UNIVERSITY SPIRIT.*

By THOMAS P. BAILEY, JR.

The Greatest Teacher is said to have come to full selfconsciousness and a knowledge of his mission at the age of thirty; perhaps our University, too, on this her thirtieth birthday, is looking forward to a fuller and a greater life. While we are entirely justified in looking forward eagerly toward fitting "outward and visible signs" of our University's greatness, let us not forget to direct our deeper spiritual glance from time to time at that "inward and spiritual grace," that University spirit without which neither marble and metal, nor landscape and climate can be of any avail. In homely fashion, then, let us briefly take spiritual stock of ourselves.

"College spirit" first, for the American university grows out of the American college, and the spirit of the one is a higher and more specialized form of the inspiration of the other. Although sports are often a good index to college life, defeat and victory mean little to true college spirit in comparison with the physical, mental, and moral causes that operate in athletic training, and the college feelings and customs connected therewith. The true college athlete is healthy and stays healthy as far as care and conscience make it possible; his performance is artistic as well as successful; his obedience is cheerful; his leadership kindly and firm. Nor is he an eye-servant, but is he dutiful in those

*Abstract of Charter Day Address, 1898.

small unseen matters that often predetermine success for the college. He values his college for its moral and intellectual life and greatness, and strives to make his athletic life reflect his inner character. We can put up with defeat, but we cannot suffer envy, hatred, malice, and uncharitableness. We welcome victory, if it be due not to the "other side's" deficiency, but to our own honest, manly effort. Let us rejoice when our students are one with the faculty in being ashamed of a mental defective or indignant at a moral delinquent, when either one or the other represents the University in anything. Indeed, a proper college spirit would make such representation impossible. The mental standard is fairly easily guarded by the Faculty: the moral ought to be guarded by the students, not by priggishness and spying, but by a high spirit of honor and honesty as the very inner life of athletic endeavor. College life is very tame without athletics; but athletic sports are very stupid and barbarous without college spirit.

The student of human nature can gain much knowledge about the spirit of a college by studying the inside history of athletics, but if he wishes to know more specifically, let him study the sociality, individual and organized; the spirit in which the studies are carried on; and, finally, the code of honor and maxims of morality implied in the daily scholastic life.

Sociality is not made to order. The violent grafting in of alien practices will not produce it; ferocious clinging to absurd and antiquated customs will not preserve it; frantic appeals to the sense of duty will not increase it. Many of the ordinary decencies of life help it on. Gentlemanly and ladylike courtesy and consideration for the feelings of others; a genial sense of humor that can take a joke, that avoids ponderous efforts at popularity, that can distinguish between coarse, vapid jests and genuine Attic salt; a generic delight in gregariousness, accompanied by a special talent for friendship and distaste for silly cliques,-these are some of the qualities we find in sociable people; and

introductions, receptions, and the like can never take their place. Organized sociality is quite a problem when common meeting-places are not at hand. But it hardly pays to demand halls and buildings for social purposes, when professors' drawing-rooms and a building supposedly given for social purposes, are so little used. Sociability is little stimulated by the mob-consciousness. When the two or three are gathered together without excluding others or over-zealously bidding them, the spirit of togetherness is more than apt to be in the midst of them. The multiplication of societies that fail to socialise, and of clubs or meetings that are bores in disguise, can only make 'organized sociality" disagreeable. Five faithful souls of catholic spirit and sympathy can do more when knit together by common interests or tastes than any number of "organized" yelling mobs. The enthusiasm of numbers is inspiring only when it is worthy. Stampeded cattle or howling savages have an æsthetic value-even have their place in the spectacular drama of the universe-but such mobbishness no more makes sociality or "college spirit" than snobbishness constitutes morality.

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Two virtues are prominent in any proper academic spirit -on the one hand, orderliness and respect for authority; on the other, spontaneity and respect for one's individuality. No college can afford to neglect either factor. Orderliness can easily degenerate into red-tapeism; liberty easily becomes license and anarchy. Formalism often gives good training; individualism frequently develops talent. But the intellectual gymnast without the athletics of the mind approaches the circus acrobat, and the intellectual athlete without formal training tends to be like unto the oarsman whose health is in his rowing muscles only. What mean cramming for examinations, "loading-up" on library extracts, enthusiastic discussion of "marks," criticism by rule of thumb, "working-off" hours and courses in the laboratory, reeling off lecture notes and text-book paragraphs in recitation, "getting-in" hours in professional

courses because one may be a teacher or a lawyer or something else? And what mean indifference as to attendance, carelessness about formal results, contempt for bibliography, disbelief in criticism, premature "specializing" in laboratory and elsewhere, contempt for what one professedly does not understand, and so on? Have we none of these faults? Then happy are we. Perhaps the professors have so many common aims and are so sympathetically acquainted with one another's methods, that scholarship and talent have become indissolubly linked together, and the students find it easy to catch the fine spirit of their teachers. In all seriousness, let us hope that the time will come when no judicious person can accuse us of departmentalism, formalism, individualism, or any other abstract, incomplete, and unlovely academic "ism."

College morality is a topic one would gladly pass over in silence. Discussion of it is painful, but refusal to treat it is worse. Let us sharply lay bare the diseased spot. In a word, do we tolerate cheating-that ugly compound of lying and stealing? Are our students and instructors careless about the ordinary moral decencies of life? Is it impossible to prevent cheating? Shall we lay all the blame. on the lower schools, without attempting to help them eradicate this evil by at least setting them a good example? No matter if "they cheat elsewhere," it is our clear and ordinary duty to join together-students and faculty-in stamping out this disgraceful evil. However few the cheaters, a great university dare not put up with them. The exact wording of a regulation or a resolution is no doubt an important matter for a learned faculty to discuss; a declaration of preferences in regard to college functionaries may be an important matter for the student body to decide upon; but these things are the "mint, anise, and cummin," which, while spicy, are not on a par with the weightier matters of the law. Perfunctory expressions. of moral disapproval and carefully construed pledges are not sufficient, even if efficient. Nothing but organized,

coöperative, class by class, weeding-out will clear the ground. Spying is a cure worse than the disease. But the students that come to this University ought to feel as soon as they enter that the public opinion against dishonesty cannot safely be tampered with. A cure has been effected in other institutions; shall we surrender to the cheaters?

Thus far, only college spirit has been spoken of. And what of university spirit, the spirit of single-minded search for truth? If our university work proper begins in the Junior year, college spirit must prepare the way, must initiate the higher truth-loving; university spirit is college spirit plus. If we agree that the work of a university divides itself into philosophy, science, and art, in the widest sense of these terms, we may claim that the truth-spirit in all these spheres of knowledge is one and the same. In this day of specialization we are prone to build Chinese walls about our little plots of truth. Even philosophy is but an abstraction from the fullness of character-life, and so with art and science. Without science, philosophy is sterile; without art, it is pedantic and wearisome to minds that want life and more of it. The very term "scientific imagination" tells us that science is born of art, and in turn begets it. To cut science off from philosophy is to deprive it of interest in its own deepest problems, as well as to render it unhuman. The material sciences cannot be disconnected from the mental sciences, and these enter into philosophy. Art has its philosophy and its science -it is at once truth natural and truth human. Yet we find one-sided devotees who shut their eyes to the glory of full-orbed truth, who claim "real reality" for their own little reflections of the light divine, who wonder what rational men can find to delight them in the flickering rays that straggle into their minds through other peep-holes. Intellectual arrogance is a most subtle form of egotistic pride. Perhaps the instructors in this University all have the university spirit of catholicity of mind and heart. If so, the students will gladly seek to "be in the spirit" also.