The first principle of college life is the principle of doing one's duty. In your appreciation of scholarship, your first duty is to learn your lessons. I have known many college men who learned their lessons, who yet failed to get from the college all that they ought to get. But I have never known a man who failed to get his lessons, whatever else he may have got, to receive the full advantage of the course. The curriculum of every good college is the resultant of scores or of hundreds of years of reflection and of trial. It represents methods, content, purposes, which many teachers through many experiments of success and of failure have learned are the best forces for training mind and for forming character.
But for the student to receive worthy advantage from these forces he is obliged to relate himself to them by hard intellectual attention and application. Sir Leslie Stephen says that the Cambridge teachers of his time were not given to enthusiasms, but preached common-sense, and common-sense said: "Stick to your triposes, grind at your mill, and don't set the universe in order till you have taken your bachelor's degree." The duty of the American college student is no less evident. He is to stick to his triposes. His triposes are his lessons. Among the greatest of all teachers was Louis Agassiz. A story has become classical as told by the distinguished naturalist, the late Dr. Samuel H. Scudder, regarding the methods of the great teacher with his students.
In brief the story is that Mr. Scudder on going to Agassiz was told, "'Take this fish and look at it. We call it a Hæmulon. By and by I will ask you what you have seen.' ... In ten minutes I had seen all that could be seen in that fish.... Half an hour passed, an hour, another hour; the fish began to look loathsome. I turned it over and around; looked it in the face—ghastly!—from behind, beneath, above, sideways, at three-quarters view—just as ghastly. I was in despair. At an early hour I concluded that lunch was necessary; so, with infinite relief, the fish was carefully replaced in the jar, and for an hour I was free.
"On my return I learned that Professor Agassiz had been at the Museum, but had gone, and would not return for several hours.... Slowly I drew forth that hideous fish, and, with a feeling of desperation, again looked at it. I might not use a magnifying glass; instruments of all kinds were interdicted. My two hands, my two eyes, and the fish; it seemed a most limited field.... At last a happy thought struck me—I would draw the fish; and now with surprise I began to discover new features in the creature....
"He listened attentively to my brief rehearsal of the structure of parts whose names were still unknown to me.... When I had finished he waited, as if expecting more, and then, with an air of disappointment, 'You have not looked very carefully; why,' he continued most earnestly, 'you haven't even seen one of the most conspicuous features of the animal, which is as plainly before your eyes as the animal itself. Look again! Look again!' and he left me to my misery.
"I ventured to ask what I should do next.
"'Oh, look at your fish,' he said, and left me again to my own devices. In a little more than an hour he returned and heard my new catalogue.
"'That is good, that is good,' he repeated: 'but that is not all; go on.' And so for three long days he placed that fish before my eyes, forbidding me to look at anything else or use any artificial aid. 'Look, look, look,' was his repeated injunction."
Doctor Scudder says that this was the best entomological lesson he ever had, and a lesson of which the influence extended to the details of every subsequent study.
It is the duty of the college student to look at his fish, to thumb his lexicon, to read his textbook, to study his notes, to think, and think hard, upon the truth therein presented. Of all the students in the world the Scotch represent this simple duty the best. The men at Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Aberdeen toil mightily.
The duty of learning one's lessons is, in these times, opposed by at least two elements of college life. One is self-indulgence and the other is athletics. Self-indulgence is a general cause and constant. Athletics have in the last thirty years come to be a force more or less dominant. Athletics represent a mighty force for collegiate and human betterment. Football, which is par excellence the college game, is an admirable method of training the man physical, the man intellectual and the man ethical. But football is not a college purpose; it is a college means. It is a means for the promotion of scholarship, for the formation of manhood. When football or other forms of college sport are turned from being a method and a means into being ends in themselves the misfortune is lamentable.
At a recent Harvard commencement, Professor Shaler, than whom no man in Harvard was more vitally in touch with all undergraduate interests, spoke of the harm wrought upon many students through their absorption in athletics. It cannot be denied for an instant that many men are hurt by giving undue attention to sports. Of course many men are benefited, and, are benefited vastly, by athletics, but men who are harmed should at once be obliged to learn the lesson of learning their lessons. That is the chief lesson which they ought to learn.