270 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
return; but we have suffered a loss that is irreparable, if there is not 
preserved in our colleges and universities the equivalent of the things 
they did, as shown in reverence for the divine beauty of personality in 
the lives of our students. 
There can be no question but that our attitude toward students is 
conventional, mechanical and institutionalistic. Behind us, to hold us 
firmly in our chosen course, besides the causes we have been describing, 
is the wish of anxious parents who forget that their young men and 
young women are not still children and who say gracious things about 
their favorite institution if their sons are held in check, and if their 
daughters are tenderly “ guarded ” and pampered. 
What are we to do about it? How can the student body and faculty 
be brought into closer relationship? How may our universities escape 
a cold institutionalism? What changes will move in the direction of 
most surely catching up the personal loves and enthusiasms of the 
average student into the warm, vigorous, purposeful life of the institu- 
tion? There are many things to do, certainly. I shall confine myself 
to a simple urgent suggestion that leads, I believe, towards the heart 
of the situation. The spirit of democracy should prevail. Not a senti- 
mental democracy that preaches equality and cooperation, and prac- 
tises autocracy. Students should be given a part, however small, in the 
control of our institutions. It is not my purpose to determine specific- 
ally what their powers should be. That has been so delightfully and 
convincingly discussed in the paper preceding my own that nothing 
further need be said. It is in itself a suggestive fact that Professor 
Fiske, like every one I have met who was connected with the Amherst 
attempt at self-government, believes in it thoroughly. Indeed I know 
of no one who has observed intimately any of the various experiments 
in student participation in student affairs, who has for it other than 
words of commendation. My contention would be that the kind of 
thing students undertake is more or less indifferent, if only they feel 
that it is worth doing and that they do it with a will. It may be the 
matter of honor in examinations. Students can do this successfully, as 
several happy instances prove, while instructors are powerless to cope 
with it, except at a cost in moral and social attitudes toward students 
that is hopelessly disastrous. Let it be the regulation of social activi- 
ties, over which faculties distress themselves and still do their work so 
bunglingly that students wink at it and smile at their own cunning. 
In some institutions students have undertaken the control of the daily 
paper, monthly literary sheet, and a comic sheet, from which they learn 
the meaning of free speech and the virtue of controlling it, derive les- 
sons in collective ownership and the joy of building for the future. In 
some instances they have been given a controlling voice in athletics, 
with advantage to the spirit of the institution. One spontaneous 
