394 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



instruction in all subjects from Greek up or down to kitchen-gardening 

 and dancing, affording great opportunity for cultivating the social side 

 and adding notably to the list of matriculants. Appendages affording 

 side passages to degrees are as welcome as summer schools, as they 

 benefit a worthy class and add to the matriculant list. The correspond- 

 ence school has not gained full recognition, but the importance of the 

 others justifies the hope of its founders. This type of expansion has 

 been at the expense of efficiency. New schools, new courses, are added, 

 the catalogue becomes more bulky each year, but the number of in- 

 structors is increased in small proportion. The instructors become 

 mere lesson-hearers. In one institution, professors offer twenty to 

 thirty-one hours a week of actual class-room work in various schools. 

 How much energy remains for genuine study is not difficult to deter- 

 mine. One need not wonder that college professors no longer lead in 

 investigation and discovery. This anxiety for bigness has led to the 

 prominence of semi-professional athletics, to the lowering of standards 

 that college champions may ' get through,' to the lowering of ideals and 

 even of morals. A student expressed well the general sentiment of his 

 class when Columbia took its stand against certain forms of athletics — 

 " What is Columbia coming to anyway ? It's going to be nothing but 

 an educational factory." 



Conceding all that is claimed for the present system, the question 

 still remains, Has the gain equalled the cost? 



No candid man, who has examined the subject carefully, who has 

 studied many colleges, will answer the question affirmatively. It mat- 

 ters not how firmly he is attached to the present system, he must 

 acknowledge that the results, from an educator's standpoint, are not 

 commensurate with the expenditures — more, that in some directions it 

 has led to positive waste. If one look over a pile of college catalogues 

 from different parts of the country, he will find whole broods of 

 academies masquerading as colleges, even as universities, with one 

 twentieth to one fourth of their pupils taking college studies, with a 

 long list of teachers, with a president traveling over the country, 

 prating on the advantage of the ' small college,' pleading the cause of 

 the ' poor professor ' and working on denominational prejudice to make 

 good the annual deficit of which his salary and traveling expenses form 

 a large part. There is something wrong in a system which creates a 

 public sentiment such as permits a half-million dollar gymnasium or 

 an immense stadium for semi-professional intercollegiate contests to 

 be heralded as a gift to education; that receives gifts for scholarships 

 and fellowships with as much acclaim as gifts for endowments; that 

 points to piles of masonry and to mere lists of matriculants as proofs of 

 success, that places the college on the basis of the shop and proves 

 economy of management by showing as many clerks as possible on a 



