8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Again, faculties are adjured 'to become acquainted with their stu- 

 dents and to pay them social attentions. Excellent advice — usually 

 where it is not needed ! Occasions may not be forced. Social relations 

 spring normally out of other relations. Instructors may rightly be 

 reminded of responsibility and duty, but the up-to-date college, as Mr. 

 Birdseye would phrase it, can not rely on untrained, voluntary service 

 where training and unremitting attention are needed. Nor can the 

 college turn to its dean or adviser and demand of him the physical 

 impossibility of knowing every student and his particular problems 

 and needs. 



We may look hopefully to the preceptorial experiment of Princeton ; 

 as also upon the system of advisers which California and other institu- 

 tions are developing with a view to giving the stumbling freshman the 

 guidance he needs, and to saving as much material as possible from the 

 college scrap-heap. There is promise also in the serum treatment of 

 President Lowell, and one may reasonably expect the academic doctors, 

 in the end, to produce a really valuable compound. 



Yet these are only palliatives. The effective solution of the problem 

 — the relation of student activities to university standards — is so simple 

 that I hesitate to mention it. It is that the college take charge of its 

 own affairs. Through these later years alma mater has been piling up 

 her equipment, employing more and more professors, proclaiming her 

 wares, absorbed in the task of growing. With some uneasiness, but with 

 affected unconcern, she has seen growing up over against her own 

 growth this monstrous structure of student activities, this artificial 

 world of student life encased in traditions too sacred to be scrutinized 

 and presided over by that stuffed goddess of liberty known as college 

 spirit. Eemembering that she once relieved herself of all in loco 

 parentis functions and that all her students are men and women, alma 

 mater has walked gingerly around this mountain and tried her level best 

 to fit into the place assigned her. It is alma mater who has failed to 

 notice the aching tooth or connived to conceal its existence from the 

 doctors of the scholarship committee. It is alma mater who has per- 

 mitted athletics and dramatics and the social whirls and editorialing 

 and the rest of the twenty-seven activities to go beyond the limits of 

 safety and sanity. It is alma mater who can not bear the responsibility 

 of dropping men from college, who, obsessed with the idea that goodness 

 is not created by legislation, thinks only of serums that may influence 

 student sentiment or grasps at Columbia's peptonized diet as a means 

 of providing degrees for those quite divorced from college study. 



Alma mater's helpless concern recalls Mrs. Stetson-Gilman's en- 

 counter with the obstacle. Climbing up the mountain one day, she 

 finds a prejudice blocking the path, cutting off the view, and absolutely 

 refusing to move. She makes polite request, she argues, she scolds, 

 she implores — all of no avail. 



