Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/614

610. The president of a large college told me that he could not consider a certain man in connection with the chair of philosophy, because he was said to have leanings toward socialism and there was too much of that kind of thing among the students already. As a matter of fact, this president probably had his eyes on his trustees rather than on his students, and there is altogether too little enthusiasm for ideal ends—wise or foolish—among our college students. On the continent they are the radicals and revolutionaries; here they are too often the premature club men.

A class endowed by the public can only be tolerated if it performs public services. Assuming that the class will last for a time, how can it be taught its responsibilities? Not surely by the Harvard plan of studying a little of everything, but nothing concerned with work in life. Even professional football is better than amateur scholarship; Your true lover is no amateur, but a professional in deadly earnest. Each boy at Harvard, rich or poor, should have some end to which he devotes himself. Those who do not care for scholarship should be given a chance to become interested in business or politics or social affairs, or else the university should be closed to them. But many will become absorbed in scholarly work if given a chance, and this can best be offered by letting them do serious work in some direction and leading them to associate with those already interested in such work.

The plan just now adopted at Harvard of establishing residence halls for freshmen traverses all that I have written. Groups of the most immature students, likely to be classified by the amount they are prepared to pay for rooms and board and the schools from which they come, will be segregated, required to study a little of everything under the supervision of celibate masters, and told that they are entering on a "period of play." If, as is said, "the change from the life of school to that of college is too abrupt at the present day," then let us make the schoolboy more of a man, not the college student less of a man. The groups in college should be formed on a plan exactly the opposite of that proposed, social, local and age distinctions being ignored, and the main grouping being in accordance with the aptitudes and life interests of the students. The ideal is the zoological hall of the old Harvard, where apprentices of a great man and a great teacher lived together. This is told of again in the charming autobiography of Shaler. A boy from the aristocratic southern classes, with ample means and good abilities but no fixed interests, fell into this group. There he discovered his life work and pursued it with boundless enthusiasm. Nor did the fact that he devoted himself exclusively to professional work in natural history in college prevent him from writing Elizabethan plays in his old age. The number of men of distinction given to the world from this small Agassiz group is truly remarkable.