1903-04 Volume 28 No 1–5 - Phi Delta Theta Scroll Archive

THB SCROLL. 313industry. Western youth can boast as good blood and ancestry as eastern.The best immigrants to the United States have settled in the West, and theirnumerous children and grandchildren attending universities are among ourmost promising students. Western men and women put forth effort morenaturally than the scions of families who have been well-to-do for generations.They possess the will for it, and also the strong physique. Neverhave I seen in the East, save in professional and graduate schools, such desperateand unremitting application to study as characterizes the mass of studentsin the prairie States.Western students generally display a veritably insatiable hunger for highereducation. In them survives the spirit of their pioneer fathers, who, beforethey had places to lay their heads, taxed themselves to build schools andequip universities. Western students attend college to learn rather than tobe taught. They average to study many more ho'urs a! day than pastern.The typical college idler is never seen here. With eagerness for knowledgethe western student combines a zeal and a power for hard work seldom ifever witnessed in eastern institutions. ;The outside "seminar," to cram men for "exp.ms," reducing th^ necessityof study to a minimum, and turning into a farce so much undergraduate"work" at the oldest of our universities, the Wes) has not adopted. *This assiduity in mental toil—often under the greatest obstacles—is aninvaluable discipline, not only intellectual, but moral,*"tending to fo^m andsettle a young man's character as desultory study could pot possibly jio. Itis not astonishing, then, that the Western collegian should display not merelymuch the greater power of concentration, but also the more earnestnessmorally. This shows itself as well in his general as in his collegiate life.The moral weight of the average university student is among the things thathave most impressed me in my experience West.Native ability, enthusiasm for knowledge, coupled with the power forstudy which their strong physiques impart, and their readier submissivenessto discipline, all attested by the goodly number of fellowships which westernmen and women hold in eastern graduate schools, assure the coming generationof western scholars a prominent place in American mental life. Theseare some of the reasons why, as a New England college professoy (not aprofessor of rhetoric) has put it, to continue as our chief purveyor c^ highesteducational products, "the East has got to get onto her job."The University of Chicago is no longer a Baptist institution.President W. R. Harper recently announced that it hadoutgrown its denominational character. He declared that inthe nature of its faculty, its students and its methods it hadspread beyond its allegiance to the Baptist Church. Most ofthe students and most of the professors, he said, were non-Baptists. All the buildings on the campus were paid for bypeople of other creeds, he continued, and ^99 out of every$100, except that given by J. D. Rockefeller, who is a Baptist,were contributed by . people not members of that church.Religious denominationalism in universities, he said, was"narrow mindedness," and the fact that the University ofChicago had broken away from this class was an evidence ofits progress.