Almus Pater: Antioch Introduces a Masculine Element Into Higher Education
I
VERY clearly do I remember my first visit to a great Eastern university. My friend, a department head, introduced me to another member of the faculty, and I was invited to call.
It was almost my initial acquaintance with the East. I was at home in desert sagebrush, in mountain lumber camps, in frozen winter travel in the North, and with mosquitoes and moccasin snakes of Southern swamps. Browbeating a ‘ roughneck ’ contractor into doing a decent construction job, or hunting a lost surveying party in the jungles, was familiar experience. But here was something new.
My host received me in his apartments and bade me be seated. The room was nicely and delicately furnished. I have the impression of filmy curtains and fragile bric-a-brac, presided over by a man who was appropriate to the room. After a few commonplaces about politics, he suggested we have tea.
Tea! I had thought these were bachelor quarters, and I did not know that my host was married. Perhaps his mother was taking care of him. But I was mistaken. He produced a set of dainty, translucent porcelain, and proceeded to make tea himself, before my astonished eyes.
I had affection for the forests and the deserts. Who would not roll up in his blanket on the winter ground in order to wake and see the rose tints of the morning twilight creep over the Western peaks? But that life has disadvantages. The open spaces furnish too few congenial associates. I had consorted with Emerson and Carlyle, with Thoreau and Wordsworth, with Huxley and Darwin, and with Plato, and I was permanently hungry for the company of friends with similar tastes. Was it not worth while to swallow the tea for the sake of finding such companionship?
So I visited more faculty members, dined at the faculty club, and loafed at the faculty quarters, always with my ears open. Of course my expectations were not fulfilled. It was not within reason that men of vigorous intellectual interests would wear their opinions upon their sleeves, or expose their substantial convictions to a stranger. The commonplaces I heard, and the mild discussions, doubtless were but the efforts of sensitive and modest men to avoid ostentation.
It is more than twenty years since that experience, but the impression still remains of a lack of masculine atmosphere about the institution. Yet, so far as I can recall, I did not see a woman on the campus. Does not the phrase ‘Alma Mater’ properly describe the characteristic influence of the undergraduate college? Does not the college in the main afford a mother’s influence to its students? It is the traditional mother’s part to provide mild discipline, sympathy, understanding, patience, forgiveness, and aspiration to her children.
The father should supply understanding, too, but of another sort. He knows that the storm can make its contribution as well as the fireside, that only rigorous living can develop stamina, that a morality which never has faced stress is not yet secure. He knows that the man who faces the world and holds to his own best, standards has a quality never achieved by him who keeps under shelter. He knows that the stresses are surely coming, and he would temper his son or daughter to them while he is yet near by to offer a friendly hand or a word of encouragement or caution. Where we find a father who is mothering his children, it generally is because his own life lacked a father’s proper influence.
The father influence is waning in America, and, unless we beware, the rugged temper of our people will begin to grow soft, or they will get their tempering in the arbitrary school of military training. Less and less do fathers see their sons and daughters. They are too busy, and the job is left to mother. Moreover, until high school is past, most teaching is by women.
Much modern employment is but little better. A man or woman very often works in shop or store or office where only a few adjustments are required, and where striking weaknesses of personality do not seriously affect the highly standardized and carefully supervised production.
And college continues to be Alma Mater. The student is still sheltered from the stresses which develop selfreliance. Coonskin coats and rakish motor cars may give a semblance of masculinity, but not the substance, and football supplies but a very specialized kind of stamina, quite different from that needed to hold down a lone job with no cheering on the side lines. Even the student who is tempered to rigorous intellectual work may be quite unfitted to meet many other kinds of stress.
A boy or girl needs both mother and father, and our systems of higher education will be sadly incomplete until Alma Mater and Almus Pater have coördinate jurisdiction and influence.
II
At Antioch College we hold that a true sense of proportion is a pearl of great price, for which we should be ready to sell very much of what we have. No quality of character, no element of personal development, is of such superlative worth that one does well to give it unlimited attention to the exclusion of all other interests. Even the pursuit of proportion may be carried to a point where it will absorb energy that otherwise could better be used in increasing the total value of living.
There is a temper of mind which assumes that we may care either for this or for that, but that the presence of any strong interest must exclude its opposite. Such minds arc insensitive to fine proportion. I cannot endure these ‘either-or’ persons. A one-track mind assumes that all others must be similarly afflicted, and that attention to any particular interest necessarily implies a disregard for contrasting interests. Tell such a person that you are interested in science, and he will say, ‘Oh, but religion is so much more important,’ as though they were mutually exclusive. Tell him you are interested in developing in young people a practical adjustment to real life, and he will assume that you have no care for a liberal education.
Therefore, regardless of everything to the contrary that may be said in this article, it will be quoted by many people as expressing the point of view that college influences are not important, but that practical experience should dominate in higher education. Than which nothing is further from the truth!
In the unconventional college programme that has been in operation at Antioch for nearly eight years, Almus Pater has reigned with Alma Mater. The sheltering, stimulating, and inspiring influences of academic halls have been blended with the sterner stuff of real living in a real world. The boys and girls of Antioch are having both kinds of influence in their lives, in the proportions that seem by experience best to bring about the complete development of personality.
Lest there still be a lurking suspicion in the reader’s mind that Antioch is chiefly interested in the tempering influences of practical contacts, before describing Antioch’s methods of introducing a masculine element into education let me just briefly describe Alma Mater at Antioch, or the ‘intramural college,’ as it is styled with academic dignity.
Antioch stands for liberal education, and the practical-minded student who wants only courses that lead to financial competence or to highly specialized interests is advised to readjust his outlook greatly, or to go elsewhere. Onetrack minds are relatively few in the student body, and these few tend to broaden out, or to seek more congenial environment. Of the entire time spent in college halls, at least half must be given to the pursuit of a liberal education, regardless of the prospective calling to be followed.
In its interpretation of the meaning of a liberal education, Antioch is more liberal than most liberal colleges. President. Eliot often criticized football on the ground that it had little continuing value after college. With graduation that chapter of the student’s athletic experience is permanently closed. So too often graduation completes a liberal education. Many educators who hold this belief object to introductory college courses on the ground that they do not establish a mastery of the subjects treated. They tacitly assume that there will be no further pursuit of those subjects after graduation.
Antioch sees a liberal education as a lifelong process, and includes introductory courses in all the major sciences, in literature, history, economics, philosophy, and æsthetics, as a beginning of that process. Advanced courses follow for students who are qualified and interested in the several fields.
A liberal education does imply an experience of mastery, and each Antioch student is asked to spend at least a third of his college time in a thoroughgoing treatment of a subject of his choice. This ‘field of concentration’ may be cultural, or, as is frequently the case, preparatory for the student’s life work. There are now under consideration additional methods for emphasizing mastery in some field which, we believe, may add to Antioch’s contribution to educational methods.
The widening and deepening of cultural interests which follow upon participation in the Antioch programme constitute one of the most notable influences of the college. Those interests arise not only from the subjects taught, but from the manner of teaching. During the last three years of the college course formal classes are for the most part dispensed with, and the students are largely left to their own initiative to develop the methods of substantial scholarship. The approval of this so-called ‘autonomous programme’ on the part of the better students is decisive.
The faculty in liberal subjects, as in other fields, has been developed with the utmost painstaking care, with scholarship, sound human quality, and skill and enthusiasm in teaching as the dominant considerat ions. Relations between students and faculty are intimate and friendly to a very exceptional degree. The environment is one to stimulate and to develop scholarly interests. Antioch alumni in graduate schools are conspicuous for the range and variety of their cultural interests.
III
The fine arts and their applications are springing into life at Antioch in interesting and surprising fashion. As is natural with the creative spirit which finds expression in the Antioch programme, productive action tends to grow out of theoretical study. The publishing of fine books, begun by a student, is continuing as a profitable industry since his graduation. Another student designs bookplates, and last year sold twenty-seven hundred dollars’ worth of them. He expects his sales this year, while he is still a student, to reach four thousand dollars. The Antioch bronze foundry makes fine art bronzes by the Italian ‘lost wax’ process. The Antioch Press does thirty thousand dollars’ worth of fine printing a year. Postural difficulties of girl students led to a study of women’s shoes, and four years of experiment finally developed the ‘Antioch shoe,’ which is a beautiful creation, while it also meets the most critical demands of orthopædists. Made by manufacturers after Antioch designs, last year over one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of these shoes were sold, and there are indications of a rapid increase in their use.
Classes in music, dramatics, drawing, painting, and modeling in clay follow after introductory courses in aesthetics, and are eagerly patronized. Few subjects are so generally elected as advance courses in literature.
In its physical setting the intramural college is rapidly becoming fitted for its work. The addition of a library, a men’s dormitory, a nursery-school plant with spacious and beautiful grounds, a gymnasium, and an excellent and adequate building to be completed during the current year to house all the natural sciences, provides reasonably suitable physical facilities.
But perhaps most remarkable is the recent accession to the Antioch campus. Through the gift of friends, Antioch now possesses a wonderful tract of forested hills and streams extending over a length of three miles, and connecting with the Clifton Gorge, perhaps the wildest and most rugged bit of forest in Ohio.
For the poet and the naturalist, as well as for young people who love skating and swimming and tramping in the woods and among the cliffs, this campus is priceless. In its hundreds of acres of natural forests there are more species of native trees than are found in all Europe, and the tract also has strong interests for the anthropologist, the geologist, the entomologist, and the general biologist. For the Antioch alumnus, college memories recall not only academic halls, but spring or autumn days beside the still waters.
This article could be taken up entirely with illustrations of contributions to the methods of higher education that have been made by Antioch. Some methods and policies that were almost unprecedented in American higher education when Antioch initiated t hem eight years ago already have been quite fully accepted, and others of these policies are slowly but surely fighting their way to general adoption.
Among such are the programme of autonomous courses, in some colleges called honors courses, the policy of giving treatment to initial science courses for the general student different from those given to specialists, the policy of admissions based on thorough individual examination of student fitness rather than upon certificate or formal examination, and the policy of giving greater weight to fundamentals and less weight to applied courses in such fields as engineering and business. The proportion of innovations in education made at Antioch eight years ago which have held their own and are gaining general acceptance is very high.
But this article concerns another phase of the Antioch programme, and if now I have convinced my readers that the Antioch Alma Mater is thriving and vigorous, perhaps I may safely refer with enthusiasm to Almus Pater, the ‘extramural college.’
IV
On one or two afternoons each week, various normal young Antiochians of both sexes present themselves at our home, where they are served with tea at the hands of their hostess. The experience no longer disturbs me, perhaps because I am now accustomed to it, perhaps because I know that Almus Pater will soon be getting in his work. In a few weeks at most these young men and women will be scattered to the four winds, handling real responsibilities on real jobs in real life, while another similar army of young men and women will be flocking back from fiveor ten-week periods on these same jobs, for a similar period in college halls.
And so this programme continues during the year, the two groups of students alternating between five or ten weeks with Alma Mater in the study halls of the intramural college and similar periods with Almus Pater, getting tempered to the real life of the world. Each job is filled by two students, who take turns.
What is there about these outside working experiences that deserves the name of ‘ extramural college ’? Are they more than just part-time jobs for paying the student’s way at college or for teaching him a calling? We believe they are.
To begin with, this extramural college has its own faculty. The dean of this college has his staff of trained and experienced men and women. These extramural faculty members search the entire Eastern United States for exceptional practical opportunities for cooperative students.
Is some modern school doing remarkably fine work? In several such schools Antioch students of education are teaching on a coöperative basis. Is an industrial laboratory blazing a trail in applied science? There Antioch coöperative students are in responsible positions. Is some industrial corporation demonstrating that discriminating ethical standards and fairness in human relations can harmonize with financial success? In such institutions, also, Antioch students are being inoculated with the newer and greater tradition.
The writing of this article has just been interrupted by a visit from the head of the department of chemistry, who related this incident. He had announced a lecture on the chemistry of the purification of city water supplies, and an engineering student volunteered to build a demonstration apparatus for him. This student designed and built in the lecture room a model waterpurification system. Muddy and polluted water from a road puddle was poured in, and, passing through the processes of agitation, coagulation, settlement, chlorination, and filtration, all visible to the observers, flowed out crystal clear for the audience to drink. Anyone who understands the necessary mechanical and chemical controls required to produce such a result will realize that this boy had profited by his coöperative job in the filtration plant of a water company in a large city.
In stores, factories, hospitals, architects’ offices, research laboratories, art institutes, newspaper offices, socialservice organizations, engineering and construction work, nursery schools, and in a bewildering variety of other undertakings, Antioch young men and women students are being introduced to real life. The three hundred pairs of coöperative students are at work for two hundred employers in sixteen states.
But the extramural faculty has not finished when it has placed the students. The jobs must be made educational. Conferences with the employers and with the students bring out strong and weak points, and furnish cotmsel on many troublesome matters. The members of the extramural faculty are truly in the place of the father. (This may seem a paradox in case of the woman members, but our analogy must not be strained too far; women as well as men arc necessary for the services of Almus Pater, as both are necessary for Alma Mater.) This faculty furnishes the advice, encouragement, warning, understanding, and discipline that a wise father would wish to give his son or daughter.
Almus Pater at Antioch must be familiar with employment possibilities and with economic, social, and educational standards over the entire Eastern United States. Where else could men or women be found so well qualified to furnish the needed counsel? They have been carefully selected from hundreds of able and experienced men and women well equipped by nature and training, w ho make it their business to know life, to know industry and a wide range of human activities; and to know young men and women, their hopes and despairs, their possibilities and limitations, their adaptability to varying fields of human endeavor.
There are many important lessons to be learned in this extramural college. The experience of having to be responsible away from the flock, the gradual tempering to the winds of reality, the growing assurance that practical life is not hopelessly difficult, and complex, but can be mastered without sacrifice of sound personal hopes and standards — all this comes from successfully meeting practical situations that are gradually increased in difficulty under the guidance of experienced loaders.
This may all be well for men students, but what about the young women? The best analogy will fail if pursued beyond reasonable limits, yet I venture the opinion that the American ’co-ed’ needs Almus Pater not a whit less than does her brother.
A girl deprived of a father’s friendship and counsel is imperfectly equipped for life, as surely as is a boy without a mother. All her lifetime she will deal with the male sex, and she probably never will have a friend who can interpret men to her as well as can a wise and sympathetic father. He knows men and the world of men, their motives and qualities, and may save her from blunders, disappointments, and disillusionment.
The extramural college can serve its women students no less than its men. Unless a young woman is content with the status of ornamental parasite, she also wants to make practical adjustment to a real world. The barriers in her way are more formidable. She has not the same freedom to venture; her opportunities are fewer, and a mistake on her part is more difficult to correct.
Hundreds of alumnæ of our women’s colleges are beginning back at the level of high-school graduates, taking business-school courses in the hope of getting a foothold in economic life. Hundreds more arc in fields of limited opportunity, with no vision of an open road ahead. Though home and family are their desires, they wish to approach them through free choice, and not through economic compulsion.
The service of the extramural college to young women is no less important than to young men. Antioch co-eds and graduates are being directed to openings in many fields, and guided in their working experiences. Some are finding their way into conventional careers for women. They are managing or teaching in nursery schools, kindergartens, and day schools, and teaching physical education, home economics, and dramatics in high schools and social settlements. Some are librarians, dietitians in hospitals, secretaries, managers of clubs, and social-service workers.
Others are finding their way into fields more recently opening to women. They are at work as editorial writers and reporters on newspapers and magazines, in architects’ offices, in bacteriological laboratories, in industrial employment service, in department-store administration, in industrial promotion, in commercial art, in accounting, and here and there in a great variety of occupations. There are defects of personality to be corrected, courage and patience to be developed, understanding of fellow workmen to be achieved, self-restraint to be practised, initiative to be exercised.
The average father lacks the experience he needs. He does not know whether to be stern or sympathetic, whether to praise or blame. He knows little of callings, and cannot advise his son or daughter wisely. The extramural faculty has had more than a thousand sons and daughters. Understanding and judgment grow out of experience. Sometimes parents have spoiled their children, and sternness is demanded. Sometimes harsh judgment from home hangs like a cloud over a boy or girl of honest purpose, and the chief need is sympathy and encouragement. Sometimes physical defects interfere with good work.
Learning a calling is of importance; opportunity to contribute very materially to one’s self-support in college, as Antioch students can do, means much to some young men and women; but perhaps the chief value of the ‘coöperative’ plan, as Antioch College has developed it, is that it allows Almus Pater to come into his own.
V
Nearly eight years of the Antioch programme are completed, and no one who observes the results can fail to be encouraged. In the establishment of intellectual interests we believe Antioch graduates will stand comparison with any American body of alumni. Few students work harder at academic pursuits. In satisfactory selection of callings there seems little doubt that a large amount of lost motion and blind fumbling is being prevented. Upon graduation more than half of Antioch students — except those continuing in graduate schools or entering educational fields — continue with employers chosen during college years.
Yet, as we see the possibilities still untouched, we feel that the extramural college is only in its infancy. Just as the work of three or four years ago seems now impossibly crude, so we believe that the coöperative programme of to-day will soon be made obsolete by possible improvements that every day present themselves. There seems little doubt that the extramural college will make contribution to personality and character no less important than that of college halls.
That the college is actually achieving its purpose of filling out undeveloped phases of personality and character is indicated by the young men and women who are attracted to it. They are predominantly the sons and daughters of business executives, professional men, and educators. They come from every part of America. For 1928-1929 Antioch has students from every state except Nevada and Mississippi, and from several foreign countries. Only 20 per cent come from Ohio. They see the programme primarily as a liberal education for living, and not as apprenticeship to a job or as a short cut to technical proficiency. Good students are always welcome, and always in demand, but there is no room for those who cannot do good academic work and also meet the requirements of practical life in a reasonably responsible manner.
Seven years ago we were forced to place our students in stores or factories wherever there were openings. To-day an employer must have a good reputation in order to secure Antioch students, and if he does not give them a fair chance to develop he is not able to keep them. Numerous excellent opportunities for educational employment sometimes remain untaken for months because every student fitted for those particular openings is already satisfactorily engaged. In some fields it still is difficult to find just the cooperative positions wanted, especially for students with highly specialized interests, such as in foreign trade, oil geology, or the teaching of dramatics; but little by little many very special cases are being well served, as in ceramics, aeronautical engineering, and physical research.
The notable success Antioch coöperative students are achieving after graduation indicates that they have an almost immediate advantage over students who have been satisfied with a narrower educational outlook. Two young men, graduates of two years ago, are already in executive positions just below the chief officers of two of Ohio’s largest department stores, with salaries already equal to those of many college presidents.
Of seven men graduated in chemistry within two years, every one has made a marked success. One of them, who joined a large corporation along with forty chemists from other institutions, already is at the head of the group in salary and responsibility. Two were in charge of industrial laboratories before graduation. Another, a year and a half out of college, is in charge of an important department in a large chemical industry. Others have made brilliant records in graduate schools.
Of twenty graduates in education, nineteen are successful, some in a very marked degree. One student, a year out of college, is head of a small department in a prominent investment banking firm. Two young women, a year out of college, are chief dietitians in large hospitals. Another co-ed, who left before graduation, is managing a club of six hundred members with a quarter of a million dollar plant, and also directs the dining-room service of several hundred meals a day.
A week with the Antioch extramural college is an interesting experience. Within a month there have been opportunities to place ten pairs of Antioch coöperative students as chemists, for biochemical work in a large clinic, for service in metallographic laboratories, and for other positions. A hurry call from the promoters of a nursery school reported that the teacher had suddenly left, and that qualified nursery-school teachers were wanted to take charge for the remainder of the year. Welltrained women students were supplied, and the school proceeded as usual.
The Arden Players were in distress, for Julius Cæsar had been taken sick. Student dramatics flourish at Antioch; a qualified student took the job of playing the rôle of Julius Cæsar, acting as stage manager as well. He appeared regularly at one-night stands, to be stabbed by friend Brutus. When he joined the troupe, this young man found the members traveling inconveniently from town to town by railroad, with delays in baggage shipments. Suggesting the purchase of a motor bus, Caesar was forthwith appointed chauffeur.
Young men were wanted to organize and manage the recreation programme in an orphans’ home and school of fourteen hundred children. Two pairs are at work on the job, and doing well. They are preparing for careers in physical education.
The engineer of a public utility was asked to give a certain job to coöperative students. ‘Can’t use students here,’ he replied; ‘this job is too technical.’ ‘You seem to have some very specialized equipment here,’ remarked the Antioch representative;‘who keeps it in order?’ ‘Oh, the manufacturers send around an inspector regularly to care for it,’ was the reply. ‘And did n’t you know that the inspector who keeps your equipment in order is an Antioch coöperative student?’ We got that job.
Thus the extramural college as organized at Antioch is filling a large gap in the essentials of American higher education. Almus Pater is undertaking to do his share, so long neglected, in bringing up his children.