The Foreign Student In America

By W. Reinald Wheeler

American life and the Christian Church have never met a more severe and searching test than they are meeting to-day in the presence of these foreign students in our schools. These young men and women from many lands are testing the honesty of the political and social axioms which have constituted our American tradition. They are proving the reality of our profession of Christian brotherhood and equality. Almost all of them came here full of confidence and hope. Many of them are going back disillusioned, some bitter, some sorrowful Many of them received their first shock at the port of entry as they came in. Some of them went on and met with the very evils which they had come to America to transcend. Some found that the Christianity which they had acquired from American missionaries was not confirmed by the Christianity which they met in the land which had sent the missionaries forth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Jun 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781473391543

Book preview

AMERICA

CHAPTER I

OUTLINE HISTORY OF STUDENT MIGRATIONS

By HENRY H. KING,

Secretary, The International Committee of Young Men’s Christian

Associations

STUDENT MIGRATIONS IN THE MIDDLE AGES

THE importance of student migrations as a force in the academic world is fitly symbolized by the fact that to them the university as an institution owes its origin. Evidence all points to the conclusion that the earliest universitas originated with the foreign students of Bologna in the last quarter of the twelfth century.¹ The motive which led in the first instance to the organization of the university corporation was that of mutual protection and assistance on the part of the foreign students. It has been pointed out that probably the German students congregated in Bologna were the first to feel the advisability of such corporate action. For a long time the corporation which was consequently formed exerted no influence over Bolognese students, who, unlike the foreigner, were exempt from oath of allegiance to the rector, and to the last were not members of the corporation. The professors also, as Bolognese citizens, were not admitted to membership in the corporation.

The early Italian universities, then, were guilds of foreign students, and their purpose, similar to that of the non-scholastic guild, is stated as follows in the Statutes of the German Nation: fraternal charity, mutual association and amity, the consolation of the sick and support of the needy, the conduct of funerals and the extirpation of rancor and quarrels, the attendance and escort of our ‘Doctorandi’ to and from the place of examination, and the spiritual advantage of numbers. In many instances the organization of a university took the form of several national groups, combining in the maintenance of one rector and a united student body, or of a rector for each nationality and a division of the university on the basis of nationality.

Just as the university as an institution owes its origin to student migrations, so also to a marked degree do individual universities owe their existence to special student migrations,—secessions, virtually, from older universities. The first migrations of this character are said to have originated with professors. Placentinus, for example, left Bologna to establish schools at Mantua and afterwards at Montpellier, either in the third or in the last quarter of the twelfth century. At the beginning of the thirteenth century whole bodies of students, dissatisfied for one reason or another with their treatment at Bologna, entered into negotiations with other towns regarding transference thither of their Studia Generalia. A whole series of such migrations followed, one to Arezzo in 1215 in consequence of a quarrel between the Lombards and the Tuscans, one to Padua in 1222, migrations to Siena in 1321 and in 1338, and so forth. The University of Vicenza owes its existence to a migration of scholars in 1204—probably from Bologna. In 1228 there was a migration from Padua to Vercelli. There is extant an interesting draft of the plans for this new university, making provision for four rectors, one each for the French, the Italians, the Provençals, and an unnamed group, thought to have been the Germans. In 1338 there was a migration from Bologna to Pisa, in consequence of an interdict laid on the former city by Benedict XII. This restlessness and nomadic tendency of students grew so pronounced, indeed, that at Bologna and elsewhere it became customary in engaging the services of the doctors, to exact of them oaths that they would not teach outside the city for a period of two years. Between 1227 and 1312 these oaths were administered by order of the town statutes upon all doctors, intending to teach in a given city. In fact severe repressive laws, sometimes exacting the death penalty, were directed against all who might conspire to bring about student migrations from the various university towns of Italy.

Portugal offers a striking illustration of the migratory habits of students. The university founded by Papal Bull in Lisbon in 1290 was transferred to Coimbra in 1308-9, returned to Lisbon in 1338-9, to Coimbra again in 1355, to Lisbon once more in 1377, and finally, in 1537, to Coimbra, where it has remained to this day.

In the early history of the University of Paris student migrations and the presence of large numbers of foreign students² play an exceedingly important part. Indeed the earliest extant Charter of Privileges of that University was occasioned by a riot which occurred in 1200 A.D., when the servant of a noble German student (a bishop-elect of Liége!) was assaulted in a tavern. The nation-organization of the University of Paris—of the type outlined in the plans for the University of Padua, to which attention has already been called—came first into existence between 1219 and 1221. Between 1222 and 1249 a common rectorship was instituted by the united nations. The organization embraced four national groups, named from the nationalities predominant at the time of formation—French, Normans, Picards, English. According to this grouping Picardy was thought of as including the Low Countries, England as including the Germans and all the inhabitants of northern and eastern Europe, and France as embracing all the more distant of the Latin races! One of the most interesting mediæval student migrations of which there is any record is the Dispersion of 1229 from the University of Paris, the outcome of a furious town and gown quarrel. Unable to gain satisfactory redress, the masters and scholars migrated to Oxford, Cambridge, and the other Studia Generalia of France, at Toulouse, at Orleans, at Rheims, and especially at Angers, where the University perhaps dates its existence as such from this dispersion. The return of most of these masters and scholars to Paris was brought about in 1231 by a series of Papal Bulls, providing for the punishment of the ecclesiastical authority at Paris whose severity toward the students had occasioned the dispersion, and what is even more important, establishing the great Charter of Privileges that has been called the Magna Charts of the university.

The origin of Oxford University is not explained in full by existing documents, but there is said to be strong evidence that like the Universities of Reggio, Vicenza, Vercelli, Padua, and Leipzig, it owes its inception to an academic migration. Between 1165 and 1169 Henry II issued a series of ordinances recalling English scholars from France. The occasion of this recall is thought to have been the quarrel between Becket and Henry II, in connection with which the French king was hostile to Henry II as the oppressor of Holy Church. The theory that this recall led to the founding of Oxford University is supported by the fact that though there had been important schools at Oxford, there is no evidence of the presence of more than one master at a time there before 1167. The theory ascribes a causal relationship to the recall of the English scholars, whom it supposes to have congregated at Oxford, and the elevation of that town into a Studium Generale, which occurred about that time.

Cambridge, likewise, appears to have originated in a student migration—from Oxford on the occasion of a quarrel there in the course of which two or three imprisoned students were executed with the consent of King John in the year 1209. Writing with what is thought to be nothing in excess of the usual mediæval exaggeration Matthew Paris states that altogether three thousand scholars left Oxford at this time. Started in consequence of this secession movement, Cambridge University was undoubtedly strengthened greatly through becoming, together with Oxford, a place of refuge for a part of the throngs of students who turned their backs on Paris in 1229.

The academic history of Europe during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries reveals with reference to student migrations a continuance of much the same conditions as we have found prevailing in the latter part of the twelfth century and the whole of the thirteenth. The wandering life adopted by students in the late Middle Ages is attributed by Professor Paul Monroe in the chapter on The Educational Renaissance preceding his edition³ of The Autobiography of Thomas Platter, to several phases of earlier mediæval life, such as the habits of the wandering priests, of the pilgrims both clerical and lay, of the crusaders, and of the itinerant merchants and craftsmen. We have already noted (p. 3) the similarity of the organizations of foreign students of the mediæval period to the non-scholastic guilds. The vagabond type of existence of these wandering scholars, known as baccants, is well described by Professor Monroe, and the Platter autobiography itself (written in 1572) throws a revealing light upon it.

From the facts brought forward in this section it is evident that student migrations are not a thing of modern origin, that they were of very general occurrence throughout Europe in the mediæval period, and that to them the university as an institution, and a great many individual universities, owe their existence.

FOREIGN STUDENTS IN GERMANY

A most important chapter in any account of student migrations must necessarily be that devoted to foreign students in the universities and technological schools of Germany. An outstanding element in the early prominence of Germany as the land par excellence for study abroad is the fact that the German universities possessed to a marked degree the elasticity of curriculum and freedom from irksome restraint so highly prized by a student in a foreign land. To this circumstance is ascribed Longfellow’s preference for Göttingen over Oxford, which despite all its elements of charm for a man of his tastes and temperament, offered scarcely hospitable welcome before the foundation of the Rhodes scholarships to students from the younger Anglo-Saxon lands. The first recorded American inspection of German university life was that made by Benjamin Franklin, who in 1766 paid to Göttingen a visit of which an interesting account has been preserved.⁴ The first academic degree awarded to an American student in a German university was that of M.D. conferred upon Benjamin Smith Barton by the University of Göttingen in the year 1799.

During the period 1781-1850 there were according to official records over a hundred Americans enrolled in different German universities. The mention of a few of those whose contributions to American scholarship are outstanding would be perhaps rewarding.

Edward Everett and George Ticknor studied together in Göttingen. The former returned bringing back and presenting to the Harvard library more German books than all the rest of New England possessed. The latter, after twenty months’ academic residence in Germany, received in 1819 appointment as Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and of Belles Lettres at Harvard University. Profoundly impressed with the thoroughness and systematic administration of German education, he proposed many reforms at Harvard, and though they were carried out immediately only in his own department, he has the substantial honor of having given the initial impulse to the reforms which were ultimately to transform Harvard into a university in the broadest sense of the term. He has been called the originator of the university idea in America, a title which should save him from oblivion by reason of the overshadowing fame of his great successor in the chair of the French and Spanish Languages and Belles Lettres at Harvard, another American student of the German universities of the day, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

A far different type of American student in Germany was F. H. Hedge, who at the tender age of twelve years went to Germany about the year 1818 in care of an older American student, George Bancroft. After five years’ study in Germany, this precocious youth returned to the United States, where he became a pioneer of German poetry and metaphysics⁵ and according to Dr. W. T. Harris, was the German fountain among the so-called Transcendentalists.

A contribution in the field of pedagogy was made by another most interesting pioneer of American study m Germany, Joseph Green Cogswell, who in 1816 took up academic residence in Göttingen. This man was well-nigh omnivorous as a student and insatiable as a seeker after intellectual and scientific progress. He obtained practical instruction from Professor Benecke in library-management; he visited Goethe at Jena and became greatly attracted to him; he studied mineralogy; and in 1819 he took his Ph.D. in Göttingen. At that time he was a Member of the Helvetic Society of Natural History and of the Academy of Munich. The year 1821 found him again in his homeland, Professor of Mineralogy and Chemistry at Harvard, and university librarian. In the latter capacity he arranged the library on the same plan as that at Göttingen—winning thereby the emphatic approval of Professor George Ticknor. In 1823 he founded near Northampton, Massachusetts, the famous Round Hill School. In this undertaking he was at first associated with George Bancroft, who in 1818—on advice given by Edward Everett, then Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, to President Kirkland, another German university product—had been sent to Germany on scholarship from Harvard, and had acted as chaperon to the youthful F. H. Hedge. During the greater part, however, of the career of the school, which was operated until 1839, Cogswell was the sole guiding genius. In this enterprise, which in the first eight years of its history enrolled 293 pupils from nineteen states and four foreign countries, this pioneer in the realm of elementary education applied many ideas imported from Germany and Switzerland, but modified to suit a New-World environment. A characteristic feature of his school was individual attention to each boy. After abandoning the enterprise because of ill health and financial reverses, Dr. Cogswell devoted himself until 1863 to the organization and administration of the Astor Library in New York City. His work in this connection is a notable contribution, but the contribution by which he most deeply impressed himself upon the life of his generation was the Round Hill School.

Another outstanding exponent of the early days of American study in Germany was J. Lothrop Motley, the historian, best known for his History of the Rise of the Dutch Republic. He was a Korpsbruder of Bismarck at Göttingen.

The growth in the enrollment of foreign students in German universities during the latter half of the nineteenth century is carefully analyzed by the United States Commissioner of Education (Report of 1902). He shows that as early as 1835-36 there were in attendance in German universities 475 foreign students, representing 4.02 per cent. of the entire enrollment. By 1870-71 these numbers had increased to 735, comprising 6.1 per cent. and by 1901-02 they amounted to 7.55 per cent. of the entire enrollment in the German universities.

In 1892, the report points out, America led with 415 of her nationals (22 per cent. of the entire foreign-student enrollment) resident in German universities, but in the year 1901-02, Russia was in the lead. In the summer semester of 1899,⁶ to take the foreign student enrollment in a typical year, there were in all approximately 6,284 foreign students resident in Germany. The significance of this last figure becomes somewhat apparent when we reflect that about the same time (1900) the number of foreign students enrolled in the universities of France was only 1,770,⁷ and that even as late as 1904 figures compiled by the United States Commissioner of Education showed a total of only 2,673 foreign students in the United States.⁸

Figures compiled for the year 1912-13⁹ show an attendance of 4,838 foreign students in the higher educational institutions of Germany. These figures would be more than doubled if special, art, technological, mining, forestry, and agricultural students were added. Of the number officially reported 2,332, or nearly half, were Russians. Of the remaining 2,506 the two largest groups were from Austria-Hungary (839) and the Balkans. There were 289 Americans, 184 Asiatics, 313 Swiss, 143 English, and various other nationalities in smaller numbers. Among the women students in this list, Russians and Americans were most largely represented. In addition to these, Britons, Austrians, Dutch, Swiss, Scandinavians, and students from the Balkans were reported as coming in growing numbers.

During the War foreign-student migrations to Germany were unquestionably disturbed very considerably. In a report¹⁰ covering the period October 1, 1919—September 30, 1920, we are told that "At the present time the German educational authorities have received 5,400 applications from foreigners to be allowed to study in German Hochschulen. Four groups of foreigners are preeminent among these: (1) those from Eastern and Southeastern Europe; (2) those from Mohammedan lands of the Near East, Turkey, Egypt, and even India, (3) those from East Asia; (4) Spaniards and South Americans. In Berlin there are now more Egyptian students than in London." Detailed statistics regarding post-war conditions of foreign study in Germany are not available. The organ of the Union of Russian Student Emigration Organizations states that there were in the spring of 1922 some 1,500 Russian students in Germany. About one thousand Chinese students are reported to have been resident in Germany in 1923.¹¹ It is stated in a recent number of the Allgemeine Missions-Nachrichten that in the summer of 1923 there were 150 Indian students in the universities and high schools of Germany. It is elsewhere stated that during the winter term 1920-21 there were 6,334 foreign students in Germany.¹² A more recent unpublished report (1922) from the Foreign Secretary of the German Student Christian Alliance makes the following significant comment on the number of foreign students in