Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/151

Rh science. It is through men born to research, trained to research, choicest product of nature and art, that science advances.

Another effect of the advertising spirit is the cheapening of salaries. The smaller the salaries, the more departments we can support. It is the spirit of advertising that leads some institutions to tolerate a type of athlete who comes as a student with none of the student's purpose. I am a firm believer in college athletics. I have done my part in them in college and out. I know that 'the color of life is red,' but the value of athletic games is lost when outside gladiators are hired to play them. No matter what the inducement, the athletic contest has no value except as the spontaneous effort of the college man. To coddle the athlete is to render him a professional. If an institution makes one rule for the ordinary student and another for the athlete it is party to a fraud. Without some such concession, half the great football teams of to-day could not exist. I would rather see football disappear and the athletic fields closed for ten years for fumigation than to see our colleges helpless in the hands of athletic professionalism, as many of them are to-day.

This is a minor matter in one sense, but it is pregnant with large dangers. Whatever the scholar does should be clean. What has the support of boards of scholars should be noble, helpful and inspiring. For the evils of college athletics, the apathy of college faculties is solely responsible. The blame falls on us: let us rise to our duty.

There is something wrong in our educational practise when a wealthy idler is allowed to take the name of student, on the sole condition that he and his grooms shall pass occasional examinations. There is no justification for the granting of degrees on cheap terms, to be used in social decoration. It is said that the chief of the great coaching trust in one of our universities earns a salary greater than was ever paid to any honest teacher. His function is to take the man who has spent the term in idleness or dissipation, and by a few hours' ingenious coaching to enable him to write a paper as good as that of a real student. The examinations thus passed are mere shams, and by the tolerance of the system the teaching force becomes responsible for it. No educational reform of the day is more important than the revival of honesty in regard to credits and examinations, such a revival of honest methods as shall make coaching trusts impossible.

The same methods which cure the aristocratic ills of idleness and cynicism are equally effective in the democratic vice of rowdyism. With high standards of work, set not at long intervals, by formal examinations, but by the daily vigilance and devotion of real teachers, all these classes of mock students disappear.

The football tramp vanishes before the work-test. The wealthy