V. - Oxford as I See It
MY private station being that of a university professor, I was
naturally deeply interested in the system of education in England.
I was therefore led to make a special visit to Oxford and to submit
the place to a searching scrutiny. Arriving one afternoon at four
o'clock, I stayed at the Mitre Hotel and did not leave until eleven
o'clock next morning. The whole of this time, except for one hour
spent in addressing the undergraduates, was devoted to a close and
eager study of the great university. When I add to this that I had
already visited Oxford in 1907 and spent a Sunday at All Souls with
Colonel L. S. Amery, it will be seen at once that my views on Oxford
are based upon observations extending over fourteen years.
At any rate I can at least claim that my acquaintance with the
British university is just as good a basis for reflection and
judgment as that of the numerous English critics who come to our side
of the water. I have known a famous English author to arrive at
Harvard University in the morning, have lunch with President Lowell,
and then write a whole chapter on the Excellence of Higher Education
in America. I have known another one come to Harvard, have lunch with
President Lowell, and do an entire book on the Decline of Serious
Study in America. Or take the case of my own university. I remember
Mr. Rudyard Kipling coming to McGill and saying in his address to the
undergraduates at 2.30 P.M., "You have here a great institution." But
how could he have gathered this information? As far as I know he
spent the entire morning with Sir Andrew Macphail in his house beside
the campus, smoking cigarettes. When I add that he distinctly refused
to visit the Palaeontologic Museum, that he saw nothing of our new
hydraulic apparatus, or of our classes in Domestic Science, his
judgment that we had here a great institution seems a little bit
superficial. I can only put beside it, to redeem it in some measure,
the hasty and ill-formed judgment expressed by Lord Milner, "McGill
is a noble university": and the rash and indiscreet expression of
the Prince of Wales, when we gave him an LL.D. degree, "McGill has
a glorious future."
To my mind these unthinking judgments about our great college do
harm, and I determined, therefore, that anything that I said about
Oxford should be the result of the actual observation and real
study based upon a bona fide residence in the Mitre Hotel.
On the strength of this basis of experience I am prepared to make the
following positive and emphatic statements. Oxford is a noble
university. It has a great past. It is at present the greatest
university in the world: and it is quite possible that it has a great
future. Oxford trains scholars of the real type better than any other
place in the world. Its methods are antiquated. It despises science.
Its lectures are rotten. It has professors who never teach and
students who never learn. It has no order, no arrangement, no system.
Its curriculum is unintelligible. It has no president. It has no
state legislature to tell it how to teach, and yet,--it gets there.
Whether we like it or not, Oxford gives something to its students, a
life and a mode of thought, which in America as yet we can emulate
but not equal.
If anybody doubts this let him go and take a room at the Mitre
Hotel (ten and six for a wainscotted bedroom, period of Charles I)
and study the place for himself.
These singular results achieved at Oxford are all the more surprising
when one considers the distressing conditions under which the
students work. The lack of an adequate building fund compels them to
go on working in the same old buildings which they have had for
centuries. The buildings at Brasenose College have not been renewed
since the year 1525. In New College and Magdalen the students are
still housed in the old buildings erected in the sixteenth century.
At Christ Church I was shown a kitchen which had been built at the
expense of Cardinal Wolsey in 1527. Incredible though it may seem,
they have no other place to cook in than this and are compelled to
use it to-day. On the day when I saw this kitchen, four cooks were
busy roasting an ox whole for the students' lunch: this at least is
what I presumed they were doing from the size of the fire-place used,
but it may not have been an ox; perhaps it was a cow. On a huge
table, twelve feet by six and made of slabs of wood five inches
thick, two other cooks were rolling out a game pie. I estimated it as
measuring three feet across. In this rude way, unchanged since the
time of Henry VIII, the unhappy Oxford students are fed. I could not
help contrasting it with the cosy little boarding houses on Cottage
Grove Avenue where I used to eat when I was a student at Chicago, or
the charming little basement dining-rooms of the students' boarding
houses in Toronto. But then, of course, Henry VIII never lived in
Toronto.
The same lack of a building-fund necessitates the Oxford students,
living in the identical old boarding houses they had in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Technically they are called "quadrangles,"
"closes" and "rooms"; but I am so broken in to the usage of my
student days that I can't help calling them boarding houses. In many
of these the old stairway has been worn down by the feet of ten
generations of students: the windows have little latticed panes:
there are old names carved here and there upon the stone, and a thick
growth of ivy covers the walls. The boarding house at St. John's
College dates from 1509, the one at Christ Church from the same
period. A few hundred thousand pounds would suffice to replace these
old buildings with neat steel and brick structures like the normal
school at Schenectady, N.Y., or the Peel Street High School at
Montreal. But nothing is done. A movement was indeed attempted last
autumn towards removing the ivy from the walls, but the result was
unsatisfactory and they are putting it back. Any one could have told
them beforehand that the mere removal of the ivy would not brighten
Oxford up, unless at the same time one cleared the stones of the old
inscriptions, put in steel fire-escapes, and in fact brought the
boarding houses up to date.
But Henry VIII being dead, nothing was done. Yet in spite of its
dilapidated buildings and its lack of fire-escapes, ventilation,
sanitation, and up-to-date kitchen facilities, I persist in my
assertion that I believe that Oxford, in its way, is the greatest
university in the world. I am aware that this is an extreme statement
and needs explanation. Oxford is much smaller in numbers, for
example, than the State University of Minnesota, and is much poorer.
It has, or had till yesterday, fewer students than the University of
Toronto. To mention Oxford beside the 26,000 students of Columbia
University sounds ridiculous. In point of money, the 39,000,000
dollar endowment of the University of Chicago, and the $35,000,000
one of Columbia, and the $43,000,000 of Harvard seem to leave Oxford
nowhere. Yet the peculiar thing is that it is not nowhere. By some
queer process of its own it seems to get there every time. It was
therefore of the very greatest interest to me, as a profound scholar,
to try to investigate just how this peculiar excellence of Oxford
arises.
It can hardly be due to anything in the curriculum or programme of
studies. Indeed, to any one accustomed to the best models of a
university curriculum as it flourishes in the United States and
Canada, the programme of studies is frankly quite laughable. There
is less Applied Science in the place than would be found with us
in a theological college. Hardly a single professor at Oxford would
recognise a dynamo if he met it in broad daylight. The Oxford
student learns nothing of chemistry, physics, heat, plumbing,
electric wiring, gas-fitting or the use of a blow-torch. Any American
college student can run a motor car, take a gasoline engine to
pieces, fix a washer on a kitchen tap, mend a broken electric bell,
and give an expert opinion on what has gone wrong with the furnace.
It is these things indeed which stamp him as a college man, and
occasion a very pardonable pride in the minds of his parents.
But in all these things the Oxford student is the merest amateur.
This is bad enough. But after all one might say this is only the
mechanical side of education. True: but one searches in vain in
the Oxford curriculum for any adequate recognition of the higher
and more cultured studies. Strange though it seems to us on this
side of the Atlantic, there are no courses at Oxford in Housekeeping,
or in Salesmanship, or in Advertising, or on Comparative Religion,
or on the influence of the Press. There are no lectures whatever
on Human Behaviour, on Altruism, on Egotism, or on the Play of Wild
Animals. Apparently, the Oxford student does not learn these things.
This cuts him off from a great deal of the larger culture of our
side of the Atlantic. "What are you studying this year?" I once
asked a fourth year student at one of our great colleges. "I am
electing Salesmanship and Religion," he answered. Here was a young
man whose training was destined inevitably to turn him into a moral
business man: either that or nothing. At Oxford Salesmanship is
not taught and Religion takes the feeble form of the New Testament.
The more one looks at these things the more amazing it becomes that
Oxford can produce any results at all.
The effect of the comparison is heightened by the peculiar position
occupied at Oxford by the professors' lectures. In the colleges of
Canada and the United States the lectures are supposed to be a really
necessary and useful part of the student's training. Again and again
I have heard the graduates of my own college assert that they had got
as much, or nearly as much, out of the lectures at college as out of
athletics or the Greek letter society or the Banjo and Mandolin Club.
In short, with us the lectures form a real part of the college life.
At Oxford it is not so. The lectures, I understand, are given and may
even be taken. But they are quite worthless and are not supposed to
have anything much to do with the development of the, student's mind.
"The lectures here," said a Canadian student to me, "are punk." I
appealed to another student to know if this was so. "I don't know
whether I'd call them exactly punk," he answered, "but they're
certainly rotten." Other judgments were that the lectures were of no
importance: that nobody took them: that they don't matter: that you
can take them if you like: that they do you no harm.
It appears further that the professors themselves are not keen on
their lectures. If the lectures are called for they give them; if
not, the professor's feelings are not hurt. He merely waits and
rests his brain until in some later year the students call for his
lectures. There are men at Oxford who have rested their brains this
way for over thirty years: the accumulated brain power thus dammed
up is said to be colossal.
I understand that the key to this mystery is found in the operations
of the person called the tutor. It is from him, or rather with him,
that the students learn all that they know: one and all are agreed on
that. Yet it is a little odd to know just how he does it. "We go over
to his rooms," said one student, "and he just lights a pipe and talks
to us." "We sit round with him," said another, "and he simply smokes
and goes over our exercises with us." From this and other evidence I
gather that what an Oxford tutor does is to get a little group of
students together and smoke at them. Men who have been systematically
smoked at for four years turn into ripe scholars. If anybody doubts
this, let him go to Oxford and he can see the thing actually in
operation. A well-smoked man speaks, and writes English with a grace
that can be acquired in no other way.
In what was said above, I seem to have been directing criticism
against the Oxford professors as such: but I have no intention of
doing so. For the Oxford professor and his whole manner of being I
have nothing but a profound respect. There is indeed the greatest
difference between the modern up-to-date American idea of a professor
and the English type. But even with us in older days, in the bygone
time when such people as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were professors,
one found the English idea; a professor was supposed to be a
venerable kind of person, with snow-white whiskers reaching to his
stomach. He was expected to moon around the campus oblivious of the
world around him. If you nodded to him he failed to see you. Of money
he knew nothing; of business, far less. He was, as his trustees were
proud to say of him, "a child."
On the other hand he contained within him a reservoir of learning
of such depth as to be practically bottomless. None of this learning
was supposed to be of any material or commercial benefit to anybody.
Its use was in saving the soul and enlarging the mind.
At the head of such a group of professors was one whose beard was
even whiter and longer, whose absence of mind was even still greater,
and whose knowledge of money, business, and practical affairs was
below zero. Him they made the president.
All this is changed in America. A university professor is now a busy,
hustling person, approximating as closely to a business man as he can
do it. It is on the business man that he models himself. He has a
little place that he calls his "office," with a typewriter machine
and a stenographer. Here he sits and dictates letters, beginning
after the best business models, "in re yours of the eighth ult.,
would say, etc., etc." He writes these letters to students, to his
fellow professors, to the president, indeed to any people who will
let him write to them. The number of letters that he writes each
month is duly counted and set to his credit. If he writes enough he
will get a reputation as an "executive," and big things may happen to
him. He may even be asked to step out of the college and take a post
as an "executive" in a soap company or an advertising firm. The man,
in short, is a "hustler," an "advertiser" whose highest aim is to be
a "live-wire." If he is not, he will presently be dismissed, or, to
use the business term, be "let go," by a board of trustees who are
themselves hustlers and live-wires. As to the professor's soul, he no
longer needs to think of it as it has been handed over along with all
the others to a Board of Censors.
The American professor deals with his students according to his
lights. It is his business to chase them along over a prescribed
ground at a prescribed pace like a flock of sheep. They all go
humping together over the hurdles with the professor chasing them
with a set of "tests" and "recitations," "marks" and "attendances,"
the whole apparatus obviously copied from the time-clock of the
business man's factory. This process is what is called "showing
results." The pace set is necessarily that of the slowest, and thus
results in what I have heard Mr. Edward Beatty describe as the
"convoy system of education."
In my own opinion, reached after fifty-two years of profound
reflection, this system contains in itself the seeds of destruction.
It puts a premium on dulness and a penalty on genius. It circumscribes
that latitude of mind which is the real spirit of learning. If we
persist in it we shall presently find that true learning will fly
away from our universities and will take rest wherever some individual
and enquiring mind can mark out its path for itself.
Now the principal reason why I am led to admire Oxford is that the
place is little touched as yet by the measuring of "results," and by
this passion for visible and provable "efficiency." The whole system
at Oxford is such as to put a premium on genius and to let mediocrity
and dulness go their way. On the dull student Oxford, after a proper
lapse of time, confers a degree which means nothing more than that he
lived and breathed at Oxford and kept out of jail. This for many
students is as much as society can expect. But for the gifted
students Oxford offers great opportunities. There is no question of
his hanging back till the last sheep has jumped over the fence. He
need wait for no one. He may move forward as fast as he likes,
following the bent of his genius. If he has in him any ability beyond
that of the common herd, his tutor, interested in his studies, will
smoke at him until he kindles him into a flame. For the tutor's soul
is not harassed by herding dull students, with dismissal hanging by a
thread over his head in the class room. The American professor has no
time to be interested in a clever student. He has time to be
interested in his "deportment," his letter-writing, his executive
work, and his organising ability and his hope of promotion to a soap
factory. But with that his mind is exhausted. The student of genius
merely means to him a student who gives no trouble, who passes all
his "tests," and is present at all his "recitations." Such a student
also, if he can be trained to be a hustler and an advertiser, will
undoubtedly "make good." But beyond that the professor does not think
of him. The everlasting principle of equality has inserted itself in
a place where it has no right to be, and where inequality is the
breath of life.
American or Canadian college trustees would be horrified at the
notion of professors who apparently do no work, give few or no
lectures and draw their pay merely for existing. Yet these are
really the only kind of professors worth having,--I mean, men who
can be trusted with a vague general mission in life,
with a salary guaranteed at least till their death, and a sphere
of duties entrusted solely to their own consciences and the promptings
of their own desires. Such men are rare, but a single one of them,
when found, is worth ten "executives" and a dozen "organisers."
The excellence of Oxford, then, as I see it, lies in the peculiar
vagueness of the organisation of its work. It starts from the
assumption that the professor is a really learned man whose sole
interest lies in his own sphere: and that a student, or at least the
only student with whom the university cares to reckon seriously, is a
young man who desires to know. This is an ancient mediaeval attitude
long since buried in more up-to-date places under successive strata
of compulsory education, state teaching, the democratisation of
knowledge and the substitution of the shadow for the substance, and
the casket for the gem. No doubt, in newer places the thing has got
to be so. Higher education in America flourishes chiefly as a
qualification for entrance into a money-making profession, and not as
a thing in itself. But in Oxford one can still see the surviving
outline of a nobler type of structure and a higher inspiration.
I do not mean to say, however, that my judgment of Oxford is one
undiluted stream of praise. In one respect at least I think that
Oxford has fallen away from the high ideals of the Middle Ages. I
refer to the fact that it admits women students to its studies. In
the Middle Ages women were regarded with a peculiar chivalry long
since lost. It was taken for granted that their brains were too
delicately poised to allow them to learn anything. It was presumed
that their minds were so exquisitely hung that intellectual effort
might disturb them. The present age has gone to the other extreme:
and this is seen nowhere more than in the crowding of women into
colleges originally designed for men. Oxford, I regret to find,
has not stood out against this change.
To a profound scholar like myself, the presence of these young women,
many of them most attractive, flittering up and down the streets of
Oxford in their caps and gowns, is very distressing.
Who is to blame for this and how they first got in I do not know.
But I understand that they first of all built a private college of
their own close to Oxford, and then edged themselves in foot by foot.
If this is so they only followed up the precedent of the recognised
method in use in America. When an American college is established,
the women go and build a college of their own overlooking the
grounds. Then they put on becoming caps and gowns and stand and look
over the fence at the college athletics. The male undergraduates, who
were originally and by nature a hardy lot, were not easily disturbed.
But inevitably some of the senior trustees fell in love with the
first year girls and became convinced that coeducation was a noble
cause. American statistics show that between 1880 and 1900 the number
of trustees and senior professors who married girl undergraduates or
who wanted to do so reached a percentage of,--I forget the exact
percentage; it was either a hundred or a little over.
I don't know just what happened at Oxford but presumably something
of the sort took place. In any case the women are now all over the
place. They attend the college lectures, they row in a boat, and
they perambulate the High Street. They are even offering a serious
competition against the men. Last year they carried off the ping-pong
championship and took the chancellor's prize for needlework, while
in music, cooking and millinery the men are said to be nowhere.
There is no doubt that unless Oxford puts the women out while there
is yet time, they will overrun the whole university. What this
means to the progress of learning few can tell and those who know
are afraid to say.
Cambridge University, I am glad to see, still sets its face sternly
against this innovation. I am reluctant to count any superiority in
the University of Cambridge. Having twice visited Oxford, having made
the place a subject of profound study for many hours at a time,
having twice addressed its undergraduates, and having stayed at the
Mitre Hotel, I consider myself an Oxford man. But I must admit that
Cambridge has chosen the wiser part.
Last autumn, while I was in London on my voyage of discovery, a
vote was taken at Cambridge to see if the women who have already
a private college nearby, should be admitted to the university.
They were triumphantly shut out; and as a fit and proper sign of
enthusiasm the undergraduates went over in a body and knocked down
the gates of the women's college. I know that it is a terrible
thing to say that any one approved of this. All the London papers
came out with headings that read,--ARE OUR UNDERGRADUATES TURNING
INTO BABOONS? and so on. The Manchester Guardian draped its pages
in black and even the London Morning Post was afraid to take bold
ground in the matter. But I do know also that there was a great
deal of secret chuckling and jubilation in the London clubs. Nothing
was expressed openly. The men of England have been too terrorised
by the women for that.
But in safe corners of the club, out of earshot of the waiters and
away from casual strangers, little groups of elderly men chuckled
quietly together. "Knocked down their gates, eh?" said the wicked
old men to one another, and then whispered guiltily behind an
uplifted hand, "Serve 'em right." Nobody dared to say anything
outside. If they had some one would have got up and asked a question
in the House of Commons. When this is done all England falls flat
upon its face.
But for my part when I heard of the Cambridge vote, I felt as Lord
Chatham did when he said in parliament, "Sir, I rejoice that America
has resisted." For I have long harboured views of my own upon the
higher education of women. In these days, however, it requires no
little hardihood to utter a single word of criticism against it.
It is like throwing half a brick through the glass roof of a
conservatory. It is bound to make trouble. Let me hasten, therefore,
to say that I believe most heartily in the higher education of
women; in fact, the higher the better. The only question to my
mind is: What is "higher education" and how do you get it? With
which goes the secondary enquiry, What is a woman and is she just
the same as a man? I know that it sounds a terrible thing to say
in these days, but I don't believe she is.
Let me say also that when I speak of coeducation I speak of what
I know. I was coeducated myself some thirty-five years ago, at the
very beginning of the thing. I learned my Greek alongside of a bevy
of beauty on the opposite benches that mashed up the irregular
verbs for us very badly. Incidentally, those girls are all married
long since, and all the Greek they know now you could put under a
thimble. But of that presently.
I have had further experience as well. I spent three years in the
graduate school of Chicago, where coeducational girls were as thick
as autumn leaves, and some thicker. And as a college professor at
McGill University in Montreal, I have taught mingled classes of
men and women for twenty years.
On the basis of which experience I say with assurance that the thing
is a mistake and has nothing to recommend it but its relative
cheapness. Let me emphasise this last point and have done with it.
Coeducation is of course a great economy. To teach ten men and ten
women in a single class of twenty costs only half as much as to teach
two classes. Where economy must rule, then, the thing has got to be.
But where the discussion turns not on what is cheapest, but on what
is best, then the case is entirely different.
The fundamental trouble is that men and women are different creatures,
with different minds and different aptitudes and different paths
in life. There is no need to raise here the question of which is
superior and which is inferior (though I think, the Lord help me,
I know the answer to that too). The point lies in the fact that
they are different.
But the mad passion for equality has masked this obvious fact. When
women began to demand, quite rightly, a share in higher education,
they took for granted that they wanted the same curriculum as the
men. They never stopped to ask whether their aptitudes were not in
various directions higher and better than those of the men, and
whether it might not be better for their sex to cultivate the things
which were best suited to their minds. Let me be more explicit. In
all that goes with physical and mathematical science, women, on the
average, are far below the standard of men. There are, of course,
exceptions. But they prove nothing. It is no use to quote to me the
case of some brilliant girl who stood first in physics at Cornell.
That's nothing. There is an elephant in the zoo that can count up to
ten, yet I refuse to reckon myself his inferior.
Tabulated results spread over years, and the actual experience of
those who teach show that in the whole domain of mathematics and
physics women are outclassed. At McGill the girls of our first year
have wept over their failures in elementary physics these twenty-five
years. It is time that some one dried their tears and took away
the subject.
But, in any case, examination tests are never the whole story. To
those who know, a written examination is far from being a true
criterion of capacity. It demands too much of mere memory,
imitativeness, and the insidious willingness to absorb other people's
ideas. Parrots and crows would do admirably in examinations. Indeed,
the colleges are full of them.
But take, on the other hand, all that goes with the aesthetic side
of education, with imaginative literature and the cult of beauty.
Here women are, or at least ought to be, the superiors of men.
Women were in primitive times the first story-tellers. They are
still so at the cradle side. The original college woman was the
witch, with her incantations and her prophecies and the glow of
her bright imagination, and if brutal men of duller brains had not
burned it out of her, she would be incanting still. To my thinking,
we need more witches in the colleges and less physics.
I have seen such young witches myself,--if I may keep the word: I
like it,--in colleges such as Wellesley in Massachusetts and Bryn
Mawr in Pennsylvania, where there isn't a man allowed within the
three mile limit. To my mind, they do infinitely better thus by
themselves. They are freer, less restrained. They discuss things
openly in their classes; they lift up their voices, and they speak,
whereas a girl in such a place as McGill, with men all about her,
sits for four years as silent as a frog full of shot.
But there is a deeper trouble still. The careers of the men and
women who go to college together are necessarily different, and
the preparation is all aimed at the man's career. The men are going
to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, business men, and politicians.
And the women are not.
There is no use pretending about it. It may sound an awful thing to
say, but the women are going to be married. That is, and always has
been, their career; and, what is more, they know it; and even at
college, while they are studying algebra and political economy, they
have their eye on it sideways all the time. The plain fact is that,
after a girl has spent four years of her time and a great deal of her
parents' money in equipping herself for a career that she is never
going to have, the wretched creature goes and gets married, and in a
few years she has forgotten which is the hypotenuse of a right-angled
triangle, and she doesn't care. She has much better things to think
of.
At this point some one will shriek: "But surely, even for marriage,
isn't it right that a girl should have a college education?" To which
I hasten to answer: most assuredly. I freely admit that a girl who
knows algebra, or once knew it, is a far more charming companion and
a nobler wife and mother than a girl who doesn't know x from y. But
the point is this: Does the higher education that fits a man to be a
lawyer also fit a person to be a wife and mother? Or, in other
words, is a lawyer a wife and mother? I say he is not. Granted that
a girl is to spend four years in time and four thousand dollars in
money in going to college, why train her for a career that she is
never going to adopt? Why not give her an education that will have a
meaning and a harmony with the real life that she is to follow?
For example, suppose that during her four years every girl lucky
enough to get a higher education spent at least six months of it
in the training and discipline of a hospital as a nurse. There is
more education and character making in that than in a whole bucketful
of algebra.
But no, the woman insists on snatching her share of an education
designed by Erasmus or William of Wykeham or William of Occam for
the creation of scholars and lawyers; and when later on in her home
there is a sudden sickness or accident, and the life or death of
those nearest to her hangs upon skill and knowledge and a trained
fortitude in emergency, she must needs send in all haste for a
hired woman to fill the place that she herself has never learned
to occupy.
But I am not here trying to elaborate a whole curriculum. I am only
trying to indicate that higher education for the man is one thing,
for the woman another. Nor do I deny the fact that women have got to
earn their living. Their higher education must enable them to do
that. They cannot all marry on their graduation day. But that is no
great matter. No scheme of education that any one is likely to devise
will fail in this respect.
The positions that they hold as teachers or civil servants they
would fill all the better if their education were fitted to their
wants.
Some few, a small minority, really and truly "have a
career,"--husbandless and childless,--in which the sacrifice is
great and the honour to them, perhaps, all the higher. And others
no doubt dream of a career in which a husband and a group of
blossoming children are carried as an appendage to a busy life at
the bar or on the platform. But all such are the mere minority, so
small as to make no difference to the general argument.
But there--I have written quite enough to make plenty of trouble
except perhaps at Cambridge University. So I return with relief to my
general study of Oxford. Viewing the situation as a whole, I am led
then to the conclusion that there must be something in the life of
Oxford itself that makes for higher learning. Smoked at by his tutor,
fed in Henry VIII's kitchen, and sleeping in a tangle of ivy, the
student evidently gets something not easily obtained in America. And
the more I reflect on the matter the more I am convinced that it is
the sleeping in the ivy that does it. How different it is from
student life as I remember it!
When I was a student at the University of Toronto thirty years ago,
I lived,--from start to finish,--in seventeen different boarding
houses. As far as I am aware these houses have not, or not yet,
been marked with tablets. But they are still to be found in the
vicinity of McCaul and Darcy, and St. Patrick Streets. Any one who
doubts the truth of what I have to say may go and look at them.
I was not alone in the nomadic life that I led. There were hundreds
of us drifting about in this fashion from one melancholy habitation
to another. We lived as a rule two or three in a house, sometimes
alone. We dined in the basement. We always had beef, done up in
some way after it was dead, and there were always soda biscuits on
the table. They used to have a brand of soda biscuits in those days
in the Toronto boarding houses that I have not seen since. They
were better than dog biscuits but with not so much snap. My
contemporaries will all remember them. A great many of the leading
barristers and professional men of Toronto were fed on them.
In the life we led we had practically no opportunities for association
on a large scale, no common rooms, no reading rooms, nothing. We
never saw the magazines,--personally I didn't even know the names
of them. The only interchange of ideas we ever got was by going
over to the Caer Howell Hotel on University Avenue and interchanging
them there.
I mention these melancholy details not for their own sake but merely
to emphasise the point that when I speak of students' dormitories,
and the larger life which they offer, I speak of what I know.
If we had had at Toronto, when I was a student, the kind of
dormitories and dormitory life that they have at Oxford, I don't
think I would ever have graduated. I'd have been there still. The
trouble is that the universities on our Continent are only just
waking up to the idea of what a university should mean. They were,
very largely, instituted and organised with the idea that a
university was a place where young men were sent to absorb the
contents of books and to listen to lectures in the class rooms. The
student was pictured as a pallid creature, burning what was called
the "midnight oil," his wan face bent over his desk. If you wanted to
do something for him you gave him a book: if you wanted to do
something really large on his behalf you gave him a whole basketful
of them. If you wanted to go still further and be a benefactor to the
college at large, you endowed a competitive scholarship and set two
or more pallid students working themselves to death to get it.
The real thing for the student is the life and environment that
surrounds him. All that he really learns he learns, in a sense, by
the active operation of his own intellect and not as the
passive recipient of lectures. And for this active operation what
he really needs most is the continued and intimate contact with
his fellows. Students must live together and eat together, talk
and smoke together. Experience shows that that is how their minds
really grow. And they must live together in a rational and comfortable
way. They must eat in a big dining room or hall, with oak beams
across the ceiling, and the stained glass in the windows, and with
a shield or tablet here or there upon the wall, to remind them
between times of the men who went before them and left a name worthy
of the memory of the college. If a student is to get from his
college what it ought to give him, a college dormitory, with the
life in common that it brings, is his absolute right. A university
that fails to give it to him is cheating him.
If I were founding a university--and I say it with all the
seriousness of which I am capable--I would found first a smoking
room; then when I had a little more money in hand I would found a
dormitory; then after that, or more probably with it, a decent
reading room and a library. After that, if I still had money over
that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text
books.
This chapter has sounded in the most part like a continuous eulogy
of Oxford with but little in favour of our American colleges. I
turn therefore with pleasure to the more congenial task of showing
what is wrong with Oxford and with the English university system
generally, and the aspect in which our American universities far
excell the British.
The point is that Henry VIII is dead. The English are so proud of
what Henry VIII and the benefactors of earlier centuries did for the
universities that they forget the present. There is little or nothing
in England to compare with the magnificent generosity of individuals,
provinces and states, which is building up the colleges of the United
States and Canada. There used to be. But by some strange confusion of
thought the English people admire the noble gifts of Cardinal Wolsey
and Henry VIII and Queen Margaret, and do not realise that the
Carnegies and Rockefellers and the William Macdonalds are the
Cardinal Wolseys of to-day. The University of Chicago was founded
upon oil. McGill University rests largely on a basis of tobacco. In
America the world of commerce and business levies on itself a noble
tribute in favour of the higher learning. In England, with a few
conspicuous exceptions, such as that at Bristol, there is little of
the sort. The feudal families are content with what their remote
ancestors have done: they do not try to emulate it in any great
degree.
In the long run this must count. Of all the various reforms that
are talked of at Oxford, and of all the imitations of American
methods that are suggested, the only one worth while, to my thinking,
is to capture a few millionaires, give them honorary degrees at a
million pounds sterling apiece, and tell them to imagine that they
are Henry the Eighth. I give Oxford warning that if this is not
done the place will not last another two centuries.
