Fathers, Mothers, and Freshmen

“ BY virtue of the authority committed to me,” says President Eliot on Commencement Day, “ I confer on you the first degree in Arts ; and to each of you I give a diploma which admits you, as youth of promise, to the fellowship of educated men.” The college sends her alumni into the world with nothing more than a warrant that they are presentable intellectually. Yet her unwritten and unspoken purpose is not so much intellectual as moral; and her strongest hope is to stamp her graduates with an abiding character. A college stands for learning, for culture, and for power ; in particular, it stands for the recognition of an aim higher than money-getting. It is a place where our young men shall see visions ; where even the idlest and lowest man of all must catch glimpses of ideals which, if he could see them steadily, would transfigure life. The Bachelor of Arts is seldom, on his Commencement Day, a scholar either polished or profound ; but he may be in the full sense of the word a man.

Though the responsibility of the Alma Mater for the manhood of her sons gets little formal recognition, whoever loves her feels it none the less, and knows that her good name depends not so much on her children’s contributions to learning as on their courtesy, their efficiency, their integrity, and their courage. The college herself, as represented by her governing bodies, feels this deeply, in a general way, but does not know and cannot find out how far her responsibility reaches into details. Intellectual discipline she professes and must provide, — subjects of study, old and new ; instructors that know their subjects and can teach them : and she is happy if she has money enough to make these things sure. Thus beyond what is spent for the chapel and for the maintenance of decent order in the premises there can be little visible outlay for the protection and the development of a student’s character. Nor can the formation of character, except as effected by courses in ethics, be measured out and paid for by the hour or by the job ; and thus the college can do little more than trust in the awakening of intellectual interests to drive out the trivial and the base, in the often unconscious influence of men of character among its Faculty, and in the habits and standards of conduct already acquired at school and at home. Now and then a college teacher rejects all responsibility outside of the classroom. “ My business,” he says, “ is to teach men: if the students are not men, I don’t want them in my classes ; if they don’t care to learn, let them go their own way. What becomes of them is no business of mine ; and if they have to leave college, so much the better for the college and for them. The first, last, and only duty of a teacher in a university is to advance the knowledge of his subject; he is false to his trust, if he spends time and strength in patching up worthless boys who have no place in an institution of learning.”

This doctrine, seldom enunciated by men that have sons and happily never lived down to, is the natural refuge of professors who see the opposition between the advancement of learning and concern for their pupils’ character, and who, with the enthusiasm of the investigator and the teacher, have time and strength for nothing more. Nor is the professor the only interested person that would shift the responsibility. Those parents who have turned their children over successively to the governess, the little boys’ school, and the big boys’ school, turn them over in time to the college. The college, they admit, has its dangers; yet it is the only thing for a gentleman’s sons at a certain time in their lives, and the risk must be taken. The business of the college they patronize is, like the business of the schools they have patronized, to develop, cultivate, and protect their sons, whom, to put it in their own language, they “ confide ” to the college for that purpose. “ I sent my boy to college,” writes the mother of a lazy little Freshman that has come to grief, “ and I supposed he would be looked out for.” “ Write me a good long letter about my Darling,” says another. “ I want my boy to be up and washed at eight,” says a careful father. “ Please send me every week an exact record of my son’s absences,” a suspicious father writes to the dean, — and the dean wonders what would become of himself, his stenographer, and his ostensible duties if all parents should ask for consideration on this same scale.

and often such appeals as I have cited, though superficially amusing, belong to the sad phenomena of the college world ; for they imply distrust at the very time when a youth, just entering the larger life and the fiercer temptations of early manhood, needs, beyond all other human helps, a relation with father and mother of long - tried and perfect trust. They imply, also, parents’ ignorance of children’s character.

To the dean of a large college, who has most to do with students and their parents in all academic sorrows, it soon becomes clear that parents are accountable for more undergraduate shortcomings than they or their sons suspect, — and this after liberal allowance for faults in the college and its officers. “ I have spent an hour to-day with Jones’s father,” said a college president in a formidable case of discipline. “ I have conceived a better opinion of the son after meeting the father,” — and the experience is repeated year by year. Five minutes, or two minutes, with a father or a mother may reveal the chief secret of a young man’s failure or misconduct, and may fill the heart of an administrative officer with infinite compassion. “ You say he gambles,” says a loud, swaggering father. “ Well, what of it ? Gentlemen always play cards.” “ I told my boy,” says a father of a different stamp, “ that I did not myself believe in [what is commonly called “ vice ”] ; but that if he went into that sort of thing, he must not go off with the crowd, but must do it quietly in a gentlemanly way.”

Hereditary and home influence less palpable but quite as pervasive and nearly as demoralizing is that of the trivially biographic mother, who, while a dozen men are waiting at the dean’s office door, assures the dean that her son, now on trial for his academic life, “ was a lovely baby,” and who, so to speak, grows up with him then and there, tracking him step by step, with frequent countermarches, to his present station ; or of the mother who insinuates that the father (whose ambassador she is) has been less competent and wise than she, and that her son gets from the father’s family offensive traits which she hopes will be kept under by the sterling merits that he gets from her own; or of the father who is tickled by the reminiscences of his own youth that are evoked when his son is caught stealing a poor shopkeeper’s sign ; or of the father who suggests that the college should employ at his expense a detective against his son ; or of the father who, when his son is suspended from the university, keeps him in a neighboring city, at any cost and with any risk and with any amount of prevarication, rather than take him home and let the neighbors suspect the truth ; or of the father who at a crucial moment in the life of a wayward son goes to Europe for pleasure (though, to do him justice, he has been of little use at home) ; or of the father who argues that his son’s love of drink cannot be hereditary, since he himself straightened out before his son was born.

The best safeguard of a young man in college — better even than being in love with the right kind of girl — is a perfectly open and affectionate relation to both parents, or to the one parent or guardian that represents both. In saying this, I presuppose parents and guardians of decent character, and capable of open and affectionate relations. One of the surprises in administrative life at college is the underhand dealing of parents, not merely with college officers, but with their own sons. “ Your son’s case is just where I cannot tell whether or no it will be wise to put him on probation,” says the dean to a well-educated and agreeable father. “ It will do him good,” says the father emphatically. “ Then,” says the dean, “ we will put him on ; ” and the father, as he takes his leave, observes, “ I shall give him to understand that it was inevitable, —that I did all I could to prevent it.” Now and then a father writes to the dean for an opinion of a son’s work and character. The dean would like to tell the son of the inquiry and to show him the answer before sending it, so that everything, favorable or unfavorable, may be above board ; but he has, or thinks he has, the father’s confidence to keep. Accordingly he says nothing to the student concerned, answers the father straightforwardly, and learns later that his letter, if unfavorable, has passed from the father to the son without comment, as if it had been a gratuitous emanation from the dean’s office. The letter may be garbled. In answer to the inquiry of a distinguished man about his ward, the dean of a college made clear, first, that the young man had been in danger of losing his degree, and next that the danger was probably over. The distinguished man had the unfavorable part of the letter copied, omitted the favorable, and sent the partial copy to the student. He omitted the dean’s signature : but the letter itself showed whence it came ; and it appeared to have been written just after the dean had assured the student of his belief that the degree was safe. The young man was frank enough and sensible enough in his perplexity to go straight to the dean ; but the false position of the distinguished man and the false position in which (to some degree unwittingly) he would have left the dean before the student are clear. It is absolutely essential to successful college government that executive officers should be square rather than “ politic,” and should be outspoken, so far as they can be without breaking anybody’s confidence. At best, it is scarcely possible to make the younger students see that the main purpose of a disciplinary officer is not the detection of wrongdoers, by fair means or by foul; and it is quite impossible for such an officer to be above suspicion in the eyes of students while parents assume that he is either a partner or a rival in disingenuous dealing.

Sometimes father and son combine to keep a mother in ignorance; and frequently that great principle of parental relation — that father or mother will forgive all and will love in spite of all, but will be most deeply wounded unless trusted — is not recognized by one parent toward another, or by the son toward either. In cases of almost total want of previous acquaintance, cases of parents who complain of vacation at boarding-school because it leaves their children on their hands, this is not to be wondered at; but in the every-day father, willing to give his children the best of all he has, a profound ignorance of his son’s acts, motives, and character must be rooted in some deep mistake, not of heart, but of judgment. That such ignorance exists is plain : it attributes truth to the tricky, sobriety to the vinous, and chastity to the wanton. Its existence is further confirmed by the attitude of these misapprehended sons when no argument can persuade them to be the first messengers, to father or mother, of their own transgression. “Your father must know this from me ; but he has a right to know it first from you. You say you cannot give him pain ; but nothing will help him so much in bearing the pain that must be his as the knowledge that you yourself can tell him all. Before I write to him or see him, I will give you time ; and I beg you to tell him: you cannot help him more now than by going to him, or hurt him more than by avoiding him. This I know if I know anything: it is not mere theory ; it is based on what I have seen of many fathers and of many sons.” Yet often the student, especially the young student, still keeps clear of his father as long as he can.

This want of filial courage at critical moments must be accounted for by a false reticence in those early years in which affectionate freedom between father or mother and son must begin. Unhappily it is fostered by literature. Even Thackeray, whose total influence is honest and clean, seems, when he writes of college life, to have in mind such general propositions as that young men always run into debt and seldom make all their debts known at home ; that all normal young men live more or less wantonly ; that only girls (whose intellects are seldom strong) are pure in heart and life, and that their purity is a kind of innocence born of blindness and of shelter from the world ; that no mother knows the morbid unrest which is stirring in her sweet-faced little boy. Pendennis, Philip, the Poems — all furnish marked instances of Thackeray’s attitude toward the exuberant folly and sin of young men ; and his notion of a man’s standard in things moral is revealed by his remark that “ no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a man,” since the author of Tom Jones.

Thackeray is only too near the truth. The earliest important cause of reticence between parent and child, the longest continued, the fiercest, and the most morbidly silent temptation, the temptation most likely to scorch and blight a whole life and the lives of those who come after, the temptation most likely to lead through passion to reckless selfishness, and through shame to reckless lying, is the manifold temptation in the mysterious relation of sex to sex. No subject needs, for the health of our sons and for the protection of our daughters, to be brought earlier out of the region of alluring and forbidden exploration into the light of wholesome truth — out of the category of the unspeakable into the category of things which, though talked of seldom, may be talked of freely between father or mother and son. Temptation, passion, will exist always; but temptation and passion which must be nursed or suppressed in secret are far more insidious, far less conquerable. Moreover, temptation and passion, when confided to a father or a mother by a son who is struggling to do right, lose half their danger : the strength of those nearest and dearest buoys up our own ; and the fear of confessing a sin — a false fear when once the sin is committed — may be wholesome as a safeguard. No parent can begin to be in a frank relation to his son if he has left that son to pick up in the street and in the newspaper all his knowledge of the laws to which he owes his life : yet, as things stand, this most vital of all subjects is often the one subject about which a young man shrinks from talking with any but contemporaries as ignorant as himself, a subject kept in the dark, except for coarse jokes at the theatre or at convivial gatherings of boys and men.

Almost equally important with an understanding between parent and son is an understanding between every student and at least one college officer. There must be some one on the spot to whom the student may talk freely and fully about such perplexities as beset every young man in a new life away from home. Even a college-bred father is collegebred in another generation, and cannot know those local and temporal characteristics of a college on the mastery of which depends so large a measure of the student’s happiness. Besides, a father may not be promptly accessible, whereas every good college has at hand many officers whose best satisfaction lies in giving freely of their time and strength to less experienced men that trust them. Some confidences, no doubt, a college officer cannot accept; but even in a case of grave wrongdoing, if the relation between him and the student is on both sides clearly understood, a full confession, the only honorable course, is usually, in the long run, the only prudent course also. At Harvard College the relation between a Freshman and his “adviser” is much what the Freshman makes it; for the adviser feels an older man’s diffidence about forcing his friendship on defenseless youth; but it may be made of high and permanent value. So may the relation between a student and any worthy college teacher whom the student, because he has seen in him something to inspire confidence, has chosen for a counselor. Here, too, a father intimate with his son may help him to overcome shyness, and to make use of that disinterested friendship of older men which is one of the best opportunities of college life and is often thrown away.

By fostering these friendships and influences, by interesting himself in every detail of a son’s career, a father may do much. A mother may often do more, by establishing her son in the friendship of good women. This is partly a matter of social influence, no doubt; a poor and ignorant woman a thousand miles away may not see how she can effect it ; may shrink from an appeal to the unknown wives of unknown professors for friendly greetings to her boy : but many women whose sons are sent to a college town know, or have friends that know, or have friends who have friends that know, good women there. The friendship of good women is, as everybody knows, the sweetest and most wholesome corrective of loneliness and of wandering desires. A boy of seventeen or eighteen, far from home for the first time, fresh from the society of mother and sisters and girl friends, may be terribly lonely. Near any college he will find a number of foolish girls, easy of acquaintance, proud to know a student, and not fastidious about conventionalities ; girls not vicious as yet, but on the unseen road to vice ; girls whom he could not comfortably introduce to his mother and sisters, but who, merely as girls, are of interest to him in the absence of social and intellectual equals. The peril of such friendships is as commonplace as truth and as undying : reckless giddiness on one side, reckless selfishness half disguised by better names on the other, the excitement of things known to be not quite proper but not clearly recognized as wrong, have led to one kind of misery or another, so long as men have been men and women women. Yet these sorrows, toward which men move at first with no semblance of passion, but with mere lonely curiosity, may be forestalled. Counsel of parents, too seldom given in such matters, will do much ; access to home life, to the friendship of motherly mothers and of modest, sensible daughters, will do more. Shy and awkward a Freshman may be, and ridiculously afraid of speaking with women : yet the shyer and the more awkward he is, the lonelier he is —the more in need of seeing the inside of a house and of a home ; the more likely to remember as what made his first college year supportable some few days in which a good woman who used to know his mother has opened her doors to him as to a human being and a friend.

After all, the most searching test of a parent’s relation to his son in college is the son’s own view of the purpose of his college life. As I have said elsewhere, “ Many parents regard college as far less serious in its demands than school or business, as a place of delightful irresponsibility, a sort of four years’ breathing-space wherein a youth may at once cultivate and disport himself before he is condemned for life to hard labor.” They “ like to see young people have a good time; ” a little evasion, a little law-breaking, and a handful of wild oats mark in their minds the youth of spirit. They distinguish between outwitting the authorities, whom they still regard as impersonal or hostile, and outwitting other less disinterested friends. “ Boys will be boys ” is a cover, not merely for the thoughtless exuberance of lively young animals, but for selfishness, trickiness, cruelty, and even vice. I wonder at the recklessness with which respectable men talk of wild oats as a normal and on the whole an attractive attribute of youth; for the wild oats theory of a young man’s life, when seen without its glamour, may mean awful physical peril, disingenuous relations with father and mother, dishonor to some girl, as yet perhaps unknown, who is going to be his wife. Yet parents, whether by precept or by example or by mere personal ineffectiveness or by dullness and neglect, encourage that very disingenuousness which is exercised against themselves. Those who have seen the unhappiness that such disingenuousness brings can never forget it. I have been begged by undergraduates to keep students out of a great Boston gambling-house, long since closed. In that gambling-house as Freshmen they had become bankrupt; and for months — almost for years — they had shifted and lied to keep their bankruptcy unknown at home. The crash of discovery had come, as it always comes; the air had cleared ; and as Seniors they were unwilling to leave college without at least an attempt to save other Freshmen from doing and from suffering what they had done and suffered. I have seen sons before the crash, and I have seen parents after it.

How much that is objectionable in college life is the result of injudicious money allowances (whether princely or niggardly) I have never determined. Some students use large incomes as wisely as their elders and more generously; some pay the entire college expenses of fellow students in need : others, no doubt, have more money than is good for them ; but it is hard to pick out that part of their moral and academic disaster for which wealth is responsible.

I may mention here that two-edged argument so often urged by a father when his son is to be dismissed from college : “ If you don’t keep him here, what shall I do with him ? He is n’t fit for anything else ; he would do nothing in a profession or in business.” I cannot say with some that it is no concern of the college what is done with him ; for a college, as I conceive it, has some interest in the future of every boy that has darkened its doors : but I can say that a youth confessedly fit for nothing else is not often good timber for an alumnus. A college is not a home for incurables or a limbo for the dull and inefficient. Moreover, as a Western father observed, “It does not pay to spend two thousand dollars on a two-dollar boy.” Though a firm believer in college training as the supreme intellectual privilege of youth, I am convinced that the salvation of some young men (for the practical purposes of this present world) is in taking them out of college and giving them long and inevitable hours in some office or factory. I do not mean that all success in college belongs to the good scholars ; for many a youth who stands low in his classes gets incalculable benefit from his college course. He may miss that important part of training which consists in his doing the thing for which he is booked ; but he does something for which — through a natural mistake, if it is a mistake — he thinks he is booked : he leads an active life, of subordination here, of leadership there, of responsibility everywhere; and he leads it in a community where learning and culture abound, where ideals are noble, and where courage and truth are rated high. Such a young man, if he barely scrapes through (provided he scrapes through honestly), has wasted neither his father’s money nor his own time. Even the desultory reader who contracts, at the expense of his studies, what has been called “the library habit,” may become the glory of his Alma Mater. It is the weak-kneed dawdler who ought to go, the youth whose body and mind are wasting away in bad hours and bad company, and whose sense of truth grows dimmer and dimmer in the smoke of his cigarettes ; yet it is precisely this youth who, through mere inertia, is hardest to move, who seems glued to the university, whose father is helpless before his future, and whose relatives contend that, since he is no man’s enemy but his own, he should be allowed to stay in college so long as his father will pay his tuition fee, — as if a college were a public conveyance wherein anybody that pays his fare may abide “ unless personally obnoxious,” or a hotel where anybody that pays enough may lie in bed and have all the good things sent up to him. No college — certainly no college with an elective system, which presupposes a youth’s interest in his own intellectual welfare —can afford to keep such as he. Nor can he afford to be kept. One of the first aims of college life is increase of power : be he scholar or athlete, the sound undergraduate learns to meet difficulties ; “ stumbling-blocks,” in the words of an admirable preacher, “ become steppingstones.” It is a short-sighted kindness that keeps in college (with its priceless opportunities for growth and its corresponding opportunities for degeneration) a youth who lies down in front of his stumbling-blocks in the vague hope that by and by the authorities will have them carted away.

The only substitute for the power that surmounts obstacles is the enthusiasm before which obstacles disappear ; and sometimes a student who has never got hold of his work finds on a sudden that it has got hold of him. Here, I admit, is the loafer’s argument (or, rather, the loafer’s father’s argument) for the loafer’s continuance at a seat of learning. In any loafer may lurk the latent enthusiast: no man’s offering is so hopelessly noncombustible that it never can be touched by the fire from heaven; and few places are more exposed to the sparks than our best colleges. Some new study, —chosen, it may be, as a “ snap,” — some magnetic teacher, some classmate’s sister, may, in the twinkling of an eye, create and establish an object in a hitherto aimless life, and an enthusiasm which makes light of work, — just as the call to arms has transmuted many an idler into a man. Some idlers whose regeneration is less sudden are idlers at college chiefly because they have yet to adjust themselves to an elective system, have yet to find their niche in the intellectual life. Talking with a famous professor some years ago about his wish to lower the requirements for admission to college, I expressed the fear that, with lowered requirements, would come a throng of idlers. “ That,” said he, with a paradoxical wisdom for which I am not yet ripe, but which I have at last begun to understand, “ That is precisely what I should like to see. I should like to see an increase in the number of these idle persons ; for here are set before them higher ideals than are set before them elsewhere.” “ People talk of evil in college,” says a graduate with business experience in New York. “ I tell you, college is a place of white purity when compared with the New York business world.” In the withdrawal of the veriest idler from the hope of the vision lies a chance of injury ; and this chance, small as it is, may fill the horizon of father or mother. “ Dismissal from college means certain ruin.” Hence these tears of strong men, these “ fits of the asterisks ” in undisciplined women. Hence those variations in the father who first proclaims that his son must stand near the head of his class or go ; next, when that son has fallen short of the least that the college demands, drags out every argument good or bad for keeping him till the end,— and at last almost leaps for joy if he is warranted auction-sound on Commencement Day. Recognition of the possible disaster in withdrawal may be blended, in a parent’s mind, with desire to avoid personal mortification ; but it is a strong motive for all that, and a worthy one. It makes an administrative officer cautious in action, and enables him to listen with sympathy to pleading for which a careless outsider might find no excuse.

Yet the chance is too small, and the risk is too great. The shock of adversity when the doors of the college close, the immediate need of hard, low-paid work in a cold world where there is no success without industry, may be the one saving thing after the failure of the academic invitation to duty with no palpable relation of industry to success. Compulsory labor with a definite object may at length bring voluntary labor and that enjoyment of work without which nobody who is so fortunate as to work for his living through most of his waking hours can be efficient or happy; and exclusion from college is sometimes the awakening from dull and selfish immaturity into responsible manhood. No one is entitled to a college education who does not earn the right from day to day by strenuous or by enthusiastic life ; college is for the ablest and the best: yet, as some fathers send their least efficient sons into the ministry, as some men who have failed in divers walks of life seek a refuge as teachers of literature, so, and with results almost as deplorable, some people send their boys to college because nobody can see in those boys a single sign of usefulness.

Wise fathers and mothers, when they visit a college officer, are commonly concerned with their sons’ courses of study ; their mission is rarely sorrowful. The parents of troublesome students are not, as a rule, wise. Yet some fathers and mothers whose sons have gone wrong stand out clearly in my mind as almost everything that a parent should be, — asking no favors, seeing clearly and promptly the distinction between the honorable and the dishonorable, and the distinction between the honorable and the half honorable, holding the standard high for their sons and for themselves in every relation of life : women struggling in silent loyalty to free their children from the iniquity of the fathers, and men as tender as women and as true as truth itself. What they are to their sons we can only guess ; to an administrative officer, they are “ as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”

L. B. R. Briggs.