WHY AREN'T STUDENTS STUDENTS

The natural reaction of most students who read President Lowell's denunciation of them before the Association of American Universities is to oppose his charges with denials. The average student has somewhere in the back of his mind, at least a slight understanding of and respect for the real purpose for which he is in college, even though his academic record may not indicate it. This same average student, therefore, may resent President Lowell's speech as doing injustice to his intentions, even if not to his achievements. But why? To say the obvious, it is because scholastic glory appears to the average undergraduate as an inferior glory, not so brilliant, and intrinsically of less worth, than other glory to which he can aspire. This attitude is unquestionably pernicious, but if remedies are to be sought, they must deal with the causes which underly so false a perspective in the student's mind.

The main causes appear to be two: one, psychological in the student, the other, external to him and concerning the very nature of scholarship itself.

In the first place, college too often does not mean to the student what it should: four years of preparation in life. "College is life," says the undergraduate; and in consequence, all the grim earnestness of life is not postponed until the real business of life is entered upon, but is seized at once. Success--the bright star of every ambitious man--already dazzles his eyes. Success he must have now. And since popular clamor is taken as the measure of success, it is no wonder a student is often misled to seek it in those paths which bring immediate recognition from his fellows. Who is branded the college failure? Not the poor student, though he may be that too. He is branded a failure who goes through college unnoticed and indistinguished from the crowd. It seems to make no difference that after years often upset these early prognostics of who's who in the class. Tinsel still passes current for gold.

This evil is magnified in a large college. Scholastic achievement is in its nature a quiet and cloistered honor. It may penetrate as far as intimate friends but such a circle is of necessity a small fraction of the enrolment.

In the second place, what a student sees of scholarship in some of those who claim to represent its glories is more likely to repel than attract him. The grind sitting at his elbow and the pedant standing on the lecture platform are poor ambassadors to the student from that wondrous Republic of Intellect whose advantages are so often talked about, but so rarely demonstrated. The normal student wants to become a well-rounded man. In the grind he sees an impotent and grotesque shadow of a man, and in the pedant, the father of the grind.

True scholarship is as easily distinguished from pedantry as day from night, once the true scholar is recognized. But the student who is not already a scholar cannot be blamed for confounding the two, especially since they have a specious resemblance. When a professor who is also a pedant poses as a scholar, such a student, if he is human, may be pardoned for saying: "If that be scholarship, I'll none of it."

Both pedant and scholar deal with the same materials. Their difference is in their methods. Both may be thought of as playing a game, with bones as counters. The pedant shuffles the bones about in the dust, toys with them, scrutinizes them under a high powered microscope, classifies them, and then leaves them--dry bones. The scholar goes through the same procedure, but before he quits the game, he breathes into his bones the breath of life, and from the dust of ages emerges a living idea. The scholar has connected them with life, and that vital connection marks the greatest difference between scholarship and pedantry.

Perhaps no American university is so fortunate as Harvard in having on its faculty a large number of true scholars. They are the real educators. But any student of one year's residence can name a few pedants too. If the ideals of students are to be changed; if scholarship is to be exalted to its proper place in the college community: one of the first moves to overcome student sophistries must be directed against pedants, undergraduate and professorial. True scholarship must be given greater recognition, and pedantry must be persecuted, even to the point of extinction.