MEN OF CLAY

In the present-day passion for whole-sale analysis the undergraduate is serving his turn. The "what" and "why" of everything the college man does is sifted, weighed and from it are deduced generalizations to fit a pattern rather than an individual. Those of us who are occupied in the pursuit of parchment letters to add to our names are all lumped together--by a writer in the "Transcript" as "that painful figure--the college boy." The same philosopher concludes his dissertation by advising us that the sooner we accept with "strong humility" Thackeray's dictum that at twenty-one a boy is an ass; the sooner we can resume our high ambition of becoming great and useful men and "shaking a loose and happy leg as sixty." A critic in New York declares the life of the average college man to be largely the result of his environment, the influence divided into 5 percent the college, 20 percent his preparatory school and 75 percent his home.

All of this is like strong medicine, helpful and effective; but dangerous if swallowed blindly without careful reading of the instructions. The ideal college man of these analyses is a man of clay, moulded by heredity and environment. Of necessity he is a type, not an individual, and he has no actions or reactions of his own towards anything. The conclusions arrived at by this line of reasoning are intentionally general. When applied personally they open pleasing vistas for those inclined to the "God fights on the side of the heaviest artillery" school of philosophy. It is dangerously easy for the small school freshman for instance to sit back, "down on his luck", satisfied that he is not responsible for his non-success in college or anywhere else,--that he is merely the victim of unfavorable circumstances. The personal equation is forgotten.

To go back to the chemical simile, analysing the undergraduate in terms of percents, it is the individual quality that outbalances all the rest. If the college is a crucible into which is poured the raw product of heredity and environment, what is it that influences most profoundly the result which emerges after four years? Is it the crucible, or the elements which made up the original compound, or is it rather the reactions of the compound itself? Home, school, and college all contribute to the make-up of "that painful figure--the college man;" but in the last analysis none of these are as important as what the individual makes of himself.