UNIVERSITY STANDARDS 79 



moral lapse in college do not count in later life — since these also are 

 exercise and training in the rights and responsibilities of manhood and 

 womanhood. " One way to deal with these strange, excited, inexperi- 

 enced and intensely human things called freshmen/' says Dean Briggs, 

 of Harvard, " is to let them flounder till they drown or swim ; and this 

 way has been advocated by men who have no sons of their own. It is 

 delightfully simple, if we can only shut eye and ear and heart and 

 conscience; and it has a kind of plausibility in the examples of men 

 who through rough usage have achieved strong character. ' The objec- 

 tion,' as the master of a great school said the other day, ' is the waste ; 

 and,' he added, ' it is such an awful thing to waste human life ! ' " 



A great mob of boys and girls are thronging the entrances of our 

 colleges and universities. All need, most are entitled to, training; 

 but not all are fitted and adapted to the college. Some ought to be in 

 the shops and marts and homes acquiring discipline by contact with 

 hard realities. Some are morally tainted and impervious to intellectual 

 appeal. The mass is plastic and possible of development into capable, 

 self-reliant citizenship. If the college can not find out these facts, who 

 can ? If the college can not rid itself of the unworthy, who is to do it ? 

 If the college can not make its standards dominate the college world, 

 how can its work become effective? Up against these problems, the 

 college must plead guilty to the charge of carelessness and ineffective- 

 ness. In a situation where youths are on the way to manhood and 

 womanhood, but not yet arrived, where standards are necessarily blurred 

 and confused, the college has been more or less helpless, because it has 

 not squarely faced the problems involved. It must be said again, the 

 college can not go back into the old boarding-school chrysalis. Athletics, 

 amusements, student activities, exercise of responsibility, were all wel- 

 comed into the college as aids to normal living, as making student life 

 more wholesome. And so they were, and did. Paradoxical as it may 

 seem, these are not yet widely enough diffused. We have come to our 

 present plight because the college has had no consistent conception of 

 its function in these matters. Harvard has retained the genial loafer 

 for .the possible good that might come " from contact between his back 

 and the bricks of the college." But what about the contagion of his 

 presence in a place where sound standards have to struggle to keep even 

 a foothold ? Other institutions have sought to rigidly exclude those who 

 did not measure up to a fixed standard, though by a rough surgery that 

 has sometimes seemed to treat measles and appendicitis pretty much 

 alike. " It is comparatively simple," says Mr. Flexner, " to extirpate 

 those who appear to be the weaker brethren; but it is not a whit more 

 intelligent than to pull every aching tooth." Yet the aching tooth 

 needs attention, and it must come to pulling at last, if nothing else 

 is done. 



