These notes are addressed to advanced students in the Department of Geology and Geography. Much that is in them would be appropriate to any student but we have a special interest in the small group whose university home is in our building. We try to live together in a companionable way that is based on a common purpose and not on authority. With so small a number, never more than 20 or 25, and an ample space to work in, there would seem to be no reason for living any other way. We are assuming, of course, that all are after the same thing and that all are here by the their own free will and were under no compulsion to come. We offer you nothing but opportunity and lots of it. Of course this includes help and good will, but we cannot give what you do not want. Anyone who needs pushing or driving is out of place here.

These notes were written at different times, each on the inspiration of the moment, and may or may not be related. An attempt has been made to arrange them in order but there is no thought of presenting a manual or students' guide. More may follow at any time. The order in which you read them does not make much difference.

What do grades signify?

A grade is a mere record of performance. It is not our estimate of the student's ability or of his good intensions or moral deserts. We think highly of some students whose grades are not high, and badly of some whose grades are good. But a grade is a record, and you must not ask us to falsify the record merely because we respect your ability or because of some excellent reason why your work was not well done or not completed. A student in a field course may sprain an ankle, but no mentally mature man would ask for credit for the work missed on that account. Or the work may be delayed by rain, but the student who takes a man's view, and not a child's, will expect to finish the work before claiming the credit.

High grades mean either talent or labor, or both; the more of one the less of the other. So far as they go, good grades are evidence of a good man, but the evidence is not conclusive and no intelligent judge would fail to ask about the conditions under which a grade was gotten.

What grades do not signify

A student may have talent and get high grades and yet not be interested in the subject. This may be the case with students who nave a strong sense of duty. It is more apt to mean that the student wants good grades or is yielding to pressure from some authority. There is nothing necessarily admirable about such a case. What the student often does not see is that his instructors are forming an opinion of him and not merely of his knowledge. Teachers have long made a virtue of a certain hypocrisy, which pretends to like or admire all pupils or students equally. Whatever place this may have with children, it is rank pretense in a university department where instructors and students alike are grown men engaged in a common cause. Under such conditions mutual respect is fundamental. The basic virtue that calls out respect is sincerity. And no grown man can be called sincere who comes to a university department not wanting what the department has to give. Professors are very human in their likes and dislikes, but there is something in the familiar relations of a scientific department which makes a sincere common interest the greatest factor in personal attraction. It cannot be faked or simulated. Professors may be terribly stupid in some things, but they have a dog-like instinct in some things, and among these is a discernment, which distinguishes between the student who is working merely for approval and the one who is pushing the subject because he wants it or needs it. The end of it is a personal sympathy between the instructor and the sincere student and a lack of respect for the one who merely yields to pressure, no matter how good his grades. The sense of companionship grows strong around a scientific department. It is one of the professor's rewards but he cannot feel it for a student whose fundamental motives are different from his own. Of course, the limitations on companionship are not all on the student's side. Those of the professor are not to be ignored but we are not talking about them just now.

Interest

There is more than one kind of interest.  Some subjects enlist your spontaneous interest by the pleasure they give. You may need them later or you may not. They interest you and that is all there is to it. This kind of interest led Harper and Faber and Twitchell and McCord and James to make the valuable fossil collections, which are now in our museum. Some students pursue some courses in this manner. Credits and grades may be given, but as an incentive they are superfluous.

There is a different kind of interest in subjects, which we know we are going to need, and which are studied for that reason. In this case our hopes and ambitions clothe the subject with interest. It might or might not attract us otherwise, but when the mastery of something becomes part of our successful career we go at it with a will, often quite unconscious of whether we like it for its own sake or not. A good deal of geology is studied in this way. And quite properly so. When we remember the wide field that a good geologist must cover, stratigraphy, paleontology, petrography, physiography, and all the rest of the geologic line, beside mathematics, chemistry, modern languages, etc., etc., it is evident that he cannot be led into all by his involuntary tastes. Yet the student who cannot put his heart into what is necessary for his future, or who has not the head to see that it is necessary, is seriously lacking in the elements of success.

Something must be said for that kind of interest, which arises from the mere wish to get through a disagreeable job with self-respect. There are plenty of such jobs, both in study and in professional practice. Don't be a professor if you wish to avoid them; nor a geologist; nor anything else. There is said to have been a time when disagreeable tasks were trumped up for young people in order to give them practice. Certainly that is not done now. Instructors spend a lot of time trying to smooth out every grade and lift you over every hill. But plenty of difficult, even distasteful, tasks will always remain for your training, and you ought to have the courage to accept the inevitable, and the self-respect to go through it without shirking. If you are a well-constituted man you will find a certain pleasure in it.

Class work

When a student registers in a class it is to be presumed that for some reason or other he wants a knowledge and understanding of the subject. He may or may not expect to enjoy it. Perhaps he has found that the learning of this one subject, the disagreeable, is an essential to the mastering of some other subjects, which he really wants. Perhaps he is merely ordered or compelled to enter a certain class. In that case he's no student. If he does not want the subject for some reason, high or low, immediate or indirect, he has no right to be there. A university differs in this respect from a military drill or a primary school. Failure of students (and the public) to comprehend this difference is the most serious difficulty we have to contend with. The slave does not reap the benefits of his own labor. His own reward is merely to escape the whip. He is therefore justified in doing just what is necessary to escape the whip and no more. There are a thousand students in this institution working in just that way, without purpose and without self-respect. The saddest part of it all is that sometimes their instructors have no higher ideal.

Meetings of classes and daily assignments are only a means to an end. A good deal of university study is done without either. If a student in science has his laboratory equipment, his books and his instructor to consult with, he has already more advantages than the greatest scholars have had. But inspiration and companionship are added if others are studying the same thing at the same time. To take advantage of this it is necessary to agree from day to day on the subject to be discussed. This necessity results in assignments. Often questions are put to the class or to individual students, a perfectly natural proceeding. Conversation has to be started some way and this is one of the ways. But there is always danger that the grown man with a child's mind may mistake the meaning of the whole procedure. He may have the reaction of the small child or the slave, that his duty is defined by the assignment and that, if not caught by a question, he has discharged his obligation. This 1s called "getting by". It's a great game, something like hide -and-seek or bull-in-the-pen or poker. Like the last, it is apt to become a habit and substitute itself for the serious business of life. Generally it takes about two days, sometimes two weeks, for the reasonably smart professor to distinguish the men who are "getting by" or merely working for approval, from those who are pursuing the subject. After that, his respect for the former is about as much as their respect for themselves, which is not saying much. The gist of this is that daily "assignments" have mighty little to do with the work of an earnest student except to enable different students to coordinate their work so that the discussions will come at the right time for all. As to the chance of this or that question being asked, no professor can ask a tenth of all the good questions anyway. The end of it is that some students get by very well through the whole term, and then fail on examination. The "Papa" or "Mamma" comes around to complain and has to be told that getting by an instructor has very little to do with being educated in geology.

Examinations

Sooner or later your knowledge and ability must be appraised. If possible this ought to be done by a stranger; someone who will judge by results only, and is not influenced by what he knows of your class work. You should be regarded merely as one who, for some good reason of your own, has been trying for a year or so to equip yourself in some geologic line, say Mineralogy, and the examiner's sole wish is to find out how successful you have been. The question of just what was "assigned" or "covered in class" may have much to do with examining children, or even freshmen, but they have very little to do with testing the success of a mature man's work; always providing, of course, that there is mutual agreement as to the general field covered. Neither have good intensions, or misfortunes, or excuses, very much to do with the verdict. They may influence the professor's judgment on the student's personal or moral qualities but such things should not be confused with intellectual attainment. No man knows everything. Both professors and students reserve the right to say they don't know. They may not carry in mind all the details and illustrations mentioned, even in the textbook used, but this does not apply to principles. Even with the latter, it must be remembered that unless we know a lot of concrete facts, generalizations are not worth very much.

The rights of others

Once each year the announcement must be made that the library and room 21 are not club rooms. We must assume two things, (1) serious purpose and (2) courtesy. There can be no rules for such things. The only right thing in the library is to keep quiet unless something must be said, then out with it and be done with it and be quiet again. Whispering disturbs people more than a business-like tone. Anyway, it's a girl's trick and not suited to a geologist.

Certain graduates are allowed desks in the room 21 on condition that they keep visitors out. Probably there never is a time when there is not a vacant room near by. If anyone wants to visit or confer at length, let him take his visitor into another room. All of this is merely good manners, and is much more important to your success than obedience to military rules. Courtesy requires that the man who wants to study be given the right of way. There is ample space in this building for every kind of good fellowship except love-making. The park is provided for that purpose

The student's share in instruction (What it means to review a paper)

In a school for children there is a sharp distinction between teacher and pupil. As the grade of learning advances in college and university, this distinction fades. This is partly because the professors, as well as students, are engaged in constant and progressive study. Partly, it is because advanced students are able to share responsibility. One way to do this is to help instruct elementary students. Another way is for each to aid the other in keeping up with the progress of science. No one man, whether student or professor, can read all the good things that are published even in his own science. Men help each other by abstracting, reviewing and criticizing important published contributions, thus saving others the time necessary for laborious reading.

In this mutually helpful performance the distinction between instructor and student should become small or disappear. But if this is to be the case, each performer must be conscious of the fact that people come to hear him for their own good and not for his. He makes himself responsible for determining just what the author was driving at when he wrote, and of making his train of thought and his conclusions clear to other people. If you cannot do this, it is asking a good deal that people should come to hear you. If your review of a paper does not make reading by others unnecessary, then there is really no cooperation and no mutual helpfulness. The test of your success in presentation is the ability of an attentive listener to get your ideas and repeat your train of thought. If he cannot do that you have failed.

The successful speaker must constantly be concerned with whether his ideas are getting across. If you are so concerned, your instinct will frequently prompt you to repeat a statement, either in different words or merely to give time for its assimilation. Especially will your instinct teach you to use simple diagrams to make sure that the hearer is getting the same mental picture you have. Whenever an argument involves space relations it is well to ask yourself twice whether your audience is following you.

Do not overestimate your hearer's familiarity with technical terms not in daily use. The same applies to scientific principles, which may receive treatment in specialized courses in geology but are not needed in others. On the other hand it is possible to explain too much and spread your subject too thin. No one man can give rules to another; but he can insist that the other shall know what he is doing and why he is doing it. In this case he must know that he is not reciting a lesson to be graded by some instructor. His grade is given by his audience, and it is high or low in proportion as he interests and helps them.

The Master of Arts

At another time I may say something of what these words meant centuries ago in Europe. What you want to know just now is what they mean to us. "Us" in this case means mainly the Geology and Geography staff in the University of Cincinnati, because we are the ones who must some day sit on your case and decide whether you are a Master, or whether you must go through life a Bachelor.

It is necessary to say first that there is no use asking what people do in other colleges or universities, or even in other department of our own. "Master" means almost anything, or - I almost said - nothing. The nearest to nothing (except when actually faked) is in those institutions where it denotes merely that a Bachelor has hung around one year more doing the kind of work he did before. As words mean only what men mean by them, we cannot legally object if some call such a boy or girl a Master of Arts. Only, we don't.

We are not so democratic as to believe that everyone who can get through high school is fit for college; or that everyone who can get through (or "get by") a college is fit for advanced study. At some time or other the child must become a man or woman intellectually. This ought to occur well before graduation, but the American College does not insist on it. Perhaps some excuse for this may be found in custom; but there is no excuse for making a child a Master of Arts.

This, of course, is dogmatic language. It means that the child in college studies one way and the man another. The child learns to recite assigned lessons, which generally means that he repeats what someone else said. Generally he does what he is told what to do, when he can't help it. I am not here describing ideals, but I am describing what we have to accept in college, and are, only too often, glad to get.

If this description fit you, you are either a child or a slave in scholarship. The Master does not need to be either pushed or pulled or told what to do next. He moves under his own power. He knows what he wants and knows how to go after it. To be sure, he has use for his professors. A professor is a very nice thing to have around if you know how to use him; but he must be kept in his place.

It is not my purpose here to tell how a mature student works (I have written you other letters on that subject) but only how to know a Master when you meet him (or her). Or, what amounts to the same thing, to know whether you are one or not. The best way is to write a thesis. This means to discuss a subject involving such knowledge of principles as you are supposed to have. It is up to you to assemble all available knowledge on the subject, and to put it in shape to be useful to others. It should not be necessary for someone else in the future to do your work over.

As a Master of Arts you are not expected to find out new things that no one else has known. Some candidates do this and it is highly commendable, but this is the responsibility of the Doctor. The task demanded of the Master is to reduce existing knowledge to orderly form. His contribution is organization and expression rather than creation or even discovery. He finds knowledge in scraps, some of it recent, some of it old, some superseded, some of it reliable, some doubtful. Statements may be consistent or inconsistent; essential or trivial. The mass is heterogeneous, bulky, and mixed with all sorts of irrelevant stuff. To bring this mass together by a mere process of addition would never on earth make a thesis. A blind veteran once stood begging on a corner in London, wearing a placard, - "Battles 8, Wounds 5, Children 9, Total 22". Some theses read that way.

There is a place for exact statement of details of concrete fact, sometimes by way of illustration, sometimes to support an argument, but all such specified details taken together are only a drop in the bucket. The original number of observations is almost infinite. They mean little until generalized. Science, discussion, and argument deal with generalizations. The writer must always decide how much concrete support his generalized statements should have. This is one of your main responsibilities. One of the last things a child learns is to make a general statement that is both true and valuable.

To say that knowledge is organized is not merely to affirm that it has been sifted and assorted. It must be arranged in order. Some things lead to others - some things depend on others. Some mental pictures come easier when others are already acquired. The order in geology is not so rigidly imperative as in mathematics. There is some room for taste and choice in treatment. But the writer who composes a paragraph without knowing what concepts the reader should have from the previous paragraphs is not organizing his subject.

It was not my intention to tell you how to write a thesis. What I have said is merely for the purpose of making clear what I mean by a Master of Arts. He is a man (woman) who, in some line of scholarship, and within the customary limit of advancement, is able to assemble, organize, and express all that is known and available about a particular subject. The same words, with a small addition, would define a Doctor. He must do something to add to the sum of human knowledge.

The first time one starts out to write something masterly - as defined above - he is apt to learn a good deal. So will his professors if they thought he was going to do something that would add to the reputation of the university. After the first shock it is customary for the professor to say, - "I would have arranged it this way, - I would have expressed myself that way, - What Dr. so-and-so meant was as follows,- I would spell certain words otherwise, - I would look up this and that chapter in elementary geology, - Your page 15 contradicts page 13, - I would not quote Mr. Dubb as authority, etc., etc." In the end a paper is produced, of which two copies may well be bound and buried in the library. Usually it contains an acknowledgment of the professor's "advice and suggestions."

Now I would not for a moment discourage this procedure. We need more of it, not less. Probably the student is being educated faster than in any other work of his course. The only thing I have to recommend is that his fitness for a degree be judged, not by the professor's work, but by that first draft in its candid immaturity, before the spelling is corrected and other infantile features remodeled. That first draft, the student's own work, should become the property of the institution, and kept for comparison with the finished product. If the two differ substantially, (or too substantially) the professor should show his generosity by saying, "I shall not charge you anything at all for my labor on that thesis. The good you got out of it is all yours, gratis. On top of this, we offer you the chance to do the same again, and perhaps again, on other subjects; and when you produce one that does not need to be done over by the professor, we will make you a "Master of Arts".

Such generosity is rare, but all the more beautiful for that. Enough of it would greatly improve the breed of Masters.

Love and Geology

"Two hearts that yearn for life's sweet prison,

Where his is her'n and her'n is his'n

(From the works of an unknown poet)

Students of geology are a likeable lot. At least the professors think so. Now and then a student finds this out for himself. Only he does not begin on the whole lot at once. He takes one at a time. There's nothing wrong in this. It would be an awful world, if, instead of falling in love with our close associates, we fell into hate. Of course hate would not be quite so noticeable. You still might occupy anyone of fifty chairs in the classroom, and no one would be the wiser. But when you fall the other way, there's only one chair that meets the needs of the case. If that chair is saved for you every day, it is because everyone understands.

Why shouldn't everyone understand? There's no reason on earth. It's an old proverb – "AII the world loves a lover." And most people envy you, even though they have no wish to rob you of your particular possession. Only, don't lose your sense of proportion. Two books are better than one when two people must study. And when you are hunting the fine striations on a fossil, it's better to have two fossils than to hunt for them on the same specimen at the same time. You might get in each other's way, and that interferes with concentration.

It is well to remember that there is no danger that she (or he) is going to get away. She's just as anxious about that as you are. And if she's not, you will do well not to make your own anxiety too plain. When it comes to the point that neither one suffers from anxiety, or both equally so, all danger is past, and good taste is the only thing you have to consider.

I have been referring to the other party as "her", but if it happens to be "her" that is reading this, you may insert parentheses to include "him or it." I recommend that you resolve to be at her side just half the time. Mingle with your fellows of both sexes for the other half. And be sure not to look unhappy. Keep a record of where you sat in each lecture and with whom you rode on each excursion, and be careful not to exceed your allowance. Lunch together three times a week. Never let the time come that people, seeing you alone, begin to look around for her (him or it) and wonder whether something has happened.

Moral. To be in love is not a thing to be ashamed of but good taste is still something to be proud of.