1

on them as his own? Or will you wantonly fling it all away, careless that the man you might have been shall never be? In all our colleges we are taught that the athlete must not break training rules. The pitcher who smokes a cigarette gives away the game. The punter who dances loses the goal, the sprinter who takes a convivial glass of beer breaks no record. His record breaks him. Some day we shall realize that the game of life is more strenuous than the game of football, more intricate than pitching curves, more difficult than punting. We should keep in trim for it. We must remember the training rules. The rules that win the football game are good also for success in business. Half the strength of young America is wasted in the dissipation of drinking or smoking. If we keep the training rules of life in literal honesty, we shall win a host of prizes that otherwise we should lose. Final success goes to the few, the very few, alas, who throughout life keep mind and soul and body clean.

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Gemeingeist unter freien Geistern," the "comradeship of free souls," this is the meaning of true college spirit. Freedom of the soul means freedom of the mind, freedom of the brain. It is said in the litany that His "service is perfect freedom." Ignorance holds men in bondage; so do selfishness, stupidity and vice. The service of God and of man is found in casting off these things. In freedom we find abundance of life. The scholar should be a man in the full life of the world. "The color of life is red," and the scholar of to-day is no longer a dim-eyed monk with a grammarian's cough. He is a worker in the rush of the century a lover of nature and an artist in building the lives of men.

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND PRACTICE IN WRITING

1. Discuss the meaning and value of college spirit. 2. What part do custom and conformity seem to play in determining what is or what is not a proper display of college spirit? 3. Enlarge on the point that students fix the reputation of a college by criticising certain practices among the students of your own college which tend to be injurious to its good name. 4. Discuss some of the ways of manifest

ing college spirit other than in connection with athletics. 5. Point out some of the things in your institution that might be viewed as hindrances to the development of college spirit. 6. Discuss the advantages or disadvantages of the class rush. 7. Hazing or helpfulness, which is the truer manifestation of college spirit? 8. Discuss courtesy in athletics. Is your institution impeccable in this matter?

HONOR IN STUDENT LIFE IN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES 1

1

CHARLES ALPHONSO SMITH

[Charles Alphonso Smith (1864– -) is the Edgar Allan Poe professor of English in the University of Virginia. In 1910-11 he lectured at the University of Berlin as Roosevelt exchange professor of American history and institutions. This selection was presented as a paper before the Department of Higher Education of the National Educational Association at the meeting in July, 1905.]

In the fourth book of his work on "The German Universities" Dr. Friedrich Paulsen analyzes student honor into three constituent elements: courage, independence, and truth-telling. This analysis, however, besides being purely abstract, looks more to the foundation of student honor than to the superstructure. The analysis given by Mr. Le Baron Russell Briggs, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences in Harvard University, is more concrete because it is based on the actual working out of honor ideals in college life. "Want of a fine sense of honor," says he,2 "appears chiefly in athletic contests, in the authorship of written work, in excuses for neglect of study, in the relation of students to the rights of persons who are not students, and in questions of duty to all who are, or who are to be, nearest and dearest." These defects Mr. Briggs considers "a part of that lopsided immaturity which characterizes privileged youth."

1 Reprinted from The Educational Review, Volume 30, page 364 (November, 1905), by per mission of the author and of the publishers.

See the excellent chapter on "College honor," in School, College, and Character, Houghton Mifflin & Co. [Author's note.]

Without attempting an adequate analysis of student honor, either of its excellences or of its defects, it may be said that the most popular error in regard to the subject is to view it wholly as a phase of ethics. Student honor is only partly a thing of the conscience. One of the most effective appeals that I ever heard made to a band of college hazers was based not so much on the view that hazing is wrong as that it is puerile and common. The students were told that society is coming more and more to regard hazing as belonging with slovenly speech, loud neckties, and even eating with the knife. The appeal was made with tact and sympathy, the students seeming to feel that their honor had been invoked because nothing was said about the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule. Student honor, as it exists in our colleges and universities to-day, is only in part, therefore, an ethical dictate; it is rather a curious blend of conscience and convention, of individualism on the one hand and compliance with the canons of good form on the other. Being essentially a communal sentiment, a faculté d'ensemble, it is peculiarly susceptible to the consensus of opinion prevailing in its own college and in the colleges that form its social or athletic environment. A college president writes: "I am almost coming to the conclusion that student honor is based entirely upon campus sentiment, and refuses to receive any other standard. Convince one team that all the other college teams sign certain pledges as a matter of form, and they will consider themselves justified in doing the same."

Another misconception is to regard student honor as instinctive or intuitive, as having the simplicity of the great emotions and but little affinity with the analytic distinctions and reasoned processes of the intellect. Shakespeare's unanswered question of fancy may be asked with equal pertinency of student honor:

"Tell me where is fancy bred,

Or in the heart or in the head?"

Undoubtedly the impulses of student honor come chiefly from

the feelings, but the code of student honor frequently finds place for more subtle distinctions than ever vexed the brain of rabbi or scholiast. It recalls at times the phrase with which Charles Lamb characterized the comedy of the Restoration: he called it "the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry."

But when all is said, student honor remains an asset of incalculable moral, social, and civic worth. You may smile at it now and then; you will more often be thrilled by it. Its inconsistencies are apparent, but student life would be gross and sordid without it. No college discipline would be tolerable that did not strive with sympathy and patience to identify itself with the honor ideals of its students. No teacher would deserve the name that did not seek in the classroom and out of it to invest these ideals with ever increasing worth and dignity. Student honor needs above all else neither praise nor blame but recognition, enlightenment, and coöperation.

That it has not received the consideration that its importance merits is evidenced by the dearth of literature bearing on the subject. It is true that more attention is now given to the ethical aspects of education than ever before: the ethical note is more often and more clearly sounded; but student honor, though it is unquestionably the strategic point in student character, has received but scant notice from writers on educational themes. No thorough treatment of the subject has yet been attempted and no concerted action has been taken. If we believe in the primacy of character rather than in the primacy of mere intellect, we cannot afford to ignore the standards of honor and dishonor that students impose upon themselves and that effect more or less permanently their character in after-years. If this paper, therefore, does nothing else than call attention to an oversight and a need, it will at least justify its niche in the program.

While it is true that student honor is measured to-day chiefly by the student's deportment on examinations and on the athletic field, there was a time when the phrase connoted primarily the student's bearing toward the faculty and toward

the property-owners in the neighborhood of the college or university. In both these respects, however, there has been a significant change for the better. Organized rebellions against college authority are comparatively rare. They occur at times, and perhaps will occur throughout the century; but they are exceptional and marked by less violence and rowdyism than in earlier years. They arose out of conditions which are now obsolescent if not obsolete. Foremost among these were the petty restrictions imposed by faculties and enforced by a system of espionage and inquisitorial investigation that rarely failed to beget an insurrectionary feeling on the part of the students. In many cases students were not only not trusted, but their very presence at a college or university seemed the warrant of suspicion. They were expressly forbidden to do what only the most versatile ingenuity would ever have thought of doing. In the inhibitions launched against them no attempt was made to discriminate between the malum prohibitum and the malum in se. This is a distinction, however, that students never fail to make, and, be it said to their credit, their insistence on their natural rights, together with their consistent opposition to artificial and unnecessary restrictions, has had its share in bringing about the era of better things. "The history of the government of the students in American colleges," says Dr. Thwing, "is a history of increasing liberality and orderliness," of increasing orderliness because of increasing liberality.

There has been also a corresponding change in the attitude of college students toward those living in the college environment. Conflicts between gownsmen and townsmen are no longer a settled feature of college life. This consummation is to be ascribed in part to the growth of college towns and to the attendant blending of student life with a larger social and civic life. It has been brought about also by the greater attention now paid to the physical comfort of students in dormitories and lecture rooms, by the modernization of the curriculum, and by the wider introduction of the elective system. The adaptation of student to study, which it is the aim