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Aspects of American Students Life.

America is a young country of great enterprise. The American dates everything from "the War," and while the interval covers a period of about half century only, the development of America in all branches is too well known to need further comment. Perhaps in no other sphere has the progress been so rapid and so revolutionary as in education. Compared with the Universities of the Old World, most of the American College are but growths of yesterday, and yet how vigorous they are! To-day, in points of equipment and organisation, they lead the world.

American student life reflects in many ways this modern and rapid growth. There is a freedom from prejudice and custom—tradition finds little, if any, place in the direction of student life.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to a large University, with its three or four thousand student, is the attempt that is made—and in most cases very successfully—to deal with the whole life of the student : physical, mental, and moral. Outside his actual classes, which occupy him during fifteen to eighteen hours a week, the University takes care to nurture its student's physical and intellectual frames. Gymnasiums of costly structure and equipment, with boxing rooms, fencing rooms, swimming baths, and running track, are found in all the modern Universities in charge of a fully-qualified man, who ranks as a Professor and has under him a staff of competent assistants. At most Colleges attendance at gymnasium for a certain number of years is compulsory; at Cornell military drill or gymnastics for two year; at Pennsylvania, no one who doubt, such conditions seem out-of-place, and yet time, I believe, will show that in this matter, at least, the Americans have looked more deeply than we have. Track matters, rowing and football are under proper coaches, and while no undue emphasis is now place on athletic, the University that does not produce graduates in accordance with the well-worn adage is not considered to be doing its duty. It is commonly supposed that the ordinary undergraduate in America in an athlete first and a student if he finds time. In this regard, however, our American cousins are much stricter than ourselves. No one is able to represent his University till he is a Sophomore page 30 (a student of one year's standing), and he cannot represent it for more than three years, making in all the four years that are generally necessary to qualify for an American degree. Further, the students who falls below being "conditioned," i. e., keeping twelve hours weekly pre term instead of fifteen, if "busted"—to use the student expression—which means that he must leave failed to pass., While the American student then engages in athletics, it is not, I think, in the vast majority of cases, to the detriment, but rather to the benefit, of hid class work.

Buildings devoted exclusively to the social life to the whole body of students are common. That at Pennsylvania is perhaps typical of the best of them. The Howard Houston Hall—a memorial to the student whose name it bears—is a three-storied building after the style of the old English Colleges, containing a general reception room, writing rooms, library, billiard and pool rooms, a branch of the Post Office, a restaurant, an auditorium with a grand organ, trophy rooms, guest rooms, photographic dark rooms, and meeting rooms for the societies of the special faculties. This Club has nearly four thousand members and, although the subscription is small, in self-supporting. It is evident that, even with the facilities that such a club offers, so large a body of students must, for its more intimate social life, divide itself into smaller groups. Those who enter the University in the same year form the class of that year, and it is but natural that they should work together to forward their own interests.

Many of the University do not admit women as undergraduates, and it surprise me considerably to find how conservative the staffs of some of the at Harvard women take classes in the University, but only in those cases in which there are few female students taking a subject, and thus increase in the staff of their own ladies' College is saved thereby. They are not really undergraduates of the University and those of the ladies'' College. At Cornell, bases on the democratic principle of its founder, that the University should be a place to which everyone might come for the kind of knowledge that he wanted, nearly one-fourth of the students are women.

There is rivalry, too, among the classes—a rivalry that, in the old days, used to take the form of "hazing," which, however, has lately given way to a peculiar method of determining superiority, class fights. At Cornell it is called the "Flag page 31 Rush," and takes place on the Campus on Hallowe'en at 8 p. m. Each class is represented by three teams of five men each, each team representing the heavy, middle, and light weights. A piece of canvas about six feet long does duty for the flag, and five men of each of the two competing classes take hold of it, while the other ten men of each side retire to a distance of some fifty yards and, on the signal, rush for the canvas flag. Anything but deliberately striking an opponent is allowed and, after five minutes chaos, the struggle is stopped and the number of hands that each class has then on the flag is counted Victoria going to the side whose number is greater. Thus all the "hazing" passions of the year are liberated in a brief five minutes.

The rivalry that exists between our Colleges in academic matters in not so apparent in America, where each University is independent and grants its own degrees. Universities there are judged, not by the number graduating only, but by the quality of the men they produce, as shewn by their subsequent careers. On the athletic side the enthusiasm and esprit de corps have an excellent opportunity of showing themselves and the change is never lost. To see an important College football match raises in the visitor's mind this serious question—Why have the game at all?

The proceedings open by the students of each University marching to the ground in force, some three or four thousand strong, to the accompaniment of College tunes played by the College band. On both sides of the ground are tiers of platforms, and each College has a side allotted to it. The students are arranged in sections under a leader and there is a kind of conductor on each side who calls through a megaphone for the kind of cheer or yell that he desires. This is announced by the section leaders and taken up by whole body of students. All through the game, which is dreadfully slow, these rival yells are shouted back and forth to the never-ending commands, "Three short ones," "One long one," etc., indicating the nature of the particular yell that is required, and the distinctive flags of the rival teams—miniatures of which are carried by most students—are waved almost continuously. To attend a closely-contested match demands almost as much training (particularly vocal training) from the enthusiastic student who has failed to "make" the team as from those who have obtained that coveted honour. To the uninitiated it seems as if the game was but the occasion for the hurling forth of rival yells.

In such large bodies a good deal of the detail in discipline must fall on a section of the students themselves. The author page 32 ities look to the senior or upper class men to see that the general tone of University life is kept as far as possible up to the idea of the controlling body, which is represented by a president, the official head of the University. To such an extent has reliance on the student been carried in some Colleges that the "honour system" is adopted in examinations, no supervisor being appointed, but the candidates left to the guided by the general moral tone of the student body. Whatever may be said for and against this procedure, it is still true that such an aim make an endeavour to introduce a higher ethical code, that indicates a healthy moral tone in a University. The control by the upper classmen shows itself also in regulations for the guidance of those entering College life—the freshmen. Among the rules issued by the Vigilance Committee of Cornell, Ithaca, are to be found the following:

No freshman shall smoke at all on the Campus, nor shall he smoke a pipe in the streets of Ithaca; certain places such as the front seats and boxes of the theatre are proscribed; regulation caps are to be worn at all times, except on Sundays; no freshman is allowed to go without a coat or a cap on the Campus.

Such regulations may appear strange, but they all aim at preventing a new student from adopting a certain course of action before he has had an opportunity of measuring the respective University values of the different courses of life.

Other topics, such as the Cosmopolitan Club at Cornell, the relation of Staff to Students, the Fraternity Houses, etc., naturally suggest themselves, but already this article has run its full course.

T. A. Hunter.