My College Days: A Retrospect

Conclusion. A Reflection Upon Traditions,with an Ideal Plan for Holiday Examinations

STEPHEN LEACOCK

I HAVE it on tradition that in the year 1860 or thereabouts, the way in which a student matriculated into a college was, that the venerable gentleman named the Principal called him into his office and asked him who his father was, and whether he had read Virgil.

If the old gentleman liked the answers to these questions he let the boy in.

Nowadays, when a student matriculates, it requires in the first place some four pages of printed regulations to tell him how; after which there is demanded two weeks of continuous writing, and the consumption of at least twenty square yards of writing paper.

One of these two systems is what we now call Organization; the other is not. I dare not doubt for a minute which is the best. There is the same difference as there is between a Court Martial and an Appeal to the Privy Council, so that it would be folly, if not treason, to express a preference for the older plan.

But like many other things, the plan was not wholly bad. For they do say that sometimes the venerable Principal would keep the boy talking for half an hour or so, and when the youth left, he would say, "Remarkable boy that! Has the makings of a scholar in him!" And the little matriculant, his heart swollen with pride, would hurry away to the college library with a new fever for Virgil's Aeneid burning within him. By such and similar processes there was set up in the college a sort of personal relationship, not easily established nowadays even by the "contact" section of the " Committee on Friendliness ".

For nowadays every matriculant is just a name and a number, and when he gets into the first year he is merely a "case", and in his second year simply a "seat", and in his third year a "condition", and in his fourth year, at the best, a "parchment", and after that not even a memory.

The College Revisited

THERE can, of course, be no doubt that present days and present things are better —none whatever. To anybody who attended a place that was called a "college" and had three hundred students, it is wonderful to come back and find it grown—or at any rate swollen, inflated, shall I say?—into a University of three thousand, with a President instead of a Principal, and with as many "faculties" and departments and committees as there are in the League of Nations. It is wonderful to think of this vast organization pouring out its graduates like beans out of a hopper. It is marvelous, I repeat, to reflect on the way that everything is organized, standardized, unified, and reduced to a provable sample of excellence.

The college athletics of the older day, how feeble they seem by comparison now! The group of students gathered round the campus in the October dusk to cheer the football team —each cheering, or calling, upon some poor notion of his own, as to the merits of the play—how crude it seems beside the organized hysteria of the Rooters Club. The college daily journal of today with its seven columns of real "news", and needing nothing but a little murder to put it right in line with the big one-cent papers, the organs of one-cent opinion, how greatly superior it is to the old-time

"College Journal"! That poor, maundering thing made its appearance at irregular intervals, emerging feebly like the Arctic sun from behind its cloud of debt, and containing nothing later in the way of "news" than a disquisition on The Art of William Shakespeare.

Or take the college library of the old days, how limited it was, with its one ancient librarian with a beard that reached his girdle, handing out the books one by one, and remembering the students by their faces. As if up-to-date students had any!

The old college is no doubt gone, and we could not bring it back if we would. But it would perhaps be well for us if we could keep alive something of the intimate and friendly spirit that inspired it.

Whereupon, I am certain, someone will at once propose a University committee on brotherly love, with power to compel attendance and impose fines.

A Christmas Examination

WITH every revolving year—and the poets and the physicists agree that they do revolve— am struck with the strange inconsistency of the words "Christmas Examination". Here on the one hand is Christmas, good, glad, old season with its holly berries and its lighted candles and its little children dancing in a world of magic round a glittering tree; Christmas, with its fabled Santa Claus defying our modern civilization by squeezing his way down the galvanized iron pipe of a gas grate: Christmas, with the sleigh-bells all a-jingle, with bright snow in the streets, with the church-bells ringing on a week day, and such a crisp gladness in the air that even the angular faces of university professors are softened out into something approaching human kindliness.

Here, I say, on the one hand is Christmas.

And here, on the other hand, are examinations, with their sleepless nights and their fevered days, with crazy questions and crooked answers, set with the calculating cruelty of the inquisitor, answered with the patient resignation of the martyr, or with the fanatical frenzy of the devotee who has swallowed his instructor's textbook and gone crazy over it; examinations, with their hideous percentages, their insulting distinctions of rank, and paid for, in cold fees, with money enough to spread a Christmas banquet for the whole university.

Here is Christmas, and here are the examinations. And the two won't go together.

We can't alter Christmas. We've had it nearly two thousand years now. In a changing world its lights glimmer through the falling snow' as a quiet beacon on things that, alter not. It stands there, fixed as a very saturnalia of good deeds, a reckless outbreak of. licensed benevolence, with its loosened pocketbooks and smiling faces, just to show us on one day of the year what we might be on the other three hundred and sixty-four. It stands a moment and then passes, leaving us to button about us again our little suit of protective selfishness, with nothing but a memory to keep us warm inside. Yet in the midst of this season of bounty and gladness, there stands the unhospitable scarecrow of examinations, conjuring fearsome images of abstruse inquisitions which no wit can answer, and of unkind professorial diligence that knoweth not the beauty of ignorance.

Christmas we cannot alter. But the examinations we can. Why not? Why will not some theorist in education tell us how we can infuse into the Christmas examinations something of the spirit of the season that gives them birth? Can we not break down something of these rigid regulations that every candidate reads, shuddering, in the printed instructions on his examination book? Can we not so estimate our percentages and frame our questions?

And when I had written thus far the whole idea of the thing broke upon me with the floodlight of discovery. Of course, nothing simpler, I reached out my hand and drew to me the hideous code of the. examination regulations. I read it over with a shudder. Is it possible that for fifty years the University has tolerated such a flat violation of very rule of Christmas behavior? I saw at once how, not only the regulations, but the very examination papers themselves ought to be so altered that the old malicious spirit might be driven out of them and Christmas come to its own again, even in an examination hall. Here is the way it is done.

The Proposed Regulations

1. CANDIDATES are permitted, nay, they are encouraged, to enter the examination hall half an hour after the examination has begun, and to leave it, re-enter it, walk across it, jump across it, roll around in it, lie down in it, tear their clothes, mutilate their books and, generally, to make themselves thoroughly and completely at home at the expense of the University.

2. Candidates are not only permitted to ask questions of the presiding examiner, but they may, if they like, talk to him, sing to him, hum grand opera to him in whole or in part, use his fountain pen, borrow his money, and, if need be, for the sake of order, request him to leave the hall. But remember that the presiding examiner is, like yourself, a very human being and, if you had the advantage of knowing him outside the class room, you would find him at this time of year one of the jolliest creatures conceivable. If you could see him presiding over the little candidates around the Christmas tree in his own house, you would almost forgive him the silly dignity that he assumes to cover his natural humanity.

3. Speaking or communicating with every other candidate, male or female, is of course the privilege of every student, and the use of the megaphone and phonograph shall in no way be curtailed or abridged.

4. Students may either make use of the books, paper and memoranda provided by the examiner, or may bring in their own memorandums, vade-mecums and conundrums, together with such dictographs, phonographs, linotypes, stethoscopes or any other aids to memory that they may see fit to use.

5. The plea of accident or forgetfulness will, of course, be immediately received in the same spirit as given.

6. Five per cent, will be accepted as a satisfactory standard, but all students failing to obtain this may be, and most certainly will be, specially exempted from further effort by a vote of the Board of Governors.

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So much for the regulations. But, of course, still more can be accomplished if the examiners will only frame their questions to suit the gentle kindliness of the season. I should not wish to show in any great detail how this is to be accom-plished. That would be trespassing on the work of departments other than our own. But I may be allowed to point the pathway of reform by proposing a few questions in representative subjects.

Examination Questions in Classics

1. Who was Themistocles? (Note in italics. If you can't think it out for yourself, he was a great Roman general, or a Greek, or something. The examiner doesn't know much about it himself, but, Lord bless you, at this time of year he doesn't care any more than you do.)

2. Translate the accompanying pas sages, or don't bother to, just as you happen to feel about it. After all, you must remember that ability to translate a lot of Latin verses is a poor test of what you really are worth.

3. Pick out all the verbs in the above and parse them, or, if you don't feel like pickmg them out, leave them sticking where they are. Remember that they've been there for two thousand years.

There! That's the way the Christmas examination in Classics is to be conducted. And in the same fashion one might try to soften down the mathematical examination into something like this:—

1. Solve the following equations-but if you can't solve them, my dear boy, don't worry about it. Take them home to father as a Christmas present, and tell him to solve them It's his business any way, not yours. He pays the fees, and if he can't solve the equations, your family must stand the loss of them. And any way, people ought not to mind the loss of a few equations at Christmas time.

There! That's enough for the mathematical examination. As for the rest, you can see how they should be framed.

But just wait a minute before we come to the end. There would remain one examination, just one, that I think every student ought to pass at this season, though he may forget it if he will, as all the kind things of Christmas are forgotten all too soon. I should call it, for want of another name, an Examination in Christ mas Kindliness, and I warn you that nothing but a hundred per cent. in it can be accepted for a pass. So here it is.

1. Is the University such a bad place after all?

2. Don't you think that perhaps, after all, the professors and the faculty and the examiners and all the rest of the crabbed machinery of your daily toil is something striving for your good? Dip deep your pen in your Christmas ink, my boy, and overstate the truth for your soul's good.

3. Are you not going some day, when your college years are long since past, and when the poor fretful thing that is called practical life has caught you in its toils, and carries you onwards towards your last Christmas-are you not going to look back at them through the soft haze of recollection, as to the memory of a shaded caravansary in a long and weary pilgrimage? Let us not forget.