FUNCTION OF THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 581 



apt to look out for himself. He will thrive probably in spite of our at- 

 tempts to educate him quite as much as because of them. The most that 

 society can do is to have plenty of opportunities ready to his hand, and 

 see to it that unnecessary and artificial restrictions do not prevent his 

 free expansion. Naturally the college will receive all alike, the ex- 

 ceptional and the mediocre; and one part, though a secondary part, of 

 its function will doubtless be to bring to light the man of brilliant parts. 

 But its machinery will be wasted if it sets itself to this as its main task. 

 To what extent the university with its specialized training is likely to 

 cooperate to the same end, it is not easy to say. Certainly it has not 

 done a great deal in the past, and its specialized and academic character 

 is against it. There is a well-founded distrust of the capacity of the 

 academic mind to set the standards of society. Even its good points are 

 against it. There is such a thing as being too reasonable, if reliance on 

 reason makes us, as it tends to do, over-critical and afraid of action such 

 as anticipates grounded theory. The specialized university can produce 

 the economist and the legal expert ; beyond this it is not so clear. What 

 distinguishes the real leader from the expert is precisely that broad out- 

 look and human sympathy which constitutes culture. And specialized 

 training, uncorrected, tends also to obscure that feeling of the need for 

 submitting scientific reasoning in state matters to the test of popular 

 agreement, which alone is consistent with the democratic ideal. Upon 

 the college, then — when nature does not ignore the school and the 

 schoolmaster altogether — most of the task seems likely to fall. If it can 

 devise some plan to meet the special needs of the exceptional man, that 

 he may not be encouraged merely to keep pace with the mass, so much 

 the better ; if not, he will probably make his own opportunities. Mean- 

 while nothing in the attempt should jeopardize the main end of the 

 college, or induce it to give way to that seductive tendency to exalt over- 

 much the claims of cleverness, which is the peculiar temptation of higher 

 education. 



