Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/573

Rh in less radical form—by hundreds of graduates who are men of reputable standing, and some of whom may be sending sons of their own to college. Talk to such graduates of loyalty to alma mater, and it will express itself in terms of getting money, recruiting students (especially athletes), coming back to reunions, putting up buildings and supporting the team; the educational aspect of the college is a negligible aspect—a subsidiary nuisance. In a gathering of "loyal" alumni of this stripe the man who would argue for even an approximation to the scholarly ideal is actually put upon the defensive—if he is not an object of derision.

If it be true that a great deal of parental and graduate opinion is openly hostile to the strenuous view of college work, no surprise should be excited by the discovery that the undergraduate atmosphere also is polluted; nor that the school-boy has either already caught the disease before leaving school, or soon contracts it in the unhealthy atmosphere of the college. Hence, unless one be wholly in error in one's pessimistic verdict upon present conditions, it turns out to be less ridiculous than it may have seemed at first blush to ask whether the highest place in college is being given to severe intellectual discipline; the mere possibility that the situation is grave should arouse all serious educators, and the veriest honesty demands a frank answer to the enquiry from all responsible for the conditions.

The answer to be expected from some parents and alumni, as we have seen, would be that intellectual considerations are altogether secondary, and that the important business of the college is not study. Probably very few college professors and presidents would care to take their stand with these enemies of the intellectual; but certainly many such academic gentlemen would have to be ranked, with or without their own consent, among the compromisers. They may not explicitly condone loafing, but they preach that

 'Tis better to have come and loafed Than never to have come at all;

they may not disparage intellectual attainment, but they are unwilling to demand it of all of their students. The attractive creed of such educators might be formulated somewhat as follows: "College is a place of large opportunities, among which the purely intellectual are not necessarily the greatest. "We should, of course, aim to develop and instruct the minds of our students, but we must not forget that one of the greatest educational forces in college is the life itself, and it is by no means incumbent upon us to insist that all of those in residence shall