Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/277

Rh impulse of students toward pure sportsmanship that grows out of facing a concrete situation with responsibility is worth a half dozen lectures by a professional moral dictator. These are only instances of the many possible lines along which student activity may express itself. President Drinker, who has, with remarkable success, encouraged selfgovernment at Lehigh University, says: "It has been my experience that the more responsibility is placed upon students, provided they are willing to assume it, the better it is for all concerned." Even a small duty that students enter upon heartfully is enough to transform their attitude into one of partnership. It is an old rule that interests follow activities as the shadow the body. Sympathies and enthusiasms apart from deeds are pale and shallow. When students undertake anything in concert they must have organization. This creates unity of action and solidarity of sentiment. The fact of positions of emolument to be filled and the need of officers, leads to college politics with its fine tension of rivalry and its tang of victory and defeat. Let us grant there will arise occasional abuses and mistakes. There are instances on record. The number is, however, relatively small. The redeeming feature of it is that whatever failures and successes they make, there is in it a preparation for citizenship. They are meeting in college life exactly the problems and difficulties that they will have to face later. We preach the gospel of learning to do by doing in the lower grades of our common schools, but are full of the notion of the value of learning to do by obeying, during the choice years of young manhood and womanhood, which are above all others the time for preparation for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. The educational world has had its prophets this long time of the value of social and family ideals among tiny children; but by a strong irony of fate, we have been slow in taking seriously the same problem during the critical formative years of a college course.

The root of the difficulty is in the need of more democracy in our institutions. That would come in a day if all concerned could apply the golden rule. There is a sort of mental near-sightedness in human nature by which it is hard to see through the other person's eyes and feel his problems. All are, furthermore, intensely human—biologically human—and want all they can get of power and prestige. Universities have differentiated into about four types of personages: a board of education, a president, a faculty and a student body. All except the last would dominate everything if it could. The best results will come only when each participates slightly in the whole, but specializes upon its own function. The board are specialists upon finance and should exercise a fairly free hand in all the material interests of the university, with only a negative control, through the power of veto, upon scholastic affairs. The faculty are specialists upon institutional questions. All