Chapter 7 No.7

The Herr Director and the College Spirit

"TAKE us out of New York," the Herr Director said after a wearing day of sightseeing, "or we will go home on the next steamer. My neck aches from looking at the sky-scrapers, my nerves are all on edge, and," glancing at the Frau Directorin who had hugely enjoyed every moment and showed no sign of weariness, "we must have rest."

I was reluctant to leave New York, because, after all, it holds those great thrills with which we like to startle our foreign friends. I feared the change from those daily surprises which thus far I had been able to give them. Lake Mohonk, the only place outside of New York City which we had visited, is unique in many ways and its experiences were not likely to be duplicated; so it was somewhat heavy heartedly that I started them on a new adventure, praying to Him who "holds the nations in the hollow of His Hand" to aid me in my praiseworthy endeavors.

I was not very sanguine that my prayer would be answered, for we were beginning a tour of the Eastern educational institutions, than which there is nothing more difficult to interpret. This, not only because they have no counterpart anywhere in Europe, and the line between our university and college is so indistinct, but because I hoped to reveal their Spirit, which no mere outsider can comprehend, and which even the man on the inside finds it difficult to understand.

I drew into the conspiracy dear friends, alumni of the different institutions, who knew every blade of grass on each respective campus, over which they walked proudly and reverently. To find one university tucked away in a village, another defying the grime and noise of a growing city which crowded upon it; one still retaining its air of exclusive dignity in spite of its garish surroundings, while a fourth was nearly swamped by the culture-hungry children of immigrants, yet remained triumphantly American, was new enough and startling enough to keep my guests on the heights.

The pleasant walks, shaded by tall, graceful elms, and the presence of distinguished Americans, acted soothingly upon the Herr Director; while the gracious attention paid to the ladies convinced the Frau Directorin that she had reached the feminine paradise. She could not understand, however, why, when the ladies were permitted to go everywhere, and were even allowed to gaze at American students in athletic undress, they were barred from sharing with us the rare privilege of seeing a thousand or more of them being fed in one of those Gothic dining halls. There, surely, one might expect nothing worse than medieval piety tempering the appetite. Probably this tradition of no ladies in the galleries is the only thing beside the architecture which is left us from that hoary age.

There are certain definite points which the enthusiastic alumnus always tries to impress upon visitors, and one of them is the past, in which every college glories, and as youth seems to be unpardonable, history begins when as yet it "was not."

In most of the places we visited, no such historic license was necessary, for many of them were respectably old, one of them being contemporaneous with the history of our country, and others belonging to that eminently respectable period, "before the Revolution."

Some have important battles named after them, and several were "Washington's headquarters," a distinction freely bestowed upon many places by that ubiquitous and much beloved "Father of our Country." At present the most important thing seems to be the buildings; dormitories, laboratories, libraries and usually most prominent of all, the gymnasium and the athletic field.

The president of one of the lesser universities, having such a million dollar plaything, became our cicerone, and while he took us hastily through everything else, lingered fondly there, showing us in detail the expensive apparatus. With classic pride he stood upon the athletic field, looking as some C?sar must have looked when he showed visitors to Rome his arena, the "largest," and at that time the "costliest in the world."

It was interesting to find that the buildings which pleased the Herr Director most were neither new nor Gothic, a fact easily explained by his dislike for everything which is English. He marvelled that we had chosen to imitate English college architecture, with its heaviness and gloom, its hideous gargoyles, its useless, and here meaningless, cloisters, rather than to continue our fine inheritance, with its severely classic lines, its wide windows inviting the light, and its generous, broad doors, so much in harmony with our educational ideals.

Of course no one had an answer ready; yet personally while I do not "hasse" England nor the things which are English, I vastly prefer, let us say Nassau Hall at Princeton, to anything which that glorious campus holds, not even excepting the graduate college with its massive and impressive Cleveland Memorial Tower.

The Herr Director shook his head many a time at the external glory of our universities and even more at the comfort and luxuries of the dormitories and fraternity houses. We were the guests of one fraternity at dinner. About twenty young men were living under one roof, having chosen each other by some mysterious, selective process, and I was tempted to think that it was their negative rather than their positive qualities which drew them together. We were shown the house from cellar to garret, much to the dismay of the Herr Director who does not like climbing stairs, but to the joy of the Frau Directorin who, woman-like, not only loves to peep into closets, and see pretty rooms, but having discovered the American standard for feminine grace, wanted to lose some of her "meat" as she expressed it in her quaint English.

Each of these young men occupied a suite of three rooms. The hangings were heavy and not in the best taste, the chairs all invited to leisure, and the most conspicuous piece of furniture was a smoking set with a big brass tobacco bowl in the center; while innumerable pipes hung from a gaudily painted rack. In keeping with the furniture were the pictures which were decently vulgar, and of books there were no more than necessary.

The Herr Director was asked regarding student life in Germany, and he contrasted their surroundings with his own cold, inhospitable Gymnasium, the relentless examinations, and the freer but responsible life in his university. He described the rooms of the present Emperor of Germany when he was a student at the University of Bonn, remarking that they looked like barracks in comparison with these. "How can you study in such luxurious rooms?" he asked, and na?vely and frankly came the answer: "We don't."

On the whole, the Herr Director liked the looks of the boys he saw, and the Frau Directorin quite fell in love with them. They were so frank, so clean looking, and what above all amazed them most, so altruistic in their outlook upon life; they looked so healthy and well groomed and were so altogether wholesome. But that boys could graduate from colleges and not have studied-that was beyond their comprehension.

The German student's social standing and his future depend upon his "exams." There is only one prime thing, and that is study. When the Herr Director learned the multiplicity of our outside activities which divide the attention of the students, he knew why they do not study. He was aghast at the scant reverence paid members of the faculty. When walking with the president of one of these universities, we met groups of students who did not salute the head of their institution and barely made way for him to pass, he grew quite wrathy, and it took the combined efforts of the president and myself to keep him from telling the young men what boors they were. I think he discovered later that it was mere thoughtlessness, and that there is something really fine about the average American student; that he is usually a gentleman at heart, but that he has not yet learned to value the grace which comes from that sacrament of the common life-lifting his hat to his superiors.

When I told him that one of my students came to me one morning in haste, with "Say, Prof, where is Prexy?" he did not laugh as I expected; but when I remembered that I did not laugh either, when it happened, I forgave him his lack of perception.

It is of course true, that the average college professor would rather be called Jimmy or Jack or some other pet name than to have his academic degrees pronounced every time a student speaks to him; but there still remains the fact that the ordinary American youth lacks this sense of respect for personality, and that an education, even a college education, does not remedy the defect.

It is a very exciting moment in the life of the undergraduates of at least one university when they try to discover if the preacher can make himself heard above their coughs, which is their way of challenging his message; but it does not help him to believe that he is in the presence of men who know what reverence means.

I do not deny that the undergraduate honors achievement, but even in that he lacks proper discrimination. How much education can do to instill this common and deplorable lack of reverence for personality I do not know; for it lies far back, too far back to be reached by mere academic training.

During our tour, the Herr Director had a chance to see one university come out of its incoherence and inexplicable confusion into unity. He heard it roar like the "Bulls of Bashan," fling its flaring colors to the wind, hoot its defiance to the enemy, dance, dervish-like, around the battle flames; he saw ten thousands of young men suffering the war fever, and an equal number of young women shrieking in wild delirium; he saw embankments of automobiles struggling to reach the seat of the conflict, armies of men trying to storm the ramparts, and newspaper correspondents mad from haste; while in the center of it all, twenty-two disguised men struggled for a chalk-line. Unfortunately, no friendly guide was near us to explain it all, and as I am still an un-Americanized alien to a football game, its meaning was lost to my guests.

When two men were carried from the field limp, and seemingly lifeless, the Frau Directorin promptly fainted. The Herr Director was beside himself, for there was no way to extricate ourselves from the maddened mass of humanity; but while he was wildly and vainly calling for water, she revived, and we stayed to the finish. I wished I had not brought them, for to appreciate a football game one must be born in America, and no explanation I offered could convince the Herr Director that we are not more cruel than the Spaniards, whose opponents in their deadly games are bulls, not men. The Frau Directorin still sheds tears at the remembrance of how badly we use our "perfectly nice young men."

The fierceness back of this conflict, the vast amount of money spent upon properly playing the game, the primary place it occupies in the imagination of the American youth, its deadening influence upon scholarship, and all the multitudinous pros and cons, are over-shadowed by the fact that, as far as the community at large is concerned, it expects this Roman holiday, and a college or university is considered good or poor, to the degree that it caters to this desire. One thing I can say for it: it is thoroughly American, bringing into the lime-light some of our virtues and most of our faults.

"In Germany," again the Herr Director, "where things are not permitted to grow merely because they grow elsewhere, it was found that for military preparedness your sports are of little or no value, especially if engaged in vicariously; and that teaching men to dig trenches and serve cannon, to obey implicitly a command and carry it out effectively, is of more use, not only to the individual's well-being, but also for the great, collective purpose of national defense."

It seems very strange to me that nearly all foreigners whom I have helped introduce to our academic life have been so gratified by its evident democracy, and that their satisfaction was greatest when their own aristocratic lineage was highest. That a man's career in our institutions of learning is not made impossible because he does manual labor to help him through, and that he may do such femininely menial tasks as waiting on table or washing dishes, while taxing their credulity, is always unstintingly praised.

I have, however, good reason to believe that while our foreign visitors find the democracy of our colleges interesting and praiseworthy, we are losing the thing itself to a large degree, and my conscience has not always been at ease when I finished a panegyric on college democracy. In fact what I fear is its defeat just there, where it is most needed, where we are supposed to train the leaders who, whether they become leaders or not, are the men who will give tone to our national life and will control its expression.

In travelling from one of the universities to the other, we came upon a group of college men in the train. The Herr Director recognized them at once, whether instinctively or because he had discovered the type, I do not know. I knew them because of the fit of their garments, or the lack of it, and by the fact that they smoked cigarettes incessantly.

The Herr Director, as a distinguished foreigner, had no difficulty in opening a conversation with them, and I think he got much illuminating amusement out of them. They had just finished their semester "exams," and one of them said that the question upon which he flunked was a comparison between the two English authors, Dickens and DeQuincy. Though he did not know the difference between these two, he showed his classic training by differentiating between a Rameses II and an Egyptian Deity cigarette merely by the color of the smoke.

I was not drawn into the conversation until the Herr Director needed me to interpret some campus English. One of the lads undertook to inform us regarding the social life of his university and more especially the fraternities, with particular emphasis upon his own, which excluded not only certain well-defined races, but also put a ban upon certain classes. "We don't admit anybody into our fraternity whose people are not somebody in their communities."

I asked him his name and he gave it to me with a French pronunciation.

I thought he was Bohemian, and recognized the name as such, in spite of its French disguise. I told him so, and pronounced it for him in the hard, Slavic way, all gutturals and consonants. I also told him its meaning: "A very common hoe such as the peasants use, and it means that your ancestors in Bohemia earned their living honestly, which I am sorry to say cannot always be said about 'people who are somebody' in our communities."

The Herr Director thought I was very hard upon the poor fellow, and later I had a good talk with him. I tried to show him that his Bohemian, peasant origin ought to be a source of pride to him. That the very fact that he and his people had come out of the steerage, and by virtue of our democratic institutions could rise to the point where they could send him to college, should make him a guardian of the American Spirit and not its foe. I do not know that he profited by what I said; for I often find myself talking to the wind and the tide, and they are both against me.

I have only pity for the gilded youth who go to an American college with its vast opportunities of human contact, yet fail to see any one outside their own social boundaries. After all, the chief glory of our educational institutions is that their best things are still democratic. No man is kept from the Holy of Holies, from sound learning, from the contact with scholarly minds, from good books, and enough of rich fellowship to make going to college worth while.

We heard one delightful story which is so typically American and so reveals the American Spirit at its best, that the Herr Director embodied it in his book. The president of a Quaker college told us that just as he found there was some danger that the men who had to work their way through, were losing caste, one of the upper classmen opened a boot and shoe mending and cleaning shop. As he was a man of means, whose standing in his group was unquestioned, his action took from common labor its ever renewing curse.

In many of the colleges we met groups of men so full of this spirit, so concerned with fostering it, that all the snobberies of which we had heard seemed even smaller than they were in their own right. We met those who gave their leisure hours to that most difficult and worthy task of Americanizing the immigrants who, in many instances, almost encroached upon the campus. The students visited them in the box-cars where they lived, or in the hovels where they reared children; they taught them English and the elements of good citizenship, and every one of them had some particular Antonio to whom he was devoted, and whom he was trying to lift to his level.

Although the general testimony was that the students had gained more from the contact than the immigrants had, I know how immeasurably much it means to these strangers to have leaning up against their own lonely souls men of culture, and sweet, clean breath, and brotherly heart.

It is this idealism in our college youth which is so precious an asset that to lose it would mean bankruptcy to our educational institutions.

Although the Herr Director did not tell me, I knew that this excursion into the universities of the East had been a success; for thus far he seemed to have enjoyed everything; at least he did not complain about anything. He seemed in an especially happy mood when we were talking it over in the home of one of the presidents, whose guests we had become. "Yes, I like your colleges very much, and if I should want my boy to have four years of more or less organized happiness, I would send him to an American college. He would have a good time, I think his morals would be safe," and he added with a smile, "his intellect would be safe also."