Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/415

Rh themselves to their proper duties and left management of the railroad to those wild understand the business.

There must be a return to the proper conception of a college, a place for study, where men and women may lie so trained as to be fit to undertake great things. A college should be exactly such a place as described by President Hyde in the address already cited. But that ideal college will remain ideal until the community has been led to recognize that for a third of a century the whole method has been wrong; that the glory of a university does not consist in the beauty of its buildings, the broad expanse of its campus, the extent of its athletic fields or in the marvelous equipment of its gymnasia, but in the character of its professors and in its equipment for legitimate work: that the greatness of a university does not consist in the number of its students, in the number and variety of its schools, but in the quality of the work done and in the character of the schools. The ideal condition will be impossible until those controlling the affairs of colleges have learned that they are not owners, hut trustees, and have to come to recognize their responsibility as honest and honorable men; until they have become convinced that it is less important for a president to be making addresses on public affairs than it is for him to attend to college affairs —for which he should lie held to strict accountability.

There must be changes in many directions. The mad chase for students should cease, requirements for entrance should be made more severe and students should be accepted, not entreated. Men unfitted by native defect or by environment should be discouraged: the fees should be increased so as to defray the cost; there should lie many scholarships, but they should he granted not as gifts but only upon severe examination; they should be earned—the examination should be conducted by a central board of examiners. Intercollegiate contests of all sorts should be abolished: the great stadia should lie abandoned or converted to some useful purpose; courses in gymnasia should be compulsory for all students; athletic fields should he opened for use of all and exercise should be encouraged. But every student should know that the aim in all athletic work is to fit him to do better work in the classroom—not, as now. that incidental work in the classroom is required to qualify him for membership on a team. Then, the heroes of a college will not be those who have won their "letters" by muscular prowess, but those who have made high rank in study. It will no longer be a disgrace in "halls of learning" to be a "dig," and one will not be stung by frequent repetition of the assertion that the output of colleges is not equal to that of former days.