82 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



was, and in the few small colleges of today is still the 

 great means of accomplishing many of the objectives I 

 have mentioned, but most institutions are no longer small 

 and the majority of students in them have little chance 

 for personal contact with the able and great scholars of 

 their institutions. The tendency has been too great in re- 

 cent years for the great men of the staffs to give over 

 their teaching to the teaching apprentices of their depart- 

 ments, especially in the under-classes. 



The public hears more of the ''student activities" re- 

 ferred to above than of scholarly attainment. For years 

 I have heard people ask why intellectual achievement 

 in the colleges should not receive the same publicity that 

 distinction in athletics does. Of course, athletics are 

 social and recreative, but there is really no answer, ex- 

 cept that it does not. But it is possible to make creative 

 or constructive scholarship more competitive, less in- 

 dividual, as is the honors system at Oxford — a matter of 

 real community or college struggle for record. As ath- 

 letic teams fight for scores, the Oxford honors system has 

 the effect of intercollegiate contest among its twenty-two 

 colleges. 



In conclusion, it may be said that a great deal is being 

 done toward the solution of this great problem, that it 

 has been talked about periodically for a great many 

 years, but that the constantly increasing numbers have 

 made the situation more critical than it has ever been. 

 Culture and democracy are not necessarily antagonistic, 

 but they tend to be. Our great institutions of necessity 

 have to lower standards. Formal instruction, system- 

 atic work, is good for a large group of our college popu- 

 lation, but many bright students have to fight the limita- 

 tions placed on their imagination, creative powers, and 

 originality by the very organization necessary to many 

 of their fellows. And it is our business to search out 

 these very students of high ability for it is they who will 

 pay society's dividends on our university investments. 



Professor George W. Stewart of the University of 

 Iowa, who spent last spring studying this whole question 

 in sixty-seven colleges of the middle west, found a wide- 



