STUDY IN THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 569 



in less radical form — by hundreds of graduates who are men of repu- 

 table standing, and some of whom may be sending sons of their own 

 to college. Talk to such graduates of loyalty to alma mater, and it will 

 express itself in terms of getting money, recruiting students (especially 

 athletes), coming back to reunions, putting up buildings and support- 

 ing the team; the educational aspect of the college is a negligible as- 

 pect — a subsidiary nuisance. In a gathering of "loyal'' alumni of 

 this stripe the man who would argue for even an approximation to the 

 scholarly ideal is actually put upon the defensive — if he is not an ob- 

 ject of derision. 



If it be true that a great deal of parental and graduate opinion is 

 openly hostile to the strenuous view of college work, no surprise should 

 be excited by the discovery that the undergraduate atmosphere also is 

 polluted ;* nor that the school-boy has either already caught the disease 

 before leaving school, or soon contracts it in the unhealthy atmosphere 

 of the college. Hence, unless one be wholly in error in one's pessi- 

 mistic verdict upon present conditions, it turns out to be less ridiculous 

 than it may have seemed at first blush to ask whether the highest place 

 in college is being given to severe intellectual discipline ; the mere possi- 

 bility that the situation is grave should arouse all serious educators, and 

 the veriest honesty demands a frank answer to the enquiry from all re- 

 sponsible for the conditions. 



The answer to be expected from some parents and alumni, as we 

 have seen, would be that intellectual considerations are altogether 

 secondary, and that the important business of the college is not study. 

 Probably very few college professors and presidents would care to take 

 their stand with these enemies of the intellectual; but certainly many 

 such academic gentlemen would have to be ranked, with or without 

 their own consent, among the compromisers. They may not explicitly 

 condone loafing, but they preach that 



'Tis better to have come and loafed 

 Than never to have come at all; 



they may not disparage intellectual attainment, but they are unwilling 

 to demand it of all of their students. The attractive creed of such edu- 

 cators might be formulated somewhat as follows : " College is a place of 

 large opportunities, among which the purely intellectual are not neces- 

 sarily the greatest. "We should, of course, aim to develop and instruct 

 the minds of our students, but we must not forget that one of the 

 greatest educational forces in college is the life itself, and it is by no 

 means incumbent upon us to insist that all of those in residence shall 



* At a recent conference of educators the following motto, which had been 

 found hanging upon the wall of a student's room, was produced: "There is 

 just this advantage about study, that it shows by contrast the value of those 

 things for which we really come to college." 



VOL. Lxxxni. — 39. 



