BY CHANCELLOR J. H. VINCENT, D.D.

Beyond the “Inner Circle,” which leads to the “Upper Chautauqua,” we come to the Uppermost Chautauqua—the University proper, with its “School of Liberal Arts,” and its “School of Theology.” Here we find provision made for college training of a thorough sort. Students all over the world may turn their homes into dormitories, refectories, and study rooms, in connection with the great University which has its local habitation at Chautauqua. Thus “hearers” and “recipients” in the Assembly, “readers” in the C. L. S. C., “student readers” in the “inner circle”—the “League of the Round-Table,” may go beyond, even to the School of Liberal Arts, the bona fide College of Chautauqua.

Chautauqua exalts the college. She believes that the benefits of a college training are manifold.

1. The action by which a youth becomes a college student—the simple going forth—leaving one set of circumstances and voluntarily entering another, with a specific purpose—is an action which has educating influence in it. It is a distinct recognition of an object and a deliberate effort to secure it. The judgment is convinced, the will makes a decision, and corresponding action follows. We have the thought, the aim, the standards, the resolve, the surrender, and the embodiment of all in an actual physical movement. There must follow these activities a reflex influence on the youth himself. It becomes a “new birth” in his life. He has gone to another plane. His everyday conduct is modified by it. He looks up and on. According to the standard he has set, the idea he entertains of education, and the motives which impel him will be the subjective effects of his action—the real power of his new life.

2. There is educating power in the complete plan of study provided in the college curriculum, covering as it does the wide world of thought, distributed over the years, with subdivisions into terms, with specific assignments of subjects, with a beginning and an ending of each division, and many beginnings and endings, with promotions according to merit, and final reviews, recognitions, and honors. There is great value in the enforced system of the college. It tends to sustain and confirm new life, begun when the student made his first movement toward an institution.

3. The association of students in college life is another educating factor. Mind meets mind in a fellowship of aim, purpose, and experience. They have left the same world; they now together enter another world. They look up to the heights and to the shining of crowns which await the gifted and faithful. They are brothers now—one “alma mater” to nourish them. They sing their songs—songs which, although without much sense, have power to awake and foster sympathy. Even a man of sense loves to listen to them. He laughs at the folly, and, though himself a sage, wishes he were one of the company of singers. The laws of affinity work out. Soul inspires soul. Memories grow apace. Attachments that endure, adventures seasoned with fun or touched with sadness, absurdities, failures, heroisms, triumphs, are crowded into the four years, and like fruitage of bloom and fragrance from a conservatory may go forth to bless many an hour of wandering, of sorrow, of reunion, of remembrance, in the later years. There was something pathetic in the return of the famous Yale College class of 1853 to their alma mater two summers ago. As they wandered about the scenes of their youth, under the old elms, through recitation rooms and chapel, singing the old songs, reviving the old friendships, recalling faces to be seen no more, no wonder that tears fell down furrowed cheeks from eyes unused to weep. Is there any stronger or sweeter friendship than that born under the ivied towers and spreading elms of college hall and campus?

In college mind meets mind in the severe competition of recitation and annual examination. The bright boy—one of a small class at home, who had it all his own way there—now finds a score or more of leaders whose unvoiced challenge he is compelled to accept, and how he does knit his brow, close his eyes, summon his strength, school his will, force his flagging energies, and grapple problems that he may hold his own, outstrip his rivals, and win prize and place for the sake of his family’s fame and for his personal satisfaction!

There is nothing that so discovers to a youth the weak points of his character as the association of college life. There are no wasted courtesies among students. Folly is soon detected, and by blunt speech, bold caricature, and merciless satire exposed. Sensitiveness is cured by ridicule, cowardice never condoned, and meanness branded beyond the possibility of concealment or pardon. College associations stimulate the best elements in a man, expose weak and wicked ones, and tend to the pruning and strengthening of character.

4. Then there is in college life association with professors and tutors, and this is, I confess, sometimes of little value, as when teachers are mere machines, but in it, at its best, are distinguishing benefits. When teachers are full men, apt men, and enthusiastic men—as college professors, and for that matter all teachers ought to be—the place of recitation soon becomes a center of power. Tact tests attainment, exposes ignorance, foils deceit, develops strength, indicates lines of discovery, and inspires courage. A living teacher supplies at once model and motive. He has gone on among the labyrinths, and up the steeps of knowledge; has tried and toiled and triumphed. He sought and he is. And now by wise questioning, by judicious revelation, by skillful concealment, by ingenious supposition, by generous raillery, by banter, by jest, by argument and by magnetic energies, the teacher stirs the student into supreme conditions of receptivity and activity. Such teachers make the college. As President Garfield said: “Give me an old school house, and a log for a bench. Put Mark Hopkins on one end, and let me, as student, sit on the other, and I have all the college I need.” When an institution is able to employ men of superior knowledge, power, and tact, students must be trained, and all their after lives affected by the influence. For memory magnifies the worth of a true teacher, and the hero of the college quadrennium becomes a demigod through the post-graduate years. A dozen men of this mold, if once they could be gotten together, would make a college the like of which has not yet been seen on the planet. Shall Chautauqua one of these days find them?

5. The college life promotes mental discipline. It drills, and drills, and draws out. It compels effort, and effort strengthens. It provides a system of mental gymnastics. What was difficult at first, soon becomes easy, until severer tests are sought from the very delight the student finds in concentration and persistency. Thus development takes place in the varied faculties of the soul. The student acquires power to observe with scientific exactness, to generalize wisely from accumulated data, to project hypotheses, to watch psychical processes, to reason with accuracy, to distinguish between the false and the true, both in the inner and the outer world; to grasp protracted and complicated processes of mathematical thought; to trace linguistic evolutions—remembering, analyzing, philosophizing; to study the students of the ages, and the products of their genius in art, poetry, jurisprudence, and discovery, in the facts of history and the great principles of sociology. All the powers employed in this manifold work during the college term are trained and thus prepared for work after the college term is ended. It is not so much the amount of knowledge acquired during the four years, as it is the power at will ever after to acquire knowledge, that marks the benefits of the college course.

6. With discipline comes the comprehensive survey of the universe. The college outlook takes the student backward along the line of historical development. It shows him the heights and the depths, the manifold varieties and inter-relations of knowledge. It gives him tools and the training to use them, and a glance at the material on which he is to use them. The student through college is a traveler, sometimes examining in detail, sometimes superficially. He gives a glance and remembers; he takes notes and thinks closely. He sees the all-surrounding regions of knowledge, and although he may make but slight researches in particular lines, he knows where to return in the after years for deeper research and ampler knowledge.

7. College life leads to self-discovery. It tests a man’s powers, and reveals to him his weakness. It shows him what he is best fitted to do, and the showing may not be in harmony either with his ambitions or his preconceived notions. A boy born for mercantile pursuits, who comes out of college a lawyer or preacher, proves that the college failed to do its legitimate and most important work for him. Professors who merely glorify intellectual attainment, and who neglect to show students their true place in the world, are little better than cranks or hobbyists. College life is the whole of life packed into a brief period, with the elements that make life magnified and intensified, so that tests of character may easily be made. It is a laboratory of experiment, where natural laws and conditions are pressed into rapid though normal operation, and processes otherwise extending over long periods of time are crowded to speedy consummation. Twenty years of ordinary life, so far as they constitute a testing period of character are, by college life, crowded into four years. A boy who is a failure then, would, for the same reasons, be a failure through the longer probation, unless the early discovery of peculiar weakness may be a protection against the perils which this weakness involves. Therefore it is a good thing for a youth to subject himself thus early to a testing, for from it may come self-discovery, when latent powers may be developed, and impending evils avoided.

Of other advantages of educational institutions I shall not now speak. They are manifold. Our youth of both sexes, whatever their callings in life, would do well to seek these advantages. Therefore parents, primary teachers, and older persons who influence youth, should constantly place before them the benefits of college education, and inspire them to reach after and attain it. Arguments should be used, appeals made, assistance proffered, that a larger percentage of American youth may aspire after college privileges, or at least remain for a longer term in the best schools of a higher grade. Haste to be rich, restiveness under restraint during the age of unwisdom, inability to regulate by authority at home the eager and ambitious life of our youth, together with false, mercenary notions of parents, who “can not afford to have so much time spent by the young folks in studying, because they must be doing something for themselves”—these are some of the causes of the depreciation and neglect of the American college—a neglect lamentable enough, and fraught with harm to the nation.

Chautauqua lifts up her voice in favor of liberal education for a larger number of people. She would pack existing institutions until wings must be added to old buildings, and new buildings be put up to accommodate young men and maidens who are determined to be educated.

Chautauqua would exalt the profession of the teacher until the highest genius, the richest scholarship, and the broadest manhood and womanhood of the nation would be consecrated to this service.

Chautauqua would give munificent salaries and put a premium on merit, sense, tact, and culture in the teacher’s office. She would turn the eyes of all the people—poor and rich, mechanics and men of other, if not higher degree, toward the high school and the college, urging house builders, house owners, house keepers, farmers, blacksmiths, bankers, millionaires, to prepare themselves by a true culture, whatever niche they fill in life, to be men and women, citizens, parents, members of society, members of the church, candidates for immortal progress.

To promote these ends the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle was organized. By its courses of popular reading it gives a college outlook to the uncultivated, and exalts the higher learning. It is, as I have elsewhere said, a John the Baptist preparing the way for seminary and university.

The managers of the Chautauqua movement, however, recognize the fact that there are thousands of full-grown men and women who are at their best intellectually, and who, with some leisure and much longing, believe they could do more than read. They want to study; to study in downright earnest; to develop mental power; to cultivate taste; to increase knowledge, to make use of it by tongue and pen and life. There are tens of thousands of young people out of school by necessities commercial and filial, who are awakened to the power within and the possibilities beyond. They believe they could learn a language, and enjoy the literature of it. They believe they could think and grow, speak and write. They are willing, and eager to try. Out of minutes they could construct college terms. They have will enough, heart enough, brain enough to begin, to go on, to go through, and all this, while the everyday life continues with its duty for this hour and for that. They believe that into the closely woven texture of everyday, home and business life, there may be drawn threads of scarlet, crimson, blue and gold, until their homespun walls become radiant with form and color worthy to decorate the royal chamber—the chamber of their king, God the Father of earnest souls.

Chautauqua denounces the talk of certain rich men about the “poor having their place,” and that it would be “better for working people to confine themselves to work, or at best to understand subjects bearing entirely on their everyday duties in field or shop, and let science and literature alone.” Chautauqua would make working men cultivated, and give them recreation from manual toil in realms of wonder, taste, science, literature and art. Chautauqua would spread out over the lot of the toiler a dome, vast, radiant, rich and inspiring.

Therefore the Chautauqua School of Liberal Arts has been organized, and chartered with full university powers, for non-resident pupils, who, by correspondence with competent instructors, may study what they please, when they please, and as they please, eliciting suggestion, and giving answer and thesis, taking all the time they need, passing final examination in writing in the presence of witnesses, and having their examination papers subjected to the scrutiny of competent and impartial critics. When, after the required standard in the several departments which constitute the college course has been attained, whether in four, or ten, or fourteen years, the successful candidate shall have his diploma and his degree; and through this window he has constructed out of all these fragments of time—fragments picked up from dusty floor and pavement, from mine, and field, and shop—through this window the light shall shine in its beauty, and people shall see what genius, industry and persistent will can do with the cast away fragments of spare moments and random opportunities.

I have thus described the “Upper Chautauqua.” By reason of the action of the Board of Managers, elsewhere reported, the plan of gradation is slightly changed from that laid down in the previous article on the “Upper Chautauqua,” and the following successive steps are found in the scheme of the Chautauqua University:

1. The Assembly, including the summer meetings, the “Platform,” “the American Church Sunday-school Normal Course,” the “School of Languages,” and the “Teachers’ Retreat.”

2. The Circle, embracing the “C. L. S. C.”

3. The “Inner Circle,” to which they belong who, having seven seals on their diploma, are members of the “League of the Round-Table.”

4. The “University Circle,” with its “School of Liberal Arts,” and the “School of Theology.”

New Haven, Conn., February 6, 1885.