The significance of the first year in college can scarcely be overstated. The first man called to the bat in some great intercollegiate game may be pardoned for feeling a bit nervous. He realizes that players and spectators are eagerly waiting for him to give them the key-note of the contest by the way he acquits himself. The young man just entering college, if he senses the situation accurately, is equally alive to the importance of his first hits.
It is a time when freedom and responsibility come in new and larger measure. College men as a rule are away from home. There is no one to ask, with the accent of authority, how they spend their evenings, who their intimates are, what habits they are forming. Studying is not done under the immediate eye of an instructor as in the grammar-school days. The young man who heretofore has felt the wholesome restraint of well-ordered family life, suddenly finds himself a free citizen in a republic, and this larger measure of liberty involves risk. The freshman may decide the case against himself before he is ever permitted to put on his sophomore hat. The way is open for him to go to the devil, physically, intellectually, socially, morally, if he chooses. The way is open, the bars are down and as often as not some young fool is just starting and beckoning his friends to “Come along.” The bad plays in the first inning are frequently so numerous and so serious as to mean the loss of the game. It is a time then to summon into action all the wisdom and conscience which may be brought to bear upon those early decisions.
There is one choice not strictly of the first year, but so intimately connected with it that I speak of it here—the decision as to whether or not one shall go to college. “It will take four of the best years of my life,” the young man says. “While I am reading books and attending lectures, playing football, and practising the college yell, other young men will be learning the ways of the business world; they will be actually laying the foundations for prosperous careers. Can I afford the time?” Furthermore, does it justify the expense? On an average it costs each student somewhere from five hundred to a thousand dollars a year in all first-class colleges, though the state universities in the West cut down that figure by remitting tuition fees, and many splendid young men take the course on much less. Is it worth what it costs?
Every young man who can compass it by any reasonable outlay of energy and sacrifice had better go to college and stay there until graduation day. There is a deal of education to be gained outside of books or college halls. The business life of a great city is a university in itself with its lectures and recitations, its examinations and other requirements. Its courses of instruction have a value all their own and its exacting demands flunk more men ten to one than either Harvard or Yale, Stanford or California. In this “university of experience” the college colors are “black and blue,” for the lessons are learned by hard knocks. But the man who knows his full share of what is in the books will show himself more competent in finding his way about in that larger school of experience. “Systematic training counts everywhere, from a prize fight up to being a bishop or a bank president.”
It is true that many men have won high place in the world’s life without college training, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Greeley, Abraham Lincoln, and all the rest,—we know the list by heart. But it did not please the Lord to make Lincolns and Franklins when he made most of us. A little extra schooling which those men might get on without, in our case will not come amiss. Furthermore, those very men with all their unusual ability did not have to compete with college men to the extent that you will be compelled to do. College men in ordinary life were scarce then; now there are three under every log. In law and medicine, in teaching and the ministry, in the administration of large business enterprises and in the world of political life, you will have to meet and try conclusions with men who have received the best the universities can give. It will be to your interest, therefore, to add to the stock of ability which the Creator has given you all the training that high school, college, and university can yield. To neglect carelessly or decline wilfully such opportunities when they are offered, becomes a wrong committed against yourself, against all who are interested in your growth, and against society which is entitled to the most competent service you can render.
When you have actually set foot upon the campus there comes the choice of courses. The modern drift toward unlimited electives, especially in the first two years, is open to serious criticism. The tendency is to allow each student to study only what he likes, consulting merely his own interest and preference. Even where young people have reached the mature age of nineteen or twenty, and are regularly entered freshmen or sophomores, it is just possible that more wisdom can be found somewhere as to what is best for their intellectual growth and training, than is discoverable in their own individual preferences. There is a disposition on their part to select courses of two kinds, those in which they are already strong or those which are supposed to be “snaps.”
Moving along the line of least resistance is not the royal road to anything worth while. Insight, grasp, and self-mastery come rather by doing hard jobs. Rolling down hill on green grass does not develop robust, enduring, effective manhood as does climbing Shasta or Whitney over loose rock and rugged snow-fields. There is no such thing as “painless education” in the market.
In the judgment of many there is peril in the fact that at one end of our educational system we have the kindergarten, bowing with almost idolatrous reverence before the untaught inclinations of the child in its effort to make the work of education as enjoyable as a game, and at the other end the university with its wide-open elective system tending to breed distaste for hard courses or for studies in which the young people do not already feel a warm interest. We shall not rear up sturdy character by too much humoring of individual taste, which is often abnormal in intellectual as in other directions. Mr. Dooley indicates a weakness in the present method where he says: “To-day the college president takes the young man into a Turkish room and gives him a cigarette, and says, ‘Now, my dear boy, what special branch of larnin’ would ye like to have studied for ye, by one of our compitint professors?’”
In the selection of courses it is unwise to ignore completely certain fields because you feel you are weak on that side—you may need rounding out. The man who sits in the seat of the scornful, displaying a contemptuous indifference toward fields which lie aside from his personal preference, may live to find that narrow seat as uncomfortable as a sharp stick. It is well not to specialize too soon, or too rigidly. We are compelled to specialize at last in order to forge ahead, but it is more important to be a man, round, full, rich in contents, than to be an expert lawyer, physician, or mining engineer. The early and rigid specialization, sometimes extending even down into the high school, tends to sacrifice the man to the profession.
There are certain fundamental interests which cannot be left out of the consideration of any educated man or woman. Take these five main fields: every student should know something of language, the instrument of communication. He should for the purposes of comparison and enlargement know something of two or three languages. His knowledge should extend beyond the mere ability to read and write and spell—it ought to include some acquaintance with the best literature of each language, the widest acquaintance naturally with the best that has been thought and said in his own tongue.
He should know something of history. There is too much of it for any one man to master it all, but he should have some genuine understanding of the chief sources of history, and of the main courses and movements of thought and life in the world. He should enlarge his own brief and local experience by some participation in age-long, national, and international experience.
He should know something of science. The general method of science is the same, whether observed in chemistry, zoology, botany, or elsewhere. One may never be a specialist in any single science, yet he may know the scientific habit of mind and appreciate the fundamental positions of science sufficiently to make him a more effective worker in his own chosen field, which may, indeed, lie quite over the divide from any directly scientific pursuit.
He should know something of the organized life of men through the study of sociology, economics, and civics. He should have some understanding of institutional life in its various industrial, political, and ecclesiastical expressions.
He should feel in some measure the power of that group of studies which have to do with mental and moral processes considered apart from the world of outward phenomena, psychology, ethics, philosophy, religion. He needs to relate his individual activity to the larger life of the whole by some genuine grasp of fundamentals in his thinking.
No single student can be at his best in all these or can even make any two of them his major interest, but a certain elementary knowledge of all these fields, thorough as far as it goes, is a better foundation for a genuine education than the most elaborate training in any one specialty.
When one builds a pyramid it must come to a point somewhere. It can only be built, with the conditions as we find them, at a certain angle, for material will not lie on a slope too steep. How high it may be, therefore, when the apex is reached will depend upon the breadth of the base. In your education, you are building character and personality, which is much more important than any special ability for money-making, and the apex of that personality will be high in proportion as you avoid the narrow base which results from too much specializing in the earlier years. Let the foundation which precedes your special or professional training be as broad as it lies within your power to make it.
If you specialize rigidly in the early years, you may a little later change your purpose in life and find yourself handicapped by the former narrow outlook. The college is a place where many a fellow finds himself for the first time, and the fellow he finds is oftentimes another and perhaps a better man than the one he had planned for in the earlier years. He may take his college course expecting to be a lawyer, but that spiritual impulse, which lands many a man in the ministry, may be at work beneath the surface, none the less potent for being one of those unseen things which are eternal. If in his college days he entirely ignores Greek or turns his back on philosophy and ethics as having little practical worth, he will find himself at a great disadvantage if he finally faces about toward the pulpit. As Cromwell said to the theologians who were so cock-sure in their opinions, “Beloved brethren, I beseech you by the mercies of God believe it possible that you may be mistaken.” You may be mistaken as to the work you will do in life. It is unwise therefore to discount that possible future by narrowing down too soon to some specialty which may prove to be off the turnpike when you make final selection of your life-work.
The selection of habits in a modern university is left almost entirely to the judgment of the individual student. The college rules grow fewer year by year. Personal supervision becomes impossible where the enrolment reaches into the thousands. Parents are sometimes unaware of the measure of liberty accorded. College presidents entertain each other with experiences which come to them in the way of letters from anxious mammas. One president tells us of a letter received from a fond mother whose son had just entered—“I shall expect you to send me a long letter each week telling me how my darling boy is doing.” Another reports a letter from a father—“Please send me each week a full report of my son’s absences, of his failures in recitation, and your own impression as to the progress he is making.” The very humor of these suggestions indicates to what measure the freedom of the student has been extended. It would be somewhat difficult for President Lowell or President Hadley, for President Jordan or President Wheeler to see to it that the boys and girls eat the proper amounts of wholesome food and put on their rubbers when it rains.
University life is not a personally conducted tour with the trains and hotels, the points of interest and suggestions as to clothing, all printed in the schedule. It is a case of going abroad upon the continent of learning, relying upon your own letter of credit to draw supplies from the banks of opportunity open to you, with the necessity upon you of learning to speak the language and order your trip for yourself in a way to gain the utmost possible good. The sheltered life policy, suitable for little boys, must come to an end some time and the young man be compelled to face the good or bad results of his own choices. The beginning of the college course is no doubt an appropriate time to inaugurate this new régime.
You will enter college without any definite college habits. This will be at once an advantage and a peril. Habits are sometimes heavy, troublesome chains; they are sometimes the best friends in sight. In driving over a mountain road on a dark night when one cannot see even his team, the deep ruts are a comfort and a safeguard—as the driver hears the wagon chuckling along in the ruts he knows that he is not on the point of going over the grade. Certain useful habits, which come from doing certain things in certain ways over and over again, are beneficial in that they take sufficient care of those lines of action and leave the man’s will and attention free to deal with other problems.
The habits you select and exhibit during the first year will almost inevitably determine your standing with the faculty and with the students. When you enter you are what cattlemen call a “maverick”—there is no brand on you. Your associates will wait to see where you belong. By your own choices you will brand yourself as studious or trifling, as thorough or a dabbler, as honest or a cheat, as clean and sound in your moral life or as shady. The habits of the first year will brand you and in the award of college honors at the hands of the faculty or of the students, and in the operation of university influences upon your career after you graduate, the brand you wear will be well-nigh determinative. Look at it carefully, then, before you apply it to yourself, for its mark will stay.
You cannot afford to shilly-shally. The man who spends his time in high school or college mainly for his own amusement is a sham and a sneak. He is there at considerable cost to somebody—parents, tax-payers, professors who are doing educational work out of love for it when they might be doing something much more remunerative—and when he merely puts up a bluff at studying he stamps himself as a sneak.
The men who undertake to get through their examinations by a kind of death-bed repentance become cheap men. In the moral world a man is judged not by the few holy emotions he can scramble together in the last fifteen minutes of earthly existence; he is judged by the whole trend and drift of his life, by the deeds done in the body, by the entire accumulation and net result of his living as deposited in the character formed. This is sound theology in any branch of the Christian Church and the principle involved is also sound in pedagogy. The real test of the student’s work is not to be found in what he did last night or in what he can show upon occasion as the result of a hasty cramming, but in what he has been doing through all the days and nights preceding the examination and in that net result which stands revealed in his mental grasp and effectiveness. Whether he becomes a man who will stand the hard tests the world puts upon every one who undertakes to do important work, will depend largely upon the habits he forms in the first year. He may take low ideals and live down to them; or he may set high ideals and then direct his energy and shape the methods of his life unceasingly to the hard task of living up to them.
There will also come the choice of intimates. You will have acquaintances many—the more the better. You will have, I hope, a large circle of friends and you will discover that college friendships are the most lasting and perhaps the most rewarding of any you form. But of lives so close as to give shape and color and odor to your life, there will not be many; and for that reason the intimates are to be chosen with the greater care.
You can know all sorts and conditions of men. You can be on good terms with many whose prevailing attitudes toward life do not meet your wish. You cannot afford to be on intimate terms with a man lacking in those fundamental qualities of every-day rectitude which are legal tender the world over. The man you admit to your heart and life as an intimate ought to be “hall marked” as they say in England; he ought to have the word “sterling” stamped upon him, indicating that in the great melting-pot of human experience he will meet the test and show full face value.
It will be good to have a few close friends who are not students. There are townspeople whose main interest is in the larger life outside the university whose friendship you need. There is some member of the faculty whom you ought to know well. In many colleges every student has a “personal adviser” in the faculty. It is a foolish mistake to look upon the professors as your enemies or as being indifferent to you, lacking in any genuine interest in your problems. They covet a closer touch with their students than the young men in their mistaken reserve are ready to accord them. The closer friendship of some one, wise, mature, sympathetic man in the faculty will be an influence wholesome and abiding, making always for your best development. The mere fact that some weak man may undertake to “cultivate” a professor in the spirit of the sycophant need not deter strong men from the enjoyment of such friendships in straightforward, manly fashion.
Let me congratulate you that you are in college! It is a jolly thing to be alive at all, these days, and to be alive and young and at school—why, the whole world is yours! The world is yours potentially, and wise, right decisions during that first year will aid mightily in making a generous measure of it actually yours. You may, if you will, score a good number of runs off your own batting by the way you play the game in the first inning.