STUDY IN THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 575 



much more justifiable are the regret and resentment of the graduate 

 who looks back upon college years that he was allowed utterly and 

 obviously to waste. 



In this connection, it may be legitimate at least to raise the ques- 

 tion whether a courageous insistence upon real attainment in scholar- 

 ship would result in the exclusion from college of a substantially larger 

 number of men than the present weaker method does, or whether the 

 result might not be simply to spur to greater effort large groups of 

 gifted fellows who are now floating along the line of least resistance. 

 Would such a policy exclude any men really worth keeping? The be- 

 lief that college is a place primarily for study implies no contempt for 

 the unscholarly type of man, who is frequently more attractive and oc- 

 casionally a bit more able (along some lines) than the good student is. 

 But that concession does not alter the obvious fact that only the man 

 who can and will study has any right to be in an educational institu- 

 tion ; an ignoramus or an idler is no more in place there than a poet in 

 the supreme court or a college professor in the steel trust. 



Finally, this great question of the college ideal is not solely an 

 individual matter; it is altogether pertinent to look at it from the 

 national point of view. So we may solemnly ask the exponent of the 

 country-club ideal whether or not he believes that the American nation 

 should expect her institutions of higher learning to demand hearty 

 devotion to work from absolutely all of those who are preparing for life 

 within their walls and who are supposed to be the material from which 

 her leaders will come in the future. Perhaps we may even go so far 

 as to suggest that a toning up of the intellectual life is one of the great 

 needs of America to-day, and to ask whence this intellectual salvation 

 is to come if not from our centers of education. 



It is reasonable to believe that most college teachers do not sub- 

 scribe to the anti-intellectual creed held by so many parents, alumni 

 and undergraduates; nor do they all, by any means, approve of the 

 policy of compromise of which some of their colleagues are guilty — 

 though it may be that not all of those who believe in the severer stand- 

 ard are sufficiently honest and strong to fight for it. Moreover, it is 

 not unduly optimistic to hold that there has been, speaking broadly, a 

 general toning up of our educational standards in the last ten or twenty 

 years. A great deal of the credit for this improvement may be due to 

 some of our younger and less distinguished institutions, in which a 

 desire for real mental training and for a large acquisition of knowledge 

 is taken for granted, and where creditable intellectual attainments are 

 demanded of every student, either by the spirit of the institution or by 

 the courage of the administration. One can not but wonder whether 

 these modest colleges will not train the Lincolns of the future — in spite 

 of their lack of Oxfordian prestige. But the importance of the non- 



