- 
 versity as its proud corporate right. On the 
 other hand there are numerous institutions 
 bearing unpretentiously the name of college, 
 which, in consideration of the scope and va- 
 riety of work covered, belong, by right, to 
 the university class. 
 
 It would be unfair to condemn too 
 strongly those founders of institutions who 
 have taken this liberty with terms of estab- 
 lished meaning. Our country is new, and, 
 coincident with the beginnings of the State, 
 came the founding of educational institu- 
 tions. We are a people of large expecta- 
 tions, and a sanely optimistic view of future 
 possibilities has often seemed to warrant the 
 hope that an institution of learning about to 
 be planted would ultimately become, in the 
 12 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE DEFINED 
 
 proper and fullest meaning of the word, a 
 university. In some instances the hope has 
 been fulfilled in accomplishment. In nu- 
 merous other instances later generations have 
 realized that their forefathers had laid insti- 
 tutional foundations in a fabric of dreams 
 which in the light of after developments 
 could not possibly find a superstructure of 
 substance. 
 
 Here and there in our history have been 
 found conservatives who have laid in mod- 
 esty the foundations of a college. That cir- 
 cumstances they were unable to foresee have 
 pushed their college forward into the larger 
 proportions of a university is not to be 
 charged against them as due to narrow- 
 mindedness or shortsightedness. Without 
 the gift of prophecy it were impossible, in a 
 developing civilization, to predict with cer- 
 tainty the magnitude an institution would 
 assume. Often has the small planting be- 
 come the large fruition. 
 
 All things considered, it would hardly be 
 wise, at this time, to yield to the demand 
 coming from many quarters for change of 
 13 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 titles. It is an easy matter to broaden the 
 name of college into the more appropriate 
 one of nniversity. It is almost impossible 
 to compress the name university, long worn 
 by an institution, into that of college. To 
 attempt to rename all the educational insti- 
 tutions of the land so that each shall be 
 known for what it is by the appellation it 
 bears, would be an undertaking beset with 
 many just objections. When graduates of the 
 years come back, at convenient seasons, and 
 when they assemble in alumni gatherings, 
 they are happy in taking on their lips the 
 name of Alma Mater that became precious 
 during the care-free period of student life. 
 Why break the heartstrings of thousands of 
 college folk by substituting a strange title 
 for one that has become sacred through years 
 of the sweetest associations the earth holds? 
 Then, too, it may afterwhile be necessary 
 to change back again. If the past may be 
 accepted in any way as a gauge for the fu- 
 ture, the institution that is small and insig- 
 nificant to-day may become large and in- 
 fluential to-morrow. Let the institutions 
 14 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE DEFINED 
 
 called colleges, if development warrant it, 
 change their names to university, but let 
 those colleges which in hnman unwisdom 
 have been called university retain the title 
 to the comfort of alumni while they hope for 
 a greater to-morrow — only, though granting 
 this, let us determine the distinction between 
 the university and the college regardless of 
 the name borne, if perchance we may re- 
 alize in America the advantages that are to 
 be found only in The Real College. 
 
 A careful study of the origin of institu- 
 tions of higher learning will reveal the fact 
 that, in the very beginning of its existence, 
 the university was an institution for ad- 
 vanced study. Charles the Great, ignorant, 
 but eager for learning, is entitled to the 
 gratitude of the generations as the inspired 
 originator of higher education. This mighty 
 founder of empire has sent a succession of 
 distinguished teachers down from the day 
 of Alcuin, for in the great abbey schoolroom 
 of St. Martin, at Tours, is found the nucleus 
 of the teaching from which the university 
 took its rise. 
 
 15 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 As an institution organized and tangible, 
 the university in the earliest stage of its de- 
 velopment was simply a scholastic guild or 
 group of scholars and teachers bound to- 
 gether like a trades-guild for the purpose of 
 investigating the more intricate intellectual 
 and spiritual problems. The purpose of the 
 founding of the University of Salerno, the 
 first in Europe, confirms the statement that 
 the university was an institution for the ad- 
 vanced work of masters, and not for the 
 making of bachelors. It existed in the first 
 place as a School of Medicine. Like Salerno, 
 all the earlier universities found their origin 
 to a great extent in endeavors to obtain and 
 provide instruction of a kind beyond the 
 range of the monastic and cathedral schools. 
 It is clear, therefore, that precedent makes 
 the university an institution for the advanced 
 research and investigations of graduate stu- 
 dents. It is true that a multiplication of in- 
 dependent colleges united in a community 
 with a centralized government in certain 
 agreed matters, as at Cambridge and Ox- 
 ford, has somewhat modified the original 
 16 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE DEFINED 
 
 European conception of a university. Not- 
 withstanding this modification the university 
 remains, in the essential purpose of its ex- 
 istence, an institution for advanced graduate, 
 technical, or professional study. This ideal 
 of the purpose of the university has been 
 taking root in America in recent years. 
 Though there are those in high educational 
 places who demand a process of exclusion, 
 there are others equally prominent who de- 
 mand an all-inclusiveness of the educational 
 endeavor in order that we may realize, on 
 the new Continent, the perfect university of 
 the world. 
 
 At the annual meeting of the National 
 Association of State University Presidents, 
 at Baton Eouge, Louisiana, in November, 
 1906, President George E. MacLean, of 
 the State University of Iowa, as chair- 
 man of a committee appointed at a pre- 
 vious meeting to present a definition of 
 a university for interpretation of member- 
 ship rights in the Association, and to fur- 
 nish an ideal to which all universities should 
 aspire, announced that he had been unable 
 2 17 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 to secure an agreement with his colleagues 
 on the committee, the Presidents of the Uni- 
 versities of Illinois and Vermont. Despair- 
 ing of any concert of action by the members 
 of the committee, he presented as his own 
 conception of the character of institution 
 necessary for recognition by the National 
 Association of State Universities the follow- 
 ing statement : 
 
 "Without attempting definitions, we be- 
 lieve that while a university may be, in the 
 words of a distinguished member of this 
 Committee, 'a complex of colleges,' it is 
 essentially much more than that. It should 
 give a liberal education and prepare practi- 
 tioners for the various professions, but its 
 keynote, in addition to the liberalization of 
 the mind, must be the spirit of specializa- 
 tion, research, and discovery of new truths 
 and new applications of old truths, and the 
 diffusion of knowledge, particularly in the 
 institutions we represent, in the service of 
 the State and Nation. 
 
 In gross, therefore, we recommend as 
 standards at this date, for an institution to 
 be recommended as a standard American 
 university : 
 
 18 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE DEFINED 
 
 1. A university giving the Degree of 
 Doctor of Philosophy or Doctor of Science, 
 after three years of graduate study in resi- 
 dence, one of which shall be at the institu- 
 tion conferring the degree; 
 
 2. A university that requires, in addition 
 to the points named in graduate study, that 
 a candidate before receiving his higher de- 
 gree shall have completed for his Bachelor's 
 Degree a course of not less than one hun- 
 dred and twenty semester hours in subjects 
 distributed with reasonable sequences, and 
 preliminary requirements among the great 
 groups of subjects, ordinarily recognized in 
 the field of liberal arts, as languages and 
 literature, philosophical and historical sci- 
 ences, material sciences and the fine arts." 
 
 President Edmund Janes James, of the 
 University of Illinois, the only other mem- 
 ber of the committee present took issue with 
 President MacLean, contending that in this 
 progressive day the universities were grow- 
 ing too rapidly, and to serve the larger in- 
 terests expected of a university they must, 
 in the near future, be relieved by the high 
 schools and small colleges of at least the 
 first two years of the college course. If 
 
 19 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 President James is right — and there are 
 many who share his views — it would seem 
 that we are likely in the United States, be- 
 fore long, to be driven back to a realization 
 of the original European conception of the 
 university. 
 
 A university may continue to maintain 
 one or more undergraduate colleges, but 
 even now it is generally admitted that the 
 prime object of its existence is to serve so- 
 ciety by solving the larger problems, the an- 
 swers to which are essential to the welfare 
 of humankind. It is certain that increasing 
 demand for skilled labor and trained experts 
 will compel the university of the future to 
 assume this character. 
 
 The day is past when a man can engage 
 in a commercial career without a thorough 
 knowledge of the scientific principles upon 
 which all sound business achievement must 
 rest. The Tuck School of Finance, at Dart- 
 mouth College — and by the way, Dartmouth 
 is one of the so-called colleges which on ac- 
 count of the number of students and the scope 
 of its work now fairly belongs to the univer- 
 20 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE DEFINED 
 
 sity class — the Wharton School of Commerce 
 at the University of Pennsylvania, and the 
 School of Commerce at the University of 
 Wisconsin, are a response to the modern de- 
 mand for trained men of affairs and are 
 augnry of a not far distant day when all 
 universities will have Graduate Schools of 
 Business, taking equal rank with Schools of 
 Law, Medicine, Theology, and Engineering. 
 Clearly, then, there must be an institution 
 that will carry youth-hood forward from the 
 work completed in the high school to the 
 point of maturity and knowledge which will 
 find him prepared for the specialization of 
 the graduate college in the university. 
 
 The institution which fills this gap is the 
 college, and that it has been a most impor- 
 tant institution in our educational system is 
 evidenced by past accomplishment in the 
 production of men and women of cultured 
 lives and effective service. It will continue 
 to be an indispensable feature of our edu- 
 cational work so long as the humanities are 
 of interest to men and so long as a good 
 foundation is a recognized necessity for a 
 21 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 superstructure of specialization. Only a few 
 years ago the friends of the American col- 
 lege were panic-stricken by the fear that the 
 institution of their affection was about to 
 be obliterated. The greatest college presi- 
 dent in the country inaugurated the move- 
 ment for the abolition of the time-honored 
 four-year college course and the substitution 
 therefor of a three-years' course, including, 
 however, as much work as had previously 
 been done in four years. Not to be outdone 
 in progressive theories of education, a prom- 
 inent metropolitan university president in 
 the East soon followed by insisting that a 
 two-years' course between the high school 
 and the professional school of the university 
 was sufficient. Following hard on the heels 
 of this declaration came a pronunciamento 
 from the distinguished president of a metro- 
 politan university in the Middle West de- 
 manding that two years be added to the four- 
 year courses now given in the average public 
 high school. Is it any wonder, in the light 
 of these proclamations emanating from rec- 
 ognized authorities in higher education, that 
 22 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE DEFINED 
 
 the friends of the college became apprehen- 
 sive? The institution of their love seemed 
 marching to a certain doom. 
 
 The college still lives, however, and if it 
 is ever changed in character the change is 
 more likely to occur on the lines suggested 
 by President James than otherwise. The 
 high schools may become colleges in the 
 scope of their work in some future day, and 
 if that day arrives it will come bringing the 
 same problems that now confront the col- 
 leges. Undergraduate colleges may continue, 
 doubtless will continue indefinitely, as at- 
 tached features of a university system, and 
 the college existing in the university has 
 many of the same problems to solve which 
 belong to the college in detachment. 
 
 A college, as an advanced grade of the 
 high school or as an inferior department of 
 a university, will always, by reason of the 
 age or stage of maturity of its students and 
 the character of its work, have a distinct 
 quality calling for the observance of par- 
 ticular forms and the realization of certain 
 ideals therein. 
 
 23 
 
THE KEAL COLLEGE 
 
 It is because of the fact that years of 
 existence have established traditions and 
 customs found only in isolation, that we shall 
 assume for our present purpose that the in- 
 dependent institution performing the func- 
 tions required between the high school and 
 the university, whether it be properly called 
 college, or miscalled university, is the type 
 of the real college. 
 
 The real college is not an academy, 
 neither is it a graduate or professional 
 school. It need hardly be said that a school 
 for the teaching of Bookkeeping, Banking, 
 Commercial Forms, and Stenography, guar- 
 anteeing a completed course and fitness for 
 a good-salaried position after six months of 
 training, though often bearing the preten- 
 tious name of college, is not a college. A 
 technical school, giving undergraduate work 
 in Mechanics, Engineering, Ceramics, or the 
 Applied Sciences, even though it offer strong 
 and thoroughly useful courses extending 
 through a number of years, is not, accord- 
 ing to the accepted conception, a college. 
 The real college bridges the chasm between 
 24 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE DEFINED 
 
 the high school or academy and the uni- 
 versity or professional school. Its mis- 
 sion is not to prepare directly for business 
 or profession. It does prepare for life. It 
 presents the humanities. It introduces the 
 student to Philosophy and Literature, and 
 grounds him in Linguistics and the Pure 
 Sciences. The real college drills the stu- 
 dent in subjects that he may never use in 
 his life's vocation. It may grant the privi- 
 lege of electing certain studies that look to- 
 ward a particular calling in later years ; but 
 these studies are, at best, only a basis for 
 the practical studies that are later to follow 
 them. 
 
 The college is a foundation builder. It 
 seeks to establish the youth in body, intel- 
 lect, and moral character so strongly that he 
 will be well prepared in due season, with 
 large vision and lofty ideals, for the suc- 
 cessful undertaking of special training. The 
 real college is a school of discipline and cul- 
 ture. The men and women of America who 
 have lived the larger life, who have won the 
 greater success, and who have rendered the 
 25 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 better service as a result of the ideals, dis- 
 cipline, and culture of the undergraduate pe- 
 riod, are satisfactory proofs that their time 
 was not misspent, and they abundantly vin- 
 dicate the importance to civilization of the 
 real college. 
 
 26 
 
THE PRESIDENT OF THE REAL 
 COLLEGE 
 
THE PRESIDENT OF THE REAL 
 COLLEGE 
 
 The Man at the Wheel is indispensable. 
 To attempt to direct an educational institu- 
 tion without a capable head is as an attempt 
 to run a ship without a pilot. The Univer- 
 sity of Virginia tried it for seventy years 
 and more, and then acknowledged that the 
 prolonged experiment was unsatisfactory. 
 The University of Cincinnati reached the 
 same conclusion much earlier in its history. 
 
 It was in deference to the expressed wish 
 of Thomas Jefferson, the founder, for an 
 academic community thoroughly democratic 
 that the University of Virginia adopted the 
 policy of handing the executive business 
 about in rotation from year to year to a fac- 
 ulty chairman. By directing inquiries to 
 those connected with the institution just 
 named, persons interested may easily secure 
 decided opinions on the practical workings of 
 29 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 this plan. The fact, though, that the Univer- 
 sity of Virginia now has a president as its 
 permanent head is doubtless the best evidence 
 that the original policy was found unsatisfac- 
 tory. We are warranted, too, now that the 
 University of Cincinnati boasts a president, in 
 drawing similar conclusions concerning that 
 institution. Other colleges have tried the ex- 
 periment of a headless directing body and 
 have sooner or later pronounced the plan im- 
 practical. There is universal acknowledg- 
 ment of the need of a managing head for 
 every enterprise of importance. The real 
 college is an important enterprise. Such a 
 college must have a responsible head. He 
 may be called chancellor, governor, master, 
 director, or president. The name does not 
 alter the main requirements of the position. 
 In America the executive and administrative 
 head of the college commonly answers to 
 the title of president. 
 
 The president of the real college is a per- 
 son of manifold duties. His obligations are 
 varied. He sustains relations to the gen- 
 eral public, to his board of trustees, to his 
 30 
 
PEESIDENT OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 faculty, to his alumni, to his patrons, and, 
 most vital of all, to his students. 
 
 The college president of the middle nine- 
 teenth century had a well-beaten path lead- 
 ing from his study to his classroom. He be- 
 longed to the college alone. The public had 
 no claims upon him. Not so to-day. One 
 of the most eloquent orators of the South 
 less than five years ago declared that his 
 life, while generally regarded as successful, 
 was to him in a measure a disappointment. 
 It was a matter of regret to him, he said, 
 that he could not have been a college presi- 
 dent, so that he might have lived a life of 
 literary ease with the books of his library, 
 unvexed by the harassing anxieties of the 
 busy outside world. The college president 
 who listened to this expressed conception of 
 his care-free existence smiled sadly as he 
 thought of the great gulf that lay fixed be- 
 tween the ideal and the real. In delivering 
 the charge to bis successor at the Prince- 
 ton installation ceremonies in October, 1902, 
 President Patton said, in substance, to Pres- 
 ident-elect Wilson: "It may be pleasant, in 
 31 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 your new position, to recall that you once 
 had the tastes and inclinations of a scholar, 
 but it will be only a recollection. ' ' No edu- 
 cational institution in our day can long sus- 
 tain itself unless its claims are unceasingly 
 pressed upon the public. The college serves 
 its students first, of course, but it is re- 
 stricted to the point of approximate ineffi- 
 ciency if its service ends there. The college 
 has not done half its work unless it carries its 
 ideals away out beyond college halls — unless 
 it lends itself to the solution of the great 
 problems of humanity. The real college 
 should serve Society, Church, and State, 
 and the college president must project the 
 influence of his institution as far as may be 
 out into the practical affairs of men. 
 
 The college, to grow and to serve hu- 
 manity, with a constantly increasing effec- 
 tiveness, must have money, and money never 
 comes without the asking. The college pres- 
 ident must know how to ask in such a way 
 that he will receive. One of his chiefest 
 duties, in relation to the public, is that of 
 a money-getter. If the institution is sup- 
 32 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 ported by the State, he must needs be skilled 
 in the art of approaching leglislators in the 
 way that will most surely bring ample ap- 
 propriations for buildings, improvements, 
 and maintenance. In this work, happy 
 would the college be, and happier its presi- 
 dent, if he could be relieved from the re- 
 sponsibility of pressing its claims. It is un- 
 seemly for one charged with the dignity of 
 educational administration to appear in the 
 role of a lobbyist, as a suppliant, knock- 
 ing at the doors of legislative halls. If 
 trustees would assume the duty of secur- 
 ing the appropriations for the support of 
 our State colleges and universities, the pub- 
 lic would be spared the spectacle of edu- 
 cators mingling with clamorous sycophants, 
 and the presidents of these institutions 
 would be spared the humiliation of a dis- 
 credited classification. Trustees, however, 
 are usually active business or professional 
 men and can promise little more than sup- 
 port, while they look to their president to 
 see to it that the legislature supplies insti- 
 tutional needs. If the president fails in this 
 3 33 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 work he is usually regarded as a general 
 failure. Excellence in other lines will not 
 compensate for lack of ability to secure the 
 needed financial support. The best that can 
 be done under present conditions, in all the 
 effort necessary to get money, is for the 
 president to maintain a bearing in harmony 
 with the exalted work of one charged with 
 a right example to youthhood. Legislators 
 respect the man who does not forget the ob- 
 ligations of his calling. They do not want 
 educators to descend to the level of the pro- 
 fessional lobbyist. The college president 
 who tries to play the politician by being a 
 good fellow may win favor with the few, but 
 with the majority he meets the failure that 
 contempt always presents to its object. To 
 drink and smoke and entertain lavishly may 
 not be considered inappropriate when it is 
 done by a railroad attorney seeking favor- 
 able legislation, but any such conduct is al- 
 most universally recognized as an incongru- 
 ity when used by a college president to win 
 favor. As the majority of our American law- 
 makers are men of sturdy common-sense and 
 34 
 
PEESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 high ideals of character, they have little re- 
 spect for an exemplar who does not every- 
 where exemplify. It is argument — facts at- 
 tractively presented — that wins legislative 
 support for colleges. The president of a 
 State college who knows how to approach 
 men skillfully but honestly, and who believes 
 in his cause, will find a sympathetic response 
 from the friends of public education in legis- 
 lative halls. 
 
 The president of a Church college who 
 succeeds is a professional beggar. To allow 
 any fine conception of modesty to restrain 
 him from asking any living person for money 
 would be to spell out for him the words of 
 his own failure in the service he should ren- 
 der his institution. For the executive of a 
 Church-supported institution there is no sur- 
 cease of toil from the morning of the day of 
 his installation to the evening of his effective 
 resignation. He must have well in hand the 
 details of institutional work, he must be con- 
 stant in the service of his students and fac- 
 ulty, while he seizes every possible odd mo- 
 ment to make personal solicitation for build- 
 
 35 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 ing and endowment funds. His crowded 
 week-days are crowned by Sabbaths that 
 know no rest, for educational sermons and 
 lectures in every possible pulpit are an in- 
 dispensable preliminary to generous educa- 
 tional collections. 
 
 In the matter of securing added financial 
 support the president of a non-sectarian in- 
 stitution maintained on private endowments 
 bears the same responsibility that rests upon 
 the shoulders of his brother executive in the 
 Church college. The commercialization of 
 the college presidency is one of the lament- 
 able facts of latter-day academic policy. 
 
 It is notorious that trustee boards of cer- 
 tain institutions in recent years have made 
 scholarship, literary influence, and command- 
 ing character secondary considerations, and 
 in the last analysis their choice of a college 
 president has been governed by his ability to 
 control a financial following. 
 
 High-minded people who would not think 
 of disparaging the particular qualities neces- 
 sary for a bank president, a corporation man- 
 ager, or a railroad director, must be par- 
 36 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 doned if they dare to believe that certain ad- 
 ditional talents and attainments are requi- 
 site to the realization of the true college 
 president. Sad the day for the student 
 when, looking for a lofty ideal, he finds in 
 the president of his college nothing better 
 than expert ability to multiply shekels. The 
 young person fronting the future has a right 
 to expect that somewhere ahead the hidden 
 years have in their keeping a gift more 
 priceless than material treasure. Buoyant 
 youth will be incited to loftiest endeavor only 
 under the inspiring charm of a big mind and 
 a great heart. 
 
 The president of the real college will un- 
 derstand, if his institution is to hold a re- 
 spectable position in the republic of letters, 
 that he has resting upon him an obligation 
 for authorship. To write poorly for the 
 public prints would be to reflect discredit 
 upon the interests with which he has con- 
 nection. To write on lines of scientific spe- 
 cialization with which he is not immediately 
 connected, or to attempt to treat those sub- 
 jects in which his knowledge is not fresh, 
 37 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 would be exhibition of a vain presumption 
 that even his position could not excuse. The 
 real college president is ever pursued by the 
 fear that administrative duties will rob him 
 of scholarly tastes and reputation, and to 
 avoid this fate he hastens, in some instances, 
 to repel it by discussing questions with which 
 he has not, and is not expected to have, ac- 
 quaintance. 
 
 Presidential duties undoubtedly will re- 
 quire abandonment of reading and research 
 on the special lines that absorb the interest 
 of the professor in the college chair. It 
 ought to be recognized, however, that admin- 
 istration is a line of specialization as emi- 
 nently respectable as Philosophy or Eco- 
 nomics or Chemistry or Mathematics or Lin- 
 guistics. The college president who devotes 
 himself with the scholar's interest to the 
 study of curricula, to problems of organiza- 
 tion and government, and to the develop- 
 ment of plans for effective institutional 
 service, will be able to write as an author- 
 ity, and his deliverances will be accepted as 
 the product of scholarship. 
 38 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 The real college president, though, will 
 not have met, to the full, the requirements 
 of his station when he has done his best as 
 financier and author. His obligation of office 
 demands that he carry the influence of his 
 institution as far as possible by word of 
 mouth. The day of enchanting eloquence 
 and persuasive argument is not past. Occa- 
 sionally it is said, and usually by those who 
 are not effective in public utterance, that the 
 multiplicity of newspapers and magazines in 
 our modern day has made the platform ob- 
 solete. It- is repeatedly averred that the or- 
 ator is no longer a potent factor in the de- 
 liberations of men. Doubtless it is true that 
 the man endowed with gifts of tongues shares 
 the privilege of molding thought with other 
 forces, as he did not do when Demosthenes 
 hurled his phillipics and Cicero convicted by 
 the force of his relentless logic. The other 
 thing, though, is also true, namely, that so 
 long as a warm personality has attractive 
 power, that long will the word spoken by 
 the living man wield an influence beyond 
 that of the lifeless composition. The after- 
 39 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 dinner speaker was never more in demand 
 than to-day, and the applause given to his 
 utterances and the editorial comment upon 
 his ideas are proof sufficient that his speech 
 arouses thought. Political campaigns have 
 not yet found a satisfactory substitute for 
 the stump. The brief does not reach the 
 jury as effectively as the oral pleadings of 
 the attorney. Hundreds find their way with 
 the returning Sabbaths to the churches where 
 gifted preachers proclaim God's everlasting 
 truth, and the galleries of congressional 
 halls will not begin to contain the multitudes 
 anxious to hear the representatives of the 
 people on living questions. It is as an ef- 
 fective public speaker that the college pres- 
 ident can do great service for his institu- 
 tion. If the strength of his personality is 
 made apparent through his spoken words in 
 pulpit, in club, on platform, or in banquet- 
 hall, parents find themselves longing to have 
 their children under his influence, and he 
 touches an hundred responsive chords that 
 will become vibrant with praise for his 
 college. 
 
 40 
 
PBESIDENT OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 A reputation is of little value to a col- 
 lege president. It may attract an initial 
 crowd, but it is valueless unless its possessor 
 wins the crowd. Men in some vocations can 
 afford an occasional, partial, or complete 
 failure in a public effort. The college presi- 
 dent must never fail. As a rule his every 
 appearance is before a new company, and 
 his institution is, in his attitudes and every 
 word, always on trial. To do poorly is 
 not only to hurt himself, but, through him- 
 self, to do injury to all those interests for 
 which he stands sponsor. If, then, he is to 
 be a fit representative of the spirit of the in- 
 stitution in the service it renders to the pub- 
 lic beyond his college halls, his obligation for 
 close study and serious thinking is heavy in- 
 deed. To assume that preparation is unnec- 
 essary for even one public duty would be to 
 entertain a delusion fraught with possibili- 
 ties fatal to his sacred trust. 
 
 After all, though, it is well to bear in 
 
 mind that the duty the president of the 
 
 real college bears to the outside world is, 
 
 at most, only adventitious. If it were not 
 
 41 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 for his position at home he would have none 
 of these incidental functions away from 
 home. It is therefore of the highest impor- 
 tance that he have a proper conception of 
 his part at the center from whence reach out 
 all his possibilities of service. He has first 
 an executive obligation to his board of trus- 
 tees. If this body has been moved by the 
 highest academic ideals in electing a presi- 
 dent, his board will expect him to be their 
 capable adviser in all that has to do with in- 
 stitutional welfare. "When trustees gather 
 once or twice a year, for a day or two, or 
 maybe for a few brief hours, dropping for 
 the time all thought of their multitudinous 
 business or professional cares to consider 
 the well-being of their college, they have a 
 right to expect that their president will have 
 its affairs so well in hand that they may 
 readily understand the exact uses to which 
 the resources have been put, so that they 
 may be intelligently and willingly led to an 
 approval of his larger future plans. When 
 trustees commence to entertain doubts as to 
 the well-balanced judgment or the clear- 
 42 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 seeing vision of their executive and coun- 
 selor, the beginning of the end of his use- 
 fulness in that relationship will have come. 
 Time was when boards of trustees not 
 only chose the president and faculty of the 
 college, but as well prescribed the curricu- 
 lum and adopted the text-books. That day 
 has some time since passed into history. It 
 was almost pathetic at a recent Commence- 
 ment of one of our ancient and honorable 
 institutions to hear a good trustee lament- 
 ing that the committee on course of study, 
 of which he was chairman, had had nothing 
 to do in recent years. He was a good man, 
 but his work as trustee had begun when col- 
 lege presidents and professors were only 
 hirelings. He had not awakened to a reali- 
 zation of the new order of things which rec- 
 ognizes that curricula and college govern- 
 ment in general are the products of experts. 
 Neither had he realized that certain com- 
 mittees exist only to give appointments to 
 members not otherwise provided for, and 
 that others are perpetuated, like the snuff- 
 box in the United States Senate, as a cour- 
 
 43 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 teous tribute to the barbarous times which 
 once were but are no more. 
 
 He did not know that no self-respecting 
 college president in the new age would sub- 
 mit for one moment to the suggestion that 
 matters purely academic should be taken 
 from his faculty of trained experts and com- 
 mitted to his board of trustees efficient in 
 business policies but thoroughly unfamiliar 
 with modern college standards. We do not 
 want in America the conservative tyranny 
 of the Oxford congregation. When the con- 
 vocation, which is composed of representa- 
 tives of the various colleges of Oxford Uni- 
 versity and which constitutes the governing 
 body of the larger institution, resolved to fol- 
 low the lead of American colleges in making 
 Greek an elective study, the congregation, 
 composed of all the doctors and masters of 
 the university, many of whom are curates, 
 vicars, and professionals, so far removed 
 from modern academic thought that they 
 might almost as well belong to the class that 
 is without a diploma, exercised its guaran- 
 teed prerogative of veto, from which there 
 44 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 is no appeal, and Greek remains compulsory 
 at Oxford. Even these, who believe in the 
 indispensable culture value of Greek, and 
 they are many, deplore the arbitrary exer- 
 cise of an authority that is out of harmony 
 with modern ideas of college direction. 
 
 The writer was interested recently in 
 poring over the well-written Minutes of one 
 of the oldest and best of our American col- 
 leges. As late as 1870 he read that the board 
 of trustees was called to order, and after 
 prayer that a committee was appointed to 
 notify the president of the institution that 
 the board was in session and ready to hear 
 any communication he might have to make. 
 "In due season the committee re-appeared, 
 escorting the president, who presented his 
 annual report and then was requested to re- 
 tire." Such action is unthinkable in this 
 enlightened day, when every college presi- 
 dent is ex-ofjicio a member of his board of 
 trustees and when the governing body would 
 not presume to take any serious action with- 
 out his presence. The latter-day board of 
 trustees relies upon the president of the real 
 45 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 college to devise systems of bookkeeping and 
 filing so that the financial transactions of the 
 institution are easily known and so that the 
 registrar may give accurate information at 
 a moment's notice. He must, by up-to-date 
 business methods, make all the records of 
 the institution permanent, comprehensive, 
 and intelligible. He is expected to be states- 
 man-like in his administration and to pro- 
 pose for the acceptance of his board plans 
 for future development that will command 
 enthusiastic support. If new buildings are 
 to be erected he will know what they ought 
 to be and where they should be. The sad- 
 dest spectacle in American college-making is 
 not the wretched architecture of our build- 
 ings, cheap as that is in poor imitation of 
 European models. The most pitiable thing 
 in the history of academic control of our 
 country is the incongruous and unsightly ar- 
 rangement of our college buildings. In most 
 institutions, when enough money has been 
 gathered together for a new structure of any 
 character, the trustees have adjourned for 
 a few minutes to walk about the campus, and 
 46 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 after a half -hour's thought, on reassembling, 
 they vote a location for the new building as 
 though it were the last one that would ever 
 have a place on the grounds. The mistakes 
 of the past are beyond recall, for poorly re- 
 lated structures and ugly groupings are even 
 to be preferred to the destruction of build- 
 ings around which loving traditions cluster 
 and which lend the indispensable effect of 
 impressive antiquity. In recent years, 
 though, there has been an awakening to the 
 importance of building locations, and the 
 president is indeed behind the times who 
 does not give careful study to the placing of 
 every new edifice, that he may direct his 
 board aright when the hour arrives for final 
 action. If he is wise, one of the first acts of 
 his administration will be to recommend the 
 employment of a competent landscape gar- 
 dener. Under his direction this expert will 
 prepare a plan of building groupings. This 
 scheme will be made with the end in view 
 of relating buildings to their uses in such a 
 way as to produce an effect of harmonious 
 47 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 beauty, and all future buildings will be lo- 
 cated in accordance with this adopted scheme. 
 
 If one feature of presidential duty may 
 be emphasized at the expense of another, it 
 will doubtless be agreed that the chief re- 
 sponsibility of the college president is for 
 his educational staff. Before boards of 
 trustees came to a proper comprehension of 
 their limitations they took official notice of 
 the fitness or unfitness of every member of 
 the faculty, and not only determined the re- 
 tention or dismissal of incumbent professors 
 and instructors, but solemnly debated the 
 qualifications of all proposed candidates be- 
 fore voting to fill a chair. Their opinion of 
 the fitness of a teacher to continue was 
 formed upon the reports concerning him 
 brought from immature students or from 
 some other incapable informant. As to the 
 election of new faculty members, the board 
 was governed in most instances by flatter- 
 ingly worded and usually worthless testi- 
 monials. 
 
 It has not been many years since the 
 trustees of a prominent institution in the 
 
 48 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 Central West, because of some faculty dis- 
 sensions on matters of discipline which could 
 not be accurately located, declared every col- 
 lege chair vacant. To-day it would be diffi- 
 cult to find a trustee presumptuous enough 
 to entertain the thought of passing judg- 
 ment on the qualifications of teachers. The 
 president is charged with this responsibility, 
 and the reputation of his institution must 
 stand or fall on his ability to meet the re- 
 sponsibility. The retention of present mem- 
 bers of his faculty and the election of new 
 members in the properly directed college will 
 depend entirely upon his dictum. Those 
 who object to granting such arbitrary power 
 to one man will, on reflection, admit that to 
 hold an executive responsible for all the 
 work of an institution, including the teach- 
 ing done, would be unfair unless therewith 
 should go the privilege of choosing his col- 
 leagues for whose work he must answer. In 
 some instances the president is required by 
 ordinance to nominate new faculty members, 
 the board confirming or rejecting his nomi- 
 nations. It is practically a universal cus- 
 4 49 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 torn to require, in one form or another, the 
 recommendation of the president as neces- 
 sarily precedent to final action. As a rule 
 an instructor who knows that the president 
 will not recommend his retention, finds it of 
 little avail to appeal to board members to 
 decide otherwise. In a well-ordered college 
 system he is referred back to the authority 
 against whose judgment he enters appeal. 
 Such power will not be used by a high-minded 
 official, worthy of his position, in a tyran- 
 nical way, and in no case will it be used to 
 satisfy an individual grievance or to avenge 
 a wrong, either real or fancied, on any mere 
 personal grounds. 
 
 The alumni of an institution are bound 
 to Alma Mater through succeeding years 
 more by their loving interest in their old 
 teachers than by any other consideration. A 
 few years distant from their own Commence- 
 ment they know none of the student body, 
 and when they return to the old college, more 
 than for any other reason it is to sit for a 
 brief while in loving devotion at the feet 
 of the ripe scholars who were at once the in- 
 50 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 spiration and the benediction of their forma- 
 tive lives. Knowing this to be true, the pres- 
 ident of the real college will spare no effort 
 to secure the permanency of tenure of his 
 teaching force. If here and there he finds 
 a colleague whose work is not satisfactory 
 and can not be made so, he will meet the 
 situation fearlessly in the interest of the 
 young people committed to his care, but he 
 will also meet it with a thoughtful regard 
 for the feelings of the colleague concerned. 
 A resignation is always less painful than a 
 dismissal. It tries the courage of a manly 
 president more to ask, in the spirit of kind- 
 ness, a resignation than it does in the pres- 
 ence of his board to demand, with heartless- 
 ness, a dismissal. The unpleasant responsi- 
 bility will be accepted for the welfare of the 
 institution, and in the fraternal spirit the un- 
 satisfactory teacher will be approached by his 
 president months before his connection with 
 the college must be severed with a courteous 
 request for his resignation. An instructor 
 of good sense will appreciate the considera- 
 tion that prevents a humiliating dismissal 
 51 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 and affords him ample time, while still under 
 pay, to find another position, and his resig- 
 nation will be given as requested. He who 
 lacks this fine sense of appreciation will still 
 be dealt with in fearless kindness by his su- 
 perior and will not be retained at the ex- 
 pense of institutional efficiency. A capable 
 teacher the president will endeavor to retain 
 at any cost and will summon all his powers 
 of legitimate persuasion to convince his 
 board of the unwisdom of allowing another 
 college to deprive them of the services of a 
 pre-eminently successful teacher because of 
 the alluring offer elsewhere of a somewhat 
 larger salary. Added expense is worthy of 
 little consideration when set over against a 
 proved efficiency. 
 
 No less care is required in making addi- 
 tions to a faculty than in holding those who 
 should be kept. It is much easier to get 
 than to get rid of a man. Testimonials flat- 
 tering in the extreme are easily obtained 
 from those of large reputation. Indeed, it 
 is notorious that some men boast that they 
 give recommendations to all who ask them, 
 52 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 expecting that those to whom they are pre- 
 sented will be able to read between the lines. 
 Again, there are too many officials and heads 
 of departments in large universities who are 
 ever willing to unload their "dead timber" 
 on some college, and if a strong recommen- 
 dation gives promise of the desired relief 
 they do not tarry long to conduct an argu- 
 ment with conscience. Unusual educational 
 advantages are not always to be depended 
 upon as a guarantee of fitness for profes- 
 sional appointment. It is generally known 
 that there are many doctors of philosophy 
 at large who would be utterly unequal to sat- 
 isfactory work in a country school. On the 
 other hand there are country teachers with- 
 out large education who could do better 
 service in college than the possessor of many 
 diplomas. University-trained men are nu- 
 merous, but scholarly teachers of magnetic 
 enthusiasm are few. The capable president 
 will not be satisfied until by months — and 
 years, if need be — he has found the one from 
 among the few who will give to his students 
 the impetus they need to start them well on 
 53 
 
THE KEAL COLLEGE 
 
 life's perilous journey. Eecommendations 
 will be accepted for what they are worth, 
 but no one will be finally employed without 
 a personal interview, or until after many in- 
 terviews, perhaps, that there may be dis- 
 covered a personality of force. A half- 
 hour's talk with a real man face to face is 
 of infinitely more value than a barrel of tes- 
 timonials, or degrees without number. 
 
 The discreet president will, as a sound 
 business man, hold his institution within the 
 bounds of its financial limitations. Nothing 
 so oppresses an institution or retards its 
 growth as an incubus of debt. The wise 
 executive will not allow his desire to keep 
 pace with other colleges, or to surpass them, 
 delude him into the belief that prosperity 
 can be found by living beyond income. 
 
 The president of the real college is a 
 despot, and no limits will be set for his des- 
 potism by his board of trustees so long as 
 his power is not abused, while his institution 
 thrives. 
 
 In considering the obligations of the col- 
 lege president to his faculty, the pith of 
 54 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 it all may be entirely comprehended in the 
 statement that he should be a leader without 
 being a dictator. He is an executive — not 
 an autocrat. The president of a college and 
 a public school superintendent do not oc- 
 cupy analogous positions in the matter of 
 their authority over those who teach. The 
 latter official directs a staff the majority of 
 whom are elementary teachers. Many of 
 these are so young in years and experience 
 as to require the constant attention of a su- 
 perior guiding mind. Then, too, the work 
 of the various grades is so closely correlated 
 that it would all be a failure unless each 
 made its full contribution to the whole by 
 following, without wavering, the plan con- 
 ceived and laid down by a central authority. 
 Constant and arbitrary supervision is a pre- 
 requisite to the largest results in any public 
 school system. The college president, on the 
 other hand, is not an inspector, and need not 
 be. His colleagues would rightly resent any 
 such assumption of prerogative by him. 
 Conditions in the college and in the public 
 school are very different. The college pro- 
 55 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 fessor is employed upon recommendation of 
 his president because he is a specialist. 
 Having had years of preparation for the 
 work of his department, he should know far 
 more in the line of his specialization than 
 any college president, and he should be guar- 
 anteed the largest liberty in determining the 
 character of his work. Further than this, it 
 should be recognized that college depart- 
 ments in large measure are independent of 
 each other. To be sure, certain preliminary 
 mathematical study is necessarily antecedent 
 to the study of higher mathematics. The 
 same is true in languages and other branches 
 of collegiate work, but these preliminaries are 
 all within the department concerned, and the 
 head of the department rather than the head 
 of the institution is responsible for their 
 proper presentation. There are certain re- 
 lated groups of studies in different depart- 
 ments pursued by students, but each part o£ 
 the group is complete in itself without re- 
 gard to its related group. It is evident, 
 therefore, that upon departmental heads, 
 and not upon the president of the college, 
 56 
 
PEESIDENT OF THE HEAL COLLEGE 
 
 should rest the full responsibility for the 
 work of the department. It is true that the 
 president is responsible for the work of his 
 college, and that sometimes he fails to do 
 his full duty to his students by a negligence 
 in this respect, which he excuses on the 
 ground that "professors are supposed to 
 know their business. ' ' The wide-awake pres- 
 ident may know of the competency or incom- 
 petency of his colleagues by ways more accu- 
 rate than personal inspection can guarantee. 
 The college community is much more compact 
 than a large public school system. The profes- 
 sors do their work in classroom, library, and 
 laboratory, in buildings on the same grounds 
 and near to each other. The president, when 
 at home, is constantly in their midst, and, 
 with his hand ever on the college pulse, he 
 knows more of what his subordinates are 
 thinking and accomplishing than the public 
 school superintendent knows of his teachers 
 after all his inspection. The daily inter- 
 course of the president with his co-workers 
 in faculty and committee meetings, in pri- 
 vate conference and in social relationships, 
 
 57 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 will give to the keen reader of men a knowl- 
 edge which will enable him to render fair 
 judgment on fitness in the day of final reck- 
 oning. The president's office is a veritable 
 cesspool where all unpleasant experiences 
 are deposited. All complaints of parents 
 and students are left there, and if the presi- 
 dent, as a spiritual chemist, is skillful in fil- 
 tering, the residuum will reveal to him the 
 actual substance of all that is justly charge- 
 able against his complained-of colleagues. 
 The president presides at the meetings of 
 his faculty, and knowing that a college fac- 
 ulty is a deliberative body, in which major- 
 ities rightly control, he will make his rec- 
 ommendations and then commit their desti- 
 nies to the hands of his associates, leaving 
 them to do with them as they will. When 
 the faculty has acted, whether in accordance 
 with his views or not, the president will exe- 
 cute as directed, in willing obedience to the 
 American principle of majority rule. 
 
 It will be agreed that the general policy 
 of the institution should be shaped by the 
 president as its responsible head, and yet 
 58 
 
PEESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 the teaching corps shares with him, accord- 
 ing to time-honored precedent, administra- 
 tive duties as is not done ontside the college. 
 When it has once been determined just what 
 work belongs to the president and what he 
 divides with his colleagues, there will be no 
 unpleasant clashing of authority. The diffi- 
 culty is that here and there is a president 
 unsatisfied unless his will dominates every 
 department of academic endeavor. He feels 
 that division of labor will spell diminution 
 of his power. He is jealous of his authority 
 and hesitates to make slightest relinquish- 
 ment of anything that will keep him promi- 
 nent as a central figure. The truly great 
 president is he who recognizes with a mod- 
 ern writer of rising fame that "The best 
 crowns have fallen to those who have not 
 sought them." His wisdom will be shown 
 in skillful distribution of work among his 
 faculty members according to their several 
 I capabilities. The successful college presi- 
 dent is not he who attends to every detail in 
 person, but rather the one who masters de- 
 tails by handing them over to other compe- 
 
 59 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 tent persons. Knowing his faculty, the pres- 
 ident who does things will appoint his com- 
 mittees with such good judgment that his 
 college system will be a well-adjusted and 
 perfectly working machine. He will watch- 
 fully guard his own prerogatives. He should 
 have the veto power, such as is granted in 
 many colleges. Such privilege, though, he 
 will not make his to abuse. He will use it 
 only in those rare instances when he is con- 
 vinced that a faculty action is thoroughly 
 inimical to institutional welfare. In most 
 cases, having conceded to his associates in 
 the faculty the right to consider certain ques- 
 tions with him on merit, he will be governed 
 by the expressed opinion of the greater num- 
 ber, even though it run counter to his own, 
 for his confidence in his fellows will lead 
 him to conclude that the judgment of the 
 sincere many must be superior to that of 
 the sincere one. It often happens that a 
 discussion in faculty meeting is so illumi- 
 nating that the president, broad enough to 
 hold himself open to conviction, experiences 
 an entire change of mind on a given matter, 
 60 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 and he is forever afterward glad that he 
 permitted his own views to be modified by 
 those who had seen better than himself. The 
 president who thus shirks no responsibility, 
 who safeguards the interests of his col- 
 leagues before the board of trustees and de- 
 fers with fraternal courtesy on all proper 
 subjects to their opinions will be supported 
 with an unfailing and effective loyalty. 
 
 It must never be forgotten that the col- 
 lege president has an inescapable obligation 
 to his alumni. The graduates of the college 
 are always ready to bring their loving hom- 
 age and lay it at the feet of the man who 
 controls the destinies of Alma Mater. In 
 turn this man should make the college the 
 permanent servant of all its sons and daugh- 
 ers to advance their spiritual and material 
 well-being. The younger graduates should 
 have the co-operation of their college in get- 
 ting properly started in life's work. The 
 alumni of all the years will appreciate the 
 interest of the institution that educated them 
 in making their achievements known to the 
 world and in using them to inspire the gen- 
 
 61 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 erations coming after. The president who 
 knows how to put men to good uses will re- 
 alize that one of the valuable assets of a 
 successful administration is a devoted body 
 of enthusiastic alumni. 
 
 It is to the undergraduates — that incho- 
 ate and ebullient mass of turbulent energy 
 and tormenting ambitions called the stu- 
 dent body — that the president sustains rela- 
 tions of most solemn and sacred obligation. 
 These keen young minds will read him 
 through and through. To others he may 
 make himself opaque. To his students he is 
 always thoroughly transparent. If nothing 
 else can make him humble, their knowledge 
 of him will always hold him close to the 
 ground. What wonderful possibilities of 
 service are open to him through them if in 
 all honesty he is ever just what he seems to 
 be, and nothing more. There is no stronger 
 disciple of the gospel of the "square deal" 
 than the young collegian. A president will 
 never control him by abuse. He will not win 
 him by oppression. College students hold 
 tyranny and play to the galleries in equal 
 62 
 
PEESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 contempt. They like an expression of confi- 
 dence and appreciation when it is merited. 
 They will accept deserved rebnke properly 
 administered. They despise unmerited com- 
 mendation. They honor perfect frankness. 
 The alert mind of yonth is qnick to distin- 
 guish between the genuine and the counter- 
 feit. 
 
 A college president can afford to be an 
 artisan in raising money. He can afford to 
 be nothing less than an artist in shaping im- 
 mortal men. He is a molder of public sen- 
 timent, and the chapel hour affords him his 
 finest opportunity for this service. Sad will 
 it be for academic ideals when students and 
 faculties are not brought together daily in 
 public congregation. It is true that Presi- 
 dent Eliot has made a covert attack on the 
 time-honored chapel service in American col- 
 leges by declaring that the college student 
 "has a right to be free from all inducements 
 to cant, hypocrisy, or conformity. On this 
 account voluntary attendance is a valuable 
 element in academic freedom. No student 
 ought to be able to suppose that he will gain 
 63 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 anything towards high rank as a scholar or 
 social standing or popularity among his fel- 
 lows by any religions observance or affilia- 
 tion whatsoever. A mercenary or profit- 
 seeking spirit in religious practices is very 
 injurious to young people and is peculiarly 
 repulsive in them." 
 
 The writer has never supposed and does 
 not believe that many others suppose that 
 chapel services are required for the purpose 
 of giving to students high rank in scholar- 
 ship or to guarantee social standing or to 
 make popularity. If the United States is, 
 as is so often asserted, a Christian nation, 
 surely a brief half -hour set aside every day 
 when teachers and taught are expected to 
 meet together to make united acknowledg- 
 ment of blessings and to offer petition for 
 continued mercies from the God of the uni- 
 verse and the Savior of men, is not incon- 
 sistent with our notions of freedom. There 
 are some institutions supported by public 
 taxation that have shown reprehensible cow- 
 ardice on this question of religious teaching 
 and requirement. The fact that men of all 
 64 
 
PBESIDENT OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 creeds and men of no creed support these 
 institutions is not reason sufficient for fail- 
 ure to make the Christian ideal permanent. 
 America is a Christian nation, and there is 
 no valid excuse for an un-Christian atmos- 
 phere in an institution supported by a Chris- 
 tian commonwealth under a Christian fed- 
 eration. The authorities of State universi- 
 ties and city colleges, apparently forgetful 
 that democracy means majority rule, are too 
 wont to make apologetic concessions to a 
 minority. It is not much wonder, therefore, 
 that some academic communities are seeth- 
 ing cauldrons of religious skepticism, if not 
 hotbeds of disturbing agnosticism and de- 
 spairing atheism. The same sad things are 
 true of some of our greater institutions of 
 private foundation, where a similar excuse 
 need not be offered for religious remissness. 
 It will not, of course, be denied by any broad- 
 minded person that the minority is entitled 
 to a respectful consideration of its convic- 
 tions at the hands of the majority. It is 
 only fair, therefore, that certain students in 
 church colleges as well as in State and mu- 
 5 65 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 nicipal institutions should be excused from 
 compulsory attendance on religious exercises 
 if their religious beliefs forbid them. In a 
 prominent Western college supported by tax- 
 ation it is the practice of the president at 
 the beginning of every college year to an- 
 nounce that all students are expected to at- 
 tend daily chapel services, but that if, for 
 conviction's sake, any desire to be excused, 
 a written request from parent or guardian 
 will release them from this obligation. It 
 is remarkable that in five years there has 
 not been one such request lodged by either 
 Jew or Gentile. The chapel service in that 
 institution does not follow the printed order 
 adopted by any particular sect or creed, but, 
 on the other hand, no apology direct or im- 
 plied is ever offered for the prominence 
 given the ideals and teachings of the Divine 
 Christ. More than that, the services and 
 exercises are so attractive that the students 
 are glad to attend. A brilliant and promis- 
 ing young man of the Roman Catholic faith, 
 who was Junior in the college referred to, 
 was recently asked by a visitor if students 
 66 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 were required to attend chapel, and the im- 
 mediate answer was, "Yes, bnt we should 
 go without compulsion, for we would feel 
 that we were missing something of value by 
 absence.' ' 
 
 At Yale University the students some- 
 times chafe under required chapel attend- 
 ance, but several times in recent years, when 
 the question has been under discussion, the 
 latest graduates have voted overwhelmingly 
 against the abandonment of the requirement. 
 
 Chancellor McCracken, of New York Uni- 
 versity, has an open offer to his students of 
 an option between chapel attendance and a 
 literary production, and the chapel service 
 has a decided advantage in popularity. 
 
 Responsibility for Christian example can 
 not be escaped by the Christian educator, 
 and students honor those who have the cour- 
 age of their convictions. A spineless teacher 
 is youth's abhorred antipathy. 
 
 The religious value aside, the chapel serv- 
 ice is the president's great opportunity. 
 Here, where every student meets every other 
 student daily in elbow touch, and where he 
 67 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 should meet all his instructors face to face, 
 is developed that esprit de corps which welds 
 all into the oneness of a college solidarity in- 
 vulnerable and invincible. Here the artist 
 president, with his faculty behind him and 
 his students before him, may mold at will 
 the personal, the civic, and the religious 
 ideals of the coming man. He will not 
 preach, but his suggestive remarks will be 
 seed in a fertile soil that will yield an abun- 
 dant harvest. A passage of Scripture effect- 
 ively read or a word of simple prayer fer- 
 vently offered may be so deeply impressed 
 as to transform a life or change a nation's 
 destiny. On this chapel platform, after de- 
 votions are over, a pleasant turn may be 
 given to an announcement so that the hearty 
 applause or ringing laughter will send the 
 before despondent student away with a new 
 song upon his lips. The observing president 
 knows that frequent cheers for the country's 
 flag intensifies love of the flag and of all 
 for which it stands. As a wise man, there- 
 fore, he will divide his public chapel service 
 into two distinct parts, so that when the dig- 
 
 68 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 nified religious service is finished the secu- 
 lar part will allow an occasional outlet for 
 surplus vitality through college or class yells, 
 thereby increasing the love of students for 
 the institution for which they cheer. 
 
 There will be times, but only at rare inter- 
 vals, when the president may need to be se- 
 vere in public denunciation of wrong atti- 
 tudes or actions, and without the chapel 
 service or something akin thereto there will 
 be no opportunity to reach the student body. 
 An appreciative word of commendation for 
 a winning team or for a lofty principle main- 
 tained by an organization, coming from the 
 president, will strengthen those who hear to 
 steel themselves for greater future achieve- 
 ments. An appeal wisely worded and skill- 
 fully presented from the rostrum will hardly 
 ever fail to meet with a hearty response. A 
 company of college students is the easiest 
 body in the world controlled when rightly 
 handled; it is the easiest body on earth to 
 antagonize when wrongly handled. Coarse 
 work here is fatal to good results. Halt the 
 coming of the day when the college president 
 69 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 shall abdicate his throne of power, the chapel 
 platform ! 
 
 The president of the real college knows 
 his students. Professors may address them 
 as "Mr." or "Miss," but the president 
 knows and calls them by their given names, 
 thus making them feel in their absence from 
 home that there is one at least who feels 
 something of parental interest in them. 
 They like this and appreciate the pains a 
 busy man has taken in them to know them 
 as they are known at home. Too great fa- 
 miliarity with young people will work in- 
 jury, but greater injury will be wrought by 
 the college president whose indolence or 
 coldness prevents the establishment of 
 friendly relations with his students. The 
 president's home should be the Mecca of 
 every tired, restless, and homesick student. 
 Not only should the president realize the 
 obligation that rests upon him to establish 
 right ideals of social forms and conventions 
 by swinging wide the doors of his house for 
 frequent receptions to students and faculty, 
 but every young person in his care should 
 
 70 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 feel himself drawn to his president's home 
 in every time of need. The good president 
 will feel it a privilege to rise at any hour 
 of the night to meet a stndent in need of 
 counsel or sympathy, and blessed indeed is 
 the young collegian who knows that he dares 
 to make snch an emergency call. The presi- 
 dent, alive to his possibilities, will not wait 
 for his students to come to him. He will 
 go to them. He will be a frequent visitor 
 at their rooms in the dormitory and the fra- 
 ternity house. Visiting often, not for the 
 purpose of espionage, but to bring the en- 
 couragement of good cheer, his students will 
 expect him at any time; they will come to 
 anticipate his visits with pleasure, and they 
 will always be prepared in body and spirit 
 to receive him. Of course, all this would 
 be impossible in an over-large institution, 
 but then it is the real college that is un- 
 der discussion. 
 
 The pathway of the president of such a 
 college is pleasant for the most part. It is 
 well, though, to bear in mind that it is not 
 rose-bordered all the way. Among those 
 
 71 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 who come to college are some to whom good 
 influence and warm interest make no appeal. 
 They will not be inspired to noble endeavor 
 by any sacrifice. There are others whose im- 
 pulses are all good, but in a moment of weak- 
 ness perhaps they yield to a temptation that 
 not only brings personal discredit but also 
 works irreparable injury to their college. 
 The president, warm-hearted and sympa- 
 thetic, will reach out a helping hand to every 
 one that it is within his power to save. He 
 will have the spirit that is willing to for- 
 give the individual seventy times seven if 
 perchance he may save him without in- 
 jury to larger interests. To confuse real 
 sympathy with superficial sentimentalism, 
 though, would make a college president 
 worse than a mere figurehead in the estab- 
 lishment and maintenance of right ideals of 
 life. Love of youth, without a proper sense 
 of justice in such a man, is equally as bad 
 as cold-blooded justice without love. The 
 executive who acts in sorrow, but who acts 
 because he must, in severely disciplining an 
 offender will be respected by the offender 
 72 
 
PEESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 and will be honored no less by the rank 
 and file of students for exhibition of stern 
 justice than for the show of virtuous pa- 
 tience. 
 
 In all things the real president, then, is 
 he whose force of character will command 
 respect. His sense of propriety will be 
 made manifest in all the functions of his 
 high office. He will be a youth among youth 
 on the campus and in all suitable places; 
 his students will come to expect, though, in 
 all formal affairs from the reception of dis- 
 tinguished visitors during the college year 
 to that climax of all academic events, the 
 conferring of degrees on Commencement 
 day, that he will conduct himself in a man- 
 ner which shows a dignified conception of 
 his great responsibilities. The nobility of 
 character uniformly preserved from day to 
 day, year in and year out, by the ideal col- 
 lege president, will provoke in young lives 
 surrounding him a laudable emulation to 
 noble life and honorable service. He will be 
 loved for what he is, as Arnold of Rugby, 
 and Jowett, the Master of Baliol, were loved 
 
 73 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 by their English boys. They will think it 
 a shame to be mean, because he believes 
 them to be in general opposition to meanness. 
 
 The commercialization of the college pres- 
 idency is a reprehensible evil of this new 
 academic age. The president of the real 
 college is a teacher. Without the teachers' 
 work he will lack the teachers ' influence. Un- 
 less he is responsible for a chair and shows 
 scholarship in his teaching, he will be looked 
 upon as a mere business manager and will 
 be without that weight of influence which is 
 the accompaniment of scholarly authority in 
 some one great subject of human thought. 
 The classroom is the college president's 
 "open sesame" to the mind of youth and to 
 his heart. President Harper, that wonder- 
 working university builder of modern times, 
 never relinquished his teaching, and every 
 undergraduate looked forward with whetted 
 anticipation to the day prior to graduation 
 when he should sit as a learner in the class- 
 room of this great president. 
 
 An organizer, a publicist, a financier, an 
 orator, an author, a scholar, a teacher, a 
 74 
 
PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 judge of men, a gentleman, a virile Chris- 
 tian, a lover of youth, a forceful leader — all 
 these are embodied in the president of the 
 real college. He makes that indefinable, in- 
 tangible, yet wonderfully real thing we call 
 a college atmosphere. How big his possi- 
 bilities ! How boundless his responsibilities ! 
 
 75 
 
THE STUDENTS OF THE REAL 
 COLLEGE 
 
THE STUDENTS OF THE REAL 
 COLLEGE 
 
 The purpose of a college must be borne 
 in mind when its student body is under dis- 
 cussion. The real college, with the sense of 
 the responsibility resting upon it for culture 
 and discipline, seeks to reach each of its stu- 
 dents as an individual. Its endeavor is to 
 lay broad and strong and deep the founda- 
 tions of character for the erection of a suit- 
 able superstructure of specialization and cit- 
 izenship. To these ends it will spare no 
 efforts for the establishment of habits of in- 
 dustry, and thoroughness in the mastery of 
 difficulties, and persistency in resisting evil 
 and shiftless inclinations. 
 
 If this general purpose is to be accom- 
 plished, the student body in our real college 
 must not be so large and unwieldy that the 
 individual is lost in the mass. President 
 Schurmann, of Cornell University, has de- 
 79 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 clared that our educational problem is this: 
 "Can we do anything for the development 
 of creative reason in America ?" He insists 
 that the " teacher realize that reason is im- 
 plicit in the pupil and that it is his busi- 
 ness to draw it out — this achievement is the 
 object of all education.' ' As though in- 
 spired, Doctor Schurmann says: 
 
 "We are too prone to rest in mere knowl- 
 edge of facts. Of course, it is easier to 
 teach the boy facts than to train him to 
 think; and our big schools and large classes 
 make the problem still more difficult. Yet 
 the true method of teaching was formulated 
 and illustrated by Socrates. It is the method 
 of personal intercourse with constant chal- 
 lenging of the reasoning faculty. It is no 
 accident that Socrates produced a Plato, or 
 that Plato again produced an Aristotle. In 
 America we have been too prone to regard 
 the teacher as an automatic pump, and the 
 boy's mind as a tub to be filled. The boy's 
 mind is really a spark of the divine reason 
 and the business of education is to fan it 
 into a living flame." 
 
 Is it conceivable that this spark can be- 
 come a flame without the close personal 
 
 80 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 contact of the Master Teacher with the in- 
 cipient thought-life of the student? Is it 
 possible to have this contact of the mature 
 personality with the immature elsewhere 
 than in a college with a limited number of 
 students? Amherst College and Williams 
 College, it will be agreed, are fair represen- 
 tatives of the best type of the real college 
 in America. In 1906-1907 the enrollment at 
 Amherst was four hundred and seventy-five, 
 and at "Williams four hundred and ninety- 
 six. With numbers like these it is possible 
 for those who teach to impress their per- 
 sonalities upon the taught in a way so 
 strongly inspirational that the fires of zeal 
 for true culture may be kindled from em- 
 bers of heredity into bright, glowing flames 
 of self -activity. 
 
 Unfortunate indeed is the student who is 
 so lost in a wilderness of numbers that he 
 is unable to find his way out into the im- 
 mediate light of his teacher's presence — sad 
 his lot when there are too many of his kind 
 gathered at one place to guarantee him from 
 6 81 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 his instructors the individual attention that 
 is his crying need. 
 
 Thrice unfortunate the student in the 
 midst of the crowd who is obliged to depend 
 upon his own unaided efforts in choosing his 
 courses and electing his studies without wise 
 suggestion from an experienced and inter- 
 ested elder. "Student freedom" is a eupho- 
 nious and fascinating expression that has be- 
 come very popular in recent years. No pro- 
 gressive twentieth-century educator would 
 care to put upon the youthhood of our col- 
 leges the straight-jackets that were worn by 
 the collegians of a century agone. We all 
 rejoice in the liberty which guarantees to 
 the student in our day the right to think 
 and act for himself. It is barely possible, 
 however, that we have overstepped ourselves 
 in concessions to our boasted academic free- 
 dom. While we guarantee the student the 
 right to work out his own intellectual sal- 
 vation, is it not better that his undeveloped 
 judgment should be directed, not repressed, 
 by the compulsion of a mature personality? 
 In a recent address on "Academic Free- 
 82 
 
STUDENTS OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 dom" before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of 
 Cornell University, President Eliot, of Har- 
 vard University, speaking of freedom for 
 students, said: 
 
 "Interest in a subject is an indication of 
 fitness for its study, or, in other words, a 
 student is much more likely to succeed in 
 a subject which interests him strongly than 
 in a subject which does not. Achievement 
 and gain in power are the true rewards of 
 persistent exertion and the best spurs to fur- 
 ther effort. The college student ought to 
 be free to specialize early in his course or 
 not to specialize at all; to make his educa- 
 tion turn on languages, mathematics, his- 
 tory, science, or philosophy — for example — 
 or on any mixture of the great subjects." 
 
 President Eliot, unsurpassed among the 
 scholars of our day in the use of pure Anglo- 
 Saxon, nevertheless adopts easily the cus- 
 tom of more careless Americans in using 
 the terms college and university interchang- 
 ably, as though they were perfect syno- 
 nyms. It is evident, though, in speaking of 
 the freedom that should be accorded to stu- 
 dents hereinbefore quoted, that he really re- 
 83 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 fers to the undergraduate — the collegian. It 
 is not unthinkable that in the largeness of his 
 institution and with his multitudinous duties 
 pressing upon, President Eliot has become 
 so far removed from intimate contact with 
 his undergraduate students that he has con- 
 fused them in his thought with the stronger 
 minds and ripened judgment of those ready 
 for advanced study and research in the grad- 
 uate and professional schools of his institu- 
 tion. It is certain, at any rate, that he as- 
 sumes for undergraduates a maturity of 
 judgment that in reality has no existence 
 in the mind of the average college student. 
 It is the experience of those who have for 
 years been identified with work in the real 
 college that the student permitted to make 
 his own choice of subjects or courses in the 
 beginning has often come to the day of grad- 
 uation with the expressed regret on his lips 
 that he had not taken very different studies. 
 The young man or woman fresh from the 
 preparatory school comes to college with ex- 
 aggerated notions of his own rights and 
 with little knowledge of his own needs. 
 84 
 
STUDENTS OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 That which he thinks he does not want may- 
 be the very thing he requires for his well- 
 rounded development. The college is not a 
 school of specialization, and the student 
 there does not know and need not know what 
 his vocation in life is to be. The real col- 
 lege seeks to prepare a student for a suc- 
 cessful career by providing him with a sub- 
 structure of body, mind, and character that 
 will enable him in later years to build 
 thereon any superstructure that his devel- 
 oped talents and mature wisdom may lead 
 him to choose. Certain peripatetic lyceum 
 lecturers have been going about the country 
 in recent years and, declaiming from the 
 platform, they have shouted that there never 
 has been and never can be such a thing as 
 a symmetrical man or woman. "Born 
 short" is the expression on which these fren- 
 zied preachers ring the changes. That no 
 one comes into the world with the begin- 
 nings of a symmetrical personality is a tru- 
 ism as old as human intelligence. The dec- 
 laration can not be relieved of its triteness 
 even though, for the sake of startling at- 
 85 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 tractiveness, it be clothed in new rhetorical 
 garb. It is admitted without argument, in 
 the most promising cases, that childhood and 
 youth never come to the beginning of any 
 educational period with an endowment of 
 evenly balanced abilities. The linguistic tal- 
 ent of one may be strong, while the mathe- 
 matical gift is very weak. The literary 
 taste of another may be pronounced and the 
 scientific bent scarcely discernible. It is in 
 recognition of this inequality of talent that 
 our whole system of preliminary education 
 has its existence. The chief object of the 
 elementary school, the secondary school, and 
 the college is to fertilize the physical and 
 spiritual waste places in the coming man. 
 
 To develop the growing youth by follow- 
 ing the line of the least resistance in each 
 case is to invite into being an abnormal in- 
 dividuality — a grotesque monstrosity. It is 
 universally recognized that one weak mem- 
 ber of the body means a weakened effi- 
 ciency for the remaining members. It is 
 equally true of the whole man. A puny, 
 sickly body is insufficient support for an 
 86 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 alert mind. A weak mind will grant license 
 to a strong body for evil deeds. Spiritually 
 speaking, the same truth holds good. A vig- 
 orous intellect can not bring to fruition its 
 conclusions unless reinforced by a devel- 
 oped will. A strong will may send a weak 
 intellect on many a fool's errand or push 
 an unfinished moral nature to the commis- 
 sion of crime. There are already too many 
 lopsided people in the land of the living. 
 
 With all the education possible it is doubt- 
 less true that a perfectly symmetrical man- 
 hood or womanhood can not be presented as 
 the product. This fact, however, does not 
 relieve those charged with the responsibility 
 of teaching from the obligation of earnest 
 endeavor to produce a uniform and well- 
 balanced personality. Much of the failure 
 among men in later life is due to the fact 
 that specialization has found unsteady foot- 
 ing on uneven foundation stones. The su- 
 perstructure of vocation totters to its early 
 fall on a groundwork firm at one point and 
 fragile at others. 
 
 The solemn responsibility resting heavily 
 87 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 on the real college is to give to the student 
 that training which shall present him to the 
 university or professional school at the end 
 of his course so well rounded in body, mind, 
 and spirit that the superstructure when 
 erected will stand forever secure. 
 
 There is no more pathetic picture in our 
 modern life than that which shows a group 
 of unformed young people about a college 
 bulletin board, at the beginning of a new 
 semester, endeavoring to select from the 
 schedule of studies those which will prove 
 easiest for them or most to their liking. If 
 our educational forebears, who were college 
 professors fifty years ago, were to come 
 forth in resurrection robes and hear these, 
 young people in their mad hunt for sinecures 
 saying: "0, take that! It 's a snap!" or, 
 "Enter that course, it 's all lectures !" or, 
 "Fight shy of that unless you want to cut 
 out your dances this term!" they would flee 
 in horrified haste back to their charnel 
 houses, glad to hide their humiliation in eter- 
 nal oblivion beneath the whitening dust of 
 their crumbling bones. 
 88 
 
STUDENTS OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 It is not easy for the proud spirit to 
 brave the obloquy of "progressive educa- 
 tors' ' by declaring against the modern elect- 
 ive system. Indeed, it is not likely that any 
 modern thinker would advocate a return to 
 the old narrow system of limited required 
 courses for the Baccalaureate degree. As 
 the modern curricula in many instances are 
 too large in the freedom they grant for par- 
 tial development, those of other days were 
 too inflexible to allow growth of the inde- 
 pendent thought and action essential to later 
 success. To permit a youth "to make his 
 education turn on languages, mathematics, 
 history, science, or philosophy, or any mix- 
 ture of these great subjects,' ' as President 
 Eliot suggests, is to grant a freedom for 
 one-sided development; or a scrap-book ma- 
 turity. In either event the final product is 
 an unfinished man. To allow a student to 
 study history because he does not like mathe- 
 matics is to grant him the privilege of for- 
 ever depriving himself of the sequential rea- 
 soning power necessary to make the culture 
 of the languages effective. To allow one 
 89 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 who is lacking the scientific mind, because 
 of that fact, to devote himself exclusively to 
 history is to prohibit to him the equipment 
 that science has to offer him for the classi- 
 fication of his historical knowledge. Because 
 crude youth lacks, in the beginning, a taste 
 for the humanities is not reason sufficient 
 for the final closing of the door to those soul- 
 developing influences in his life offered by 
 the problems of philosophy and the beauties 
 of literature. 
 
 The real college grants to its students 
 large elective freedom, but its courses are 
 so grouped that it is possible for the student, 
 while following his natural bent, to find no 
 way of escape from the study of those sub- 
 jects which supplement natural inclination 
 in the way that will make this natural in- 
 clination, when developed, most effective. 
 The real college, recognizing the great im- 
 portance of personal contact between teacher 
 and taught, will at the very beginning of the 
 student's college life guide him in mapping 
 out his course as the needs of his case make 
 revelation. Entrance credits and examina- 
 90 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 tions which now demand a certain prepara- 
 tion for admission should be amplified by 
 the authorities of the real college, and the 
 prospective student should be examined in 
 the beginning as to his talents and his lack, 
 his tastes and his antipathies, that the col- 
 lege course may give him, by its discipline 
 and its culture, the training necessary to pre- 
 pare him for effective service in coming 
 years. 
 
 Bigness in numbers tends to destroy the 
 sense of individual responsibility. Unfor- 
 tunate is the student so swallowed up in the 
 crowd that his consciousness of personal 
 obligation is lost. Is it not easy for such 
 a student to feel that it is right for the in- 
 stitution to suffer the reproach that he as 
 a person would shrink from suffering? 
 
 The student body in the real college is 
 not of one sex. Speaking alone for the young 
 man, let it be said that an Eveless Eden is 
 impossible, and if it were possible it would 
 seriously cripple him in the developing pe- 
 riod of his life. Some very strong argu- 
 ments may be advanced for the education of 
 
 91 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 young women in isolation. Solicitous par- 
 ents and anxious friends are justified in 
 every sensible endeavor to safeguard the 
 young woman against all possible imposition 
 by wickedness upon innocence. To preserve 
 the sweetness of the girlish spirit as the nu- 
 cleus of a noble womanhood is their solemn 
 duty. It is borne out by the experience of 
 the years, however, that the young man 
 of prankish mind and the young woman 
 with love of adventure in her heart find the 
 walls that shut one out and the other in a 
 challenge to their spirit of daring, and un- 
 less these forbidding walls are leveled, they 
 stand but to convict two souls of shameful 
 cowardice. 
 
 The scandal that is so much feared as 
 the result of bringing young men and women 
 together in college relations is almost never 
 realized by fulfillment of the fear. On the 
 contrary, the attempt at artificial separation 
 in holding girls confined alone has often 
 brought sad consequences because of the un- 
 conventional means employed by young men 
 and women in conspiracy to get together 
 92 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 through defiance of unnatural restraint. 
 Young women under sensible chaperonage in 
 a co-educational institution establish easily 
 for themselves a code of conventions, the vi- 
 olation of which, either by man or woman, 
 brings a rebuke of censure far more effective 
 as a preventive against a future breach than 
 a thousand brick walls reared by unsympa- 
 thetic authority. It is inevitable that some 
 day women must be brought face to face 
 with men, and if in the formative period of 
 life they learn to meet them properly, the 
 chances are that in the coming years of con- 
 firmed judgment they will never meet them 
 improperly. 
 
 In any event there is only one side to the 
 argument, so far as young men are con- 
 cerned. That they are advantaged by the re- 
 straints of womanly presence on the campus 
 and in the classroom is easily demonstrated 
 by comparing the manners and characters 
 of young men who are students in colleges 
 for men only with those of young men who 
 attend coeducational institutions. Isolation 
 of men in college no less than in a mining 
 93 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 camp induces brutality and degrading coarse- 
 ness. We do not want in America the swag- 
 ger of the German student whose claim to 
 distinction is determined by the bulldog pipe, 
 the flowing beer mug, the ribald song, and 
 the number of scars the duels fought by him 
 have left upon his face. 
 
 The football field is made more respect- 
 able by the presence and loyal support of 
 the girl students. A sentiment, encouraged 
 by high authority, has been growing in re- 
 cent years that may entirely destroy the 
 chivalric spirit of the American gentleman. 
 In our effort to develop a rugged manhood 
 there should be a care that we do not lose 
 the finer spiritual qualities in the bestial 
 masculinity of a mere animal strength. 
 There is a worse evil under the sun than 
 the gentle spirit in men. Better a " Molly 
 Coddle" than a "Bill Bruiser." The mili- 
 tant spirit is not the ideal of this new age. 
 To solve the social, industrial, and political 
 problems that are the challenge of advanc- 
 ing civilization, to meet the business com- 
 petition as man should meet man, to fulfill 
 94 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 the expectations of the home life, and to 
 make the Church of the living God puissant 
 in the uplift of humanity, a sturdy manhood 
 of keen mind and gentle heart is required. 
 A strong body and a fearless spirit are al- 
 ways essential, but moral courage rather 
 than physical daring will hasten the morning 
 dawn of the perfect day. A lofty concep- 
 tion of honor, a generous appreciation of 
 the claims of others, a fine sense of justice, 
 a boldness to do the right at any cost, a 
 zeal for virtue, an unaffected gentility, and 
 a love for toil will give to the world its 
 mightiest potentiality for good — a manly 
 gentleman. Such a type of genuine man- 
 hood can be developed only by association 
 with womanhood — where native roughness 
 becomes the brave spirit of gallant knight- 
 hood by the tempering process the constant 
 presence of the gentler sex compels. 
 
 Better intellectual results are secured 
 where men meet women on a footing of com- 
 petition in the classroom. A young man will 
 often allow a more industrious student of 
 his own sex to surpass him, but the pride of 
 
 95 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 inherent manhood will make the achieve- 
 ment of the young woman at his side an 
 incentive to endeavor that will bring out by 
 honest toil the best of which his intellect is 
 capable. The real college is a college for 
 men and women. The relative number of 
 women to men has no large place in this dis- 
 cussion. It may be said in passing that a 
 majority of women present in any institu- 
 tion tends to discourage the virile spirit 
 that should be grown. The feminization of 
 men by overwhelming numbers of women is 
 exceedingly undesirable. One young woman 
 to four young men in a given student body 
 would seem to be about the proper ratio to 
 give to manhood the needful stimulus for 
 earnest work and gentlemanly bearing. 
 
 The students in the real college are dem- 
 ocratic. In the large institution bigness is 
 the foe to democracy. The numbers there 
 are sufficient to enable those who come from 
 a particular social class to bind themselves 
 together in groups that are large enough 
 without the necessity of seeking those who 
 belong to another class. The sons of the 
 96 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 rich gravitate toward those of their fellows 
 who are scions of the same artificial aristoc- 
 racy. Those of moderate means are driven 
 by exclusion from the wealthier clubs to find 
 their associates among those of their kind, 
 while those whose poverty commands toil to 
 give them the means for their education must 
 struggle through the course as best they 
 may without comfort of the Protean com- 
 radeship which means so much in academic 
 life. 
 
 In the real college, where every student 
 knows every other student, the numbers are 
 not large enough to permit the formation of 
 cliques on unnatural lines. Here the son of 
 wealth touches elbows with the son of toil, 
 and the reciprocal love and respect induced 
 are a preparation for the coming better day, 
 when the only caste recognized in American 
 civilization will be the caste of efficiency. 
 Thus is the real college the largest hope for 
 the breaking down of those unnatural bar- 
 riers which are the menace of our national 
 perpetuity. The authorities of the large 
 universities with college departments are 
 7 97 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 coming to recognize the great advantage 
 that the real college enjoys by its limited 
 numbers for the development of trne de- 
 mocracy. Already some of them are devis- 
 ing means to bring to their institutions the 
 advantages which are now the exclusive 
 property of the institution smaller in the 
 number of its students. Doctor Woodrow 
 Wilson, one of the most progressive of mod- 
 ern university presidents, an administrator 
 who is striving in the spirit of sanity to 
 hold for his institution all that is best of 
 the old, while he reaches out to claim for 
 his own all that is good in the new, has 
 proposed a means of bringing all the oppor- 
 tunities for the nurture of democracy that 
 belong to the real college into the under- 
 graduate college of the university. In a re- 
 cent report to his board of trustees Presi- 
 dent Wilson has recommended a scheme that 
 would "draw the undergraduates together 
 in residential squads, in which they shall eat 
 as well as lodge together, every undergrad- 
 uate being required actually to live in his 
 squad, each squad being likewise provided 
 98 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 with a handsome common room for the pur- 
 pose of social intercourse, in addition to the 
 common dining-room and common kitchen." 
 It is doubtful whether this plan will accom- 
 plish what is hoped for it. The democratic 
 spirit may be developed within the squad, 
 but along therewith there will be a corre- 
 sponding loss of loyalty to the name of 
 Princeton. Love for the ideals of the squad 
 will supplant love for the ideals and tradi- 
 tions of the institution. In the real college 
 the squad is not a wheel within a wheel — it 
 is the whole student body of the institution. 
 There the name of the college is given to 
 the one and only squad, and loyalty to the 
 institution with its customs and standards 
 is inevitable and supreme. The Princeton 
 plan contemplates a modification of the Eng- 
 lish system of multiplied colleges, the squad 
 being substituted for the college. There will 
 be this difference between the English col- 
 lege and the Princeton plan: At Oxford the 
 loyalty of the students is always for the col- 
 lege of their membership, rather than for 
 that well-nigh intangible something called 
 99 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 the University of Oxford, which exists only 
 by the sufferance of several individual col- 
 leges. The students shout for Merton or 
 Oriel, or Christ Church, or Baliol or Mag- 
 dalen, and the coat of arms they revere is 
 that of their college rather than that of the 
 university. Princeton will hardly care to sac- 
 rifice the chief asset of her development, loy- 
 alty to the university, to loyalty to a squad. 
 The devotion of alumni to the corporate 
 name is always to be preferred even above 
 the democratic spirit. The real democracy, 
 as a feature of academic life, can be realized 
 only by its nurture in smaller groups. As 
 the size of the Swiss Republic has made it 
 the purest type of a democratic government 
 among the nations, so to the real college, 
 alone, is committed the exclusive mission 
 of undergraduate democratization. If the 
 larger universities are willing to break their 
 undergraduate bodies up into small groups, 
 with a sacrifice thereby of loyalty for the 
 greater institution, we may grow this indis- 
 pensable spirit of our Americanism there — 
 100 
 
STUDENTS OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 otherwise the real college will continue to 
 be the nursery of true democracy. 
 
 The real college is exclusive — not in the 
 sense of refusing its opportunities to young 
 people from any walk of life or any condi- 
 tion of purse. It is not exclusive in the 
 recognition of the European idea of family 
 aristocracy. The real college, standing for 
 a nobility of character, is exclusive in the 
 matter of numbers and in standards of 
 scholarship and life. It demands from those 
 who would become students a thorough 
 readiness for college life, and those who 
 can show a burning desire for intellectual 
 achievement and a lofty moral conception 
 are eligible for admission to its halls. When 
 these requirements have been satisfied no 
 question of possession or birthright will be 
 raised. Indeed, to realize an ideal condi- 
 tion, the students in the real college will rep- 
 resent, as to parentage, a diversity of occu- 
 pations. Exclusive in the sense of limited 
 numbers, ability, and character, the spirit 
 of true democracy can best be grown in an 
 atmosphere where the youthful offspring of 
 101 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 farmer, mechanic, merchant, professional, 
 and laborer touch elbows while under the 
 wholesome instruction of sane teachers. 
 Thus the real college develops that spirit of 
 toleration for the views of others, that gen- 
 erous respect for all honest vocations, that 
 broad sympathy for all conditions of men, 
 and that unstinted love for all the race 
 which is the chief hope of the republic. 
 
 Even under the most favorable condi- 
 tions the democratic spirit is not easily prop- 
 agated, for a study of the civilization proc- 
 esses justifies the question raised but re- 
 cently by a distinguished editorial writer, 
 "whether, contrary to the historical theory, 
 democracy is not an acquired taste and 
 snobbery the natural instinct of man. ,, The 
 real college may easily become unreal. Un- 
 der improper direction, or from lack of di- 
 rection, on the part of those charged with 
 the responsibility of maintaining its ideals, 
 the student body and faculty readily drift 
 into exaggerated notions of their own supe- 
 riority, and their academic community is 
 soon a small aggregation of useless and in- 
 102 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 sufferable egotists. Students readily form 
 themselves, even in the smallest of colleges, 
 into cliques of various sorts, and these, un- 
 checked in the inclination to establish false 
 notions of merit, ultimately drive out and 
 effectively keep away those who can not or 
 will not drop naturally into one of these sets. 
 Thus the college, instead of continuing to 
 be the fallow ground of a healthy democ- 
 racy, becomes the fecund soil for the germi- 
 nation of a spindling aristocracy. 
 
 For years a war of words has been rag- 
 ing about the American college fraternity 
 system as a question of dispute among those 
 who are jealous for the best interests of the 
 real college — and the battle is still on. 
 Whether we like it or not, the fraternity as 
 an institution of college life has existed for 
 more than a century and, with its extensive 
 chapter houses and libraries and great con- 
 ventions, its catalogues and periodicals, with 
 ramifications reaching out among thousands 
 of loyal alumni from the humblest walks of 
 life up to those whose literary fame or 
 political glory has not operated to destroy 
 103 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 the love of their college fraternity, it is 
 here to stay. 
 
 That evils may follow in its wake is none 
 the less time of a college Greek letter fra- 
 ternity than of any other human organiza- 
 tion. Its opponents, however, are all on the 
 outside, and if they could but know how ut- 
 terly harmless the average college fraternity 
 really is they would vote themselves worthy 
 of admission to the grade of laughing-stock. 
 It will be conceded that any organized group 
 composed of maturing men, without sug- 
 gestion or direction from interested elders, 
 may easily degenerate into a hateful and 
 useless clique of intolerable snobs. Worse 
 than that, an undirected or misdirected or- 
 ganization of this sort may become a hot- 
 house for intellectual dissipation and gross 
 misconduct. 
 
 The modern fraternity house, inhabited 
 altogether by young men, and servants de- 
 pendent upon these young men for their 
 hire, is a standing invitation to indolence, 
 inordinate pleasure, roughness, and vul- 
 garity. It will hardly be denied that the 
 104 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 absence of woman's restraining influence, in 
 addition to the lack of respected authority 
 exerted by an older man, will induce degrad- 
 ing action in the unbridled younger spirits 
 who reign supreme in a house they call their 
 own. The youth who leaves the parental 
 roof-tree for college halls with some sense 
 of the proprieties instilled, with delicate but 
 not prudish conception of the sacred right 
 of personal privacy, and with some notions 
 of manly refinement, may be shocked at 
 first with what he sees in the house of the 
 fraternity with which he has cast his lot. 
 A young man, though, is very strong at 
 eighteen or nineteen years of age, who does 
 not sooner or later become spiritually in- 
 fected by the frequent hearing of the pro- 
 fane oath, the filthy word, and the salacious 
 story. He is extraordinarily impervious to 
 impressions if he does not lose his respect 
 for privacy as he looks upon his brothers 
 running about the hall or appearing in the 
 parlor scantily clad or entirely unclothed. 
 
 It is hard for any chap with music in 
 his soul to resist the temptation to leave 
 105 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 his studies when the guitars and mandolins 
 are thrumming or when the piano is gallop- 
 ing away in the lead of a rollicking song. 
 Many fathers and mothers would never send 
 their sons to college if the veil could be 
 lifted to them for an advance view of the 
 orgies about the gaming table and the foam- 
 ing beer schooner of the fraternity house. 
 The conspiracy of falsehood to shield a sin- 
 ning fraternity brother or to cover the com- 
 bined misconduct of several or all, the plot of 
 politics to secure preferment by fair or unfair 
 method, without regard to merit, make the 
 Greek letter society in some colleges a curse 
 and not a blessing. Bad as all these evils 
 may be, however, the most serious handi- 
 cap to any institution of learning, in the ex- 
 tent of its influence as a healthful factor 
 in modern society, is that put upon it by 
 student organizations whose members have 
 built about themselves walls of exclusive- 
 ness on foundations of groundless belief in 
 their own inalienable importance. 
 
 Pride of an institution in its own off- 
 spring would forbid the writer, if he were 
 106 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 otherwise disposed, the privilege of an un- 
 qualified condemnation of college frater- 
 nities. 1 
 
 These evils arising from fraternity life, 
 when they are found, do not exist because 
 the organization is a Greek letter society. 
 Given similar conditions, and they are found 
 in the clubs and social organizations of 
 those institutions which forbid to their stu- 
 dents membership in fraternities. Indeed, 
 the clubs of the anti-fraternity colleges are 
 often worse in their immorality because their 
 organizations are purely local. They have 
 no feeling of responsibility for their actions 
 nor pride in maintaining the good name of 
 a great national body of which they are a 
 part, such as the national fraternities have. 
 
 Under proper direction the fraternities, 
 clubs, or societies may fix the standards of 
 college life and be a democratizing force in 
 academic activities. 
 
 l Three of the great Greek Letter fraternities, Beta Theta 
 PI, Phi Delta Theta, and Sigma Chi were born at Miami Univer- 
 sity. The second chapter of Alpha Delta Phi was also estab- 
 lished here, as well as one of the earlier chapters of Delta 
 Kappa Epsilon. 
 
 107 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 In the case of the great national fra- 
 ternities it is true, in nearly every college, 
 that the faculty is represented by the mem- 
 bership of one or more of its body in every 
 fraternity in the institution. In the national 
 Greek letter fraternities it is "once a mem- 
 ber, always a member," and any fraternity 
 takes pride in pointing to the fact that this 
 faculty member or that is a member of 
 their brotherhood. 
 
 The college professor has the privilege 
 of going to the chapter house or of attend- 
 ing the meetings of his fraternity whenever 
 he chooses to do so, and, better than that, 
 he is always received with open arms and 
 the grip of welcome by the students of the 
 chapter. In the real college the professor 
 alive to the possibilities of this close, per- 
 sonal contact, while not assuming to dictate, 
 will lead, by their own consent, the student 
 members of his fraternity in the establish- 
 ment of standards of intellectual and moral 
 excellence that will guarantee to them their 
 own self-respect while they win the respect 
 of others. The alumni of a fraternity are 
 108 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 always an asset of pride, and the active 
 members, anxious for the support of those 
 who have gone out in other years, will yield 
 ready acquiescence to the suggestions of their 
 graduates as to the ideals they should seek to 
 realize for themselves. Faculty members and 
 alumni, co-operating with young men who are 
 anxious to do right when they are shown the 
 way, may make the fraternity a potent fac- 
 tor in all that is best in college life. No 
 one interested in the future of the republic 
 would want to extract one drop of good red 
 blood from the veins of the husky collegian. 
 In fact, the man or woman so straight-laced 
 that he can not see the possibilities of vig- 
 orous, joyous youthhood, and who would 
 forbid to the students the happiness that is 
 found in true college spirit, is an enemy to 
 modern civilization, fit to be relegated to the 
 gallery of the antiquities. That the college 
 fraternity does raise the standard of mo- 
 rality, maintain the scholarship of its mem- 
 bers, and encourage democracy in many col- 
 leges, is confirmed by the testimony of those 
 who know. There are colleges in America 
 109 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 where fraternity prayer-meetings and cir- 
 cles for Bible stndy flourish, and the mem- 
 bers of the fraternities where these things 
 obtain are not, in the parlance of the campns, 
 college "sissies" — they are wide-awake, 
 manly young fellows, taking a serious view 
 of life while they bubble over with good 
 cheer. 
 
 There is a chapter of a great national 
 fraternity in a typical real college, whose 
 members are among the finest and most 
 highly respected students of the institution, 
 and they will not allow any false notions of 
 fraternity and fraternal obligations to take 
 root. These say to their new members: 
 ' i Call on us for help and sympathy whenever 
 needed. We will support you against injus- 
 tice. If you go wrong we may forgive you 
 the first time, perhaps the second time, and 
 help you to your feet ; but if you persist and 
 become chronic in your wrongdoing, we 
 shall not enter into any conspiracy of false- 
 hood or deception to shield you from the 
 penalties you should suffer at the hands of 
 the authorities for violence to the standards 
 110 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 of the college. More than that, we shall co- 
 operate with the faculties in meting ont jus- 
 tice to you." This same fraternity has one 
 of its upper-classmen, whose regularly ap- 
 pointed duty it is to call once a month upon 
 the registrar of the college for reports of the 
 work being done in the classroom by all the 
 members of the fraternity. This report is 
 carried to the next meeting of the chapter, 
 and the delinquents are exhorted, for their 
 own sakes as well as for the sake of the fra- 
 ternity and the institution, to devote them- 
 selves more assiduously to the preparation 
 of their lessons. The members of this frater- 
 nity are leaders in athletics, debate, and in 
 the activities of the Young Men's Christian 
 Association. They stand high in a social way 
 and know how to appear as gentlemen at re- 
 ceptions and other formal functions. Some 
 of the members of this fraternity are from 
 homes of wealth, some are of moderate 
 means, a few are poor, and one of the last- 
 mentioned class, a most highly respected 
 young man, fires the furnace and acts as 
 house janitor to defray his expenses in col- 
 Ill 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 lege. The composite of wealth, moderate 
 means, poverty, and character cemented to- 
 gether in indissoluble nnion in this frater- 
 nity gives the everlasting lie to the oft-re- 
 peated and unsupported statement that the 
 college fraternity is always and necessarily 
 undemocratic and a hotbed of iniquity. In 
 the real college the fraternities do not form 
 a caste, but are simply a group of congenial 
 spirits, true to certain obligations, but rec- 
 ognizing that the college, and not the fra- 
 ternity, should be the chief object of their 
 affection. The men of the fraternities by 
 the mechanism of organization may fix 
 standards of conduct and scholarship which 
 will control the student body, and meeting 
 the humblest non-fraternity man, not in a 
 patronizing way, as an inferior, but cor- 
 dially, as a worthy fellow, the elective of- 
 fices of the student body will go to those 
 pre-eminently qualified, without regard to 
 affiliations. Thus, in the real college, there 
 may arise and flourish a real democracy. 
 
 The fullest measure of self-government, 
 consistent with the security of society, is 
 112 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 always desirable among men. If students 
 in days of preparation for the obligations of 
 the great outside world are encouraged to 
 establish for themselves an ethical system 
 which holds them constant in their efforts to 
 regard the rights of their fellow-men, to be 
 loyal to the State, to fulfill their duties to 
 God, and to be true to themselves, collegians 
 may prove to be the little leaven that, 
 thrown into society, will so leaven the whole 
 lump of our civilization as to emphasize the 
 insanity of anarchy and make all the re- 
 quirements of the law an unnecessary arti- 
 ficiality. To this end the real college should 
 grow to the fullest possible extent a system 
 of student government such as is well exem- 
 plified at Bowdoin College. The beginning 
 of this self-dependence is found always in 
 the classroom where the college professor of 
 large vision encourages the student at the 
 outset to develop his powers of individual 
 initiative. The old-fashioned college pro- 
 fessor was unwilling to grant the student 
 an opinion of his own worthy of considera- 
 tion, but insisted that it was the prerogative 
 8 113 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 of the teacher to do all the thinking. The 
 student in our real college is allowed opin- 
 ions of his own in the classroom, provided 
 only that they are presented with due re- 
 spect. The old-style literary or debating 
 society, with its governance in the hands of 
 the students, with its orations, essays, im- 
 promptus, debates and drill in parliamen- 
 tary practice, is an invaluable aid to inde- 
 pendent thought. The Honorable Whitelaw 
 Eeid, our ambassador to the Court of Saint 
 James, has declared in the later years of 
 his life that among the strongest agencies 
 in developing his power of independent 
 thought and expression while a student at 
 Miami University, was a debate extending 
 through several weeks to determine whether 
 or not a new carpet should be purchased 
 for the hall of the Erodelphian Literary So- 
 ciety. 
 
 Independent thinking, within due bounds, 
 is necessary to independent action in the 
 ordering of a life. In the desire to develop 
 a stalwart character by the encouragement 
 of independence, there are colleges that 
 114 
 
STUDENTS OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 have fallen into the error of turning the en- 
 tire government over to students. It is no 
 wonder that these ill-considered experiments 
 have often proven disastrous and, far from 
 bringing about the desired order, have pro- 
 duced the chaos of misrule. To assume 
 that the average youth in his minority has 
 developed the judgment necessary to take 
 upon himself the entire responsibility for 
 devising alone, or in concert with others of 
 his kind, a system of satisfactory govern- 
 ment, is to assume a maturity which expe- 
 rience tells us minors do not possess. The 
 Bowdoin system of self-government is an 
 evolution. It does not spring into existence 
 full-grown. It is the outgrowth of years of 
 careful experiment. Where Bowdoin has 
 succeeded gloriously, others have made in- 
 glorious failure. The parent sending his 
 son to college has the right to expect that 
 he will be guided gently if possible, but 
 firmly if need be, in the establishment of his 
 ideals. Left absolutely to themselves in 
 government, young men easily confuse lib- 
 erty with license, and instead of develop- 
 115 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 ing the self-restraint essential to their own 
 good and that of society, they throw off all 
 restraint, thus weakening themselves, while 
 they become the terror of orderly society. 
 The real college recognizes that students 
 are best governed by the standards that are 
 placed before them by those in authority. 
 If good ideals are skillfully presented they 
 appeal to the student, and he yields that 
 ready response which makes the self-gov- 
 ernment system a government not of com- 
 pulsion but of cheerful consent. The ma- 
 turing man makes the first step toward self- 
 government — and it is a step that can not 
 be missed — when he yields consent of his 
 will to be led by those in whom he has con- 
 fidence. Led thus and encouraged to de- 
 velop his own power of initiative, the youth 
 will prepare himself in a normal way to take 
 upon himself in due season the responsibil- 
 ities of self-government. The sanest college 
 government is a government of co-operation. 
 When the spirit of an institution is 
 healthful the students yield ready acqui- 
 escence to its ideals. The infamous pranks 
 116 
 
STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 of a generation agone no longer have a 
 place in the plans of the collegian. There 
 is in every sound yonng man a surplus of 
 animal spirit, and if this does not exhaust 
 itself properly under direction, it will pass 
 off improperly without direction. A safety- 
 valve is as necessary to a young man as 
 to a steam engine. The modern class-rush, 
 which some souls who seem never to have 
 enjoyed any youth for themselves in younger 
 years view with unspeakable horror, if prop- 
 erly conducted is not only a fine antidote 
 for the old wickedness of hazing, but it fur- 
 nishes, as well, a healthful outlet for super- 
 fluous energy. The system of modern ath- 
 letics, too, is a most valuable and highly 
 acceptable substitute for the lawless van- 
 dalism of former years. The stealing of 
 the college bell, disfiguring buildings, pollut- 
 ing wells, placing live-stock in classrooms 
 and agricultural implements on the tops of 
 buildings, shaving the tail of the president's 
 horse, and other barbarisms, exist only in 
 a few so-called colleges whose management 
 has not awakened to the dawn of the twen- 
 117 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 tieth century. Even in the real college there 
 is now and then a sporadic case of outre 
 misconduct, but it is usually condemned by 
 the rank and file of the students. If the 
 story papers would cease to print the tales 
 of daring pranks never played, and if alumni 
 who graduated in a day when a great gulf 
 was fixed between faculty and students would 
 forget to recount at Commencement seasons 
 and banquets the embellished tales of the 
 barbarous days when they were students, 
 the little remaining tendency to senseless 
 and criminal prankishness would speedily 
 vanish and the day of entire student self- 
 government would be hastened. It is alarm- 
 ing to discover how fertile in imagination 
 even the judicial mind may prove itself to 
 be in a recital of college capers. The writer 
 has heard in three different colleges from 
 staid men whose reputations for sobriety 
 and honesty at home is unimpeachable, re- 
 count the story of dragging away the presi- 
 dent's buggy from his carriage house to an 
 obscure point miles away, and when about 
 to take their departure the students were 
 118 
 
STUDENTS OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 chagrined to hear the president call out in 
 stentorian tones from beneath the robes in 
 which he was bundled within the conveyance, 
 ordering the boys to haul him back home. 
 Stranger than all else in every one of these 
 instances the teller of this thrilling tale has 
 solemnly declared at the wind-up that he 
 himself was the leading participant in the 
 prank and its humiliating denouement. 
 
 The students of the real college, studied 
 by their teachers as individuals, and encour- 
 aged to find themselves, will profit by every 
 experience of academic life. The work of 
 the classroom is important, but the activities 
 of the athletic field, the social life, the dia- 
 mond-cut-diamond process that prevails in 
 the workshop of the college lapidary, are in- 
 valuable and peculiar privileges enjoyed by 
 the college man. Standards of scholarship 
 are indispensable. No institution can af- 
 ford, as a general practice, to allow its good 
 name to be jeopardized by passing through 
 its course those students who do not meet 
 its requirements. A sharp distinction is 
 drawn, however, by the faculty of the real 
 119 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 college between the criminal idler and the 
 earnest student slow to learn. It has often 
 happened that a yonng man apparently 
 stupid in the work of the classroom, but 
 otherwise a person of fine possibilities, has 
 appeared as a student in college. The proper 
 encouragement of such an one by those 
 charged with responsibility may never make 
 of that young man a brilliant student, but 
 if he is able to win a bare passing credit 
 in his classes he may become influential on 
 the campus, and because of strength in other 
 lines and the saturation of his own life in 
 the college atmosphere he may become a 
 typical college man and in later years a 
 credit, if not an honor, to his Alma Mater. 
 The students of the real college find 
 themselves inspired by the uplift of glori- 
 ous traditions, but living always in close 
 touch with scholarly teachers who are in 
 sympathy with the spirit of modern thought 
 and progress, they are unhampered in real- 
 izing the best that the latest discovery has 
 to offer to young souls ambitious for suc- 
 cessful service. 
 
 120 
 
THE FACULTY OF THE REAL 
 COLLEGE 
 
THE FACULTY OF THE REAL 
 COLLEGE 
 
 The reading world is familiar with the 
 statement of President Grarfield concerning 
 Mark Hopkins, a log and himself, so often 
 quoted that it has become hackneyed. The 
 underlying truth of this oft-repeated senti- 
 ment accounts for its persistence. A beauti- 
 ful fact as firmly established as the power 
 of a respected teacher to mold the life of 
 the one he teaches, can never grow too old 
 for the emphasis of repetition. 
 
 The impress of the college professor 
 upon students is expressed by them in their 
 academic community and is productive of 
 that intangible yet indispensable something 
 we call the spirit of the institution. More 
 than that, it is upon the professors of the 
 college, taken together in that collective 
 group commonly called the faculty, that the 
 reputation of the institution largely depends. 
 
 It is something more than a matter for 
 123 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 the present moment whether the educational 
 staff of a given college is ordinary or ex- 
 traordinary. A passable scholarship and the 
 fairly good instruction of a particular teach- 
 ing corps may be of some immediate value 
 to students because of the fine character and 
 lofty moral conceptions of the individuals 
 composing it, but this is not sufficient. Every 
 graduate of an institution is limited in the 
 respect accorded him for his education by 
 the reputation of his Alma Mater established 
 by those who teach or those who have taught 
 therein. The standing of every alumnus is 
 enhanced through the years with every ad- 
 vance movement of his college secured by 
 the added regard for the achievement of its 
 faculty in the realm of the humanities or in 
 the field of science. Comprehensively de- 
 scribed, the faculty of the real college is 
 composed of virile men, tactful, apt to teach, 
 able to inspire the confidence of youthhood 
 by their learning, their enthusiasm, and 
 their lofty moral conceptions, and competent 
 to command respect for their scholarship in 
 the world of letters. 
 
 124 
 
FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 An analysis of faculty obligations in- 
 volves first a consideration of the relation 
 of faculty members to the president of the 
 college. That the responsibilities of the 
 president and his colleagues are at once 
 similar and distinct will hardly be ques- 
 tioned. If the administrative work of the 
 real college is even approximately successful 
 it will be because the duties of the president 
 are shared by his associates. According to 
 generally accepted precedent in American 
 colleges an election to a chair means more 
 than a call to the work immediately con- 
 nected with a certain line of specialized in- 
 struction in the institution. The professor 
 who accepts such an election should under- 
 stand that his acceptance involves the best 
 service he can render from his own chair, 
 plus a large activity beyond the narrow 
 limits of his own special field, which will con- 
 tribute to the general welfare of the insti- 
 tution. He will understand that he is ex- 
 pected, as a matter of course, without ex- 
 plicit contractual stipulations, to attend all 
 faculty meetings in which he may hold mem- 
 125 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 bership, that he is to participate in the de- 
 liberations of the faculty, and that he is to 
 assume cheerfully the work of all the com- 
 mittees to which he may be assigned. 
 
 In every student body there are some 
 restless spirits who will not respond to the 
 appeals that are made to manhood, and, re- 
 fusing to be controlled by modern methods, 
 they must needs be dealt with in harsher 
 manner. The problem of discipline in the 
 real college will never entirely disappear so 
 long as the coming man traces his lineage 
 from Adam. It is a weak academic govern- 
 ment that runs to the extreme of culpable 
 laxity on the one hand or to undue severity 
 on the other. If the college is to produce 
 men, students inspired by the consciousness 
 of their own capabilities revealed to them 
 by skillful teaching will, as a rule, recog- 
 nize and utilize their power of initiative in 
 work and in character building. Knowing 
 that the highest type of manhood is devel- 
 oped as the result of an awakening of this 
 consciousness, college authorities anxious for 
 the best permanent results will keep the goad 
 126 
 
FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 out of sight, the emblems of authority hid- 
 den, and penalties in the background. But 
 to bury beyond the possibility of resurrec- 
 tion the "thou shalt" and the "thou shalt 
 not," which every man must ultimately 
 learn — if he has not learned it by the telling 
 — by bitter experience, is to place the stamp 
 of criminal impotency upon college govern- 
 ment in the making of men. Faculty mem- 
 bers will assume, without shirking, their un- 
 pleasant parts in bearing the burden of col- 
 lege discipline. 
 
 The curriculum, the library, the campus, 
 the athletic field, the buildings, the equip- 
 ment, and the organizations of the college 
 are all so vital to the effectiveness of the 
 college that the members of the educational 
 staff can hardly escape sharing with the 
 president an interest in each and all of them. 
 
 No one will question the right of faculty 
 members to advise the president. Indeed, if 
 he is as wise as such an official should be, 
 he will seek the counsel of his associates, and 
 knowing that "in the multitude of counsel- 
 ors there is safety," he will be ready to 
 127 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 modify his plans and policies after hearing 
 from his colleagues. The right to advise 
 does not, however, include within it the pre- 
 rogative of censorious criticism. Next to a 
 despotic egotist in the presidency the most 
 obstructive hindrance to the growth of a 
 healthful spirit in a given college is a coterie 
 of professors painfully sycophantic in the 
 presence of their lord and master, and bit- 
 terly denunciatory of him when left to them- 
 selves. It is difficult to conceive of a more 
 painful caricature on true manliness than 
 that made up by a little professorial group 
 gathered together in a darkened corridor or 
 behind a building, gesticulating wildly 
 against the administration, unless it be the 
 same small crowd in the study of one of the 
 number, or in a clubroom planning surrep- 
 titiously for the overthrow of their chief. 
 
 The president of one of the larger State 
 universities of the Central West was appar- 
 ently highly esteemed by all those who 
 served with him, but when he resigned, a 
 prominent professor, too cowardly to be 
 other than obsequious while he thought the 
 128 
 
FACULTY OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 tenure of the president permanent, re- 
 marked, "Well, there is certainly a great 
 ground-swell of relief among the faculty now 
 that we are to be relieved of the incubus of 
 this administration. ' ' Such reprehensible 
 hypocrisy, nourished by those who teach, 
 can not but exert a blighting influence, even 
 though it be unconscious, upon the life of 
 the institution as a whole. 
 
 An American college without a respon- 
 sible head — let it be repeated — be he known 
 as chancellor, president, or by any title what- 
 soever, is like a ship without a pilot. The 
 crew is indispensable, but let them work 
 never so unceasingly and unselfishly, ship- 
 wreck will inevitably come if there be no one 
 at the wheel. It is true that an unskilled 
 or headstrong helmsman may run the vessel 
 on rocks or sandbar. In a recent contribu- 
 tion to Science under the caption, "The 
 Ideal University Administration, ' ' Profes- 
 sor Kent, of Syracuse University, introduces 
 his article by saying: 
 
 1 1 The recent controversy in Syracuse Uni- 
 versity is one that is of far more impor- 
 9 129 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 tance to the educational interests of the conn- 
 try than a mere qnarrel between two indi- 
 viduals. It is a symptom of disease which, 
 to some extent, is common in many univer- 
 sities ; that is, the government of a university 
 by a single autocrat, supported in power by 
 a body of absent trustees who are not edu- 
 cational experts. The time is ripe for a gen- 
 eral study of university administration." 
 
 With no more than this broad hint as to 
 recent troubles at home, the author branches 
 out into a presentation of his own notions 
 as to the ideal university and its govern- 
 ment. After a somewhat vague elaboration 
 of his theories he concludes his article with 
 the categorical assertion that " under such 
 a government strong men could be secured 
 to fill the professors' chairs; they would be 
 secure in their positions as long as they did 
 their duty, and such a disgraceful proceed- 
 ing as the one that has just taken place at 
 Syracuse would be impossible." 
 
 Without any attempt to analyze in detail 
 the motives that have prompted this article, 
 let it be said, in passing, that it is impos- 
 
 130 
 
FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 sible to escape the conviction that the ani- 
 mus of the argument in the body of the pro- 
 duction seems to be revealed in the caustic 
 reference to unpleasant conditions at home 
 in opening, and in the bitter allusion to the 
 local troubles in concluding. 
 
 In-so-far as Dean Kent seeks to establish 
 general principles that shall govern insti- 
 tutions other than his own, his theory of 
 university administration is worthy of se- 
 rious study. What he has to say of univer- 
 sity government is equally applicable to the 
 government of a college. He has given ex- 
 pression to a feeling of unrest that is dis- 
 turbing the peace of mind of more than one 
 college professor in America to-day. In 
 common with many of his kind, he is crying 
 out for emancipation from a tyranny that 
 is becoming too common. He wants the 
 freedom that numerous other college pro- 
 fessors feel to be their indisputable right. 
 The incompleteness of his premises, how- 
 ever, makes acceptance of his conclusions 
 impossible. After denning a university as a 
 "congregation of students and teachers,'? he 
 131 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 limits the constitution of a university in its 
 origin to one of three methods, namely: 
 
 (1) A body of students of legal age estab- 
 lishing a corporation, hiring their own teach- 
 ers, framing a set of by-laws and erecting 
 and furnishing buildings and equipment; 
 
 (2) a body composed exclusively of teachers 
 forming an organization, electing themselves 
 as officers, issuing stock, renting or erecting 
 buildings and furnishing them, and adver- 
 tising for students; or (3) a single rich man 
 furnishing money, forming a corporation 
 with four dummy stockholders, giving them 
 one share of stock each, erecting buildings, 
 providing the necessary equipment, hiring 
 teachers, advertising for students, and be- 
 ginning the business of furnishing educa- 
 tion for tuition fees. 
 
 To attempt to restrict a college or uni- 
 versity to one of these three foundations 
 named by Professor Kent is to run counter 
 to the facts of history in American academic 
 establishment. It is to reduce higher edu- 
 cation in our country to the level of a mere 
 socialistic organization or a mercenary com- 
 132 
 
FACULTY OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 mercial enterprise. As a matter of fact, it 
 is well known that there are no colleges or 
 universities of note in the New World formed 
 altogether by students. The work of higher 
 education this side the sea has not to any- 
 successful degree been a mere money-making 
 business. To be sure, in a few instances 
 bodies of teachers have associated them- 
 selves together to form so-called normal 
 schools, and for a little time, by advertising 
 their "get educated quick" schemes, they 
 have been successful in duping hundreds of 
 unsophisticated youth into seeking educa- 
 tional advantages where they were not to 
 be found. 
 
 It has often happened, too, particularly 
 in the far West, that a railroad company 
 or a real estate corporation, to increase 
 travel or to develop a town site, has estab- 
 lished a so-called college to help on the sale 
 of building lots. There have been a few 
 scattered attempts by single individuals to 
 found institutions of learning for personal 
 financial profit. None of these ventures by 
 teachers, by land agents, or individual spec- 
 133 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 ulators have, however, been regarded by the 
 public in general as serions educational ef- 
 forts, and certainly the institutions they 
 have founded have led, in nearly every case, 
 so precarious an existence and have been of 
 such doubtful value that those engaged in 
 real college and university work have never 
 recognized them. 
 
 The real college in America is not a 
 money-making institution. It is, from the 
 standpoint of immediate returns in dollars 
 and cents, a money-losing project. Schools 
 of higher learning, of the best type, to-day 
 are charitable institutions. They have not 
 originated in any one of these three ways 
 suggested by Professor Kent as essential to 
 the formation of a university. The colleges 
 of our land are the outgrowth of a com- 
 mendable and unselfish paternalism. The 
 Church at great sacrifice has established and 
 maintained many of the best of them. The 
 States have realized the responsibility rest- 
 ing upon government for the proper train- 
 ing of the sovereign people who compose a 
 democratic government and have subsidized 
 134 
 
FACULTY OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 with public funds colleges and universities 
 which challenge the respect of the world. It 
 is true that Church colleges have received 
 in some cases large benefactions from men 
 of wealth, but no man has ever made large 
 gifts to any such institution expecting that 
 he would receive the same sort of return 
 thereon that would be his by investment in 
 "Standard Oil" or "Steel" stock. In this 
 latter day it is true that many institutions 
 of learning, denominational in origin and, at 
 times in their existence strongly sectarian, 
 are breaking away in greater or lesser meas- 
 ure from the dependence upon Church sup- 
 port. As a strong body of loyal alumni 
 grows up about a particular institution the 
 Church is relieved from the obligation of 
 maintenance and the devoted graduates as- 
 sume the responsibility for support. Even 
 State supported institutions after some years 
 of existence come to look to former students 
 for sympathetic help as a necessity. While 
 such schools never get beyond the necessity 
 of State appropriations, yet former students 
 and graduates are their most valuable as- 
 135 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 sets. It is upon those they have taught that 
 State colleges and universities must depend 
 for influence in securing needed govern- 
 mental help, and such institutions in many 
 instances are not opposed to supplementing 
 the support received through public taxation 
 with individual gifts from loving sons and 
 patriotic friends. Church colleges share the 
 support they receive from members of the 
 Church with their graduates. The alumni 
 of State institutions join with the citizens 
 of the State at large in justly claiming the 
 rights of partners in the ownership of their 
 Alma Mater. It is clear, then, that the re- 
 sponsibility of professors in standard col- 
 leges and universities is not to themselves 
 and their students alone. It is to the Church 
 in some cases. In other instances it is to the 
 Church and its graduates and the State. In 
 all cases it is to the public at large. No col- 
 lege worthy of the name could exist with- 
 out a paternalistic prop outside of itself. 
 Colleges and universities are institutions for 
 public service. It is unthinkable in this, 
 country, at any rate, that the right of direc- 
 136 
 
FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 tion lies altogether with those resident in 
 the academic commnnity, as Professor Kent 
 maintains. As well absolve the pastor of a 
 flock or the governor of the commonwealth 
 from all responsibility for official conduct to 
 any one but himself, as to claim freedom 
 from responsibility for educational policies 
 and efficiency to those living beyond the 
 boundaries of the campus. 
 
 In further elaboration of his " Ideal Uni- 
 versity Administration'' the author named 
 declares that "the best system for a univer- 
 sity is neither the boss nor the czar system; 
 not mob rule, but a carefully planned system 
 of representative government, of which the 
 United States is a model.' ' He further rec- 
 ommends a university senate or council, and 
 rather grudgingly concedes that there may 
 be a president or chancellor elected by the 
 trustees who is to represent the university 
 on all public occasions. "If the president 
 is a money-getter and an orator," he says, 
 "so much the better; but whatever he is, 
 it is not wise to give him autocratic power 
 over the faculties, nor over the council.' [ 
 137 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 Professor George Malcolm Stratton, of 
 Johns Hopkins University, with apparent ab- 
 sence of personal piqne and with greater dig- 
 nity gives expression to the feelings that pos- 
 sess many of his contemporaries in American 
 universities. His "Externalism in Ameri- 
 can Universities, ' ' in The Atlantic Monthly 
 of October, 1907, is a strong argument for 
 revolution in the American system of college 
 government, and his conclusions seem al- 
 most incontrovertible. It is unfair to quote 
 any portion of this genuine contribution to 
 the literature of college idealism as compre- 
 hending the whole of his argument. And yet 
 it seems possible that he has voiced a well- 
 nigh universal professorial opinion in say- 
 ing: 
 
 1 ' The American university president holds 
 a place unique in the history of higher edu- 
 cation. He is a ruler responsible to no one 
 whom he governs, and he holds for an in- 
 definite term the powers of academic life and 
 death. Subject to the formal approval of 
 the trustees, he selects new members of the 
 faculty, promotes, dismisses them. To the 
 faculty, it is true, there seems to be left the 
 138 
 
FACULTY OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 important power to define the requirements 
 for admission to the university and to its de- 
 grees, and yet these activities are, in a fun- 
 damental way, directed by the president, 
 since by his word comes growth to this de- 
 partment and atrophy to that. And while 
 his sway is subject to a constitution, and he 
 can not quite justly be called an autocrat, 
 nevertheless the charter brings to him, per- 
 haps, less serious restrictions than those 
 which often, in the larger world, would bind 
 men who bear the name of emperor. ' ' 
 
 That the love of power for its own sake 
 is more dangerous than the love of money 
 for its own sake is an assertion that will 
 hardly be questioned. It is utterly repug- 
 nant to our national notions of democracy 
 to tolerate an arrant bossism even in politi- 
 cal affairs. Much more offensive is an im- 
 perious dictatorship when it brandishes its 
 scepter in the ecclesiastical domain. Most 
 unendurable of all is it when it dominates 
 an academic community. 
 
 That there are those in the political world 
 who give their orders simply for the joy of 
 witnessing an abject obedience from cring- 
 139 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 ing subjects is a conclusion that seems en- 
 tirely warranted by superficial observation. 
 There are bishops of the Church who re- 
 move and exchange priests and preachers 
 and run contrary to the wishes of congrega- 
 tions simply, it would seem, to show that 
 they can do these things. It must be admit- 
 ted that there are also some educational 
 autocrats in the land of the living who cher- 
 ish their official power as the most priceless 
 of all their possessions. At every great edu- 
 cational gathering it is possible to hear some 
 petty village principal or some vainglori- 
 ous city superintendent exalting the perpen- 
 dicular personal pronoun as he stands among 
 a group of those whom he imagines to be 
 his admirers while he explains the skillful 
 and effective way he has of using the ax. 
 At gatherings of college men one may occa- 
 sionally hear a diminutive college president 
 with magnified opinions of his own superior 
 wisdom boast of his ruthless disregard of 
 faculty instructions and tell of his many 
 successful feats in administering discipline 
 to his recalcitrant colleagues. It is a safe 
 140 
 
FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 statement, however, that the overwhelming 
 majority of school superintendents and col- 
 lege presidents in the United States are not 
 of such sort. 
 
 Most men do not reach positions of col- 
 lege authority by a single leap from the 
 graduate school. As a rule the college pres- 
 ident grows into his larger responsibility. 
 A study of the biographies of those engaged 
 in the work of higher educational adminis- 
 tration in our own country will disclose the 
 fact that most of them have taken all the 
 intermediate steps and have come up by the 
 hard way of earned promotions. Nearly all 
 college presidents serve apprenticeships as 
 tutors and instructors and find their way to 
 the honor of departmental chairs before they 
 are drafted for institutional headship. In 
 the main, they are men who have been tested 
 in the ranks, and the recognition of their 
 worth by their associates has won them the 
 call to presidential duties. Such men by ex- 
 perimental knowledge must, in the nature of 
 the case, have large sympathy, not only with 
 the members of the student body, but with 
 141 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 their subordinates of all grades in the fac- 
 ulty. 
 
 If here and there a college president for- 
 gets his obligations as the servant of all and 
 becomes lordly, it does not follow that there 
 should be universal abolition of the college 
 presidency. Indeed, it is impossible to con- 
 ceive of a live college in this country with- 
 out a chief official performing functions sim- 
 ilar to those we have come to regard as the 
 work of a president. The American college 
 is entirely different from the European in- 
 stitution. Its mission is not narrow, but 
 broad. Its responsibility is not to the few 
 scholars composing a certain academic com- 
 munity, but to the multiplied thousands out- 
 side the college halls. In the New World 
 the college exists not for the benefit of the 
 few favored ones, but for the service of the 
 whole race of men. 
 
 It has already been shown that the few 
 trials of acephalous college government in 
 this country have resulted in confessed fail- 
 ure. It has been demonstrated that there 
 is necessity for some one very much alive, 
 142 
 
FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 at the head of every public institution, to 
 whom the supporting public may look for a 
 proper accounting, and he in turn must have 
 those accountable to him, that he, with their 
 help, may make satisfactory report of insti- 
 tutional stewardship to those whom the in- 
 stitution exists to serve. 
 
 To declare against centralized authority 
 in our colleges is to run counter to the spirit 
 of our own times. Finding that multiplica- 
 tion of offices has contributed chiefly to the 
 building of corrupt political machines but- 
 tressed by henchmen who fatten at the ex- 
 pense of the people, and that distribution of 
 responsibility in municipal affairs has re- 
 sulted in a constantly increasing inefficiency 
 in public service, many cities are now seek- 
 ing to find methods by which authority may 
 be concentrated and responsibility located. 
 A very careful editorial writer in The Out- 
 look has recently said that "in spite of the 
 natural conservatism of cities the so-called 
 ' Galveston Plan' of municipal government 
 continues to make headway. The plan, it 
 will be recalled, is based upon the principle 
 143 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 of centralizing power and responsibility. It 
 provides for the abolition of the ward alder- 
 man and for the concentrating of executive 
 and legislative functions in a board of five 
 men elected on a general ticket, each of whom 
 becomes the head of a department." Two 
 of the great trans-Mississippi States have 
 recently, by legislative enactment, made it 
 possible for their cities to adopt a modified 
 Galveston plan. ' ' Fort Worth, Dallas, Hous- 
 ton, and El Paso, all inspired by the suc- 
 cess of their sister city of the same State, 
 have adopted the "Commission Plan" of 
 municipal government. Leavenworth, Des 
 Moines, and Cedar Eapids, as the result of 
 the adoption of this plan, testify to an in- 
 creased efficiency in public service at a 
 greatly reduced cost. The rising young city 
 of Tulsa, in the State of Oklahoma, is one 
 of the latest converts to the centralization 
 of accountability provided by the Commis- 
 sion System. Such eminent students as Pro- 
 fessor Albert Bushnell Hart, of Harvard 
 University, and Professor Sparling, of the 
 University of "Wisconsin, have commended 
 144 
 
FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 the "Commission Plan" for its simplicity 
 and the noteworthy results already attained 
 under it. It may be well, in passing, to em- 
 phasize the fact that these distinguished men 
 who place their seal of approval on concen- 
 trated authority in municipalities are them- 
 selves members of faculties in great univer- 
 sities widely separated, but both of which 
 are constantly growing in greatness of repu- 
 tation and power for service, under authority 
 centralized in presidents to whose efficient 
 leadership the whole world to-day pays trib- 
 ute. Concentration of authority in city, 
 State, and national government is recog- 
 nized to-day as the one thing to be desired 
 above all others for economy and efficiency, 
 and it is pertinent to inquire why a simi- 
 larly centralized direction would not work to 
 greater advantage in college administration 
 than the divided responsibility which, in the 
 few institutions in which it has been at- 
 tempted, has resulted in wretched failure. 
 
 Bearing in mind that the real college is 
 not self-supporting, that it is a charitable 
 concern existing for the service of the pub- 
 10 145 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 lie, is it not reasonable that there shonld be 
 some one to be held directly responsible for 
 its success or failure? It is inconceivable 
 that, for any ordinary incapability, members 
 of a self-constituted faculty would vote to 
 put one of their own number out of service. 
 There is, at all events, a modicum of human 
 nature in college professors. A care for indi- 
 vidual interests, if there were no considera- 
 tions of fraternal courtesy to govern, would 
 certainly encourage a reciprocal indulgence 
 of peculiarities and faults, if not a total un- 
 fitness, inimical to the best service of the col- 
 lege. For the professors, rather than the 
 trustees, to elect the president of an educa- 
 tional institution, as urged by Professor 
 Stratton, would be to provide a still stronger 
 protection for professorial inefficiency. Never 
 in the history of the world has there lived a 
 man who has found his largest incentive to 
 endeavor within himself. The best man does 
 his best when he is spurred to effort by the 
 knowledge that he is accountable for all that 
 he does or fails to do to some one else. It is 
 to claim the existence of a perfected order 
 146 
 
FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 of manhood such as the sun has never shone 
 on to maintain that any considerable num- 
 ber of human beings will work to their limit 
 from love of work. It will be readily granted 
 that men do work well because they are in- 
 terested in tasks they have set for them- 
 selves, but their effectiveness is accentuated 
 by knowledge of the fact that they are re- 
 sponsible to others as well as to themselves. 
 Those who have inside knowledge will admit 
 that they have known college professors who 
 were insufferably lazy. There are those who 
 have won some fame that are prone to rest 
 on their laurels. Left to follow their own 
 inclinations, these self-satisfied teachers, in- 
 stead of bringing to students and the larger 
 public the inspiration of a growing life, 
 would hand them the husks of a spent glory. 
 To do all that we may do, every one of us 
 must be kept under the lash. 
 
 A college or university without a central- 
 ized control never can be a " union of gifted 
 persons working together to increase the 
 store of intelligence among men." More 
 than that, there never has been a competent 
 147 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 academic community working on a purely- 
 socialistic basis. A president elected by the 
 professors and subject to their dismissal 
 when a mere majority of them find he will 
 not do their bidding would be an impotent 
 puppet. 
 
 The same human frailties that are com- 
 mon to college professors are also found in 
 college presidents. If, though, a man of 
 broad vision, of great .heart, of scholarly 
 perspicacity and successful experience can 
 be found — and there are some such — to 
 whom the direction of a given college is en- 
 trusted, he will accomplish more in com- 
 pelling it to become a mighty factor for 
 good among men, within a few years, than 
 could be accomplished without such cen- 
 tralized direction in many decades. A pres- 
 ident of this sort, himself goaded to his most 
 earnest endeavor by the responsibility he 
 owes to the board of trustees, who are his 
 employers, and by a constituency who de- 
 mands from him results as the price of his 
 continuance in office, will gather about him 
 as his co-laborers in college work the best 
 148 
 
FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 faculty the funds at his command will allow. 
 No one knows better than the wise college 
 president that his own fitness for his post 
 is best demonstrated by his ability to find 
 and keep a strong educational staff. Per- 
 manency of tenure is a matter of self-pres- 
 ervation and, if for no other reason, demands 
 that he hold every professor who proves 
 himself worthy. Under such a president ev- 
 ery member of the faculty will feel himself 
 secure so long as he does his whole duty. 
 When he fails in doing his full duty there is 
 one in authority who, knowing his own re- 
 sponsibility for the efficiency of the college, 
 will have the courage to recommend a dis- 
 missal, which could not come under a com- 
 munistic government. Professional para- 
 sites are hostile to college vitality. They 
 will not have the chance to sap the life-blood 
 of an institution which has a courageous 
 president who knows he will be held answer- 
 able for institutional impotence, superin- 
 duced by premature professorial senility. 
 An indolent teacher here and there, dis- 
 charged by recommendation of a brave pres- 
 149 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 ident, may have a grievance against such a 
 president, but the generations will be debtor 
 to him. 
 
 The college executive who wields the "big 
 stick" simply to find pleasure in hearing the 
 blow fall, will soon be discovered and will 
 thereby contribute to his own speedy de- 
 thronement. Professors working with the 
 average college president will not be re- 
 stricted in their freedom. Their counsel will 
 be frequently sought by him. They will dare 
 to speak their minds frankly to him in the 
 privacy of his own office or study and pub- 
 licly in committees and faculty meetings. He 
 will recognize that a college faculty is a de- 
 liberative body, and he will bow to the ex- 
 pressed will of the majority on all questions 
 that are submitted to them as their guaran- 
 teed right to decide. He will reserve to 
 himself only such plenary authority as is 
 necessary to establish and maintain policies 
 for which he is, in the main, held responsi- 
 ble. Showing himself fraternal and sympa- 
 thetic to his colleagues, he will be supported 
 by them when it is necessary for him, in the 
 150 
 
FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 interest of the institution, to take extreme 
 action. He will be their advocate and de- 
 fender in every just cause. The ideal col- 
 lege government consists of a capable, fear- 
 less president on the one hand, and on the 
 other it is a scholarly, public-spirited faculty, 
 both working in sympathetic co-operation as 
 servants of humanity. It is because we have 
 many such ideal systems of academic govern- 
 ment that the American college is to-day the 
 best the world has ever known. 
 
 But members of a college faculty are re- 
 lated to each other in a way vital to the wel- 
 fare of themselves and their institution. I 
 have heard of bitterly opposing factions in 
 college-governing bodies, but I have never 
 known of an institution in which such a state 
 of affairs had actual existence. It is always 
 possible to hear of an institution where there 
 is lack of harmony, but the institution is al- 
 ways in some other town, city, or State. It 
 is safe to affirm that a college faculty rent 
 with internal dissensions could have no par- 
 allel in misery outside the hateful jealousies 
 that make for perpetual woe in an Oriental 
 151 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 harem. College professors are members of 
 an educational family, and the respect and 
 consideration shown for one another and for 
 all will not only contribute to individual hap- 
 piness and effectiveness, but to the esteem 
 in which all teachers are held by those who 
 are taught. Nothing is more desirable in 
 the college world than the inculcation in stu- 
 dents of a high regard for the manliness 
 of scholarship; and when faculty colleagues 
 invariably speak well of each other and show 
 genuine appreciation of the character and 
 achievements of their associates, they fix a 
 lofty ideal of learning in the minds of their 
 student constituency. The real college is a 
 republic of letters, where every member 
 gives himself, without stint, in earnest co- 
 operation to the cultivation of a public sen- 
 timent healthful to noble character and gen- 
 uine scholarship, and the American college 
 is preponderantly of this splendid type. 
 
 If the terms college and university in this 
 discussion have been used interchangeably 
 and synonymously, let it be pleaded in justifi- 
 cation therefor that in many respects their 
 152 
 
FACULTY OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 mission and their functions are identical. In 
 respect to these points of similarity a criti- 
 cism passed on one would apply with equal 
 force to the other. There is a field, though, 
 which belongs distinctively to the college, 
 and which the university, by reason of its 
 very bigness, can not enter. This is the field 
 of personal contact of teachers and students, 
 which the smallness of the real college per- 
 mits it to occupy as its exclusive domain. It 
 is, then, in the relations maintained by fac- 
 ulty members to their students in the real 
 college that their true worth is determined. 
 In a recent issue of the New York Even- 
 ing Post, under the caption, "The College 
 Grindstone," a severe indictment is lodged 
 against the American college professor. The 
 opening statement is the alarmingly em- 
 phatic declaration that "the recently pub- 
 lished 'Life and Letters of Sir Eichard 
 J ebb' must fill the occupants of academic 
 chairs in America with envious despair.' ■ 
 With characteristic Anglo-maniacal admira- 
 tion, in immediate succession to the fore- 
 going sentence, we are told that "this pic- 
 153 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 ture of a life of a college professor in 
 Great Britain is far different from that of 
 a college professor in America." With 
 such premises it is not hard to anticipate 
 the conclusion of this arraignment. The 
 writer has adopted as his own a common 
 error of our own times. He assumes, with 
 many others, that the chief business of 
 the college professor is that of a producer. 
 According to this all too prevalent notion the 
 teacher in the modern college who fails to 
 contribute to the technical journals of his 
 special line or to literature in general is a 
 pitiable failure. Apparently the indignation 
 of this editorial writer grows by what it feeds 
 upon, for, proceeding, he says : 
 
 "In America this notion of the scholar and 
 man of letters combined in one person is but 
 dimly conceived by most members of the 
 academic body: and it has apparently never 
 entered the heads of many college trustees." 
 
 He bemoans the fact that, though we have 
 had among our college professors a Long- 
 fellow and a Lowell, "the vast majority can 
 
 154 
 
FACULTY OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 hope to be nothing more than competent 
 teachers and editors of useful text-books — a 
 respectable but not inspiring career.' ' 
 
 " Nothing more than competent teach- 
 ers !" Shades of Socrates, Pestalozzi, and 
 Arnold of Rugby, what an inpeachment! 
 Socrates wrote nothing, but as the teacher 
 of Alcibiades and the Athenian youth he 
 has lived to a day that reaches centuries 
 away from the hemlock cup. Pestalozzi 
 wrote "Leonard and Gertrude," but it re- 
 flects his experience gained by eating, drink- 
 ing, sleeping, suffering, and rejoicing with 
 the little children who loved him as their 
 teacher. The intellectual faculties of Doc- 
 tor Arnold did not surpass those of many of 
 his contemporaries, and in scholarship he 
 occupied a subordinate place to many of his 
 associates. As has been truly observed, "his 
 'Thucydides,' his history, his sermons, and 
 miscellaneous writings are all proofs of his 
 ability and goodness, and yet the story of 
 his own life is worth them all." The record 
 of his career is a fulfillment of the prophecy, 
 "If elected Master of Rugby, he would 
 155 
 
THE KEAL COLLEGE 
 
 change the face of education all through the 
 public schools of England.' ' It was only a 
 few words in the quick-shifting sands, ob- 
 literated by the winds before the setting of 
 the sun, that were written by Him who 
 taught in the unroofed schoolroom of Gali- 
 lee, and yet His teachings have transformed 
 nations, and the truth He inculcated goes 
 marching on against the coming of the day 
 of a perfected civilization. 
 
 From the days of Socrates and the Car- 
 penter's Son down to the present, in elemen- 
 tary school and college, there have been hun- 
 dreds of those who have been "nothing more 
 than competent teachers," whose lives of 
 high scholarship, of fine culture, and lofty 
 character have contributed, as nothing else 
 in the world has done, to the making of use- 
 ful and happy lives. To be "nothing more 
 than competent teachers" will not mean the 
 writing of the names of the teachers high on 
 the scroll of eternal fame, but it will mean 
 more than that; it will mean the writing of 
 imperishable principles on the plastic tab- 
 lets of youthful character, and these will 
 156 
 
FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 crystallize into monuments that will outlast 
 memorials of bronze and marble, enduring 
 in the heaven of heavens forever. 
 
 It should never be forgotten that the best 
 product of any school is not a book, but a 
 man. It is painful to contemplate the am- 
 bition of too many new-fledged doctors of 
 philosophy seeking educational positions, 
 whose ambition is not to teach but to write. 
 Many of them look with contempt on teach- 
 ing, while they pine for the honors of author- 
 ship. It is beyond the limits of conjecture 
 how many good teachers have been spoiled 
 by an ambition which has found its fruition 
 in an unread literature, but it is a safe prop- 
 osition that the dust-covered theses of our 
 graduate colleges would make a bonfire of 
 very respectable flame. 
 
 There are numbers of those fresh from 
 graduate study who, if they can not write, 
 will insist upon lecturing. They would feel 
 themselves very common to speak of teach- 
 ing, so they go not to the classroom but to 
 the "lecture-room." If the colleges in re- 
 cent years have suffered from one thing more 
 157 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 than another, it seems probable that it is 
 from the attempt to use the methods of the 
 graduate school in undergraduate work. It 
 should never be forgotten that, according to 
 its etymological signification, education 
 means a leading forth, or a drawing out, a 
 development. The immature mind can not 
 be developed by the "pouring in" process. 
 Maturing intellectual powers grow by exer- 
 cise, and there is no better exercise for the 
 youthful mind than the old-fashioned reci- 
 tation method. The Socratic system of ques- 
 tions and answers amplified in such a way 
 as to bring the growing man to his feet to 
 show by concise English, in properly related 
 sentences, the results of his study, is the 
 ideal method. Nothing more vicious in our 
 modern educational system has shown itself 
 than this stifling of unfolding manhood by 
 the so-called "lecture plan." The real col- 
 lege requires its professors, first of all, to 
 be teachers. They are teachers by the in- 
 spiration of their scholarship and their in- 
 sistence upon clearness of understanding 
 and accuracy of statement in the classroom. 
 158 
 
FACULTY OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 Above all, they are teachers in their homes, 
 on the campus, and on the streets, by the 
 lives they live before their students, whose 
 close inspection they can not escape either 
 by night or by day. In the real college the 
 teacher necessarily lives so close to those he 
 teaches that the impress of his character is 
 left upon them whether he will or not. The 
 educator who aspires to a Bohemian exist- 
 ence would do well to find a position in a 
 great university, where his unconventional 
 manner of living will remain undiscovered, 
 rather than in the real college, where he will 
 be known and read of all. 
 
 It is inconceivable that one can be the 
 right sort of teacher in the real college if 
 his daily life is not ordered in accordance 
 with the highest standards of morality — is 
 it necessary to say Christian morality? 
 
 The vulgar swagger assumed by some 
 college and university professors in this lat- 
 ter day would be pitiable if it were not posi- 
 tively mischievous. Time was when the man 
 who taught in college believed that his life 
 159 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 should be one of consecration to the highest 
 ideals of character. He believed that all 
 questionable conduct should be avoided. For 
 the sake of his influence upon his students 
 he consistently refrained from indulging 
 himself in those diversions which to men oc- 
 cupying less responsible positions might be 
 occasionally allowable if not always per- 
 missible. 
 
 It is not an unusual thing in these days 
 to see a college professor with a cigar or 
 cigarette between his teeth, smoking openly 
 before his students. At the banquets attend- 
 ant upon educational assemblies and learned 
 societies not only is after-dinner smoking 
 common, but the wineglass has become indis- 
 pensable. In the English universities many 
 of the fellows refuse to drink, not from any 
 moral compunctions, but because in drink- 
 ing they would seem common. There are 
 many college teachers in this country who 
 do not drink, but it is a sad commentary on 
 higher education in America that there are 
 so many in positions of educational leader- 
 ship who are at utter variance with the spirit 
 160 
 
FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 of an age that, like no other, stands for the 
 annihilation of the drink traffic. 
 
 No more hateful spectacle confronts ad- 
 vancing civilization than a beer-sipping, 
 wine-bibbing, college professor. He is hate- 
 ful because he is incongruous. More than 
 that, he is hateful because of the havoc he 
 works as an iconoclast in the beautiful temple 
 of youthful ideals. It is a safe prediction 
 that in the near coming day, when the Ameri- 
 can saloon is only an historic tradition, the 
 college professor who drinks in public or in 
 private will not be tolerated beyond the 
 meeting of the board of trustees succeeding 
 his discovery. 
 
 To be correct in his habits of scholarship 
 and in his domestic, religious, political, and 
 social life is essential to the highest success 
 of the professor in our real college. To be 
 aggressive in his attempts to reach his stu- 
 dents by a direct influence for good outside 
 the classroom is to realize largely on the op- 
 portunities for personal contact possible 
 only in the real college. 
 
 There is ground for fear that over-much 
 11 161 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 anxiety to maintain a high intellectual stand- 
 ard in our colleges has led to the pitiless 
 crushing of those possessed of great likeli- 
 hood for usefulness. If the high-grade col- 
 lege has any excuse whatever for its ex- 
 istence, it is found in its possibilities for the 
 inspiration of individual instruction. It is, 
 of course, easiest to require a student to 
 come up, with the rest of the class, to a 
 certain grade, and if he fails, to refuse him 
 permission to return. The highest skill of 
 the teacher is shown, however, not in mak- 
 ing something out of a genius. He who can 
 take the dullard, or the indifferent one, or 
 the happy-go-lucky youth, or the unpromis- 
 ing one, and fire him with a resolution that 
 will lead to achievement, is an artist, and 
 the beneficent results of his work will widen 
 with the successive generations to the end 
 of time. It is only in the real college that 
 such accomplishments are possible. 
 
 A recent writer in World's Work has 
 prophesied the coming of a day when we 
 shall have in our leading educational insti- 
 tutions a Chair of Eugenics. The world of 
 162 
 
FACULTY OF THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 scholarship will extend cordial welcome to 
 the coming of the expert who shall teach the 
 rising generations how to make future gen- 
 erations well born. After all, though, the 
 expert who takes the man already born and 
 teaches him how to live is rendering the 
 largest service to those that are yet unborn. 
 It is proper to indulge the hope that the day 
 is not far distant when, in every college, we 
 shall have a Professor of Individual Atten- 
 tion. This man will have taken his graduate 
 study in human temperaments. He will be 
 a student of ancestry and prenatal influences. 
 He will know what to expect as the product 
 of certain environments. He will know how 
 to remedy the spiritual and intellectual and 
 physical ill-health which is the result of 
 previous faulty teaching. He will not only 
 be a master of applied psychology, but as 
 well of applied physiology. He will make it 
 his business when he comes to his college 
 chair to provide himself with statistics as to 
 every Freshman. He will arm himself with 
 facts as to the parents of every new student, 
 his former teachers, his habits of life, his 
 163 
 
THE KEAL COLLEGE 
 
 inclinations and his tendencies, his likes and 
 his dislikes. He will revise these individual 
 records as students proceed on their way 
 through college. When a student gives his 
 first indication of failure he will be referred 
 to this Professor of Individual Attention, 
 who, knowing more about the youth than the 
 youth knows of himself, will approach him 
 from the right direction and, instead of al- 
 lowing him to be thrown out, he will save 
 him to a useful career that will honor his 
 Alma Mater. 
 
 There are some living men who in stu- 
 dent days were tossed out of college as 
 worthless or hopelessly dissolute, who have 
 afterward lived useful, successful, and hon- 
 orable lives. It has sometimes happened 
 that the college which has discarded them 
 has later been glad to confer honorary de- 
 grees on those who in the critical period of 
 their lives it made no serious effort to save. 
 
 After all, though, no Professor of Indi- 
 vidual Attention, no number of personal pre- 
 ceptors, can do the work of the professors 
 who fill the usual college chairs. There is 
 164 
 
FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 no way of escape from responsibility for him 
 who teaches any subject. He who is master 
 of his particular line of academic specializa- 
 tion, who knows his students by name, who 
 greets them with a pleasant word, who pos- 
 sesses a genuine sympathy for youth, who 
 lives an exalted life, and who denies himself 
 to go out in aggressive activity for the de- 
 velopment of a higher life among those he 
 teaches, and whose incentive to labor comes 
 as the result of a life itself transformed by 
 the spirit of Christ, is the real teacher. He 
 will accentuate his influence if he writes 
 some books and is known in the great out- 
 side world, but he will be loyal to his insti- 
 tution, cordially supporting all just author- 
 ity, unselfishly co-operating with his col- 
 leagues and living every day with a passion 
 that finds its gratification in the service of 
 humanity. Men of such purposes serving as 
 members of the faculty will be powerful in 
 the making of the real college. 
 
 165 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE MAN 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE MAN* 
 
 The college man is sui generis. Seen 
 through the sordid eyes of the man of the 
 world, he is a worthless hnlk of hopeless 
 egotism. He is an object of abuse at the 
 hands of porcine men who would refuse to 
 exuberant youth a legitimate outlet for sur- 
 plus vitality, while they boast themselves 
 practical as they fatten at the sour swill- 
 trough of dishonest business methods. The 
 college man is held up to public ridicule by 
 the cheap paragraphist who has failed to 
 avail himself of advantages which might 
 have lifted him above the level of a tolerated 
 nuisance. The vulgar populace, in changing 
 mood, makes the student the subject of ma- 
 licious criticism or churlish raillery. 
 
 Viewed objectively, our college man is a 
 biped with bifurcated hair hanging low on 
 
 * This chapter is a vagrant. It was not written in connection 
 with those preceding it in this book. "The Real College Man " 
 is an after-dinner address delivered at numerous college ban- 
 quets. It is reproduced in this connection because it is a con- 
 crete resum6 of the purpose of the real college as hereinbefore 
 set forth.— G. P. B. 
 
 169 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 either side, leaving only a triangle of ques- 
 tionable whiteness above the eyebrows. If 
 he wears a head-covering of any sort above 
 this tousled thicket it is a cap, in color of 
 blinding red, or bine, or green, or yellow, 
 and of a " Happy Hooligan' ' circumference; 
 or, mayhap, it is a flat and well-nigh brimless 
 hat with a wide band, fit rival for the coat 
 of Joseph, the patriarch. His necktie can be 
 heard three squares away. Beneath his vest- 
 less coat, his wide expanse of negligee shirt- 
 front, displayed on a station platform, would 
 prevent a disastrous train-wreck if the block 
 should fail to work. His belted and suspen- 
 derless trousers are a perpetual source of 
 anxiety to friends fearful of his reputation 
 for decency. His striped socks, set into the 
 latest cut of topless shoes, under turned-up 
 pantaloons, complete a picture that make 
 the lower extremities a fit termination for 
 the spectacular beginning at the top. 
 
 Heard objectively, the college man is a 
 creature of abnormal lungs from which come 
 forth the bellowings of yellings and the ear- 
 splitting notes of rollicking song. 
 170 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE MAN 
 
 It is this superficially objective present- 
 ment that makes the collegian a creature of 
 loathing to the womanly man, a public men- 
 ace to the omniscient editor, and a thorn in 
 the flesh of the petty officer of the peace. 
 These irascible individuals, who themselves 
 never had any youth or, if they had, buried 
 it in oblivion so long ago that it is eternally 
 lost to memory, would clothe the college stu- 
 dent in creaseless, broad-brimmed black hat, 
 Prince Albert coat, side-buttoned trousers, 
 cloth gaiters, boiled shirt, celluloid collar, 
 cambric tie, and a solemn face, and then call 
 it a man. God save the mark ! 
 
 There must be something more than this 
 objective side to the man who later in life 
 finds himself a part of the great body of 
 the college-trained that compose sixty-nine 
 per cent of the eleven thousand three hun- 
 dred and eighty-four people of the nation 
 whose names appear in "Who 's Who in 
 America." He must be worth something, or 
 he would not find his way to leadership in 
 the halls of Congress, to the dignity of the 
 Supreme Bench, and to the power of the Ex- 
 171 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 ecutive Chair. He is more than ordinary, 
 or he would not predominate in the field of 
 literature, while he leads at the bar, and in 
 medicine, and monopolizes the pulpit. Yes, 
 cut away the excrescences, plunge the knife 
 into the brain, drive it deep into the heart 
 of the college student, and you find the nu- 
 cleus of a real man. 
 
 The college man is a likable chap. I 
 have lived with him so long that I could not 
 be happy without him. He makes a sur- 
 rounding that preserves the spirit of eter- 
 nal youth. It is unthinkable to me that one 
 could grow old in living with him. I love 
 him because of his possibilities. I would not 
 change him one whit. I want him with his 
 spirit of joyous optimism. His college yell 
 is as the music of the morning to my soul. 
 I am willing to take him as he is — thatched 
 head, cuffs on trousers, and all. These are 
 the outward symbols of an inward enthusi- 
 asm that prophesies an aggressive man to 
 whom some day this old world will listen. 
 
 Viewed subjectively, for he has his sub- 
 jective as well as his objective side, the col- 
 172 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE MAN 
 
 lege man is an individnal of limitless pros- 
 pects for usefulness. His possibilities con- 
 stitute the measure of his responsibility. 
 His opportunities for the development of his 
 talents and the growth of a stalwart char- 
 acter place within his grasp a life of influ- 
 ence that will widen with successive genera- 
 tions to the end of time and that will main- 
 tain its power through all eternity. 
 
 The real college man is indispensable to 
 civilization, but the real college man is pro- 
 duced only by the real college. When the 
 word " college" is mentioned there loom big 
 before us thoughts of a beautiful campus, 
 groups of buildings, adequate equipment, 
 the teaching of the humanities, the arts and 
 sciences, scholarly professors, and hurry- 
 ing crowds of young people. But all these 
 do not make a college. The real college is 
 campus, buildings, equipment, courses, teach- 
 ers, and students, plus that intangible but 
 indispensable something that we call an at- 
 mosphere. A proper environment is the 
 first condition of a true college atmosphere. 
 There must be a real college community. If 
 173 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE 
 
 the institution be located in a great city, 
 there must needs be an institutional life- 
 center, a college heart. That Columbia Uni- 
 versity and The College of the City of New 
 York are not types of the real college is due 
 to the fact that the students there meet their 
 professors only for a brief hour in the lec- 
 ture-room and know them only at a distance, 
 without themselves being known by those 
 who instruct. Students do not even know 
 each other except within the limitations of 
 their own small circle of intimates in these 
 institutions, for when lectures are ended they 
 scatter all over that great city, and their 
 identity as collegians is hopelessly lost in 
 the swirling crowd of commercialism. Is 
 it any wonder that Columbia University has 
 no football team worthy of the name? For- 
 mer President Seth Low may have been 
 right when he declared that Columbia Uni- 
 versity should develop along the lines of 
 least resistance and make of itself a collec- 
 tion of graduate and professional colleges, 
 leaving the pure college work to be done by 
 those institutions located in more secluded 
 174 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE MAN 
 
 places friendly to the growth of true college 
 life. There are institutions, though, in the 
 large cities that have demonstrated that a 
 college community is possible in a crowded 
 center. The University of Chicago is strong 
 in its college spirit. The far-seeing vision 
 of President Harper, master college builder 
 of the world, revealed to him the importance 
 of making the university itself the center 
 where students would of necessity pass the 
 greater part of their time. What has been 
 done there can be done in large measure in 
 other city colleges. Dormitories, student 
 buildings, commons, clubhouses, and fre- 
 quent convocations will keep students jos- 
 tling against each other, and constantly 
 touching elbows with professors in such a 
 way that a college consciousness will spring 
 into being. It will, of course, be admitted 
 that a smaller town which exists primarily 
 because of the institution in its midst will 
 more easily lend itself to the development 
 of a college community than a large city. 
 It is because of such locations that Yale and 
 Dartmouth and Princeton and Michigan are 
 175 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 so strong in community life and spirit. And 
 yet, in a small city like Ann Arbor, when I 
 visited there last, three years ago, students 
 and faculties were clamoring loudly for a 
 student building on the campus, where all 
 might come to know each other better and 
 cultivate the feeling of college fellowship. 
 
 If it be true that a college community is 
 essential, it is equally true that size is an- 
 other important factor in producing a col- 
 lege atmosphere. A caravansary is hostile 
 to good air. Medical colleges, law schools, 
 engineering shops, and barns for animal 
 husbandry do not make a real college. It 
 must be borne in mind that a college is not 
 in any sense of the word a technical or a 
 professional school. The real college pre- 
 sents the humanities, the arts, and the pure 
 sciences. It provides the discipline and cul- 
 ture which will best fit men to enjoy life 
 and that will prepare them for a more in- 
 telligent later study in the lines of their 
 chosen specialization. In the formative days 
 of college life the associations and compan- 
 ionships are of no less value than the work 
 176 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE MAN 
 
 required for graduation. The college day is 
 a care-free period, and the friendships there 
 formed and the pleasures there enjoyed 
 abide forever as the aroma of fragrant in- 
 cense, sweetening life through all the busy 
 years that follow. That such a college with 
 these glorious associations can exist in a 
 large institution is not questioned. It can 
 not exist, however, if it be overshadowed by 
 the magnified importance of trades-schools 
 and graduate colleges round about it. To 
 have a real college in a great university, the 
 college of liberal arts, though small in its 
 student body, should be the nucleus of the 
 university life and should be built up by the 
 authorities as a necessary stepping-stone to 
 the successful later work in the utilitarian 
 departments of instruction. It will be ad- 
 mitted, though, that the college in isolation 
 has less opposition in maintaining its ideals 
 and that the purest college atmosphere is at- 
 tainable where numbers are not so great as 
 to prevent free circulation and easy and con- 
 tinuous social intercourse. Five hundred to 
 six hundred students are enough to make a 
 12 177 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 real college; more than that many would 
 stifle the atmosphere. It is this exclusive- 
 ness in numbers that has given to Amherst 
 and Williams and Bowdoin and Wesleyan 
 their distinction. 
 
 The ideals of an institution, too, con- 
 tribute in no small measure to the making 
 of an atmosphere. The responsibility for 
 institutional ideals, in the main, rests on the 
 governing body. If the president and fac- 
 ulty constitute themselves an oligarchy, seek- 
 ing a rule of tyranny, the college air will 
 hang heavy in its oppressiveness. A com- 
 pany of college students is easily controlled 
 when properly directed; it is the easiest 
 body in the world to antagonize by improper 
 methods. It should be assumed that he who 
 is old enough to go to college is old enough 
 to be a man. There is no class on earth 
 which so quickly and so bitterly resents the 
 crack of the whip as that composed of those 
 who have but just been emancipated from 
 apron-strings. This is as it should be. The 
 youth mature enough to leave his mother is 
 sufficiently mature to be treated as an adult. 
 178 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE MAN 
 
 What a wonderful opportunity is open to the 
 college president at this critical period! If 
 he will but appeal to his students as men, 
 they will respond to his appeal. All ijie 
 threats and all the dire penalties imposed 
 by the college faculties of the olden day did 
 not prevent the theft of the bell-clapper, 
 the shaving of horses' tails, the pollution of 
 wells, the inartistic decoration of buildings, 
 the destruction of property, indignities to 
 fellow students, and a tone of universal dis- 
 respect. In the real college of our modern 
 day there is absence of petty rules, and the 
 sympathy existing between teachers and 
 taught is so pronounced, without sacrifice of 
 professorial dignity, that vandalism has be- 
 come history, and respect for man and rev- 
 erence for God are enthroned in student life. 
 The new is everywhere supplanting the old, 
 and the real college is an atmosphere where 
 the standard of excellence is all-round man- 
 hood. 
 
 One thing more is yet needed to produce 
 the perfect college atmosphere, and that is 
 Tradition. It is worth while to have a his- 
 179 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 tory. An institution may have all the other 
 requisites, but until it has hoary years re- 
 plete with honor behind it, the atmosphere 
 will lack the bracing quality that makes 
 young blood tingle. The student who has 
 found his way to a college atmosphere 
 fraught with sacred traditions will be 
 spurred to highest endeavor as with Words- 
 worth he reverently declares: "I could not 
 print ground where the grass had yielded to 
 the steps of generations of illustrious men, 
 unmoved. I could not always, lightly pass 
 through the same gateways, sleep where they 
 had slept, wake where they had waked, range 
 that enclosure old, that garden of great in- 
 tellects, undisturbed. ' ' 
 
 The college, then, of comely campus, 
 good equipment, rich curricula, competent 
 teachers, and wide-awake students, in an at- 
 mosphere made redolent by the right envi- 
 ronment, the proper numbers, lofty ideals, 
 and honorable annals, is the real college, and 
 there we shall find the real college man. 
 
 The real college man, breathing such an 
 atmosphere as this, is a patriot. He believes 
 180 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE MAN 
 
 in his institution, he rejoices in its victories, 
 and contributes to their multiplication. It 
 has always been a mystery to me, and the 
 mystery deepens with every added day, why 
 it is that certain sanctimonious individuals 
 pucker up their sour faces and, if possible, 
 look more acetose than common whenever 
 their ears are greeted with a college yell. 
 There is no music in all the world so sweet 
 to me as the yell of my own college coming 
 from the lusty lungs of my own students. 
 It is the expression of abounding life, of 
 healthful youth, of unselfish loyalty. I know 
 that every time a boy yells for his college 
 he is drawing its colors about him a little 
 more securely, and I know, too, that he is 
 laying the foundation for that larger patri- 
 otism which in later years will accentuate 
 his love of country every time he gives a 
 cheer for the Stars and Stripes. 
 
 Let that fossil who declaims against foot- 
 ball be relegated to the museum of the an- 
 tiquities! Let dumbness strike him who 
 would use his voice against the songs and 
 shouts of joyous college men when they tri- 
 181 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 umph in oratory or debate! Palsied be the 
 arm of the tyrant who would reach out a 
 hand to throttle class spirit ! Blinded be the 
 eyes of him who will see nothing but evil 
 in devotion to fraternity! We live in an 
 age when gentleness and regard for the 
 rights of others are our watchwords of 
 progress; but to make our civilization all it 
 should be, there must be some iron in the 
 blood. The real college man is fearless in 
 his loyalty to his college, and this fearless 
 loyalty is a preparation for the larger pa- 
 triotism which will show itself in unflinching 
 devotion to righteousness in the service of 
 society and the State when maturer years 
 have come. 
 
 The real college man is a scholar as well 
 as a patriot. Indeed, it is impossible to form 
 any conception of loyalty in disassociation 
 from obligation. The supreme duty of the 
 college man is work. It is the consciousness 
 of work faithfully done that makes possible 
 the other side of his college life. He who 
 permits his college to provide him with a 
 disciplined mind and a refined taste is ac- 
 182 
 
THE REAL COLLEGE MAN 
 
 cepting an equipment that will bring to his 
 later years a satisfaction in living amply 
 compensating him for the lack of many 
 grosser comforts. To be able to think 
 clearly and to reason wisely, to possess a 
 sane judgment, to have an appreciation of 
 the fine things in literature, in art, and in 
 history, is to have the joyful consciousness 
 of a life that is high above the common-place. 
 
 Last of all, our real college man is a man 
 of character. He is plain, unassuming good- 
 ness. He has good red blood in his veins, 
 but he knows that the greatest triumph pos- 
 sible to mortal man is that victory over self 
 which subdues the passions, controls appe- 
 tite, directs desire, commands reverence, and 
 establishes honesty. The real college will 
 keep ever before its students for their emu- 
 lation the blameless character of Him who 
 was both God and man, and seeking to fash- 
 ion their ideals after this life, college men 
 will be firmly established in every good word 
 and work. 
 
 Then, blessings on the college man ! Ma- 
 tured in the atmosphere of the real college, 
 183 
 
THE EEAL COLLEGE 
 
 he is the most hopeful prophecy of our na- 
 tional salvation. Let him wash and dress 
 and comb as he will! Love him for all that 
 he is and for all that he may be. His pa- 
 triotism, his scholarship, and his character 
 will make him the mightiest potentiality of 
 fntnre years in dethroning " Graft' ' and in 
 crushing Tyranny. He will be the finest ex- 
 ponent of public and private honesty in our 
 American life, for when cap is discarded, 
 when hair is cut, and when trousers are un- 
 rolled, we shall find that the real college has 
 given to the world a real man. 
 
 184 
 
TH.S BOOK Sn THE ^"'^^ T ° RETU ™ 
 WILL >NC RE AS E TO S oT E ° * ™ E PENALTY 
 
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