UNIVERSITY STANDARDS 73 



Professor Mitchell, " to object that the college exists primarily for the 

 production of scholarship and the training of scholars. . . . That has 

 happened in collegiate education which is not unknown in commercial 

 industry: the by-products have been discovered to possess unsuspected 

 values, and in the wide-spread popular demand for them a profound 

 change has been wrought in the college clientele and in the needs which 

 the colleges are called upon to meet. By a very slight and entirely 

 logical extension of the system of free election we could let each take, 

 for an appropriate fee, whatever he might desire of the goods the col- 

 lege had to offer." This deduction Professor Mitchell rejects because 

 " on every side the system of free election has failed and broken into 

 chaos precisely because the college is not a commercial enterprise." 

 " Yet it is equally futile and ridiculous to attempt to make scholars of 

 those who have no scholarly aptitude or ambition." Both kinds, how- 

 ever, may find their satisfaction in the same college, though not, he 

 thinks, in the same classes. For the one class Columbia will provide 

 scholarly training ; for the other, something different. In Mr. Dooley's 

 college, when the applicant for admission arrives, " th' prisidint takes 

 him into a Turkish room, gives him a cigareet, an' says : ' Me dear boy, 

 what special branch iv learnin' wud ye like to have studied f'r ye be our 

 compitint professors ? ' " The Columbia president will not' do this ; 

 but Columbia's enforced regimen for by-product majors will at least 

 eschew the " futile and ridiculous " attempt to impose scholarship upon 

 them. 



I am frank to say that if the analyses represent the case at all fairly, 

 the remedies seem inadequate. The elective system, for example, is a 

 manifestation on the academic side of a transformation which has cov- 

 ered the whole range of college activity. Many causes have contrib- 

 uted to this result. The quickening principle was the German univer- 

 sity ideal carried over to the American college by pioneers in that great 

 procession of American youth who have sought the stimulus of German 

 scholarship. Coincident with this has been the development of second- 

 ary education and the postponement of the period of college training. 

 When the entering age was pushed up from twelve and thirteen to six- 

 teen, eighteen, and even higher, a change in discipline was necessary. 

 The multiplication of subjects of study made some sort of selection 

 inevitable. If Harvard were to schedule but seventeen courses the elect- 

 ive system could be abandoned — for seventeen courses constitute a 

 four years' program; whereas, if all the courses now offered were pre- 

 scribed for graduation it would take the student more than seventy 

 years to earn his degree. Of sheer necessity some freedom of choice 

 must be conceded; and the invitation to the student to share in the 

 selective process has been the most clarifying principle in modern 

 higher education. The system has grown because it has worked. The 



