Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/110

104 on railway or street cars to meet their recitations in some college. The greatest instrument of culture in a college is the 'college atmosphere,' the personal influence exerted by its professors and students. The college atmosphere develops feebly in the rush of a great city. The 'spuretudenten' or railway track students, as the Germans call them, the students who live far from the university, get very little of this atmosphere. The young woman who attends the university under these conditions contributes nothing to the university atmosphere, and therefore receives very little from it. She may attend her recitations and pass her examinations, but she is in all essential respects 'in absentia,' and so far as the best influences of the university are concerned, she is neither 'coeducated' nor 'educated.' The 'spur '-student system is bad enough for young men, virtually wasting half their time. With young women the condition of continuous railroading, attempted study on the trains, the necessary frowsiness of railway travel and the laxness of manners it cultivates, are all elements very undesirable in higher education. If young women enter the colleges, they should demand that suitable place be made for them. Failing to find this, they should look for it somewhere else. Associations which develop vulgarity cannot be used for the promotion of culture either for men or for women. That the influence of cultured women on the whole is opposed to vulgarity is a powerful argument for education, and is the secret basis of much of the agitation against it.

With all this it is necesarynecessary [sic] for us to recognize actual facts. There is no question that a reaction has set in against coeducation. The number of those who proclaim their unquestioning faith is relatively fewer than would have been the case ten years ago. This change in sentiment is not universal. It will be nowhere revolutionary. Young women will not be excluded from any institution where they are now welcomed, nor will the almost universal rule of coeducation in state institutions be in any way reversed. The reaction shows itself in a little less civility of boys towards their sisters and the sisters of other boys; in a little more hedging on the part of the professors; in a little less pointing with pride on the part of college executive officials. There is nothing tangible in all this. Its existence may be denied or referred to ignorance or prejudice.

But such as it is, we may for a moment inquire into its causes. First as to those least worthy. Here we may place the dislike of the idle boy to have his failures witnessed by women who can do better. I have heard of such feelings, but I have no evidence that they play much actual part in the question at issue. Inferior women do better work than inferior men because they are more docile and have much less to detract their minds. But there exists a strong feeling among rowdyish young men that the preference of women interferes with rowdyish