WHAT MAKES A COLLEGE? 155 



high scholarship in social service, it has not looked after the character 

 and effectiveness of its resources from the point of view of changing 

 social needs. 



No one will deny for a moment that the colleges have rendered in- 

 dispensable service to the country in spite of their lack of resources 

 and of their point of view with regard to scholarship — some indeed will 

 say because of it. It is time, however, that every institution of higher 

 learning should eschew the old notion of compulsory morality and of 

 the paramount desirability of personal influence irrespective of rhyme 

 or reason. Other things being equal, the man of the greatest intel- 

 lectual equipment will be the most moral man because in the long run 

 he will be most effective in advancing the social welfare. The chances 

 are that he will have just as much desire to do good as his less well- 

 equipped brother; and he will have in addition the very essential ca- 

 pacity of directing his forces to the good end he desires to accomplish. 

 The small colleges have worked faithfully to make other things equal, 

 but only in the universities and in the larger colleges is there yet much 

 true insight into the social value of genuine scholarship, or sufficient 

 recognition that morality and knowledge go hand in hand. If the uni- 

 versities have erred in one direction — letting " moral discipline " go by 

 the board — the colleges have erred in the other. What the colleges have 

 now more explicitly to recognize is that the world to-day needs men and 

 women whose good intentions, whose Christian " character," are 

 directed and made effective by scientific knowledge of things as they are, 

 by hardheaded capacity and courage to think, by energy to act rationally 

 and with sympathetic understanding, even in the face of complex diffi- 

 culties and unkindly criticism; and that it is the business of the col- 

 lege to develop the potentialities of such capacity. 



To develop these basic powers we must have the right processes, and, 

 back of the process, sufficient resources, for without resources the edu- 

 cation needful to-day is an impossibility. The educational resources of 

 the college are its material equipment, its students, and its faculty — 

 and the greatest of these is the faculty. When all is said, the faculty 

 makes the college — and scholarship makes the faculty. But even now 

 the colleges recognize this but vaguely, and with some reluctance, per- 

 haps because the men the universities have supplied to them as teachers 

 have had often a sort of non-human, pseudo-scholarship of useless eru- 

 dition, rather than the real scholarship and the real enthusiasms of 

 men and women who not only know their own subjects passably well, 

 but are deeply enough interested in human life to wish their work to 

 have some direct and tangible relation to it. Given a faculty with gen- 

 uine scholarship of this kind, with a reasonable average of experience 

 in teaching and acquaintance with educational theory, with a con- 

 sciousness of the problems of the college in its relation to the educa- 

 tional needs of a democracy undergoing the strains of growth and 



