PRESIDENT TUCKER'S ADDRESS AT THE OPENING OF COLLEGE

I welcome you again. Gentlemen, to your place in the honorable succession of college students. Year by year, with the natural increase of students, the question inevitably arises, is there a corresponding increase in the intellectual and moral valuation of the College? To those of us who watch as well as direct this annual process of production, the growing concern is for the quality of the product. Whether the number of those seeking the higher education throughout the country is, or is not, rightly proportioned to the whole population, it is evidently sufficient to give prominence to other questions than that of numbers. What are the motives, the purposes, the determinations of those entering our colleges and universities. As respects yourselves how much intellectual and moral enthusiasm, how much will power, have you brought with you as you enter or return to the College. What capacity can you show for quickening and enlargement, what disposition to resist the easy, the unworthy, the commonplace, what resoluteness of desire to advance, and in due time to achieve. These are the questions which concern you, man by man, and which concern us all in regard to you—not chiefly how many of you are here, but being here, what personal values are you capable of taking on.

The opening addresses of the past years have been set to the one purpose of clarifying the outlook on college life. A man can go through college without really seeing the things which are best worth seeing, some of the very things indeed which he thought and expected to find there. I have been anxious that no man amongst you should go through college blindly, or with dim and confused vision, but clearly having always in sight the realities. To go back no further than the year when those of you who are seniors entered college, I endeavored to show how much was involved in the social influences of college life, which were all the while making a man more or less of a gentleman, according to his understanding and use of them. The year following I discussed the present claims of scholarship upon undergraduates, showing you what it meant for a college man not to be a scholar at least in spirit and intention. And last year I took up the very vital relation of a college training to the new demands of citizenship. In the address of this year I go further and deeper in my thought, for I am to pass into the region of motives. The legitimate and appropriate outcome of a college course is personal power. What are to be your motives in the accumulation of this kind of power? Some of you may recall that as I announced the subject of the last year I then remarked that it had been in my thought to conclude this series of discussions with the consideration of the question—are our colleges now producing under other forms the equivalent of that altruism, which, at the origin of the older colleges, found its immediate and most vivid expression in religious consecration. The opportunity of again addressing you, which I did not then anticipate, having returned to me, I make use of it to carry out my original intention. Of the four essential objects of college training, to train the gentleman, to train the scholar, to train the citizen (which we have already considered), there remains for our consideration the highest task of the college, namely, that of trying to bring every man within its influence under the spirit of altruism in some one of its compelling forms.

As I pass to this last object of college training, I recall each of the preceding objects for a word of comment suggested by the texperience of the year, or by the present circumstance.

In speaking of the training which produces the gentleman I referred particularly to the opportunity for its exercise on the field of sport. I now wish to congratulate you upon the way in which during the last year the College in a collective sense played the gentleman. In your action in regard to summer baseball you took what you regarded as the position of honor at the risk of defeat. The fact that your action brought you success does not detract from the honor due to you, and in this honor none are more deserving of recognition than those who generously acted with you to their own disadvantage. This College has not seen a finer example of undergraduate loyalty than was shown by the men who gave their influence and active support to the teams from which they had been debarred.

Since urging upon you the special claims of scholarship, I have noted a very stimulating suggestion from John Morley (he will be to us for long time John Morley not Lord Morley), as to the inciting cause of scholarship. "The general principles of a study," he said byway of quotation, in an address at the University of Manchester, "you may learn by books at home—the detail, the color, the tone which make it live in us all, these you catch from those in whom it already lives." Scholarship, that is, Gentlemen, is contagious. You "catch" it from those who have it. Only there must be contact. In so far, therefore, as you find men here in whom you see "the detail, the color, the tone," of scholarship, pass them not by. If in your elections you shun the scholar because you are not willing to suffer his mental travail, you know at the time that you are guilty of intellectual cowardice; you do not, however, quite realize that later you must for so doing pay the coward's penalty. Believe me, as I say to you that nothing lasts like the impact of a really great though hard teacher upon the mind of a student. Among all the teachers I had in preparatory, college, or professional training, one man abides with me. I refer to Clement Long, the Professor of Political Economy when I was in college, the most impersonal man on the faculty. I doubt if at any time he knew ten men out of his classroom. But he taught men, who cared to know, the ways of knowledge, how to measure facts, how to detect errors, how to state the truth. After many years I pay this tribute to his memory, in gratitude for his abiding influence, and as an illustration of the permanent value to any man of the endurance of hardship under a great teacher.

It is a fact of some academic significance that a national election occurs once in a man's college course. The academic value of these elections varies, even in their reminder of the claims of citizenship upon college men. But now and then an election is peculiarly instructive. I think that the coming election is important in the academic view from the fact that agitation and contention about public issues have reached the stage of definition. I can hardly see how the present campaign can do less than to clarify the public mind. I advise you to this end to read the utterances of our most intelligent and candid men. You may well consider the campaign as something more than an interesting or possibly exciting incident in your college course.

I think that you will agree with me, as we now take up our immediate subject — The Preservation of the Spirit of Altruism in our Colleges—that although the subject comes last in the order of discussion it instantly claims precedence. Certainly it represents our academic obligation, because it represents our great academic inheritance. The glory of the historic colleges lay not in their scholarship, in the modern sense, but in the one fact that they were founded for ends which were unmistakably altruistic, - Harvard, for "Christ and the Church," Yale, for "public employment in the Church and in the Civil State," and all the colonial colleges for like aims under different terms of consecration. You are familiar with the specific purpose of the founding of our own college, a purpose intensified rather than concealed by its romantic origin.

Broadly stated the terms in which the earlier generations expressed their altruistic aims were the state and the church. Colleges were founded to quicken the motives of men and to increase their efficiency in these directions, especially to increase their efficiency through the quickening of motive. The more modern foundations "state their objects in the same general terms. Michigan, leading the state universities, falls back upon the language of the ordinance of 1787 to express its motive —"Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." Many of the recent foundations stand more distinctively for the advancement of science through research or application. But the ultimate end of the higher education, more clearly its end the higher it is, now as formerly, is altruistic.

And this ultimate end of the higher education is entirely congruous with the personal intention of those who seek its benefits. Very few men, according to my observation, come to college confirmed selfseekers. Some are morally indifferent, but they are for the most part just as indifferent to their own best interests as they are to the best interests of others. I have noticed that when men really come to themselves in college, when, that is, they begin to realize their splendid possibilities, they are much more apt to turn to unselfish than to selfish ends.

Why then, you naturally ask me, if our colleges are founded for altruistic ends, and if college men as a rule are as well intentioned toward others as toward themselves, why should it be, why is it, so difficult for us to preserve the spirit of altruism. What I have to say further will be in answer to this question: and if in what I may say I seem to emphasize the difficulty of the problem, it is that I may also emphasize its urgency.

The first reason which I give for the difficulty of maintaining the spirit of altruism in our colleges is the lack, the rather increasing lack, of moral maturity in the average undergraduate. I do not say the lack of morality, for morality is on the whole steadily on the increase in our colleges. Nor do I say the lack of a certain moral earnestness which may at any time find vigorous expression in college sentiment. By moral maturity, I mean simply the power of a man to assume the responsibility for himself. This kind of responsibility is much more marked in a college as a whole than in the individuals who at a given time compose it. Our colleges have made immense gains in public opinion, in general behavior, in the collective self respect, but the average individual student has not shown the same relative gain in the power to act for his own best interest, especially in the earlier part of his course. For example, the college course is laid out by years, or by hours, a minimum number of which is assigned by each year. The object of this spacing of college work is perfectly evident. Nothing could be plainer. Every man knows at the outset that if he does not do the minimum work assigned to him in an allotted space he must soon or late pay the penalty. To change the figure, if one cannot keep the college pace, he must fall out of the running. And yet there are a great many who for no other reason whatever than that of moral irresponsibility fail, year by year, of the minimum task. And in far too many instances these failures continue beyond any reasonable time for self adjustment. The sophomore year, I do not of course refer to any sophomore class, the sophomore year represents more than any other year arrested development. It represents the most of loss and the least of gain among the college years. The average sophomore has not yet learned how to become an upper-classman.

To meet this particular expression of moral immaturity in the earlier years, the faculty has adopted regulations, of which you have been apprized, which make it impossible for those who neglect their work in this earlier period to make up the deficiency by extra hours in the later years, at the cost of work assigned to those years. The chief object of these regulations is to stimulate moral responsibility at the outset by making it certainly and demonstrably evident that the least penalty for early neglects and failures is overtime for graduation. A further object as I have intimated is to protect the later years of the college course from the effects of the earlier waste. It is to be hoped that fewer men will find themselves defrauded of the best results of their advanced courses through their deficiencies in the courses on which the advanced work is conditioned.

Now the kind of moral immaturity which I am discussing is not due to a decrease in the age of college students. There is a general impression that college students are younger than formerly. Graduates returning to the College speak of its youthful appearance. The fact is, the college age practically remains unchanged. The graduates are simply growing old. Statistics of the Eastern colleges, covering over a hundred years, carefully compiled and computed, show that there has been no perceptible variation of age within the century. The age of graduation for the first two decades of the nineteenth century was twenty-two years and six months for the first decade, and twenty-two years and nine months for the second decade. The age of graduation for the last two decades of the century was twenty-two years and ten months for the first, and twenty-two years and nine months for the second. The average age for the century was exactly that for the last decade—twenty-two years and nine months.

The registrar informs me that for the last three classes -1906, '07, '08, the age of entrance was nineteen years and three months, and of graduation twenty-three years. This average is slightly above that of the average given for the Eastern colleges at the close of the previous century, but I presume that it would be found that the like advance had been made since then in all the colleges. Practically the college period is from nineteen to twenty-three, and this certainly is not the period of boyhood, of irresponsible thought or activity. It is the period in which one may reasonably be expected to come into responsible relation to himself, to be able to organize his daily life, to make calculation for his immediate future, to adjust himself to those influences under which he has voluntarily, and perhaps with some sacrifice, placed himself.

It is, therefore, quite unreasonable to refer the moral immaturity of this period, so far as it exists, to a physical immaturity which no longer exists in such degree as to warrant the reference The real causes of this immaturity are many, and vary with the individual, with his training, bis temperament, his associations, but the remedy must be in all cases one and the same. The final appeal must be made to the individual himself. The fact that any one of you has become a college man is the sufficient ground for this appeal. It is proper for me to say to every one of you now entering college that you belong here not simply because you have met the technical requirements for entrance, but far more because it is to be assumed that you are prepared to be responsible for yourself. lam not now speaking of your responsibility to the College, to its traditions, its rules, its definite purposes. I am speaking of the very simple but very vital matter of your responsibility to and for yourselves, your ability to realize in some sufficient way the purpose for which you are here. Without this sense of responsibility all aids and helps to personal development are quickly exhausted. After a time it becomes an unjustifiable waste to follow the receding motives of college students with increasing incentives, especially with the duplication of the teaching force. If it takes two instructors to teach twenty or twenty-five men who do not care to study, where one instructor could better teach the same number of self responsible men, you can readily see that irresponsibility is costly. It is too costly to be encouraged by providing for it. Colleges were not founded, and are not maintained to pay in large degree the extra cost of the indifference or the selfishness of irresponsibility. I, therefore, say to you very frankly that the altruism which established this College ought to be met by a corresponding altruism on your part, an altruism which finds its first expression in the generous and courageous purpose to relieve the College of unnecessary burdens on your behalf. I say courageous, as well as generous, because it requires courage to meet the distracting and in some cases disorganizing influences under which you may find yourself. I commend to you a saying of Caesar in regard to the conduct of one of his commanders in the third campaign in Gaul in extricating the legion under his command from a most embarrassing situation—"he took counsel" Caesar said, "of the valor of his mind." When you find yourself in mental or moral dangers take like counsel.

I add a word in this connection to the more influential men in the upper classes. You have it in your power to raise or to lower the standards of the College. Under your influence, sometimes personal, sometimes organized, there has been a steady elevation of standards at many points. At one point you have not reached the proper standard. You are not setting the proper pace for work. You are not spreading through the College an enthusiasm for work. You are content with good results where influence demands satisfaction only with the best results. To make work popular the best men must work. If the best men among you played as some of you work, sport would not be popular. More is at stake in this regard than your personal fortunes, which can be retrieved. The standing of the College is in your hands very much as the standing of a university is in the keeping of its graduate schools. The graduate work of a university may or may not influence its undergraduate work, but it counts largely in the general average. The average law student of graduate rank does one half more, if not twice as much work as the average undergraduate, but his extra work goes to the credit of the combination. The colleges must stand upon their own merits, creating within themselves the sentiment which will uphold their standards. In your rating of men who deserve most from the College because they are doing most for it, make a higher place and let it be known that you are making a higher place for those who can create an enthusiasm for work.

The second and only other reason which I give for the difficulty of maintaining the spirit of altruism in our colleges is the incoming of so many callings, attractive to college students, which are not in themselves altruistic, and which are displacing some which were. The reaction in thought from one's future occupation is no longer in most cases a moral reaction. The college man of today can think, and plan, and work for his future without taking other people with their interests and needs into that future. And this for the reason, as we all know, that the art of living for others is quite dependent upon the opportunity for living in others. Keeping this fact in mind we are able to grade the relative altruistic effect of the great callings by their necessary contact with human necessities—first, because the contact is most direct, the ministry, teaching, and medicine; then at a second remove, because Contact comes through the application of moral principles, these same professions again, and law and politics; then at a third remove, because giving contact through material betterments of one kind or another, callings like engineering; and then at a further remove still the various businesses which give contact through the use of money. Now the tendencies among college men are more and more away from the professions and callings which give the most direct contact with individual life, which stir the sympathies and awaken the moral nature, and toward those which are more remote in their altruistic effects. If a man will so regard it a factory with its teeming and throbbing life is as much a place for unselfish service as a parish or a school or a hospital, but how many men do so regard it. Wall Street may contribute its tithe to education or reform or religion; indirectly it may give its all to those material enterprises which build up the country, but who goes to Wall Street with any one of these objects first in mind or nearest his heart. When Peter Cooper went to New York, a poor lad, he had in mind Cooper Institute. As he grew in fortune that object grew. What he saw each succeeding year was not more money, but the increasing opportunity to be of service to the young men and young women of the city, an example which shows how rare it is, and yet how entirely possible if not easy it is to be altruistic through the use of money. I think that the time has come for our colleges to idealize in the minds of college students some of the popular callings which lack ideality. The reaction upon college life from any calling which stands for pure secularism is dangerous. It is not the business of a college to intensify power unless it can at the same time idealize power. Some of you, the majority of you, are turning your backs upon the old professions, which, as idealized, stood for truth, for justice, for mercy. You are going into the callings which are chiefly concerned with the making and the use of money, few of which have been as yet idealized. You have, therefore, a double task before you, first to keep your own altruistic motive, such as it may be, and then, partly with this end in view, to do all that you can to affect the methods, the tone, the spirit of your calling.

Let me refer you very definitely to certain demands which must be met before the money making callings can be put upon the same altruistic basis with the callings which rest upon the use of personality, or upon the application of well defined moral principles.

1. Money, dishonestly or unjustly made, does a harm to the country, as well as to the individual, which cannot be offset by any compensating good resulting from its after use. Hence the first and most insistent demand of altruism in business is honesty, plain unmistakable honesty. If a man is not prepared to meet that demand or if he has failed to meet it, it is idle for him to affect altruism.

2. Money, in the form of capital, is not a neutral, a non-moral agency, whether used by an individual, or by a corporation, or by a trust. Capital touches a thousand lives where charity touches one, and it touches each life more sensitively. Capital is very largely the money which is paid to the brain and hand of industry, or for the material which again is shaped by the same brain and hand. The income which reverts to the capitalist, be he an individual or a stockholder, is in most of the industries far less than the expenditure for labor of one sort or another. Hence the second demand of altruism in business is that one shall keep steadily in mind the human relations of money as capital.

(The capital stock of railroads for the year 1907 was $6,803,760,000. The amount paid in dividends was $272,795,000. The amount paid in wages was $900,801,000).

3. Money viewed as the means of power or influence or luxury, represents the highest kind of responsibility. If you propose to make money for social or political ends you therefore incur graver responsibilities than the capitalist, the employer of labor. The two points at which the conscience of the country is most sensitive under the present enormous accretion of wealth are political corruption and social extravagance. The political corruptionist has learned, or is being taught, his lesson. The social spendthrift has yet to learn his lesson, and is therefore at present the more dangerous person. The vulgar display of riches is probably the greatest irritant, if not the most demoralizing force, in the general life of the nation. Contrasts between the rich and the poor can be borne, to a degree, because it is generally understood and accepted that poverty may belong to the individual as well as to his environment, but no nation under the moral standards of today, can long abide undisturbed by the flaunting of riches in the face of poverty. I caution you, therefore, should any of you inherit or acquire wealth, that you have a care to appearances. The plain demand of altruism in the social use of money is that its possession shall not become a stumbling block which shall cause offense to the life of the people.

4. Money, to be of any considerable value as a factor in benevolence, requires interested intelligence or intelligent interest on the part of its possessor. The relatively small amount of money given annually for the moral progress of the world is due not altogether to the selfishness of the rich, but quite as much to their ignorance. Very many of the very rich do not know the value of the great civilizing forces, education, art, research, remedial agencies, missions. Some one has computed that the greater gifts to these objects during the past year were made by not more than twenty men, but there must be many hundreds of multi-millionaires in the country. The number of private-spirited citizens is enormously out of proportion to that of public-spirited citizens. Perhaps it is as just as it is charitable to attribute this vast amount of private spirit to ignorance. The late Mr. E. B. Haskell, for many years the proprietor of the Boston Herald, once told me of his acquaintance with a fellow citizen of this type whom he met first at Yokohama. Meeting him later at Athens, as he seemed to be lonely, he asked him if he would like to drive with him to Marathon. "Why, yes, but what happened at Marathon?" Thinking that the comparison might help him, Mr. Haskell replied that Marathon was the Gettysburg of- Greece. "But what happened at Gettysburg?" This man was nearly forty years old when the battle of Gettysburg was fought, and he was doing business not three hundred miles away, but so absorbed was he in his business that the battle made no impression on him. The altruism which teaches a man how to give broadly and wisely begins in knowledge. The man of wealth who offers as an excuse for not giving to the great objects of moral progress that he is not interested in them more often reflects upon his mind than upon his disposition. His shortage is in intelligence.

I have dwelt upon these demands of altruism upon college men who are proposing to themselves business careers because you ought to know in advance what you must do to idealize your careers, so that you may keep up the succession of devoted men who are the real glory of the College and the real security of the country. You cannot afford to be non-altruistic. The College cannot afford to have you such. The country cannot afford to have you such. The true outcome of the higher education of the country is not moral neutrality. Scholarship cannot evade the just claims of altruism and long remain positive, virile, and influential. The saying holds true as one ascends to the highest objects of pursuit, "No man liveth unto himself." Living to that end alone or supremely he ceases to live.

What motive then have you, let me ask you as my final word, what motive have you, strong enough, patient enough, quickening enough, to ensure the altruistic spirit in the midst of the stirring actualities of college life, or in anticipation of your careers. Nothing could be more idle than for you to say to another, as your response to this address, "go to now, let us be altruistic, let us change the temper of the College, in due time let us try to redeem society from its enslaving secularism." Back of any opinion, or spoken word, or quickened desire, must lie the high resolve, and back of the resolve the sufficient motive. Most of us, I think, fail to. bring our better desires and purposes to a conclusion through some miscalculation as to the amount of motive necessary to their realization. What Matthew Arnold calls the "governing idea" must be greater than the end we propose to reach. It takes more than the spirit of liberty to make men free, more than the spirit of equality to make men equal. So Matthew Arnold points the moral in the failure of the French Revolution, saying "that however poorly men may have got on when their governing idea was 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,' they can get on even less by the governing idea that 'all men are born free and equal.'" I would not have you underestimate the amount of motive which it takes to accomplish a college course, and to put you into right relation to an honorable career. Hence the question which I ask you, which I do not propose to answer, the most sobering and the most exhilarating question which men in your circumstances can entertain, each man for himself—Is my motive, my "governing idea," big enough and staunch enough to carry me through college? Is it true enough, brave enough, and sufficiently satisfying to enable me to meet hereafter the temptations of men and the tests of the world?