THE REACTION FROM COEDUCATION. 17 



be in jeopardy. No university can safely become a matrimonial bureau, 

 nor yet a clearing house for flirtations. With the entire absence of 

 supervision, which characterizes the attitude of many coeducational in- 

 stitutions toward the social life of students, it is not to be wondered at 

 that an occasional silly boy and an occasional silly girl should occa- 

 sionally do some extremely silly thing. It only remains to remember 

 that the same boy and girl will, with remarkably few exceptions, do 

 equally silly things whatever educational surroundings may be given 

 them. Furthermore, institutions which have attempted to control these 

 matters by fixed rules of deportment seem on the whole to have suc- 

 ceeded in producing rather more risque escapades than those which 

 eschew restrictions altogether. Public opinion has generally proved a 

 safe guide in this direction. It would be folly to pretend that no social 

 transgressions have occurred, but on the whole judged by any standard 

 reasonably applicable to the situation, the relations of the men and 

 women in the majority of such colleges seem to have been wholesome 

 and unobjectionable. Instances of actual immorality have been so 

 extremely rare as fairly to be considered pathological. That the future 

 has some very serious perplexities in store on this score, however, for 

 some peculiarly situated institutions of which we shall speak presently, 

 seems more than probable. A very little injudicious conduct of the 

 character under consideration goes far to create an atmosphere of a 

 very obnoxious kind, and it is such infrequent but pervasive cases which 

 cause anxiety to the friends and give courage to the foes of coeducation. 

 Even though actual flirtation is avoided, many critics insist that 

 boys' interests are stimulated in other boys' sisters at a time when 

 it would be quite as well if they could be diverted into entirely differ- 

 ent channels, even football. Girls, it is said, are unduly excited by 

 masculine attention at a critical time in their physiological develop- 

 ment, when they might better be engaged in storing their minds with 

 useful learning. On the other side of this account it is to be observed 

 that the shock of the class room goes far to shatter the traditional 

 masculine idol in the feminine mind. This destructive process is in 

 the case of most young women in such coeducational colleges begun in 

 the primary schools and carried without interruption up to the aca- 

 demic level. By means of this anti-romantic treatment girls are un- 

 tionably spared much painful disillusionizing, and they are brought 

 through a difficult period with probably a minimum of silliness and 

 mawkish sentimentality. Moreover, they are often spared certain 

 highly morbid experiences familiar to the authorities of girls' col- 

 leges. In the case of the boy there is abundant evidence to warrant the 

 opinion that the grosser forms of vice to which he falls an occasional 

 prey are rendered distinctly less alluring by daily contact with women 



VOL. LXII. 2. 



