i54 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



were set up on every hand for student guidance — so many of them that 

 we of these unregenerate days can only pause and marvel. Some 

 hampering relics of these elaborate systems of legislation remain, and 

 in a few women's colleges and coeducational institutions innumerable 

 rules are still imposed upon the women, even where the men are prac- 

 tically without regulation, and where there is much talk of education 

 as a training in the power of seZ/-direction. The aim of it was and is 

 moral discipline. It was discipline — no doubt of that — but whether it 

 was training in self-direction is doubtful. We do not learn to swim by 

 being kept away from the water. Trained in a negative morality, a 

 morality of shibboleths, a morality of restraint, it is not strange that 

 many of the graduates of these older days have to-day inadequate ideas 

 of what American society must demand from its educated men and 

 women. 



Moral discipline was matched by mental discipline. Certain sub- 

 jects were thought peculiarly adapted to mind training. Of course 

 these were the classics, mathematics and philosophy. Then science, 

 with difficulty, got a foothold in the curriculum, and eventually large 

 sums were spent in the equipment of laboratories. For a long time, 

 however, there was more or less scorn of material equipment, unless in 

 the shape of ornate buildings useful not only for academic purposes, but 

 for advertising as well. Even the physical sciences did not have a uni- 

 versally cordial welcome. For many years the biological sciences were 

 viewed askance ; and the modern sciences of society had to creep in sur- 

 reptitiously and apologetically through the side door of philosophy. 

 Mark Hopkins and his log were a sadly overworked simile. From the 

 first, the weak point in the theory of collegiate education was the idea 

 of compulsory morality, and the corollary notion that intellectuality 

 along broad lines of advancing scholarship was in some ways a danger- 

 ous luxury. Not infrequently, even now, do we hear scornful mention 

 of " mere scholarship " — and this not from cub undergraduates, but 

 from seasoned professors who should know better. Intellectual ca- 

 pacity in a student is not infrequently thought a matter secondary to 

 his belief in the virgin birth of Christ or the regularity with which he 

 attends church. In the professor scholarship is too often deemed of 

 less importance than his ability to " influence " students through per- 

 sonal contact. Many a thoughtful person, observing small college 

 ideals from the inside, is coming to believe that they give too large a 

 place to personal loyalty and personal influence and too little to ra- 

 tional scholarship. Here we are close to the great and vital short- 

 coming of the American small college. It has not duly recognized the 

 moral value of intellect and scholarship; it has not furnished its pro- 

 fessors with sufficient means or stimuli for scholarship on their own 

 behalf, nor has it insisted upon anything but the veriest mediocrity of 

 attainment on the part of its students. Not recognizing the value of 



