WHAT MAKES A COLLEGE? 159 



are worrying about petty non-economies in routine administration, they 

 are not getting down to essentials. They are rather distorting our 

 perspective and confusing issues and values. We must demand more 

 serious scholarship on the part of our students. And there is no surer 

 way of getting it than to have more of it ourselves. We wish our stu- 

 dents to develop true moral perspective. Again, there is no surer way 

 for them to acquire it than to come into intellectual contact with men 

 and women who have it. We get breadth of view only by widening the 

 windows of the mind, not by crystal-gazing, however clear our crystal 

 may be. The world needs to-day as much as ever it did a far-sighted, 

 intelligent, self-directive morality. Never before, perhaps, have college 

 faculties so needed capacity intelligently to weigh values, economic, 

 political, social, moral, religious. Never before have they so needed 

 actual contact with the world, needed to take personal part in the social, 

 economic and political conflicts that are certainly determining now, 

 over again, whether the country, this time both north and south, shall 

 be free or slave, oligarchy or true democracy. The colleges have been 

 able to forget, they have revolved about in a beautiful utopian individ- 

 ualism of class culture and personal salvation until the universities, the 

 trade unions, the socialistic propaganda, the muck-raking magazines 

 and even the yellow journals have called it to their attention — they 

 have been able to forget that humanity crucified on a reckless indus- 

 trialism is as tragic a thing as Christ crucified on the cross. We must 

 have pragmatism of service to balance pragmatism of truth. In both 

 cases that is worth while which works. Personality is much, loyalty and 

 integrity are much, but neither personality, nor integrity, nor broad 

 loyalty, can develop properly in the absence of capacity to see all the ele- 

 ments of modern life in something like their true values, amid the 

 shifting lights of a rapid and complex evolution. True scholarship 

 would help to develop this capacity. It would bring us nearer to seeing 

 life clearly and seeing it whole — and truthfully. 



The faculty makes the college. Scholarship and experience make 

 the faculty. But scholarship and experience depend in the long run 

 upon wealth and income. They have their material basis in the dollar. 

 Even in education we can not escape the economic foundations of his- 

 tory. The American public can have just as good colleges as it is will- 

 ing to pay for ; and if it is willing to pay reasonably for efficient service 

 here, as it pays lavishly elsewhere, it will find that nowhere else does a 

 dollar purchase so much real utility. The public is abundantly able to 

 pay for better colleges. It simply has not realized that the develop- 

 ment and maintenance of ability costs money; nor has it yet a suffi- 

 ciently high ideal of what the college should be and do. Least of all 

 have many of the colleges themselves the right idea of what makes a 

 real college. 



