270 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



return; but we have suffered a loss that is irreparable, if there is not 

 preserved in our colleges and universities the equivalent of the things 

 they did, as shown in reverence for the divine beauty of personality in 

 the lives of our students. 



There can be no question but that our attitude toward students is 

 conventional, mechanical and institutionalistic. Behind us, to hold us 

 firmly in our chosen course, besides the causes we have been describing, 

 is the wish of anxious parents who forget that their young men and 

 young women are not still children and who say gracious things about 

 their favorite institution if their sons are held in check, and if their 

 daughters are tenderly " guarded " and pampered. 



What are we to do about it? How can the student body and faculty 

 be brought into closer relationship? How may our universities escape 

 a cold institutionalism ? What changes will move in the direction of 

 most surely catching up the personal loves and enthusiasms of the 

 average student into the warm, vigorous, purposeful life of the institu- 

 tion ? There are many things to do, certainly. I shall confine myself 

 to a simple urgent suggestion that leads, I believe, towards the heart 

 of the situation. The spirit of democracy should prevail. Not a senti- 

 mental democracy that preaches equality and cooperation, and prac- 

 tises autocracy. Students should be given a part, however small, in the 

 control of our institutions. It is not my purpose to determine specific- 

 ally what their powers should be. That has been so delightfully and 

 convincingly discussed in the paper preceding my own that nothing 

 further need be said. It is in itself a suggestive fact that Professor 

 Fiske, like every one I have met who was connected with the Amherst 

 attempt at self-government, believes in it thoroughly. Indeed I know 

 of no one who has observed intimately any of the various experiments 

 in student participation in student affairs, who has for it other than 

 words of commendation. My contention would be that the kind of 

 thing students undertake is more or less indifferent, if only they feel 

 that it is worth doing and that they do it with a will. It may be the 

 matter of honor in examinations. Students can do this successfully, as 

 several happy instances prove, while instructors are powerless to cope 

 with it, except at a cost in moral and social attitudes toward students 

 that is hopelessly disastrous. Let it be the regulation of social activi- 

 ties, over which faculties distress themselves and still do their work so 

 bunglingly that students wink at it and smile at their own cunning. 

 In some institutions students have undertaken the control of the daily 

 paper, monthly literary sheet, and a comic sheet, from which they learn 

 the meaning of free speech and the virtue of controlling it, derive les- 

 sons in collective ownership and the joy of building for the future. In 

 some instances they have been given a controlling voice in athletics, 

 with advantage to the spirit of the institution. One spontaneous 



