June 28, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



995 



fession, there is every reason to believe that 

 the total number of college students in the 

 United States will increase very fast. If, 

 therefore, the undergraduate departments 

 of the larger endowed universities maintain 

 their hold upon public confidence, it seems 

 not unreasonable to suppose that in the 

 space of a generation they may triple or 

 quadruple in size ; and before that happens 

 the question of student life must be solved, 

 or will have solved itself, for better or 

 worse. 



The problem is so to organize the stu- 

 dents as to mix together on an intimate 

 footing men of all kinds from all parts of 

 the country. The obvious solution is to 

 break the undergraduate body into groups 

 like the English colleges, large enough to 

 give each man a chance to associate closely 

 with a considerable number of his fellows, 

 and not so large as to cause a division into 

 exclusive cliques. It must be understood, 

 of course, that this applies only to the social 

 life, not to the instruction, which would re- 

 main a university matter as heretofore. 

 Such a suggestion of breaking up the stu- 

 dent body has often been made, and some- 

 thing of the kind must be done sooner or 

 later if we are to maintain our old ideas 

 of the value of college life. Incidentally, 

 it would have the effect of provoking in- 

 ternal emulation which we sorely need. 

 The socialistic, or for this purpose it is 

 more appropriate to say the Christian, 

 spirit that has come over the world kas 

 affected profoundly our undergraduates. 

 Of late years an appeal to purely individual 

 objects has less effect upon them than it did 

 formerly. A student likes to feel that he 

 is striving not for his own selfish fame 

 alone, but for the glory of the organization 

 to which he belongs, and hence a rivalry 

 between a number of colleges would add a 

 powerful incentive to effort in many lines. 



But it is not enough to suggest that the 

 undergraduate body can advantageously be 



divided into groups ; the difficulty comes in 

 arranging how the groups can be formed; 

 and here we get very little light from 

 European experience. The German uni- 

 versities, and those that have followed their 

 model, are collections of professional schools 

 training men to be clergymen, lawyers, 

 physicians and teachers or professors. 

 They have nothing corresponding to the 

 liberal culture at which our college pur- 

 poEts to aim. That phase of education is 

 supposed to be completed at the gym- 

 nasium. In England, on the other hand, 

 where the universities have developed the 

 ancient traditions in a very different way, 

 the social conditions are such as to preclude 

 the chief difficulty that confronts us. Ox- 

 ford and Cambridge are doing a work of 

 the same nature as our undergraduate de- 

 partments, and they are made up of colleges 

 such as I am now discussing; but the bulk 

 of their students are drawn from a single 

 class in the community. Men of a different 

 class who want that kind of education usu- 

 ally go to London, or to one of the pro- 

 vincial universities. This fact, together 

 with the inducement of scholarships, and 

 the tendency to be guided by inherited as- 

 sociations, causes the students to distribute 

 themselves among the colleges in a very 

 satisfactory way. The men who have 

 grown up together as boys, or who come 

 from the same region, do not collect unduly 

 in one college. In America we should have 

 quite a different result if we allowed the 

 boy to select his group on first coming to 

 the university. He would almost certainly 

 go to the group or college where the men 

 were that he knew already, or at least to a 

 place where he would not feel too much of 

 a stranger. The students would be mainly 

 segregated on the basis of origin, of geo- 

 graphical sections, of preparatory schools, 

 of home surroundings ; and thus we should 

 have— as people have said— a college for 

 western men, a college for southern men, a 



