1 6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



doubtedly be occasionally influenced in this way. No boy likes to be 

 called effeminate, whether the charge be true or false. In these inter- 

 esting methods of undermining college spirit, many enthusiastic per- 

 sons are now engaged. The feeling which they are attempting to arouse 

 and play upon rarely or never occurs spontaneously to a boy brought 

 up in coeducational schools. It is only as one finds a constituency 

 reared in non-coeducational schools that any extensive and sincere 

 antipathy of this sort can be counted upon. Specific instances illus- 

 trative of this fact would be easy to mention. Elsewhere the animosity 

 of the men toward the women, if it exists at all, is an evident pose so 

 transparent and unreliable as to deceive no one. In some institutions 

 it has gained a specious prominence through resentment that the 

 women support male student organizations and interests so feebly. 

 Depleted athletic treasuries have been active ferments in this form of 

 anti-woman agitation. Meantime, if one wishes college spirit in its 

 more demonstrative and vocal forms, he must, in young colleges, at 

 least, arrange for athletic victories, and women have not proved a seri- 

 ous impediment to these. 



A vaguer form of this same criticism is often met with in the 

 charge that women exercise a deleterious effect on that impalpable 

 something known as academic atmosphere. When this objection is 

 run to ground it is generally found to refer to the depreciation of 

 scholarship already sufficiently mentioned, or to certain social compli- 

 cations of which we shall speak in a moment, or to the fact that the 

 spirit of an institution differs in some other important but unnamable 

 particular from that peculiar to Oxford or Yale or Harvard. Needless 

 to say, the last form of this criticism is quite beyond controversy. It 

 only remains to point out that all attempts to imbue with this spirit 

 the occasional men's colleges found in the coeducational region have 

 failed, in the judgment of competent observers, quite as completely to 

 secure this desired result as have the efforts in coeducational institu- 

 tions. The difficulties involved are referable much more certainly to 

 tbe absence of tradition due to the youth of these colleges and to geo- 

 graphically determined social conditions, than to coeducation. More- 

 over, it is questionable if these difficulties will ever be wholly removed, 

 and still more questionable whether this would be desirable even if 

 it were possible. 



The asserted violation of reasonable social proprieties constitutes one 

 of the most frequent and important sources of annoyance to the advo- 

 cates of coeducation. To behold the campus dotted with couples, bill- 

 ing and cooing their way to an A.B., is a thing, it is said, to rejoice 

 Venus or Pan rather than Minerva, and were it the frequent or neces- 

 sary outcome of coeducation, the future of the system would certainly 



