74 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



supplanting of the old self-improvement, or culture, theory by the Ger- 

 man ideal of scholarship gave a tremendous impulse to serious college 

 work. And with serious college work in hand, both the old 

 paternalism and the childishness of the schoolboy college must 

 necessarily slough off. " I will not ask you to be true to us," 

 President White said at the opening of Cornell University in 1868. 

 " I will ask you to be true to yourselves. In Heaven's name be 

 men ! Is it not time that some poor student traditions be sup- 

 planted by better? You are not here to be made; you are here to 

 make yourselves. You are not here to hang upon a university; you are 

 here to help build a university. This is no place for children's tricks 

 and toys, for exploits which only excite the wonderment of boarding- 

 school misses. You are here to begin a man's work in the greatest time 

 and land the world has yet known." Cornell students responded to this 

 appeal, and so did students the country over to similar appeals. Throw- 

 ing dead cats through class room windows, locking professors in their 

 rooms, muffling college bells, levitating domestic animals to third-floor 

 chapels, and like customs, though they died hard, actually died. Defi- 

 niteness of purpose was given to college study. The new subjects, with 

 their fresh and unexplored fields, absorbed the student and gave him a 

 seriousness his predecessor had lacked. A manlier attitude prevailed. 

 Co-education began to arrive; and in all the state universities particu- 

 larly, the presence of a body of serious-minded young women did much 

 to elevate the atmosphere of college life. The superfluous energies of 

 youth heretofore wasted in boyish tricks and worse turned to 

 athletic sports, and to developing, one after the other, the twenty- 

 seven activities Mr. Birdseye has noted. The testimony to the im- 

 provement in manners and morals within the student body is over- 

 whelming. Petty regulations and rules of conduct atrophied and 

 dropped off. College students began to be regarded and to feel as 

 men and women, with responsibility for their own conduct — to the 

 profit of all and to the immense relief of college authorities. 



The flowering period of this cycle may be roughly fixed as the 

 twenty- five years from 1870 to 1895. All went well so long as the im- 

 pulse set free by the liberalizing of the college curriculum lasted, and 

 while the college constituency was essentially homogeneous. In the 

 later years certain vital changes were taking place, partly as the result 

 of these very movements, partly from influences outside the college. 

 Wealth and luxury became widely diffused. The schools multiplied 

 and were free, and the opportunity of school and college came without 

 effort. Going to college became part of the ordinary routine of a boy's 

 and girl's life. With youths that were earnest there came also to col- 

 lege doors troops of the unearnest. The twenty-seven student activities 

 became more and more engrossing. Within the college boundaries 



