1 8683 ''Free Must the Scholar Be'' 



such claims were dishonest — as, for instance, when 

 college catalogues were padded by including scholars 

 in a preparatory or grammar school, or (in one case 

 of which I knew) even children taking private 

 lessons in music! 



White in his autobiography graphically describes 

 his early exasperating experience at Hobart College, 

 a small denominational institution at Geneva, New 

 York, from which he went on to Yale; but Hobart, 

 with all its patching and fitting, was by no means 

 one of the worst of its class. And the gradual The 

 introduction of the elective system, however un- ^^^-^^"'^ 

 welcome, worked a great change for the better even ^^'^^'^"^ 

 in such colleges, because it enabled the student to 

 select the subjects he wanted, and especially the 

 men who held his attention. Under the old plan 

 even at Yale, as White so clearly shows, real teachers 

 and eminent scholars worked at a great disadvantage, 

 being compelled as they were to hear and mark 

 daily the recitations of "reluctant students." To 

 condemn the elective system, therefore, because it 

 does not make a scholar out of every youth it touches 

 is to show little conception of the rank failure of the 

 old regime. Those who have criticized President 

 Eliot's unreserved adoption of the new one at 

 Harvard forgot or never realized the intellectual 

 lassitude among young men submitted to a pre- 

 arranged discipline awakening no interest and with 

 no visible relation to present tastes or future career. 

 Volition or vocation — one or the other — is the Scholars 

 backbone of all real scholarship. Men and women self-made 

 draw mental nutriment only from what their minds 

 assimilate. Scholars must make themselves, and 

 find joy in the process. 



C 87 2 



