76 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF THE COLLEGE 



By Pkofessob WALTER LIBBY 



NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY 



THE expression socialization of the college is here used not to indi- 

 cate a process to be set going at some time in the future, but to 

 denote a development which can be observed in the history of institu- 

 tions of higher learning and which educational leaders as the conscious 

 guides of evolution may now further, direct, and render consistent with 

 itself. A comparison of the Oxford clerk of the fourteenth century, 

 ascetic, other-worldly, sententious, immersed in scholastic logic, with 

 some of the alert, yet philosophical, public men produced by the English 

 universities of to-day, shows the line that academic evolution has fol- 

 lowed during the intervening centuries. On this continent these con- 

 trasted types of university man find their analogies in the Harvard man 

 of the middle of the seventeenth century, a clergyman trained by the 

 clergy for the clergy, and the Harvard man of the twentieth century, 

 educated under more democratic and less clerical influences. 



The tendency of colleges to change in adapting themselves to 

 changed social conditions is obvious enough. At the same time it is 

 generally admitted that through economic and other changes society is 

 marked by greater and greater complexity. How must we shape the 

 college curriculum, methods, administration, etc., in order that our 

 graduates may prove themselves efficient in the complex social condi- 

 tions of the present day? This is the problem whose solution we and 

 all interested in the progress of higher education have to discover. To 

 the settlement of this question as it presents itself at this time I wish 

 to offer a slight contribution from the standpoint of the college pro- 

 fessor of pedagogy. 



In the first place, for an American college to -adopt at this time the 

 narrow curriculum that two centuries ago introduced the student to 

 professional studies would be a reversion dictated by despair. Funda- 

 mental as Latin, Greek and mathematics are to our civilization, our 

 culture, our science, they do not of themselves afford an adequate prepa- 

 ration for life under modern conditions. Helpful as Latin and Greek 

 are to our esthetic appreciation and sense of ethical values, filled with 

 illumination and bristling with suggestions as are the ancient litera- 

 tures, they could not mean so much for us had our minds not been 

 formed and informed by other studies. Even as a step toward the dif- 



