CENTRALIZED AUTHORITY 271 
impulse of students toward pure sportsmanship that grows out of 
facing a concrete situation with responsibility is worth a half dozen 
lectures by a professional moral dictator. These are only instances of 
the many possible lines along which student activity may express itself. 
President Drinker, who has, with remarkable success, encouraged self- 
government at Lehigh University, says: “It has been my experience 
that the more responsibility is placed upon students, provided they are 
willing to assume it, the better it is for all concerned.” Even a small 
duty that students enter upon heartfully is enough to transform their 
attitude into one of partnership. It is an old rule that interests follow 
activities as the shadow the body. Sympathies and enthusiasms apart 
from deeds are pale and shallow. When students undertake anything 
in concert they must have organization. This creates unity of action 
and solidarity of sentiment. The fact of positions of emolument to be 
filled and the need of officers, leads to college politics with its fine ten- 
sion of rivalry and its tang of victory and defeat. Let us grant there 
will arise occasional abuses and mistakes. There are instances on 
record. The number is, however, relatively small. The redeeming 
feature of it is that whatever failures and successes they make, there is 
in it a preparation for citizenship. They are meeting in college life 
exactly the problems and difficulties that they will have to face later. 
We preach the gospel of learning to do by doing in the lower grades of 
our common schools, but are full of the notion of the value of learning 
to do by obeying, during the choice years of young manhood and woman- 
hood, which are above all others the time for preparation for the duties 
and responsibilities of citizenship. The educational world has had its 
prophets this long time of the value of social and family ideals among 
tiny children ; but by a strong irony of fate, we have been slow in taking 
seriously the same problem during the critical formative years of a 
college course. 
The root of the difficulty is in the need of more democracy in our 
institutions. That would come in a day if all concerned could apply 
the golden rule. There is a sort of mental near-sightedness in human 
nature by which it is hard to see through the other person’s eyes and 
feel his problems. All are, furthermore, intensely human—hiologically 
human—and want all they can get of power and prestige. Universities 
have differentiated into about four types of personages: a board of 
education, a president, a faculty and a student body. All except the 
last would dominate everything if it could. The best results will come 
only when each participates slightly in the whole, but specializes upon 
its own function. The board are specialists upon finance and should 
exercise a fairly free hand in all the material interests of the university, 
with only a negative control, through the power of veto, upon scholastic 
affairs. The faculty are specialists upon institutional questions. All} 
