COLLEGE LIFE MERELY AN OPPORTUNITY

AT the cross-roads of life Hercules met the seductive form of Folly; but he chose to walk with Virtue, who at the same time invited him into her paths. The Freshman, also, stands at the parting of the ways. He will not have been in college a week before he will have to make choices that shall largely determine all his goings and comings for the future. "Success consists in being ready for your opportunity." To be permitted to go to college is a privilege that few may claim — a privilege too high to measure. Yet the guarantees of college life are far less certain than most Freshmen suppose. Entrance upon college life is, after all, only an opportunity. The course will be strewn with wrecks all the way along the Freshman year. Many will be sent home because of idleness or dissipation. Some will be endured, but will be so hobbled and handicapped by conditions and penalties that they might almost as well be out of the race. And even of those who persevere to the

end of the four years course, not a few will at last prove failures in it. The mere fact that a man has completed a college course is no assurance of success in life. "For many years it has been possible in New York City to employ at from ten dollars to twelve dollars per week large numbers of lawyers of over ten years standing who were graduates of both college and law school."

So this new world in which the youth finds himself is not the magic world that he had supposed it to be. The tropic isles and Elysian fields are still far to seek. The college world is, in reality, the nearest approach to an enchanted realm that we shall ever find on earth; but there is sore danger that a youth may wander with Caliban and drunken Stephano into the thorny places and standing pools instead of into the cave of Prospero, the master magician. In a sense, the student within college walls does "fleet the time carelessly as they did in the Golden World." Yet there must be some hewing of wood and drawing of water; there are flocks to tend; there is grubbing to do. One must, like stout Robinson Crusoe, bring off one's goods on rafts, and build oneself a house, and set it about with stakes, and explore, and develop, and defend the heritage the shores of which one has succeeded in reaching. Success during the first year at college depends upon common sense, upon work, upon decency and sobriety. If a boy has drifted in from "the gold coast" to indulge in the luxury of a college course by special dispensation, his ship will find sure anchorage in no respectable college. The lazy, idle, vicious boy, who thinks of college life as being merely an opportunity to loaf and dissipate, to engage in athletics, and to recline in the elegant leisure of a sumptuous fraternity home, is doomed to failure, disappointment, and humiliation.

II

THE AMERICAN COLLEGE UNDER FIRE

As a matter of fact, every college president and every college professor knows that the average Freshman is not such a youth as has just been described. We know that the great majority of Freshmen are bright, candid, earnest, and lovable boys who are coming up to college with a high and pure ambition to make the most of themselves and to make life count. But the American college is under fire. Many influential people think that our colleges are not justifying themselves; that Freshmen are, for the most part, noisy, lazy, conceited, dissipated young upstarts; that the average college graduate who goes into business is unable to hold his own with the boy who has gone directly from the high school into the office or the factory. These critics question whether what stands for a college education does not do a young fellow more harm than good. Men of standing and ability and wide knowledge of the world variously allude to the college as “a club for idling classes,' "a training school for shamming and shirking," "the most gigantic illusion of the age," a sort of "educational vermiform appendix." These men are disposed to think that a college diploma rarely assures intellectual discipline. One great journal affirms that "students nowadays get from their college life little but educational disadvantages." And, worst of all, scores of our chief educators and educational experts are sounding solemn notes of warning to college authorities as well as to undergraduates. We are told that our graduates are not as "ripe and fit" for advanced professional study at twenty-three as the German students

are at twenty. It is charged that "the college graduate is neither a trained nor a serious worker." President Garfield of Williams thinks that college doors should be closed promptly and effectually against "those who loaf because they choose to, and who do not propose to change their occupation." One brilliant educator does not believe that the public should be put to the expense of a thousand dollars per head in order that boys may go through college merely

to enjoy themselves in drinking and in betting on athletics." President Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching says, "the two objections generally brought against the college today are vagueness of aim and lack of intellectual stamina;" and Mr. Flexner declares that "a youth may win his degree on a showing that would in an office cost him his desk."

These are serious charges that are brought against us, and it is well that the student should know about them from the start. In almost every case they are made by men whose opinion is worthy of consideration. Indeed, for the past ten years, the drift of public opinion in certain quarters has been setting powerfully against the college. Of course there is much to be said in reply to all this; and much has been said sanely and forcefully. College authorities are doing all that they can to make conditions better. But just now it is especially important that the entering student - that all undergraduates, indeed should have clear ideas of the meaning of college life and should be heedful of the honor and prestige of the college.

Why did you come to college? Have you a clear idea of what you are seeking here? Will the motive that prompted you to come bear scrutiny? Do you know what a college course really stands for? Did you just drift in? Or are

you here only because you were sent? Did you come merely to have a good time; to loaf; to enjoy the social life of the college; to join a fraternity; and to win and wear new and larger honors in athletics? The student who is actuated by no higher motives than these is not likely to be happy here. His studies will prove more or less of an annoyance to him, and the professors are sure to be a nuisance. Such a fellow will clutter things up, and get in the way of the business of the college. And even if he were allowed to "ply his music" allowed to shirk and dodge and temporize he could not afford it; he would be "paying too dear for

his whistle."

III

WHAT A COLLEGE EDUCATION REALLY MEANS

As I was reading a book by Dean Briggs of Harvard, the other day, I came across an expression that I like very much

"the difficult and windy heights." That suggests to my mind the real college atmosphere. And it calls up images that make my blood tingle. It braces me for action. Is not the supreme object of a college education the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the severe disciplining of the moral nature? The great Thomas Jefferson gives this as the object of higher education: "to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order; . . . and generally to form them to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within themselves." The college is not a place for idleness and triviality, for sport and luxury, for the thousand and one absorbing side-interests that