XXA Small College
PROFESSORMaturinhas always questioned the somewhat popular belief that the small college, once so important, is about to disappear between the portentously rumbling upper and nether millstones of the universities and the public schools. He was therefore more than glad to accept, in the form of an invitation to visit a professorial friend at a country college, an opportunity to see for himself.
During two hundred express-train miles away from the metropolis, and twenty more deliberate ones away from the main line, he thought a good deal about the matter, not without regret that the German ideal of specialized scholarship should completely overcome the English ideal of general culture. After the professor’s cordial greetings, conversation at once turned to this topic. The professor, however, was so unapprehensive that he claimed attention rather for the attractive situation of his town, after remarking that, as a matter of fact, the small colleges were increasing in attendance and resources much more rapidly, in proportion, than the great universities. Hisown college, in the last five years, had enlarged its endowment from three hundred thousand to nearly a million dollars, and its attendance from two to nearly four hundred students. Five hundred was to be the limit, the president and his faculty being unanimous in believing that no college should be too large to give attention to every student every day in every class. “This was sufficiently reassuring,” said Professor Maturin, as he told me about it, “to permit my attending comfortably to my surroundings, which were indeed charming.” I continue the account in his own words.
“The college campus stretched along the main street, at the southern end of the town—a large rectangle of wonderful greensward, resulting from the English recipe of watering for a hundred years, and guarded by a small army of enormous elms that must have been already in occupation when the tract was bought from the provincial proprietors, in the early years of the republic. Here stood the two buildings that accommodated all the academic and domestic life of the college during its first half century. Both of native limestone, with softer brownstone trimmings, the older was a notable example of the best American public architecture of an hundred yearsago. The dozen other buildings nearby were similarly landmarks in the later history of the institution.
“The brownstone and dark brick chapel gave its lower floor to the libraries of the college and the literary societies, which made a total of about forty thousand volumes, some of them purchased and imported in bulk by the founders of the college. For student use the collection seemed quite adequate, not indeed for specialization, but certainly for the fundamental, general training for which the college stood. The work of the freshman and sophomore years consisted largely of required subjects, the junior and senior years largely of electives. This system, long in vogue, proved most acceptable, particularly to such graduates as my friend the professor, who had taken in college, Latin, Greek, French, and German; much English, some history, and a little economics; geology, physics, chemistry, physiology, and hygiene; mathematics up to and including calculus and astronomy; logic, psychology, ethics, and an introduction to philosophy—surely a broad foundation for his subsequent specialization in history. Later experience made him wish that he had studied also biology, sociology, and something of music and the fine arts.The first two of these were now provided by the institution.
“I had long heard of the president of the college as a distinguished clergyman and a more than kindly man. My first meeting with him left an impression of rarely mingled strength and fineness that every subsequent conversation but confirmed and deepened. I saw most of the professors, next morning, ranged on the chapel platform, and I subsequently learned to know all of them, either personally, or through my friend’s characterizations. This acquaintance was entirely in rebuttal of the charge that all professors belong to the mutually exclusive classes of those who know their subjects and those who love their students. These professors, almost to a man, managed to do both. The amount of wise and kindly personal consideration given to every student was little short of incredible, and had notable results in both character and culture. A better-mannered set of undergraduates I never saw, and this in spite of the fact that the freshmen indicated, for the most part, that the college had to work with more than ordinarily raw material. Something in the atmosphere added a fineness to the prevailing vigor, which delighted the eyes of a visitor accustomed to city anaemia, and produceda host of generous customs like doffing the hat to professors and standing in chapel while the president passed.
“I could not see that my friend’s very considerable scholarship was hindered by the obligation that he felt to know the name and something of the nature of each of his students. Indeed, I think that it was rather helped. His intellectual life had a freedom from dreaminess, on the one hand, and from pedantry, on the other, that I could attribute to no other cause. Such constant and intimate contact with youthful immaturity and ignorance would probably cause deterioration in a man of inferior ability and training, but my friend was both able and well trained, and so were most of his colleagues. His college course had been immediately followed by a year at one American university, and two years at another. Then, after an interval of teaching, he had had six months in England and a year and a half on the Continent, finishing in Germany with a doctor’s degree and a dissertation of real historical value. The others had had similar experiences, the language men, particularly, having enjoyed prolonged foreign residence.
“I was interested to learn that the head of the department of English, although an inspiringteacher and a writer of originality and distinction, had never been to college at all, but had gained his training and had amassed his really notable scholarship entirely through private instruction, individual reading, and extensive travel, and had come to his professorship only after a successful career as a critic and an editor. I was sufficiently impressed by this to inquire of the president how he avoided the requirement I had heard more than one university officer make, that every instructor should be the possessor of a doctor’s degree. He answered almost abruptly: ‘In selecting our staff, as everything else, we try to ignore the union label. It is always the sign of the conventional, and the conventional, especially in the humanities, too often means the mediocre.’ And then he changed the subject. That was surely radical educational doctrine, but in this case, at least, it was certainly justified by the results.
“In fine, the faculty seemed to me quite equal to the average of a university staff, and, because of their constant accessibility, appeared to be considerably more influential as teachers of immature students.
“Most of the professors lived near the college. My friend was the owner of an attractive small house, with a bit of ground, opposite the campus,computing the entire carrying cost at less than three hundred dollars a year. Adequate food and service were equally available and cheap. ‘Indeed, I have,’ he said, very earnestly,—I take pains to quote him exactly,—‘I have the smallest quarrel that it is possible to have with the academic income. Ours is not the ill fortune of those professors who suffer privation because ambitious presidents and business-like trustees agree that advertising is better than instruction, and spend on unessential but showy buildings funds that would relieve the men on their staff from financial anxieties distracting in themselves and occasioning those efforts to earn from outside sources which so often seriously undermine a professor’s academic usefulness, if not his intellectual and physical health. We manage to live on the two thousand dollars which is the professorial stipend here, knowing that proportion of the income of the college to be a generous proof of its belief in the primary importance of instruction. We decrease the numerator to suit the denominator. We seek the simplest food, clothing, and furnishings; reduce service to a minimum; buy fewer books; take shorter vacations; give less to charity, and nothing to public causes. Not being able to have what we want,we succeed pretty well in enjoying what we have, sustained by the intellectual and moral satisfactions of our calling—except sometimes. We, of course, become accustomed to the humiliating knowledge that the public does not consider our labor and devotion worth paying highly for. But the realization that the meagreness of our incomes, by more and more separating our lives from those of other men, is steadily decreasing our usefulness and influence—that is at times hard to bear.
“‘So far as living in a small town is concerned, save for the spice of variety which one may store up in vacation, it furnishes ideal nourishment for the intellectual life. The time at one’s command seems almost inexhaustible, and there are practically no distractions. Our social circle is limited, but interesting. Lacking the opera, our ladies become fair pianists. In place of museums of art, they have a club that studies art appreciation and history. Instead of going to the theatre, we read and talk of books, of which we know a few well rather than many slightly. Being devoid of the opportunity and hence free from the obligation of winnowing the current ephemera of my specialty, I am constantly occupied, instead, with the monumental, permanent contributions to thesubject. One cannot do both things, and I am content with my enforced choice.’
“The students were unquestionably gainers by their rural environment. They evidently studied a great deal, that being the most interesting occupation available. The cheapness of the place enabled many of them to obtain for a low tuition and a ridiculously low cost of living, a training they would elsewhere have been unable to pay for. For recreation they spent much time in the gymnasium, on the athletic field, and wandering far through the charming surrounding country. There was a not unhealthy amount of what is known as college and class spirit, with the numerous traditional customs thereto attendant.
“I could not see that the fraternities, which played a large part in the student life, did anything more than give to natural tastes and tendencies an organization that helped the student to see qualities, and the faculty to watch defects, in the mass. The religious life of the place impressed me as abundant and powerful, but in no way overstrained. When I saw some of the young ladies whose habit it was to be at home to students on Friday evenings, I wished myself a youth again. The boys repaid their kindness in many ways, not the least pleasing of which wasthe serenading which invariably followed the closing of the fraternity meetings, which were held from ten o’clock to midnight on the night preceding the weekly holiday—a custom that seemed to satisfy the youthful desire to act very much grown up, at the small price of consequent sleepiness. The healthy spirit of the place frowned on actual dissipation.
“Thinking over my visit, during the return journey, I realized that the whole question of the relative usefulness of the metropolitan university and the rural college reduces to an estimate of the comparative values of the large and the small, the near and the remote, of efficiency and culture. Our national environment and history have emphasized the importance of the large, the immediate, the efficient. But there is always much to be said on both sides of every question, and it is at least possible that enough importance has not been attributed to the small, the distinctive, the fine.
“On the whole,” concluded Professor Maturin, “I am inclined to disagree with my friends in the universities, and to believe that the future of the small college is bright rather than dark.”