UNIVERSITY STANDARDS 71 



are supposed to be seriously at work is so low a standard in quality en- 

 dured." In his report of the same year Dean Ferry, of Williams, says : 

 " The spirit of the college is excellent in all respects save that of lack 

 of seriousness toward the work of the class room. Could the under- 

 graduate be made to believe that it is worth while to devote serious and 

 uninterrupted effort to the study of the matter set before him in his 

 college courses, the atmosphere of the college would leave little to be 

 desired." 



Mr. Birdseye counted twenty-seven distinct interests and occupa- 

 tions which engage the student in a modern university, outside of the 

 work for which the university exists. " The teachers in our colleges," 

 says Woodrow Wilson, " are men of learning and conceive it their duty 

 to impart learning; but their pupils do not desire it; and the parents 

 of their pupils do not desire it for them. . . . Many of the parents of 

 our modern undergraduates will frankly tell you that what they want 

 for their sons is not so much what they will get in the class room as 

 something else, which they are at a loss to define, which they will get 

 from the associations of college life." Speaking of amusements and 

 athletic activities, he says : " Athletics has no competitor except these 

 amusements and petty engrossments; they have no serious competitor 

 except athletics. The scholar is not in the game. He keeps modestly 

 to his class room and his study and must be looked up and asked ques- 

 tions if you would know what he is thinking about. . . . He deplores 

 athletics and all the other absorbing and non-academic pursuits which 

 he sees drawing the attention of his pupils . . . but he will not enter 

 into competition with them." 



In looking about for a scapegoat our critics have found the elective 

 system the most handy. Those who hark back to the old humanistic 

 college, like Princeton's ex-president, and those who recognize that the 

 old has gone forever, like Mr. Flexner, seem to unite on this point. The 

 elective system does well enough for the seriously minded. What does 

 it do for his brother, of opposite inclination ? asks Mr. Flexner. " It 

 simply furnishes him an abundant opportunity to exercise a low inge- 

 nuity in picking his way to a degree with the least exertion, the least 

 inconvenience in the way of hours, the least shock to the prejudices 

 which function for him in place of ideas, tastes and convictions. He 

 comes out at the spout as he went in at the hopper — except for the 

 additional moral havoc wrought by four years of ' beating the game.' " 

 Woodrow Wilson finds the evil of the elective system, not so much in 

 the easy escape of the loafer as in the heterogeneity introduced, the 

 dilution of the college atmosphere with professional and vocational 

 aims. " It is notorious," he says, " how deep and how narrow the ab- 

 sorptions of the professional school are. . . . The work to be done in 

 them is as exact, as definite, as exclusive as that of the office and the 



