Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Loafer
I caught sight of Jack and Eddie and Mac sitting in the Arcade as I passed this morning on my way down town. They had evidently got up too late for breakfast and were "hitting a coke" before they subjected themselves to the strain of a ten o'clock. The last bell had rung, but they were taking their time and giving Eddie opportunity to finish the risqué tale of his last conquest. Mac had already been out of classes this semester for five weeks because of a slight illness, but that seemed to him an asset rather than a liability, for the instructor knowing he had been ill, could not reasonably expect him to get into the work vigorously all at once or to come to classes regularly or on time. Jack had been out to a dance the night before, and not being prepared had cut his nine o'clock, and Eddie was taking the cuts which as a senior he thought himself entitled to. They were good illustrations, these three happy-golucky souls, of the college loafer—irregular, irresponsible, unambitious—the type of men who are the real menace to-day of undergraduate life in college.
It takes a man of some energy to be a real devil, so that the loafer at first seldom gets into anything that is difficult, or dangerous, or not nice; he doesn't initiate things; some one else makes the plan, though he may trail along behind in an escapade and seem to be a real part of the procession. He is a passive, talkative being; he loves ease, leisure, sleep, coca cola, cigarettes, chocolate bostons, and girls. He is a stroller, a hanger on. If, as I am writing these paragraphs, I should look out of my window upon the broad green expanse of our back campus, I should catch sight of him walking lazily under the shade of the tall elm trees of Burrill Avenue, or sprawled upon the grass, a girl by his side, a smile on his face, his books and his intellectual obligations forgotten. He knows the last dance step, the latest gossip, and he has seen the last bills at the Orpheum. He would be entirely innocuous if he were not allowed to run at large. The trouble is he infects the crowd.
It is not difficult to understand the environment which conduces to the development of this type of student. At home he has neither been given nor has he assumed any responsibility. He has had no duties, no regular set tasks; he has done no work; often he has been mother's darling. It has usually, at home, been a problem as to what should be done with him in the summer vacation when there was no school, so he loafed around lazy and discontented. He has seldom done well in his preparatory school or high school; he has passed, but neither he nor his parents have had any ambitions for him to be a grind or the valedictorian of his class. If his mother were asked she would probably say, "We are very well satisfied with what Clarence has done in high school; he is not a natural student, and has never been very strong, so that we have never pushed him nor wanted him to over-study." And Clarence has done as his parents desired and has never overstudied.
He comes naturally to speak of himself as "no student" and to take a certain pride in the fact that this characteristic in some way differentiates him from the common herd of undergraduates who do their work because they like it, or who go at things with energy because it is their duty. He takes his commonplace work as a matter of course, just as many people assume without trying that they can not learn to spell.
"You had a shamefully low average last semester," I remarked to Brinkerhoff the other day, "for a man of your training and ability."
"Well, I'm no student," was his self-satisfied reply, which was only another way of saying, "I'm a hopeless loafer, and you ought to be satisfied that I got through as well as I did." There was no shame on his part, no resolve to do better, simply a resignation to the inevitable.
The loafer in college is not always a boy who has been brought up in luxury; he not infrequently comes from very humble surroundings; but wherever he has been brought up he has never developed any love for work. When he enters college it is without ambition, without any definite purpose or object; he has little idea of what he wants to do, no love of books, no interest in study, no vision of the future. He does not know whether he wants to go north or south, whether he would like to study art or ceramic engineering, whether he would prefer to spend his life as a missionary or as a vaudeville star. Some of the other fellows were coming to college, so he threw a few changes of clothing into a suitcase and came along, just as he might have joined a camping party or taken a hike into the country. Some of the most confirmed loafers I have known have been men who had to work for a part of their living. Loafing in college is not, as many people think, a matter of money, but of temperament.
Yesterday a father came into my office to discuss with me the possibility of his son's entering college.
"What course does he want to take?" I asked in order more intelligently to answer his question.
"I don't know," was the reply. "We have not thought much about that. I don't believe George has decided on anything yet."
"What is he interested in? What sort of work or study does he like best?" I continued, trying to get myself square with the intellectual compass.
"He has never shown any special interest in anything yet. We hoped that after he got to college he would develop interest in some line of work."
"Is he in love?" I ventured, determined to get somewhere if possible.
"Well, he certainly does like the girls."
It is this sort, interested in nothing but his senses and his emotions, that develops into the loafer. A boy will seldom show more ambition in college than he has shown at home; if he has had no vision or purpose there, he will be unlikely to find one in college. We do not change our characters by changing our lodging house, and if we have disliked work in Chicago we shall hardly take to it in Champaign.
"You haven't done much for Babb in college," a fellow townsman of his said to me when I was on a visit to the country town from which the freshman referred to came. "He's as lazy and worthless as ever."
"If you have had him here for nineteen years and have done nothing for him, how can you expect us to reorganize him in six months?" I inquired.
"I thought you were able to do everything in college," he replied. But we are not.
I have found the greatest interest as an executive officer in college in getting the peculiar viewpoint of the loafer. When I call him for irregularity, and if I am shrewd enough to prove to him that these excuses which he has offered were not thought sufficient on his part to keep him from certain social pleasures in which I have seen him indulging, he leans upon the prop of all loafers and asserts that the rules of the college permit a certain number of cuts to all students, and he has not yet exceeded his limit. "Anyway," he goes on, "a fellow can't go to class all the time." One of the most common excuses of the loafer for not attending class is that of not being wakened in time by the proper person. I have a letter now on my desk from a young fellow dropped from college for poor work who says: "A good deal of my trouble was due to the ineffective waking system in our house," meaning that the freshman whose duty it was to come around and wake him up, sometimes went to sleep at the switch. The next most popular excuse for absence is that he was busy studying for another course than the one he cut. It never seems to occur to him that there are regular hours of study far more than adequate for the purposes of even the good student, and that it is seldom if ever necessary to cut class in order to study. Cutting class with him is a habit as regular and as persistent as smoking, for every loafer smokes.
He either smokes because he puts in so much time loafing that he needs some recreation to keep him from getting lonesome, or he loafs because he has smoked so much that it has robbed him of the energy sufficient to do anything else. The odor of the Fatimas which he has burned up floats across the desk to me as he comes in to ask me for an excuse because of illness; before he steps off the campus he has lighted another to stimulate his waning interest in life, and wherever you meet him,—between dances, at his room, on the street,—he is drawing strength and comfort from a pipe or a cigarette. It is the badge of his fraternity.
"Why do you smoke so much?" I asked Rheims, whose restless manner and putty colored complexion and yellow finger nails told the story of his devotion to Nicotine. "You know it hurts you."
"Yes, I suppose it does; but why do you want to rob a man of all pleasure?" That was too much for me.
It is hard for the loafer to study; there are so many easier, subtler, cleverer ways to get by. He means to do it—to-morrow, Sunday, next week, before the end of the semester,—but he is such an awfully popular fellow, he has so many friends to entertain, so many dates to keep, so many extra-curriculum duties to perform, that he has little or no time to give to study. He borrows your notes which he has been too lazy or too busy to take himself, and never returns them until you go to his room and hunt him up; he questions you about your outside reading and tries to get the gist of its content so that he may be spared the labor of doing it for himself, he sits by you during the quiz hours and stealthily cribs your ideas which he rephrases so that they seem his own. More's the pity, sometimes he does it so well that he gets a better grade than you do who have gone through the assigned reading with puritanic conscientiousness.
The loafer is usually a very charming fellow; he is selfish, but diplomatic and well-mannered. "How does it happen," I asked one of the clan not long ago, "that you do so little work about the fraternity house while Moore is always at it?"
"Moore has no diplomacy," was the reply. "I saw at the start that if I didn't talk back and was always polite and courteous to the fellows, they seldom 'fagged' me; Moore is impudent, and he has to do all the work while the fellows sit around and are amused at my line of talk."
He loves to talk and he generally talks well and knows it. He is usually popular in any crowd, for he has never brought on brain fag through overwork or overstudy. He can be found at every fraternity house sitting before the grate fire spinning his yarns to any hour of the night. He dislikes going to bed even more than he dislikes getting up in the morning, and will never think of going so long as he can get some one to keep him company. Not infrequently he has in him some touch of the genius. He has talent without motive power. As I write this sentence my mind drifts back to Jim Watson. "Why don't you stir up Jim?" I asked the president of his fraternity one day, "he might amount to something if he would work."
"Oh, Jim," was his reply, "Jim's an awfully good fellow; he's charming; no one could say anything cross to Jim. He's an artist; he's a poet; he's a dreamer; he could do anything if he would."
He was correct in his diagnosis; I simply phrased it a little differently; Jim was the most delightfully artistic loafer in college. He was the sort of fellow of whom people were always saying that he would be a great man if he ever got down to work; but he never did, and he's the most commonplace citizen to-day of the country town in which he lives.
Some people argue that college is a good place for the loafer even if he will not do his college work with credit. He learns to know people, he picks up a smattering of useful information through his daily rubbing up against those who do study, and whether he puts forth much effort of his own or not he comes constantly into contact with people of culture and experience and refinement. He is of no great harm to the college, they say, and the college may be of untold benefit to him. Perhaps so.
I remember a number of years ago we had in the University—I had him in fact in some of my own classes—a big lazy loafer who so far as any of his instructors could discover never "cracked" a book. He had one virtue; he never cut a recitation even though he never recited, and he was also an impenetrable wall in football. One day the president of the institution, who at that time had general charge of all delinquents whether in scholarship or in other things, was looking over Mr. Hicks' scholastic record, which was no credit to any one.
"We can never keep this man," he said to the athletic director, "even though he can play football. I shall have to send him home."
"Perhaps you are right," said the director, "but if you do you will shut him off from any further chance of intellectual improvement. He's an exemplary loafer who for the first time in his life is associating with people of cultivation and of ideals. The University is doing him more good than he is doing it harm, it is helping to make him a man, and so far as I can see he ought to be allowed to stay a little longer." Whether the argument was a specious one or not, the president consented, and the man stayed on and played on. He is a respected successful city banker to-day,—he had money—so that perhaps in this case at least the athletic director was right.
I have myself often been the victim of the charms of these fascinating loafers. In their own houses, and in mine, I have been forced often to yield to the magic of their personality. They are good fellows, many of them; they have within them infinite possibilities, unlimited power, if they would only work.
A good deal has been said and written about the dissipations and immoralities of college life, and much that has been written is false. I have been associated with college students more than half of my life, and I have known thousands of them personally. The undergraduate is not free from the temptations and the evils which other men yield to. There are men in college who drink, there are men who gamble, and there are men whose lives are not clean, as there are in every community, but the sum total of these and the evil which they perpetrate is far outweighed by the loafer in college and the vicious influences of which he is the source. It is almost without exception the man who has nothing to do or who having something which he ought to do yet does not do it, who is responsible for the sins and dissipations of college life. It is loafing and lack of a really worthy ambition to give a man balance that leads students into all the other sins and indiscretions of undergraduate life. There is no other evil in college to compare with it, and none so difficult of remedy or of correction.
"I am coming back to college," one of them wrote me this week, "and I know you will be surprised to hear that I do not expect to give you any more trouble."
"If you are intending to go to class regularly, to study faithfully, and to do your work like a man," was my reply, "I shall welcome you with open arms; if you are going to loaf as you have done in the past, I wish to the Lord you would stay where you are."
It is hard for the loafer to reform. Sometimes he can do it in a new environment and under generally new conditions, but the man who has wasted his time in college and who stays out a semester or a year with the hope that he will gain ambition and self-control is often disappointed or disappoints his friends who may have placed faith in him. As soon as he strikes the old crowd and the old campus the spell is on him again; he is like the reformed toper who catches the odor of the highball. Last spring a young fellow who had been out of college a year returned to try to finish his work. He had previously been a confirmed loafer who had by strategy and luck barely escaped dismissal.
"I'm sorry you have come back, Baker," I said to him. "I've expended about as much physical and mental energy on you as I think you are entitled to. I should not care to give you a permit to reënter unless I can have some assurance that you are coming back with a definite purpose to do your work faithfully and well." He gave me the assurance, but there was no real enthusiasm in what he did. He cut class and fooled away his time trying, of course, to keep safely within the limit that would bring him passing grades, but he was the same old loafer as before.
"I am hurting no one but myself," is the favorite excuse of every young fellow who by irregular habits is injuring his mind or his body, but the loafer can truthfully make no such assertion. No young fellow loafs long alone; he spends little of his time reading even trashy or vicious books; he is not given to solitude or meditation. He must gather friends about him and they go out together. There never was a loafer in college who did not ruin some one else in order that he might have a pal to accompany him on his daily orgies of pool and billiards and poker, and soft drinks and fussing and vaudeville and the movies and local gossip, or whatever it is with which he whiles away his hours.
"You don't need to be afraid of my leading any one astray," a young fellow not in college said to me when asking my permission to live in one of the fraternity houses.
"Have you a regular job?" I asked.
"Yes, in the daytime," said he.
"What do you do at night?" I went on.
"Nothing," he confessed.
"Then you are a bad man to live in a house where students are supposed to study at night, for nobody does nothing alone."
I said at the outset that the loafer very seldom initiates things, and this is true, but he falls easily into disreputable habits. The student who does not spend his time in study, is not at all likely to be spending it in making his own character or that of the world better. Most of the men who have failed or gone to the bad in college have done so because they had learned to loaf. There are few things so good for the developing and strengthening of character as work. If one has duties to occupy the major part of his waking hours, he is pretty safe.
The loafer is a far greater foe to scholarship than is the man of what we ordinarily speak of as distinctly bad habits. Even if he does his work, and very frequently he is lucky or clever enough to pass, he has no desire to do well.
"A pass is as good as one hundred to me," I hear him say repeatedly, and he preaches the foolish doctrine so assiduously that many innocent and inexperienced freshmen believe him. I said foolish doctrine, for not many practices have succeeded in getting more men out of college than this one of calculating how near one can come to failing and yet pass.
"I don't think I should have been dropped," a loafer pleaded with me. "I meant to pass; though I did not care to get a high grade; in point of fact the way I had it figured out I did pass, but the instructor evidently did not figure as I did."
"Evidently not; they don't always," was all I could say.
The loafer is a hindrance to all kinds of progress. If he gets elected to office it is for the honor and not with the idea of doing any work, and the interests in his keeping go to the bow-wows; if he is on a committee he is late when it meets or he never comes at all; if he is a member of an organization, he lies down sluggishly and retards all advancement.
I was at a loss to know last fall why an organization in which I was interested was getting on s0 badly.
"Who is your president?" I asked one of the members.
"Baird," was the reply, "and he's too lazy to do anything himself and too conceited and self-satisfied to let any of us do what ought to be done." Most loafers in office play the part of the dog in the manger admirably. The loafer has done more to undermine the faith of sensible, practical people in the value of a college training than any other class of student. Men can pass over without comment a dozen first rate fellows whose lives have been broadened and whose ideals have been strengthened and whose usefulness to the community has been increased by their college training, but the loafer never gets by them. He is an argument hard to meet.
I was trying to persuade Old Man Elliott who runs the hardware store in the country town where I spent my childhood that he ought to send his son to college. The boy had done well in high school; he was ambitious, and the old man could well afford the money. I was getting on pretty well when Bill Haws in golf togs ambled down the street leisurely, a cigarette in his mouth and a vicious looking bull dog tugging at the chain which he was holding. Bill had registered at Michigan once and had been fired because he wouldn't work. The old man looked at him a moment and shook his head. "Do you think I want my boy to look like that?" he asked. And yet Bill Haws had not been injured by college. He had been a loafer always; it had been bred in him by his indulgent father and by his foolish mother, but the college got the credit for his unambitious lethargic life, as in such cases it always will.
When President Lincoln was being beset and reviled for retaining General Grant, whom many considered incompetent, at the head of the Northern Army, he replied, "I can not spare this man; he fights." It is this sort that the college needs—men who have a purpose and determination to carry it through if it takes the skin off, men who will fight the hardest intellectual battles stubbornly and persistently. There is no success, there is no ultimate salvation for any excepting through hard, persistent regular work; and for that reason, it seems to me there is no place in college for the loafer. Especially do I feel that this is true in a state university. The young fellow who goes to such an institution pays in tuition scarcely a tenth of what his education is costing the state. Every wash woman and laborer and artisan, every farmer and clerk and merchant in the state is paying a part of the cost of this young man's education, and is doing this with the thought, if he has thought of it at all, that the student should become a better citizen. Such an institution is no place for loafers; it is a place for men with ambitions, with a purpose, with willingness to work and a desire to make the most of themselves and to do what they can for the upbuilding and the betterment of the communities into which they go. The quicker a college gets rid of its loafers the better it will be for the loafers and for the college.