Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/19

Rh outstrip the men in mere class room exercises, and that the latter should consequently be spared such depressing competition. A few eminent Harvard professors have even gone so far as to rank their students at Radcliffe higher than the men in the corresponding Harvard classes. This may of course be the exception which proves the rule. One may safely surmise that there are no wider differences in point of scholarship between coeducational institutions as a class and men's colleges, than there are among men's colleges themselves. Indeed, in elective courses, in which the men and women are represented in anything like equal numbers, a common verdict of instructors concerning their relative merits is that the women are on the average the better students. They seldom attain the eminence of the ablest men, but the ablest men are excessively rare. There is certainly no palpable proof and not even good circumstantial evidence to convict women of lowering the undergraduate standards of scholarship.

A subtler form of this same criticism aimed at American education in general, but especially applicable to coeducational institutions, is the assertion that women exercise a repressive influence upon the spirit of research for which they have as a sex neither capacity nor appreciation. Inasmuch as a real university must get its highest inspiration from the spirit of investigation it is obviously a matter of paramount importance to prevent women from securing any considerable influence in university life. This argument can be made rhetorically effective, but it begs the whole question and will carry no conviction to one not already convinced.

The disrespect for women's intellectual capacity, indicated in the above criticisms, sometimes takes still another form in the charge that as a class women are not serious-minded in their work. For many of them, it is said, life is a game with matrimony as its principal stake, and college work is but an amusing episode. Coupled with another frequent criticism based upon the professional tendencies of which we have already spoken, i. e., that the intellectual horizon of college women is too often bounded by purely utilitarian considerations of the bread and butter world of pedagogics, this leaves women in possession of few academic virtues. Apparently they are either too strenuous or too flippant, and both characteristics are institutionally undesirable.

It must be remembered that coeducational colleges inconsiderately differ very widely from one another, and so render the task of the generalizer extremely hazardous. Unquestionably one could find institutions where the frivolous society girl is overmuch in evidence, whereas in others the uncomely drudge doth too much abound, and probably neither of these young persons is wholesome in excess. But it is needless to say that in every coeducational university of