Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/85

Rh representatives of the alumni. This is the cabinet of the academic state. The second, congregation, consists ideally of the teaching force of the university. It has important legislative powers. Convocation is made up of the M.A. alumni who have maintained close relations with their alma mater. This body chooses the chancellor of the university, exercises the right of veto, elects members of Parliament. Even this scheme is now undergoing reform along even more democratic lines. How far behind we are, with many of our colleges and universities governed by a secret conclave of wealthy men and a president not responsible to the teaching force or to the alumni!

To prepare citizens for a democracy the organization of the college itself must be democratic. If it be true that we learn to do by doing, the student should learn at college to be a citizen of a free state, not alone by precepts or academic instruction, but by the experience of membership in a free college community. Wherever there is an absence of social aim and organization on the part of college officers it is little wonder that the student body is lacking in purpose and does not rise above a community consciousness of a very primitive sort. With the colleges filled with the right social spirit the students feel themselves the members of a great republic of letters, or rather, of a democracy of science, possessed of a truth too vital to be merely individual and academic. The utilization of the ethical and social life of the school as a means of moral education, which, since Arnold's day, has been a recognized feature of the great English public schools, where, as Haklane remarks, English boys are permitted and encouraged to govern one another, is still almost unknown in some of the American colleges. If the president and the professors take the students into their confidence in the discussion of general aims as regards the welfare and progress of the people, then the corporate life of the school can be organized on a higher basis, discipline becomes more and more self-discipline, and anti-social types feel themselves condemned by the judgment of their peers in academic standing.

A measure of the change for want of which many American institutions of higher learning are suffering to-day was wrought out in the German universities by Fichte and others over one hundred years ago. It can be described briefly as a greater measure of freedom, spontaneity, self-activity. One should not, however, forget that increased freedom must mean an increased sense of responsibility and that self-activity must be activity of social import under social stimulation. When the members of the college understand their true social end and aim, athletics will occupy a more subsidiary place, and our institutions of higher learning will be more than mere clubs for wealthy young men. It is only in the absence of the enunciation of serious purposes that the college shows the tendency to triviality and puerility of which some