606 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXX. No. 772 



mission to speak of them not as an ad- 

 ministrator, but as a college teacher— a 

 calling in which I have some background 

 of experience. 



The college is the latest phase of the 

 institutional life of our country to be as- 

 sailed by the reformer, and it can not be 

 denied that we have been unfortunate in 

 some of those who have hurried in to tell 

 us our faults. All angles of the complex 

 problem are gradually coming into view, 

 however, and the public once awake may 

 be trusted to do its own thinking. 



To open the whole subject in one address 

 is manifestly impossible, yet there are 

 some fundamental matters here which 

 should be better understood. I shall 

 speak briefly first of the place and inten- 

 tion of the college in our American educa- 

 tion and later on certain aspects of the 

 curriculum on undergraduate life and some 

 of the problems of teaching. 



The college rises on the finished founda- 

 tions of the secondary school and leads 

 to the professional and liberal departments 

 of the university on the one hand and 

 directly into the open fields and the 

 branching highways of life on the other. 

 It offers a quiet space for the broadening, 

 deepening and enriching of the mind and 

 soul of man, a home of mental industry 

 and moral growth, a season for "the 

 austere and serious girding of the loins of 

 youth" and an inspiration to "that other 

 life of refined pleasure and action in the 

 open places of the world." 



To those approaching graduate studies 

 the college should ofiier those fundamental 

 courses which serve as points of depar- 

 ture for the higher branches of theoretical 

 and practical knowledge pursued in the 

 university. To all it should give sound 

 training in those analytical powers of 

 reason upon which sane judgment must 

 ever rely for its validity and it should 



offer that knowledge of economic, social 

 and political problems essential to enlight- 

 ened and effective citizenship. The college 

 should aid its students to understand what 

 man is to-day by filling in the background, 

 physical, mental and spiritual, out of 

 which he has come in obedience to law. 

 The whole current of college life should 

 be so directed as to foster the finer quali- 

 ties of mind and spirit which give men 

 dignity, poise and that deeper sense of 

 honorable and unselfish devotion to the 

 great and common good. 



Whatever knowledge and trained facul- 

 ties a student may have acquired at gradu- 

 ation depend more upon the man and less 

 upon the college. Colleges may provide 

 the richest opportunities and the fullest 

 incentive, but that which lies beyond is 

 work the student must do in himself. Col- 

 lege, like life, is whatever the man has in- 

 dustry, ability and insight to make of it. 

 "They also serve who only stand and 

 wait" was written to console blindness 

 and advancing years, not as an apology 

 for strength and youth. 



THE CURRICULUM 



To attack the curriculum seems to be an 

 easy and rather stimulating task for most 

 reformers, but to grasp its whole signifi- 

 cance and deal fairly by it require more 

 thought and pains than many a magazine 

 or newspaper writer is accustomed to give 

 to the things he so often whimsically ap- 

 proves or condemns. To understand the 

 recent history of our colleges, from any 

 point of view, the intellectual development 

 of the world during the past half cen- 

 tury must be taken into account as well 

 as the rather lagging response which has 

 come from school and church to its widen- 

 ing demands. 



The middle of the last century saw the 

 beginning of several intellectual move- 



