Should Students Study?. William Trufant Foster

      Chapter I. College Life

       Table of Contents

      "Do not let your studies interfere with your college education." This motto adorns the walls of many a student's room. It is his semi-humorous way of expressing his semi-conviction that his studies do not count—that the thing to go in for is "College Life." The thing, made up of intercollegiate athletics and lesser diversions, looms large in the student's mind. This frequenter of college walks and halls and tombs and grand stands I call a "student" for want of a safer term, though it sometimes does him injustice. He has sundry answers to the question whether students should study.

       Not Merely an Academic Question

      In academic circles this is not merely an academic question. The boy who goes to college faces it, in one form or another, again and again. Indeed, before he dons his freshman togs his mother tells him not to study too hard, and his father gives him to understand that deficiencies in scholarship, which do not end his college career, will be overlooked if he makes the football team. He observes the boys who return from college; he finds that their language and their clothes bear marks of a higher education. He bears accounts of initiations and celebrations. His chum's big brother takes him aside and tells him confidentially just how he must conduct himself in order to be rushed for the right fraternity. Everybody tells him he must be a "good fellow"; few discourse upon the joys of curriculum. Whether students should study may remain with him and open question, but he begins to doubt whether students do study.

      With his mind set on going to college, he reads all that comes to hand on the subject. The newspapers give him vivid details of the games, big and little, with full-page pictures of the heroes. They report nightshirt parades, student riots, dances, beernights—anything but studies. Now and then they do give space to a professor, if he has been indiscreet, or has appeared to say something scandalous which everybody in college knows he did not say, or if he his sued for divorce. They even spare him and inch or two if he is awarded a Nobel Prize.

      The lad reads stories of College Life. How they glow with escapades! His mind becomes a moving picture of thrilling escapes, of goats enthroned on professiorial chairs, of freshies ducked in chilling waters, of battalions of roosters yelling with the precision of a cash-register. Now and then there is mention of lectures and examinations, for it appears that the sophisticated youth knows many devices for "getting by" these impediments to the unalloyed enjoyment of College Life. Surely the high-school teacher who spoke with such enthusiasm about the lectures of "Old Socrates" must be hopelessly behind the times. Surely nobody goes to college nowadays for lectures.

      After entering college the boy continues his studies in the philosophy of education under the tutelage of a sophomore. His tutor informs him that the object of education is the all-round man. The faculty and the curriculum, he explains, are obstacles, but the upper classes rescue the poor freshman from pentagonal and other primitive shapes and round him out with smokers, hazing, initiations, jamborees, and visits to the big city, where he makes the acquaintance of drinks and ladies far more brilliant-hued than those of his somber native town. He is told that he is "seeing life," and that college will make an all-round man of him yet, if the faculty do not interfere with his education.

      If this sophomoric philosophy leaves any doubts to puzzle the freshman, they may be cleared away by the alumni who return to warm up the fraternity-house with stories of the good old days. And, of course, the lad joins a fraternity before giving his course of study a thought. For what is college to a non-fraternity man? Merely and institution of learning. To the man with the Greek-lettered pin the fraternity is the sine qua non of higher education, the radiant whole of which the college is a convenient part, providing for the fraternity a local habitation.