A Disinterested View of Princeton and its Honor System

Editor’s note: This story from 1909 contains dated language that is no longer used today. In the interest of keeping a historical record, it appears here as it was originally published.

It is naturally gratifying to Princeton men to read such an appreciation of their University as that in The Independent of March 4th. The author, Mr. Edwin E. Slosson, is a Master of Science of the University of Kansas, a Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Chicago, and was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wyoming before joining The Independent staff. His university affiliations are therefore somewhat cosmopolitan, his training peculiarly fitting him to write the critical and comparative series on Great American Universities, of which the paper on Princeton is the third to appear. By special permission the following excerpts are reproduced from Mr. Slosson’s article on Princeton:

What I like about Princeton is that it has an ideal of education and is working it out. It is not exactly my ideal, but that does not matter to anybody but me. The remarkable thing is that here is a university that know what it wants and is trying to get it. Many universities seem to me to be drifting. Some of them are trying in vain not to drift. Some of them are bragging about the speed they are making, when they are really being borne along by the current of affairs and not keeping up with it at that. But Princeton is steering a pretty straight course toward a port of its own choice, regardless of wind and current, perhaps even heading a trifle up-stream.

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Princeton has shown its originality chiefly in going ahead and doing what others have always said ought to be done. Almost every educator if asked what was the main fault of our large colleges would have said that it was the loss of personal relationship between instructor and student, resulting in ill-adapted and careless teaching on the one side and in diversion of interest on the other. Teacher and pupil were not even on opposite ends of the same log. They were at opposite ends of a telephone working only one way. Now Woodrow Wilson is bringing them together by means of his preceptorial system.

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The best thing about the preceptorial relation is probably the opportunity it affords for unforced friendships to spring up between older and younger men. For this purpose it is superior to freshman receptions, faculty-student baseball games, afternoon teas by faculty dames, advisers’ evenings, class parties and similar mixing devices in vogue elsewhere. The student under the preceptorial system has at least had the opportunity to form the personal acquaintance of a number of cultured and scholarly men, and of conversing with them repeatedly and informally on the subjects with which they are most conversant. This is more than can be said for the opportunities afforded by our other great universities. The love of learning is contagious rather than infectious. It is conveyed mostly by personal contact, rarely thru the medium of buildings, furniture, clothing or books. A boy at Princeton has a good chance of catching it sometime during the four years if he is at all susceptible. That is all there is to it anyway.

Obviously whether a preceptor is a good thing or not depends on whether he is a good preceptor. Many brilliant lecturers or distinguish investigators would not do in that capacity. He must have tact and kindliness as well as scholarship. He must know boys as well as books. Every effort is being made at Princeton to keep the system flexible, to give the preceptor an opportunity to work out his own methods, to prevent him from becoming merely another cog in the educational machine.

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But the preceptorial system on the whole works very well. Everybody agrees that it has made a great improvement in studiousness. A man who talks shop at the club tables I no longer whistled down. The library is much more used than formerly and for voluntary reading in lines suggested by the conferences. Still the students do not work so hard as they do at a university like Columbia, where student activities are not so numerous and attractive. This is, of course, a personal opinion, insusceptible of proof. It may be disbelieved by those who know less than I about it or contradicted by those who know more.

The preceptorial system is a new broom and sweeps clean. The men who are “creating this new role” are conscious that they are being watched by other universities with emotions of mingled hope and fear; hope that the system may be just what is needed to make collegiate education effective; fear lest they too will have to put in preceptors and where can they get the money for it? The real test of the system will come in later years, when the preceptors get old, and lazy, and tired, and mechanical, and no longer able to tell apart the young men who file thru their studies in unending line. And what sort of men will the preceptors be when the system becomes old and commonplace? Will they be young and inexperienced men, just out of college, not interested in their duties, waiting for a chance at “something bigger” elsewhere, or taking the job as a “grubstake” to keep them alive while they are writing a book or working out a scientific discovery that will make them famous? If so, they have the same faults as the younger instructors elsewhere. On the other hand, if a man is contented to remain a preceptor all his life, teaching the same elementary studies over and over to a handful of students, living on a small salary, probably in a students’ dormitory, a celibate and recluse, will he be the most inspiring and profitable of associates for young men? But this is borrowing trouble from the future.

Having decided that the students are to study something, the next thing is to decide what they are to study. On this point Princeton has also very definite ideas, and, unlike Harvard, does not regard it as an unwarrantable interference with personal liberty to impose them on the student. The faculty, believing that they know more about the proper sequence and correlation of studies than the students who have not taken them, have arranged three well-defined courses of four years, leading to the degrees of A.B., Litt.B. and B.S., in which most of the work is prescribed or emphatically advised. This leaves the student little opportunity for the desultory “strolling” or “tasting” which some educators regard as one of the main benefits of a college course. That is, the student at Princeton, in the place of free election of particular studies, has the option of different groups.

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A segregation of students, according to their ability and industriousness, is effected by the new honors system. This was first introduced in the department of mathematics and physics two years ago, and having proved a success is this year adopted by the classical department. I have called attention to similar movements in Harvard and Yale, but Princeton seems to be working out this, as it is its other ideas, in a more thorogoing and consistent fashion.

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The preceptorial system, the segregation for conferences, Special Honors and the Proseminaries as well as the rigid entrance and course requirements, and the dormitory and commons regulations, are all working to the same end, to the formation of small, homogeneous groups of students and the adaptation of instruction to the individual.

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The greatest development of Princeton, as of Harvard, will next be in scientific and technological lines, both graduate and undergraduate. Whether any “McKay millions” are in sight for it or not I do not know, but, if we may judge of the heigh of a structure from the breadth of its foundations, the extensive preparations now being made would give rise to such a surprise. We have seen the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hunting from New Jersey to California for a classical man for president, a striking illustration of the tendency I have discussed above. Schools of applied science budded on to a classical college like Princeton may be expected to produce a new variety, which will be worth cultivating elsewhere.

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Princeton is still a college in spirit. The graduate and professional students are too few to exert any decided influence over student life. The absence of older men, of men who mean business, who are tremendously set on something, gives to the place an air of leisure and of youth. I know that there is hard studying done there, that the students are noted for strenuous athletics, but they do not make much fuss about it, they do not seem hurried and worried. The machinery does not rattle and bang as it does in some universities. I do not know that I ought to mention such intangible impressions. Though they are very real to me they can be only hazily exprest and not substantiated at all.

The students at Princeton struck me as being more boyish than elsewhere. This is not a reproach. I do not think youthfulness necessarily objectionable in youth. They seemed like Peter Pan, not quite grown up and not quite wanting to. I believe that Eastern students are, as a rule, a trifle younger for the same grades than in the West, but that is not it. The Easterners are more advanced in their studies, more carefully trained, more sophisticated, yet it does not seem to me that the Westerners could at any period of their lives have been so youthful in spirit as the Princetonians. The Westerner is in dead earnest, if not about his studies, then about getting out of them. The Princetonian does not seem to care whether school keeps or not, but this is not a synical affectation of indifference; it is the natural indifference of irresponsible and careless boyishness. I cannot say exactly what gave me this impression. Perhaps it was the way they trooped into the back seats of Marquand Chapel and grabbed certificates of attendance for the “spotters” at the door; or the air with which they wore their yellow slickers (it rains every day at Princeton. I know, because I was there a week); or else it was their habit of whittling their desks, and talking and laughing during the lecture in a carefully modulate undertone.

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The aim of Princeton is homogeneity. Harvard’s ideal is diversity. The Harvard students are gathered from all over the world, admitted under all sorts of conditions and given the most diversified training. A State university, although in a way more local in its constituency, cuts a slice down all the way through its particular jelly-cake, taking in part of every layer, except sometimes a bit of the frosting falls off. But Princeton practically offers on particular kind of college training to one rather limited social class of the United States. Its entrance requirements, which are high, narrow in range and exclusively by examination, its tuition fees and expensiveness, its limited range of election, its lack of professional schools, its rules and customs, its life, traditions and atmosphere, shut out or fail to attract the vast majority of potential students.

In the first place half the human race is excluded on the ground of sex, a congenital defect for which they are not in the least to blame. Princeton is the only one of these fourteen great universities which does not in some way provide for the educational needs of women. Negroes also are shut out by reason of their race, another injustice in which Princeton is unique among the universities. Nothing is said about this in the catalog, but I think I am safe in saying that if a negro, presuming upon this omission, should present himself for entrance he would be so strongly advised to go elsewhere that he would go. Princeton has no share in the international movement which is sweeping over the country. Harvard, Yale and Cornell have twenty-five or more Chinese apiece, but never one has Princeton. The Princeton students, I believe, support some of their graduates as missionaries among the Chinese, but apparently they do not like to have them around. There are thirty-three Japanese in Columbia; one at Princeton, in the graduate school. Cornell has thirty-two students from South America; Pennsylvania has thirty-seven; only one at Princeton, and he has an English name. The Christian tradition of Princeton, the exclusiveness of the upper-class clubs and the prejudices of the students keep away many Jews, although not all – there are eleven in the Freshman class. Anti-Semitic feeling seemed to me more dominant at Princeton than at any of the other universities I visited. “If the Jews once got in,” I was told, “they would ruin Princeton as they have Columbia and Pennsylvania.” Sixty-six per cent of the students of Princeton come from the three States of New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

That there are certain educational advantages derivable from association with a greater diversity of students than obtains at Princeton is undeniable, but it is also true that the university avoids some evils and difficulties by thus limiting its field, and is able to do with a homogeneous body of students many things that are impossible to a city or State university. I have talked about some of them, but I must mention another because it is one of the institutions of which Princeton is most justly proud, that is, the honor system.

The “honor system” must not be confused with the “honors system,” although there seems to be more connection between the two words at Princeton than elsewhere. At Harvard I saw a crowd of students going into a large hall and, following them in, I found I could not get out, that no one was allowed to leave the examination room for twenty minutes. The students were insulated, the carefully protected papers distributed, and guards walked up and down the aisles with their eyes moving like the searchlight of a steamer in a fog. Nothing like this at Princeton; the students are on their honor not to cheat and they do not, or but rarely. Each entering class is instructed by the Seniors into the Princeton code of honor which requires any student seeing another receiving or giving assistance on examination to report him for a trial by his peers of the student body. In all universities it is customary to trust certain classes, but in no other of the fourteen did I find so complete a reliance on student honesty. I do not think the plan would be practicable in the long run with a very large and heterogeneous collection of students. It is probable that Princeton will lose this with some other fine features of its student life as the university grows and becomes more cosmopolitan. The semi-monastic seclusion of the country village cannot be long maintained.

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The metamorphosis of Princeton from a college into a university is most interesting to watch because of the clear-sighted and systematic way in which it is being accomplished. It is like looking over the shoulder of an artist, the gradual realization that the dabs of different colored paint which he is scattering apparently haphazard over the campus, I mean the canvas, belong just where he put them and are coming together to make a complete picture as he, and nobody else, saw it before he began. The greater Princeton is an artistic achievement. There seems to be nothing accidental, nothing forced about it, although there must be, since chance and necessity enter into all plans human. One department after another is taken up and strengthened; first, the classics, then physics, next, I believe, biology. Princeton does not undertake to do so many different things as other universities, but what it does undertake it does exceptionally well.

This was originally published in the March 10, 1909 issue of PAW.