Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/31

Rh, and whose tastes will dictate, a less hasty and slavish subserviency to the demands of professional training, and a longer dalliance with arts and letters. This disposition will be rapidly augmented by a wider appreciation of the educational value of these subjects on the part of the communities whence these young men come. Should these various influences cooperate, there can be no question that the present anomalous conditions would be extensively modified. At all events it would set the tide of men back into the humanities. It seems improbable that women will find it tempting or profitable in the near future to attempt extensively entrance upon law or technology or theology. But many of the courses involved in preparation for these careers will undoubtedly appeal to them in increasing measure.

Far and away the most serious problem which coeducation has to face is unquestionably that involved in maintaining proper social relations between the sexes, and this must, if solved permanently, gain its solution from the action of public sentiment in the student body itself. Faculty counsel and administrative suasion will do much, but in the last analysis the suppression of unprofitable and excessive social intercourse on the one hand, and the elimination of irrational sex prejudice on the other, must be accomplished through the force of sincere and enlightened student opinion. This is an altogether hopeful circumstance, although it points to a corrective which is necessarily slow in development and susceptible of temporary error. To distrust its final success is to repudiate the lesson of every liberalizing step which has resulted in making the American college student so completely his own master. Whether the method adopted will involve the social ostracism of women which exists in a mild form at several important coeducational universities, and in a pronounced form at one, it is difficult to say. Certainly the result at this last institution should commend itself to many opponents of the system, for it seems to have materially retarded the increase in the attendance of women such as has been experienced by other coeducational colleges. Evidently this method is calculated to correct only one form of excess in the relations of the sexes. Stupid prejudice is not likely to die under this treatment. Indeed, it will hardly die under any system, for there will probably always be men as there are now, both among faculty and students, who simply dislike personally to have women about. This feeling is moreover warmly reciprocated by some women. Such persons, if in coeducational institutions, should seize an early opportunity to transfer the scene of their labors. Nothing can be socially more unwholesome and more insidious in its effects upon personal dignity than life in a community where such forms of contempt and antisocial sentiment are general and sincere.