78 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Let us hasten away from this impossible college and come back for 

 a brief space to the real institution, in which nevertheless some portion 

 of this virus is at work. And first, it is safe to say that the day is not 

 to be saved by a return to fixed programs of study made out of faculty 

 piecings. Nor can Woodrow Wilson, or his successors, succeed in draw- 

 ing off from the great mass of undergraduates the saving remnant fore- 

 ordained to be separated for four years from all training that bears 

 upon a special task — attractive as that ideal may be. Nor will Presi- 

 dent Hadley's ideal — " where a student learns things that he is not 

 going to use in after life by methods that he is going to use " — ever 

 again dominate the college. President Wilson found the work of the 

 professional school " as exact, as definite, as exclusive as that of the 

 office and the shop." The college can stand a large infusion of this 

 , ideal. Columbia's plan of providing an academic annex for majors in 

 dullness, athletics and social functions seems none too promising. The 

 junior college, and other compartment arrangements, useful perhaps as 

 administrative makeshifts, are futile as attempts to segregate differing 

 ideals of education. 



In turning to greater administrative efficiency as a remedy, one can 

 not but sympathize with the gentle plaint of Professor Showerman: 

 " The professor thought of the administration of his college — of all the 

 regents, registrars, clerks, secretaries, committees, and advisers, of all 

 the printing and writing and classifying and pigeonholing, of all the 

 roll-calling and quizzing and examination. What was all this marvel- 

 lous system for? Why, simply this: in order that young men and 

 women who came to college to get an education might be prevented 

 from avoiding the very thing they came for ! " Humiliating as the 

 admission may be, that is about what it has come to. Of regents and 

 registrars and pigeonholing and classifying we have perhaps a suffi- 

 ciency. But of that concern for what Mr. Birdseye calls the student 

 life department — ninety per cent, of the student's actual time — there 

 is, alas, not a sufficiency. 



Professor Barrows, who frankly abandons the undergraduate 

 college as a period of serious intellectual effort, would still think 

 of it as a moral opportunity — not for courses in ethics and for- 

 mal moral teaching, I take it, but that by some process or other 

 these bright, alert girls and boys might be enough arrested in 

 their absorbing play to see, in the scholarly atmosphere shed from 

 above, in the quiet ideals of the cloister, in generous comradeship with 

 generous comrades, a moral quality and beauty that should win their 

 allegiance and emulation. As a matter of fact, there has been too much 

 reliance on the theory that somehow, through the mysterious processes 

 of providence, just spending four years in college is in itself a saving 

 and redeeming grace; that somehow shamming, and dissipation, and 



