Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/276

270 return; but we have suffered a loss that is irreparable, if there is not preserved in our colleges and universities the equivalent of the things they did, as shown in reverence for the divine beauty of personality in the lives of our students.

There can be no question but that our attitude toward students is conventional, mechanical and institutionalistic. Behind us, to hold us firmly in our chosen course, besides the causes we have been describing, is the wish of anxious parents who forget that their young men and young women are not still children and who say gracious things about their favorite institution if their sons are held in check, and if their daughters are tenderly "guarded" and pampered.

What are we to do about it? How can the student body and faculty be brought into closer relationship? How may our universities escape a cold institutionalism? What changes will move in the direction of most surely catching up the personal loves and enthusiasms of the average student into the warm, vigorous, purposeful life of the institution? There are many things to do, certainly. I shall confine myself to a simple urgent suggestion that leads, I believe, towards the heart of the situation. The spirit of democracy should prevail. Not a sentimental democracy that preaches equality and cooperation, and practises autocracy. Students should be given a part, however small, in the control of our institutions. It is not my purpose to determine specifically what their powers should be. That has been so delightfully and convincingly discussed in the paper preceding my own that nothing further need be said. It is in itself a suggestive fact that Professor Fiske, like every one I have met who was connected with the Amherst attempt at self-government, believes in it thoroughly. Indeed I know of no one who has observed intimately any of the various experiments in student participation in student affairs, who has for it other than words of commendation. My contention would be that the kind of thing students undertake is more or less indifferent, if only they feel that it is worth doing and that they do it with a will. It may be the matter of honor in examinations. Students can do this successfully, as several happy instances prove, while instructors are powerless to cope with it, except at a cost in moral and social attitudes toward students that is hopelessly disastrous. Let it be the regulation of social activities, over which faculties distress themselves and still do their work so bunglingly that students wink at it and smile at their own cunning. In some institutions students have undertaken the control of the daily paper, monthly literary sheet, and a comic sheet, from which they learn the meaning of free speech and the virtue of controlling it, derive lessons in collective ownership and the joy of building for the future. In some instances they have been given a controlling voice in athletics, with advantage to the spirit of the institution. One spontaneous