Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/311

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1866.]
University Reform.
303

penalty but that of expulsion, and that only in the way of self-defence against positively noxious and dangerous members. Let the civil law take care of civil offences. The American citizen should early learn to govern himself, and to re-enact the civil law by free consent. Let easy and familiar relations be established between teachers and taught, and personal influence will do more for the maintenance of order than the most elaborate code. Experience has shown that great reliance may be placed on the sense of honor in young men, when properly appealed to and fairly brought into play. Raumer, in his "History of German Universities," testifies that the Burschenschaften abolished there the last vestige of that system of hazing practised on new-comers, which seems to be an indigenous weed of the college soil. It infested the ancient universities of Athens, Berytus, Carthage,[1] as well as the mediæval and the modern. Our ancestors provided a natural outlet for it when they ordained that the Freshmen should be subject to the Seniors, should take off their hats in their presence, and run of their errands. This system, under the name of "Pennalism," had developed, in the German universities, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a degree of oppression and tyrannous abuse of the new-comer unknown to American colleges, and altogether incredible were it not sufficiently vouched by contemporary writers, and by the acts of the various governments which labored to suppress it. A certain German worthy writes to his son, who is about to enter the university: "You think, perhaps, that in the universities they sup pure wisdom by spoonfuls, . . . . but when you are arrived there, you will find that you must be made a fool of for the first year. . . . . Consent to be a fool for this one year; let yourself be plagued and abused; and when an old veteran steps up to you and tweaks your nose, let it not appear singular; endure it, harden yourself to it. Olim meminisse juvabit."[2] The universities legislated against this barbarism; all the governments of Germany conspired to crush it; but in spite of all their efforts, which were only partially successful, traces of it still lingered in the early years of this century. It was not completely abolished until, in 1818, there was formed at Jena by delegates from fourteen universities a voluntary association of students on a moral basis, known as "The General German Burschenschaft," the first principle in whose constitution was, "Unity, freedom, and equality of all students among themselves,—equality of all rights and duties,"—and whose second principle was "Christian German education of every mental and bodily faculty for the service of the Fatherland." This, according to Raumer, was the end of Pennalism in Germany. What the governments, with their stringent enactments and formidable penalties, failed to accomplish, was accomplished at last by a voluntary association of students, organizing that sense of honor which, in youth and societies of youth, if rightly touched, is never appealed to in vain.

The question has been newly agitated in these days, whether knowledge of Greek and Latin is a necessary part of polite education, and whether it should constitute one of the requirements of the academic course. It has seemed to me that those who take the affirmative in this discussion give undue weight to the literary argument, and not enough to the glossological. The literary argument fails to establish the supreme importance of a knowledge of these languages as a part of polite education. The place which the Greek and Latin authors have come to occupy in the estimation of European scholars is due, not entirely to their intrinsic merits, great as those merits unquestionably are, but in part to traditional prepossessions. When after a millen-

  1. St. Augustine records his connection, when a student at Carthage, with the "Eversores" (Destructives), an association which flourished at that university.
  2. Raumer's "History of German Universities." Translated by Frederic B. Perkins.