Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/78

74 Men from foreign universities are astonished to find that Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other great universities are known to the public generally only as football associations; that the newspapers so rarely make reference to the eminence of men composing the faculties of those universities, that such references as are made are too often in the shape of squibs ridiculing statements charged upon them by irresponsible reporters. Little is said now about sitting at "the feet of Gamaliel "and apparently Gamaliel's race has disappeared. It is no wonder that the callow graduate of a few years' standing announces to the gaping undergraduate that he never derived any advantage from the professors and that his present greatness is due wholly to himself.

The effect on the morale of our colleges is increasingly bad; alumni of less than fifteen years' standing seem to think that they can show their love for alma mater best by a gift for a grandstand, a stadium or something else to increase interest in team exhibitions; the athlete is the college hero, the mere student is a "dig" without college spirit; worse than all, the new generation of college instructors has grown up in this atmosphere and favors continuance of the condition; appeals of a highly-paid coach or of the team manager do not fall on deaf ears when addressed to such instructors, who are not likely to check the growing tendency to lower the standard in favor of efficient athletes.

It is impossible to ignore the fact that this tendency exists. The college curriculum was arranged so as to require much time for actual preparation outside of the class-room; yet men, who during a considerable part of the college year are unable to give serious attention to study, succeed in "catching up" so as to pass examinations and in obtaining their degrees. The usual reply to this argument is that so and-so, who was very prominent in sports, graduated at the head of his class and did well afterward. Very true. And the writer knows a man who, throughout his college course, earned his livelihood as night watchman for the custom house on a New York pier, yet graduated at the head of his class and made his mark afterward in the world's affairs. But to offer such men as representing the average student is as absurd as would be the assertion that Aristotle typified the Greek intellect or that James J. Jeffries typifies American physique. The average student finds much study a weariness to the flesh; glee clubs, athletics and the rest increase the weariness; they absorb the chief interest and there remains only a petty fraction of the original interest to be devoted to study. Other men, loving study quite as little, spend their energy in "rooting" for the team and they too receive their degrees.

But the matter of good faith must not be neglected. This wild craze for outside courses is of comparatively recent origin. The great funds acquired by our colleges were given for the training of the mind, not for the training of the body; the money for gymnasiums and the