THE COLLEGE 121 



with little or no personal interest in his students on the part of the 

 lecturer, or required reaction on the part of the hearer. This per- 

 sonal contact is sometimes supplied vicariously in the person of a 

 graduate student, or recently fledged doctor of philosophy, who 

 quizzes fractions of the mass at stated intervals. The information 

 imparted is the best and most advanced. t The fame of the lecturers 

 is unsurpassed. But the appropriation of the material presented is 

 largely optional. As the personal element in teaching is largely 

 vicarious, learning in turn tends to become vicarious also. Printed 

 notes, expert coaches, improvised " seminars," reduce to compara- 

 tively few hours the labor of those who register themselves as 

 students. Affording splendid and unequaled opportunities for the 

 earnest and studious few, these university-colleges afford the wealthy 

 idler the elegant leisure that he craves. 



For the great majority of the students in a university-college, 

 even athletics becomes likewise vicarious, the exertions of the elegant 

 idler in this direction being confined mainly to the lungs and the 

 pocketbook. In so vast a body the opportunity for social leader- 

 ship and prominence in college affairs is confined to the exceptional 

 few; impossible for the average many. The average boy of eighteen 

 or twenty soon drifts into the irresponsibility of an unnoticed unit 

 in the preponderating mass. Discipline in the university-college 

 becomes practically limited to the requirement that the student shall 

 exercise sufficient control over his animal and social instincts to 

 maintain intense intellectual activity for two periods of two or 

 three weeks in each college year. 



By thus closing in upon the college from both sides, and marking 

 off the institutions which come so close to it that they are often 

 confounded with it, we have made the definition of the real college 

 comparatively easy. We are now ready to describe its characteristic 

 marks. 



It requires as a condition of admission that the work of the school 

 shall have been thoroughly done. Either by examination before 

 entering, or by elimination at the first opportunity afterward, it 

 strictly limits its students to those who have had a thorough school 

 training. It does this because it is impossible to give a college educa- 

 tion to an untrained mind. It is even more essential that a student 

 shall have done hard work before coming to college than that he 

 shall do hard work while in college. The previously trained mind 

 can get a great deal out of college with comparatively little work. 

 The mind that has not been previously well trained can get very 

 little out of college, even by hard work. This may be a stumbling- 

 block to the school man, and foolishness to the university man; but 

 the college man knows that in spite of these criticisms from below 

 and from above, an amount of leisure can be well afforded in college 



