Atlantic Classics Volume Ii Part 9

Next to the physical development and the maintenance of the health of all the students and teachers of an inst.i.tution, the main purpose of athletics as education is to provide recreation as a preparation for study rather than as a subst.i.tute for study. But, intercollegiate athletics having won and retained unquestioned supremacy in our colleges, students do not tolerate the idea of a conflicting interest.

Even the nights preceding the great contests must be free from the interference of intellectual concerns. An editorial in one of our college weeklies makes this point clear. If a member of the faculty ventured to put the matter so extremely, he would be charged with exaggeration. But in this paper the students navely present their conviction that even the most signal opportunities for enjoying literature must be sacrificed by the entire student body in order that they may get together and yell in preparation for their function of sitting in the grandstand. In this case the conflicting interest appeared in no less a person than Alfred Noyes. For a geographically isolated community to hear the poet was an opportunity of a college lifetime. Yet the students wrote as follows:--

v 'THE RALLY _vs_. NOYES

'Returning alumni this year were somewhat surprised to find the Hall used for a lecture on the eve of our great gridiron struggle, and some were very much disappointed. The student body was only partially reconciled to the situation and was represented in great part by Freshmen [who were required to attend].'

The relative importance of intercollegiate athletics and other college affairs, in the minds of students, is indicated by student publications.

There is no more tangible scale for measuring the interests of college youth than the papers which they edit for their own satisfaction, unrestrained by the faculty.

Let us take two of the worthiest colleges as examples. The Bowdoin College _Orient_, a weekly publication, is typical. For the first nine weeks of the academic year 1914-15, the _Orient_ gave 450 inches to intercollegiate athletics. For the same period, it devoted six inches to art, ten inches to social service, thirteen inches to music, and twelve inches to debating. Judging from this free expression, the students rate the interests of intercollegiate athletics nearly three times as high as the combined interests of art, music, religion, philosophy, social service, literature, debating, the curriculum, and the faculty. Second in importance to intercollegiate athletics, valued at 450 inches, are dances and fraternities, valued at 78 inches.

Another possible measure of the student's interest is found in _Harvard of Today from an Undergraduate Point of View_, published in 1913 by the Harvard Federation of Territorial Clubs. The book gives to athletics ten pages; to the clubs, six pages; to debating, five lines--and that student activity requires sustained thinking and is most closely correlated with the curriculum. The faculty escapes without mention.

'From an undergraduate point of view' the faculty appears to be an inc.u.mbrance upon the joys of college life.

These publications appear to be fair representatives of their cla.s.s. It is probable, furthermore, that the relative attention given by the student papers to intellectual interests is a criterion of the conversation of students.

Not long ago, I spent some time with the graduate students at an Eastern university. Their conversation at dinner gave no evidence of common intellectual interests. They appeared to talk of little but football games.

On a visit to a Southern state university, I found the women's dormitory in confusion. The matron excused the noise and disorder on the ground that a big football game was pending and it seemed impossible for the girls to think of anything else.

'The big game comes to-morrow?' I asked.

'Oh, no, next week,' she said.

Last spring, at a large university on the Pacific Coast, I met one young woman of the freshman cla.s.s who had already been to thirty-one dances that year. At a state university of the Middle West, I found that the students had decided to have their big football game on Friday instead of Sat.u.r.day, in order to wrench one more day from the loose grip of the curriculum. When the faculty protested, the students painted on the walks, 'Friday is a holiday'--and it was.

Intellectual enthusiasm is rare in American colleges, and is likely to be rarer still if social and athletic affairs continue to overshadow all other interests. Their dominance has given many a college faculty its characteristic att.i.tude in matters of government. They a.s.sume that boys and girls will come to college for anything but studies. They tell new students just how many lectures in each course they may escape. A penalty of unsatisfactory work is the obligation to attend all the meetings on their schedule, and the usual reward for faithful conduct is the privilege of 'cutting' more lectures without a summons from the dean. Always the aim of students appears to be to escape as much as possible of the college life provided by the faculty, in order to indulge in more of the college life provided by themselves. Their inventive powers are marvelous; they bring forth an endless procession of devices for evading the opportunities for the sake of which (according to old-fashioned notions) students seek admission to college.

The complacent acceptance of this condition by college faculties--the pervasive a.s.sumption that students have no genuine intellectual enthusiasm--tends to stagnation. In the realm of thought some appear to have discovered the secret of petrified motion.

The p.r.o.nounced tendencies in higher education aggravate the disease.

Feeble palliatives are resorted to from time to time,--the baseball schedule in one college, after six hours of debate by the faculty, was cut down from twenty-four games to twenty-two,--but the bold and necessary surgeon seldom gets in his good work. When he does operate, he is hung in effigy or elected President of the United States.

Concerning the policy of no intercollegiate games at Clark College, President Sanford says: 'Our experience with this plan has been absolutely satisfactory and no change of policy would be considered.

Doubtless some of the less intellectually serious among the students might like to see intercollegiate sports introduced. It is generally understood that in a three-year college there is not time for such extras.' The faculty appear to be unanimously in favor of no intercollegiate games, since the course at Clark College takes only three years. Intercollegiate contests appear to be ruled out chiefly on the ground that, in a three-year course, students cannot afford to waste time. But why is it worse for a young man to waste parts of three years of his student life than to waste parts of four years of it?

The educational effect of our exaggerated emphasis on intercollegiate athletics is shown in the att.i.tude of alumni. It is difficult to arouse the interest of a large proportion of graduates in anything else. At one of the best of our small colleges, in the Mississippi Valley, I saw a ma.s.sive concrete grandstand. This valiant emulation of the Harvard stadium seemed to me to typify the indifference of alumni to the crying needs of their alma mater. For these graduates who contributed costly concrete seats, to be used by the student body in lieu of exercise, showed no concern over the fact that the college was worrying along with scientific laboratories inferior to those of the majority of modern high schools. 'What could I do?' the president asked. 'They would give the stadium, and they would not give the laboratories.'

IV

There have been numerous attempts to prove that intercollegiate athletics are not detrimental to scholarship by showing that athletes receive higher marks than other students. Such arguments are beside the point. Though we take no account of the weak-kneed indulgence to athletes in inst.i.tutions where winning games is the dominant interest, and of the special coaching in their studies provided for them because they are on the teams, we must take account of the fact that wherever the student body regards playing on intercollegiate teams as the supreme expression of loyalty, the men of greatest physical and mental strength are more likely than the others to go out for the teams, and these are the very men of whom we rightly expect greatest proficiency in scholarship. That they do not as a group show notable leadership in intellectual activities seems due to the excessive physical training which, at certain seasons, they subst.i.tute for study.

But this is not the main point. A large college might be willing to sacrifice the scholarship of a score of students, if that were all. The chief charge against intercollegiate athletics is their demoralizing effect on the scholarship of the entire inst.i.tution. The weaklings who have not grit enough to stand up on the gridiron and be tackled talk interminably about the latest game and the chances of winning the next one. They spend their hours in cheering the football hero, and their money in betting on him. The man of highest achievement in scholarship they either ignore or condemn with unpleasant epithets.

Further hindrances to scholarship are found in the periodic absences of the teams. It is said that athletes are required to make up the work they miss during their trips, but is not this one of the nave ways whereby faculties deceive themselves? They are faced with this dilemma.

Either the work of a given week in their courses is so substantial, and their own contribution to the work so great, that students cannot possibly miss it, and 'make it up' while meeting the equally great demands of the following week, or else the work of all the students is so easy that the athletes on a week's absence do not miss much. What actually happens, year in and year out, is that the standards of scholarship of the entire inst.i.tution are lowered to meet the exigencies of intercollegiate athletics.

To what an illogical position we are driven by our fetish worship of college 'amateur athletics'! We especially provide the summer vacation as a period for play and recreation, and as a time when a majority of students must earn a part of the expenses of the college year. For these purposes we suspend all cla.s.ses. Yet the student who uses this vacation to play ball and thereby earn some money must either lie about it or be condemned to outer darkness. There are no intercollegiate athletics for him; he has become a 'professional.' It matters not how fine his ideals of sport may be, how strong his character, or how high his scholarship.

These considerations are ignored. The honors all go to the athlete who neglects his studies in order to make games his supreme interest during that part of the twelve months which is specifically set apart for studies.

Far more sensible would be an arrangement whereby, if we must have intercollegiate athletics at all, the games could be scheduled in vacation periods, and a part of the gate-receipts, if we must have them at all, could be used for the necessary living expenses of worthy students, instead of being squandered, as much of that money is squandered to-day. That this will seem a preposterous plan to those who are caught in the maelstrom of the present collegiate system need not surprise us. An accurate record of the history of intercollegiate athletics shows that, year in and year out, the arrangements desired by students are those that interfere most seriously with study during the days especially intended for study.

The maelstrom of college athletics! That would not seem too strong a term if we could view the age in which we live in right perspective--an age so unbalanced nervously that it demands perpetual excitement. We have fallen into a vicious circle: the excesses of excitement create a pathological nervous condition which craves greater excesses. The advertis.e.m.e.nt of a head-on collision of two locomotives is said to have drawn the largest crowd in the history of modern 'sport'; next in attractiveness is an intercollegiate football game. It is unfortunate that our universities, which should serve as balancing forces,--which should inculcate the ideal of sport as a counterpoise to an overwrought civilization,--are actually making conditions worse through cultivating, by means of athletics as a business, that pa.s.sion for excitement which makes sustained thinking impossible and which is elsewhere kept at fever heat by prize-fights, bullfights, and blood-curdling motion pictures.

V

But even if intercollegiate games are detrimental to the interests of scholarship, is not the college spirit they create worth all they cost?

Perhaps so. A university is more than a curriculum and a campus. It is more than the most elaborate student annual can depict. Even in Carlyle's day, it was more than he called it: a true university was never a mere 'collection of books.' It is the spirit that giveth life, and 'college spirit' is certainly a name to conjure with. The first question is what we mean by college spirit. A student may throw his hat in the air, grab a megaphone, give 'three long rahs,' go through the gymnastics of a cheer-leader,--putting the most ingenious mechanical toys to shame,--and yet leave some doubt whether he has adequately defined college spirit.

What is this college spirit that hovers over the paid coach and his grandstand--this 'indefinable something,' as one writer calls it, 'which is fanned into a bright flame by intercollegiate athletics'? Shall we judge the spirit by its manifestations in an inst.i.tution famed above all else for its winning teams and its college spirit? In such an inst.i.tution, not long ago, every student was cudgeled or cajoled into 'supporting the team,' and many a callow youth acted as though he thought he had reached the heights of self-sacrifice when he sat for hours on the grandstand, watching practice, puffing innumerable cigarettes, and laying up a stock of canned enthusiasm for the big game.

A student who would not support his team by betting on it was regarded as deficient in spirit. Every intercollegiate game was the occasion of general neglect of college courses. If the game was at a neighboring city, the cla.s.s-rooms were half empty for two days; but the bar-rooms of that city were not empty, and worse places regularly doubled their rates on the night of a big game. Some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the team went to jail for disturbing the peace. If the contest took place at home, returning alumni filled the fraternity houses and celebrated with general drunkenness. 'An indefinable something'--consisting of college property and that of private citizens--was 'fanned into a bright flame' in celebration of the victory. Following this came the spectacle of young men parading the streets in nightshirts. For residents of the town who did not enjoy this particular kind of spirit, the night was made hideous by the noises of revelry. All this and much more was tolerated for years on the a.s.sumption that students, imbued with college spirit, should not be subjected to the laws of decent living that govern those members of civilized communities who have not had the advantages of a higher education. The most serious difficulties between faculties and students and between students and the police, the country over, for the past twenty years, have arisen in connection with displays of 'college spirit' after the 'big game.' Any college and any community might cheerfully sacrifice this kind of college spirit.

But some men mean by college spirit something finer than lawlessness, dissipation, and rowdyism. They mean the loyalty to an inst.i.tution which makes a student guard its good name by being manly and courteous in conduct at all times and in all places. They mean the sense of responsibility which aids a student in forming habits of temperance and industry. They mean that eagerness to make a grateful use of his opportunities which leads a student to keep his own body fit, through moderate athletics, and a physical training that knows no season--is never broken. By college spirit some men mean this and far more: they mean that loyalty to a college which rivets a man to the severest tasks of scholarship, through which he gains intellectual power and enthusiasm, without which no graduate is an entire credit to any college; and finally they mean that vision of an ideal life beyond Commencement which shows a man that only through the rigid subordination of transient and trivial pleasures can he hope to become the only great victory a university ever wins--a trained, devoted, and inspired alumnus, working for the welfare of mankind. There is no evidence that the intercollegiate athletics of to-day inculcate in many men this kind of college spirit.

Have I exaggerated the evils of intercollegiate athletics? Possibly I have. Exceptions should be cited here and there. But I am convinced that college faculties agree with me in my main contentions. My impression is that at least three fourths of the teachers I have met the country over believe that the American college would better serve its highest purposes, if intercollegiate athletics were no more. At a recent dinner of ten deans and presidents, they declared, one by one, in confidence, that they would abolish intercollegiate athletics if they could withstand the pressure of students and alumni.

Is it therefore necessary for all inst.i.tutions to give up intercollegiate athletics permanently? Probably not. Let our colleges first adopt whatever measures may be necessary to make athletics yield their educational values to all students and teachers. If intercollegiate athletics can then be conducted as incidental and contributory to the main purposes of athletics, well and good. But first of all the question must be decisively settled, which aims are to dominate--those of business or those of education. And it will be difficult for a college already in the clutches of commercialism to retain the system and at the same time cultivate a spirit antagonistic to it. Probably the quicker and surer way would be to suspend all intercollegiate athletics for a college generation by agreement of groups of colleges--during which period every effort should be made to establish the tradition of athletics for education. If an inst.i.tution could not survive such a period of transition, it is a fair question whether the inst.i.tution has any reason for survival.

Typically American though our frantic devotion to intercollegiate athletics may be, we shall not long tolerate a system which provides only a costly, injurious, and excessive regime of physical training for a few students, especially those who need it least. The call to-day is for inexpensive, healthful, and moderate exercise for all students, especially those who need it most. Colleges must sooner or later heed that call: their athletics must be for education, not for business.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Car-Window Botany

By Lida F. Baldwin

One thinks of the botanist as in silence and solitude wandering by some forest brook, or penetrating into almost impenetrable swamps, or climbing rocky mountain paths, lured on by the hope of finding some rare and curious flower. But I in my own experience have had some of my best finds from the windows of a railway train.

It was with people sitting all around me, and the engine puffing noisily away on an up grade, that my delighted eyes first fell on the one-flowered pyrola. The railway cutting had been made in the heart of the deep forest, and as the bank settled down, some of the rarer and shyer forest growths, such as ground-pine, arbutus, and pyrola, in the course of years had slipped over the brink of the cutting and were now part way down the bank. Inside the car were tired and grimy faces; just a few feet outside were forest freshness and greenness, and the white blossoms of the pyrola with their delicate flush.

Sometimes there is no bank on either side of the railway, and from the car window one catches glimpses into the edges of forests, or looks down upon swamps and small clear ponds, or gazes across broad level meadows; but more often one's view from the car window is confined to the narrow ditch of water just beyond the road-bed and to the sides of the cutting just beyond the ditch. Even in that confined outlook there are always possibilities; and it was in just such a ditch of water, as our train slowed up on the outskirts of Buffalo, that I saw growing great numbers of what looked like miniature calla lilies. There were the same golden, erect spadix, and the same ivory-white spathe rolled back in the very curve of the spathe of the calla lily; but the flower was not one quarter the size of the calla. As usual my botany was in my handbag; and the temptation to make a quick dash from the train, to try to secure one specimen for a.n.a.lysis, was almost irresistible. But I did resist the temptation; for the bank was quite steep, and I never could have climbed back in time if the train had started while I was trying to secure my flower; and a lonely woman would have been left in the dusk, watching the train bearing her friends vanish in the deepening twilight.

But the small white beauties were never forgotten, and years afterwards I found the flower, _arum pal.u.s.tris_, growing in a swamp not many miles from my old home.

One July day I traveled from Quebec to Portland on the slowest of trains. The road ran for much of the way, first on one side, then on the other, of the Chaudiere River, but never far out of sight of its clear brown waters. Fortunately for me, our locomotive used wood for fuel, and consequently every few hours we would stop at some great woodpile in a forest clearing while the trainmen threw a fresh supply of wood into the tender; and some of the pa.s.sengers took advantage of the stop to make short explorations into the forest. About mid-day, as we were riding slowly along, I began to notice a pink-purple flower that was new to me, growing here and there in rather marshy places. Shortly after I had first seen the flower the added slowness of the train showed that we were coming to another woodpile. The instant the train stopped I was out of the cars, over the low rail fence, and picking my way carefully from gra.s.sy hummock to gra.s.sy hummock; and soon I had found a specimen. Upon a.n.a.lysis it proved to be calopogon, familiar to all New Englanders from childhood, but new to my Ohio eyes.

I have never made any formal herbarium, and the only botanical record I have ever kept consists of the date and place of my first seeing the flower written opposite its scientific name in the margin of the pages of my old school-girl's copy of Gray's Botany. But that is the only record one needs to whom all the flowers one knows are either old friends or new acquaintances--in either case distinct individuals.

Often, as I have been turning the pages of the old botany in a bit of a.n.a.lyzing, I have stopped at the page on which is written, opposite the scientific name of the calopogon, 'Saint Henry's, Canada, July 11, 1884'; and across the more than twenty years that lie between, I smell once more the balsam of the Canadian forest, and see the amber-brown waters of the Chaudiere River, and hear the shouts of the trainmen as they throw the great sticks of wood up to the tender; and giving color to all this mental picture is the pink-purple blossom of the calopogon.

But all trains do not have the accommodating habit of stopping for wood just after you have seen a strange flower; in that case, all that you can do is, take the best mental landmarks you can, and then at the first opportunity go back for your specimen. One summer I was going down on the express from Philadelphia to Cape May. As you near the coast the road runs through very level country, and between the railway and the pine wood lies a strip of marshy ground about forty feet wide. Each year, as I go back to the sea-coast, I watch eagerly for my first sight of the two characteristic flowers of the Jersey coast, the swamp mallow and the sabbatia. On this particular morning I had already seen many of the great mallows with their rose-pink flowers, so like those of the hollyhock that not even the most careless eye can fail to notice the family resemblance; and I had welcomed them as a sure sign of the fast-nearing seash.o.r.e.

Now, with my face, as usual, close to the window, I was watching the spa.r.s.e marsh-gra.s.s most narrowly to see if I could detect amidst it the pink star-shaped flower of the sabbatia. Suddenly the marsh-gra.s.s was set thick with spikes of yellow flowers, just rising above the level of the gra.s.s. There was only that one hurried look as the train went by; but from that look I felt almost certain of two things: the first was that I had never seen that flower before, and the second, that it must be close of kin to an old flower friend of mine, the white fringed-orchis.