6io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



inations. The president of a large college told me that he could not 

 consider a certain man in connection with the chair of philosophy, 

 because he was said to have leanings toward socialism and there was too 

 much of that kind of thing among the students already. As a matter 

 of fact, this president probably had his eyes on his trustees rather than 

 on his students, and there is altogether too little enthusiasm for ideal 

 ends — wise or foolish — among our college students. On the continent 

 they are the radicals and revolutionaries; here they are too often the 

 premature club men. 



A class endowed by the public can only be tolerated if it performs 

 public services. Assuming that the class will last for a time, how can 

 it be taught its responsibilities? Not surely by the Harvard plan of 

 studying a little of everything, but nothing concerned with work in life. 

 Even professional football is better than amateur scholarship; Your 

 true lover is no amateur, but a professional in deadly earnest. Each 

 boy at Harvard, rich or poor, should have some end to which he devotes 

 himself. Those who do not care for scholarship should be given a 

 chance to become interested in business or politics or social affairs, or 

 else the university should be closed to them. But many will become 

 absorbed in scholarly work if given a chance, and this can best be offered 

 by letting them do serious work in some direction and leading them to 

 associate with those already interested in such work. 



The plan just now adopted at Harvard of establishing residence 

 halls for freshmen traverses all that I have written. Groups of the 

 most immature students, likely to be classified by the amount they are 

 prepared to pay for rooms and board and the schools from which they 

 come, will be segregated, required to study a little of everything under 

 the supervision of celibate masters, and told that they are entering on a 

 " period of play." If, as is said, " the change from the life of school 

 to that of college is too abrupt at the present day," then let us make the 

 schoolboy more of a man, not the college student less of a man. The 

 groups in college should be formed on a plan exactly the opposite of 

 that proposed, social, local and age distinctions being ignored, and the 

 main grouping being in accordance with the aptitudes and life interests 

 of the students. The ideal is the zoological hall of the old Harvard, 

 where apprentices of a great man and a great teacher lived together. 

 This is told of again in the charming autobiography of Shaler. A boy 

 from the aristocratic southern classes, with ample means and good 

 abilities but no fixed interests, fell into this group. There he discov- 

 ered his life work and pursued it with boundless enthusiasm. Nor did 

 the fact that he devoted himself exclusively to professional work in 

 natural history in college prevent him from writing Elizabethan plays 

 in his old age. The number of men of distinction given to the world 

 from this small Agassiz group is truly remarkable. 



