The influx of foreign students has added to the cosmopolitan life
of American institutions. So far as they are Orientals, the English
departments are specially modified both in the character of the
attendance and the instruction by their presence. The professor’s
task of adjusting instruction to a mixed assembly of American,
Indian, Mohammedan, Porto Rican, Chinese, and Japanese students may
be inferred from the answer of a young East Indian student who was
asked to describe in English his daily routine:
At the break of day I rises from my own bed, then I employ
myself till 8 o’clock, after which I employ myself to
bathe, then take for my body some sweetmeat, and just at 9½
I came to school to attend my class duty, then, at 2½ P. M.
I return from school and engage myself to do my further
duties then I engage for a quarter to take my tiffin, then
I study till 5 P. M., after which I began to play anything
which comes in my head. After 8½ half pass to eight we are
began to sleep, before sleeping I told a constable just 11
o’ he came and rose us from half pass elevan we began to
read still morning.
The familiar din of dishes at the commons of Columbia, as
well as at the University of California, serves to raise the
pitch of a polyglot table-talk that often represents a dozen
nationalities. Last year in American colleges there were hundreds
of undergraduates of alien speech, customs, ideals, temperaments,
and religion. Among these were a specially important delegation
of three hundred Chinese young men who were beneficiaries of the
Boxer indemnity fund. These students from foreign nations still
further subdivide undergraduate life through their race clubs,
societies for learning English, special religious conferences, and
new studies.
COLLEGE TRADITIONS
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