The undergraduate, spending laborious days upon the invention which
shall make industrial progress possible in lands his eyes will
never see, is carried along by an impulse not easily expressed.
He realizes the feeling that Robert Louis Stevenson expressed
when he said about his writing that he felt like thanking God
that he had a chance to earn his bread upon such joyful terms. He
has deliberately turned his back upon certain temporalities in
order to face the sunrise of some new ideal for social betterment
or national progress. He has heard the gods calling him to some
far-reaching profession that is more than a position. There is
stirring in him always the sense of message. He has caught the
clear, captivating voice of a unique life-work. It urges him on to
the occupation of his new land of dreams. Is this leader worried
because some one misunderstands him? Does he envy the man who,
following another ideal, sweeps by in an automobile which perhaps
his own particular genius has made possible? The pioneer of letters
who has known the sweetness and light of literary satisfaction, the
fine frenzy of that creative, imaginative activity in which ideas
are caught and crystallized in words, does not despair when his
earthly rewards seem to linger.
The college, then, is a means only to the larger life of spirit and
service. It exists to point out the goal the attainment of which
lies inherent in the student. The college is like the tug-boat that
pulls the ship from the harbor to the clear water of the free, open
sea. The curriculum, the play-life, the laboratory, the patriotism
of the college spirit, the buildings, and the men, are only torches
gleaming through the morning shadows of the student’s coming day.
V
THE COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD
“How crooked can a modern business man be and still be straight?”
This question was propounded at a college dinner in New York by a
young lawyer who, in behalf of the recent graduates of an Eastern
university, had been asked to give utterance to some of the first
impressions of a young alumnus upon his entrance into the life of
the world. The question was not asked in a trifling manner, but
it represented the query which inevitably arises in the mind of
the graduate of ideals and high desires who to-day leaves his alma
mater to plunge into the confused business and professional life of
our times.
The question awakens the inquiry as to whether the colleges of
America are to-day sending into the world trained leaders or
subservient followers; whether graduates enter their special
careers with a real message and mission, or whether, however
optimistically they may begin their work, their high purposes are
buried or not beneath the rush of practical and material affairs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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