TRUE PORTRAITS RARE
I often think of this comparison as I consider the American college in conjunction with the widely divergent representations of it and the variety of conceptions which are expressed as to what its purposes really are. There are photographs without number but the portraits are very rare.
The genial cynicism or the barbed criticism of editorial comment in journals of opinion, the reportorial descriptions in novels dealing with college life, the burlesques seen upon the stage, the maudlin balderdash of the moving pictures, the biologically, sharply specialized humor of college publications, the extremes of intercollegiate athletic fervor,—all these and more offer pictures of the American college. But no one of them is adequate as a portrait, nor are all together.
The true portrait of the American college would show a community in which generosity of spirit and graces of culture are predominant, where eagerness for wisdom and truth pervades the atmosphere, where the cooperative enterprise which we call education is carried on with, mutual esteem and respect between faculty and students. It would likewise show, to be sure, some degree of self-seeking and self-indulgence, some effort to arrogate special privilege to individual selves, some pride of opinion, some intellectual arrogance, and some close-mindedness, but these would appear, as they are, merely as blemishes upon the portrait. Each college generation has it within its power to refine or to smudge this portrait.
As one thoughtfully continues consideration of the significance of the beginning of a college year, query must arise as to what limit can be placed upon the potentialities represented in the occasion. It has been estimated that in the coming academic year nearly a million students will be enrolled in American institutions of higher learning. I do not know the basis upon which these figures were formulated, nor exactly what they include, but it is probably safe to assume that at least one-tenth of these will be new matriculants.
A decade and a half ago the course of history had been changed by England's first hundred thousand who entered the World War. You who have been among the reverent visitors who have viewed on tablets in the great public schools, as at Eton or in the quadrangles and cloisters at Oxford and Cambridge, the long lists of names of those who died know whence came the men who made up those courageous thousands. Faced with the necessity, against almost insuperable odds, of matching force with force and checking violence with violence, these men uncomplainingly assumed the responsibility that fell upon them. With full recognition of the consecration which must be theirs and with full understanding of the inevitable price which they must pay, the flower of England's youth strove and wrought and died.
