Some difficulties also showed themselves in the first working of our university machinery. In my ``plan of organization,'' as well as in various addresses and reports, I had insisted that the university should present various courses of instruction, general and special, and that students should be allowed much liberty of choice between these. This at first caused serious friction. It has disappeared, now that the public schools of the State have adjusted themselves to the proper preparation of students for the various courses; but at that time these difficulties were in full force and vigor. One of the most troublesome signs of this was the changing and shifting by students from course to course, which both injured them and embarrassed their instructors. To meet this tendency I not only addressed the students to show that good, substantial, continuous work on any one course which any one of them was likely to choose was far better than indecision and shifting about between various courses, but also reprinted for their use John Foster's famous ``Essay on Decision of Character.'' This tractate had done me much good in my student days and at various times since, when I had allowed myself to linger too long between different courses of action; and I now distributed it freely, the result being that students generally made their election between courses with increased care, and when they had made it stood by it.
Yet for these difficulties in getting the student body under way there were compensations, and best of these was the character and bearing of the students. There were, of course, sundry exhibitions of boyishness, but the spirit of the whole body was better than that of any similar collection of young men I had ever seen. One reason was that we were happily spared any large proportion of rich men's sons, but the main reason was clearly the permission of choice between various courses of study in accordance with individual aims and tastes. In this way a far larger number were interested than had ever been under the old system of forcing all alike through one simple, single course, regardless of aims and tastes; and thus it came that, even from the first, the tone at Cornell was given, not by men who affected to despise study, but by men who devoted themselves to study. It evidently became disreputable for any student not to be really at work in some one of the many courses presented. There were few cases really calling for discipline. I prized this fact all the more because it justified a theory of mine. Ihad long felt that the greatest cause of student turbulence and dissipation was the absence of interest in study consequent upon the fact that only one course was provided, and I had arrived at the conclusion that providing various courses, suited to various aims and tastes, would diminish this evil.
As regards student discipline in the university, I had dwelt in my ``plan of organization'' upon the advisability of a departure from the system inherited from the English colleges, which was still widely prevailing. It had been developed in America probably beyond anything known in Great Britain and Germany, and was far less satisfactory than in these latter countries, for the simple reason that in them the university authorities have some legal power to secure testimony and administer punishment, while in America they have virtually none. The result had been most unfortunate, as I have shown in other parts of these chapters referring to various student escapades in the older American universities, some of them having cost human life. I had therefore taken the ground that, so far as possible, students should be treated as responsible citizens;that, as citizens, they should be left to be dealt with by the constituted authorities; and that members of the faculty should no longer be considered as policemen. I had, during my college life, known sundry college tutors seriously injured while thus doing police duty; I have seen a professor driven out of a room, through the panel of a door, with books, boots, and bootjacks hurled at his head; and even the respected president of a college, a doctor of divinity, while patrolling buildings with the janitors, subjected to outrageous indignity.
Fortunately the causes already named, to which may be added athletic sports, especially boating, so greatly diminished student mischief at Cornell, that cases of discipline were reduced to a minimum--so much so, in fact, that there were hardly ever any of a serious character. I felt that then and there was the time to reiterate the doctrine laid down in my ``plan of organization,'' that a professor should not be called upon to be a policeman, and that if the grounds were to be policed, proper men should be employed for that purpose. This doctrine was reasonable and it prevailed. The Cornell grounds and buildings, under the care of a patrol appointed for that purpose, have been carefully guarded, and never has a member of the faculty been called upon to perform police duty.
There were indeed some cases requiring discipline by the faculty, and one of these will provoke a smile on the part of all who took part in it as long as they shall live.
