84 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



grounds for the leisure classes. Many critics within and without the 

 college comment on the lack of serious purpose among the students, the 

 failure of the heads of colleges to formulate for their institutions a 

 definite aim and program. Others concentrate their attention on 

 administrative questions, the lack of responsibility of the trustees, the 

 helplessness of the faculties, the autocracy of the president. Finally, 

 it is admitted by an eminent educational authority that a fair equivalent 

 of a college training can be gained through correspondence or even a 

 brief course of reading. Such pessimistic comment falls away from a 

 college or university animated by such social spirit as I have sought 

 here to indicate and advocate. Such a spirit will entail not a narrow, 

 but a broad curriculum to answer the needs of an increasingly complex 

 civilization, and a more liberal discipline with more guidance, and less 

 repression, more freedom and an increased sense of responsibility, in 

 order to fit for citizenship in an enlightened and self-disciplined democ- 

 racy. Great changes in administration are inevitable, an autocratic 

 university is incompatible in a free democracy, but the essential change 

 needed is an educational rather than an administrative one. 



The typical American college has been necesarily denominational to 

 maintain the doctrines and faith that to its constituency seemed vital. 

 In the present great diversity of belief many of the colleges show little 

 or no sectarian bias. Unless these institutions are, with increased 

 liberalism, to be marked by laxity of principle, and flabbiness of moral 

 purpose, they must gain a new motivation worthy of the times, they 

 must work under the inspiration that a hope and faith in human prog- 

 ress gives. To show how the minds of students can be affected educa- 

 tionally so that the college may be touched with this spirit of modern 

 democratic culture is the main purpose of these pages. 



In conclusion we may say that the change we seek to further in 

 harmony with an evolution already under way is designed to make the 

 college responsive to the social need of the present, to render it more 

 publicly significant, possibly less denominational, certainly not less 

 religious. In a word, one might say, more democratic and less sectarian. 



