The atmospheric quality of a college is determined largely by the character and traditions of undergraduate life.  If that life has generous ideals, sound impulses, and traditions which appeal to the imagination, the atmosphere will do as much for many men as the formal instruction they receive.  It will inspire self-respect, firm ambitions, and general dignity and nobleness of nature.  Men will be drawn together by the sympathy of aspiration, rather than by mere congeniality of habit, and their daily association will have an educational influence of the most lasting kind.  It is this association which often leaves its mark on men who have failed to make right use of the opportunities for specific instruction which surround them.  A college education is complete, so far as any provisional education is complete, only when the student receives the strong impress of both teachers and associates; when instruction is competent and vital, and undergraduate life is wholesome, generous, and aspiring.

It is a significant fact that when a group of men develop creative gifts in later life it will generally be found that their undergraduate life together discovered strong sympathetic aspirations which bound them together and gave their intercourse a very stimulating quality.  The action and reaction upon each other of a group of young men of generous aims are peculiarly delicate and influential, affecting the very sources of individual strength and impulse.

Such influences are intermittent and irregular; it would be a great gain if they could become continuous and, in a flexible sense, organic.  Student life has been, at times, highly organized and penetrated by intellectual impulses.  Colleges differ greatly in this respect, but in American institutions the student life of to-day does not anywhere near realize its rich possibilities.  Its interest in athletics is so great that in this single field it may be said to be fairly well organized and fairly effective in securing the end for which it works; but in no other field is a similar activity discoverable, unless it be in that of journalism.  One of the most interesting features of the intellectual and moral revival now going on in France is the notable change that has come over student life, a change shown in a revival of song, of old student customs, of solidarity of feeling, and of a generous enthusiasm for the common traditions and views.  May not American students learn something from this contemporary illustration of the possibilities of organized student life?

Literary Monthly, 1893.

SELF-MADE MEN

I.—­B.  PRATT

ALFRED C. CHAPIN ’69