in stentorian tones that were heard by the newspapers from Maine to California, that he would as lief send a boy to hell as to one of the large American colleges. Within ten days the number of aspiring candidates for the alternative resting place had increased, we were told, by many hundred. At the Denver meeting of the National Education Association, in July last, one speaker was reported as saying that the colleges of the country were failures, that they exerted a ruinous influence on the secondary schools, and that they constantly did other sad and bad things. And so it goes, through a tiresome round of ignorance, misunderstanding, half-truth, malevolence, and sheer sensationalism. It is within the mark to say that from attacks of this kind no college teacher or college administrator has yet got any helpful suggestion whatever.

The line of criticism first named is, however, quite a different matter. It springs from what Matthew Arnold would have called the disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought about colleges and their work. It is in high degree helpful to the man at the wheel and it is usually constructive.

The truth of the matter appears to be that our time is one of transition and rapid change, and that the college finds itself perplexed and hard-put to keep adjusted both to its own standards and ideals and to the shifting social and educational tastes of the people. There are some things that the college can not do without stultification; there are other things that the college must do to live: these are the upper and the nether millstones. The advent of the American university, since 1876, has troubled the college not a little. The insistent and emphatic demand for vocational training has troubled the college still more. The college which is a member of a university-as at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Cornell-finds its troubles taking one form; the separate college—as Williams, Amherst, Haverford, Hamilton-finds them taking another. The danger to the college of the first type is absorption in the university; the danger to the college of the second type is destruction by the university. Either result would be calamitous. Both the college in the university and the separate

college are justified in making an energetic struggle for existence.

To ape the methods and the aims of a university, even with some success, is not, however, to justify the claim to be a good and useful college. To travel on all fours with the vocational schools may avert extinction as an institution, but it is not the way to continue to exist as a college.

To put the matter bluntly, whenever there are no longer youths who are able and willing to spend a few years in laying the foundation for happy, useful, intelligent manhood by opening the mind, refining the manners, firing the imagination, and strengthening the morals thru living in a community of contemporaries, in contact with noble teachers and guides in the liberal arts and sciences, then the colleges may close their doors or allow themselves to be absorbed or destroyed. by universities and vocational schools. At the same time a large part of the light of our nation's life will go out. But until that time comes-and may if not be earlier than the Greek Kalends!-the college has a place, a duty, and an opportunity.

Not all of those who tell the colleges what to do know their limitations and difficulties. In almost every case funds are lacking, even for the most obvious and necessary improvements. Moreover, colleges can not safely move singly and alone in policies that touch the public interest at many points. Much action in education must be concerted and harmonious to be effective. The men for any given job are not always easy to find, and, if found, they are not always easy to get. Large and complex bodies necessarily move slowly, and colleges move slowly, not only because they are, in a sense, large and complex, but because their task of training generous and enthusiastic youth to share in the intellectual life and the moral aspirations of the race is pretty well understood, has been pretty well understood for generations, and has not been made to appear in any very new light of late by the shifting fancies of superficial critics of colleges, of the intellectual life, and the moral aspirations of the

race.

The most vexing problems of the college center about three phases of its work: its relations with the secondary schools, its instruction, and its discipline.

more.

I. The relations of the college to the secondary schools are more satisfactory now than ever before, and are steadily becoming better still. The College Entrance Examination Board, now ten years old, has smoothed out many rough places, and has gained the strength and prestige to accomplish much Its membership now includes (I believe) every college that prescribes examinations for admission to the freshman class, except Princeton. It has standardized those examinations and brought order into a region once ruled by chaos. It has made it possible for secondary school teachers to have a share in formulating, conducting, and rating the examinations of pupils passing from school to college. It has quietly, but constantly, held before colleges the folly of insisting upon idiosyncrasies in college admission tests, and the wisdom of their agreeing together to state one and the same thing in one and the same way. The academic mind is peculiar, but not impregnable, and it is coming round in regard to all these matters.

The statements of the standard college admission requirements in English, French, and German have been much improved of late years, and that of physics has recently been made over in order to satisfy the demonstrated needs of the secondary schools. The statement of the requirement in history, although framed upon the recommendation of seven eminent men, is constantly criticized, and Mr. Frederick M. DeForest, in an article printed in the September number of the EDUCATIONAL REVIEW, states with conclusive force the bad effects of the present college entrance requirements in Latin. This last-named situation is so bad that steps are already being taken to improve it. In this respect, therefore, most colleges are doing what they can to meet the views of their wise and helpful critics.

II. College instruction has been having troubles of its own for two decades or more. Paradoxical as it may seem, the great enemy of good college teaching is the new, highly

specialized scholarship. The colleges are plentifully supplied with distinguished men to whom the education of the young is either a lost art or a negligible quantity. Celestial mechanics or comparative philology or physical chemistry or medieval history or experimental psychology is the thing. These men are incomparable as guides in laboratory or seminar for the mature and self-knowing student; they are hopelessly at sea before the problem of a normal boy of seventeen or eighteen, fresh from school, who comes to college to get something of what wise men once thought it not silly to call general culture. The present-day college student is berated on every side because he prefers so many other things to scholarship. Surely, we should all be glad if he cared more for scholarship; but is he alone to blame? Is he being taught or lectured at? Is he being led or driven? Is he brought understandingly and with ample introductory explanation into a new subject, or is he hurled into it and left to flounder helplessly until, not comprehending, he turns from it in disgust? Is a prepared sequence of study, based upon his individual tastes and capacity, suggested and explained to him, or is he compelled to do something that he neither cares for nor understands, or permitted to do anything he chooses whether he cares for it and understands it or not?

The answers to these questions are, unfortunately, easy and obvious. That the present-day college student is not wholly careless of scholarship is shown by the zeal with which he pursues it when it is united with personality. College men of an older generation never tire of talking of Anderson of Rochester, of Wayland of Brown, of Hopkins of Williams, of Seelye of Amherst, of McCosh of Princeton, of Anthon and Lieber of Columbia, of Norton and Shaler of Harvard, of Hadley and Sumner of Yale, of Cooper of Rutgers, of North of Hamilton, of Canfield of Kansas, and a score more, clara et venerabilia nomina. Just so the student of today seeks strong and noble personalities among his teachers, is guided by them, and responds quickly to their stimulus, when he can find them. Of such, one may be permitted to mention George R. Carpenter of Columbia and Garman of Amherst

among the sadly early dead, and Fine of Princeton and King of Oberlin among the living. Rich personality and human sympathy and insight plus scholarship, is the formula for a great college teacher. Such an one will never lack for earnest students in large numbers, whether his courses be prescribed or elective. The problem of college instruction is solved when men of this type, even if their achievements and distinction be considerably less than the greatest, are found and put at work in the college service.

III. College discipline is feeling its way toward a new and higher effectiveness, based upon the community feeling and cooperation between teachers and taught in accomplishing the aims and purposes for which colleges exist. Rules of behavior are giving place to ideals of conduct. Student opinion, trusted with responsibility for the good name of a college, is showing itself strong and willing to protect it. Many things happen that one could wish otherwise, but college students are human beings, and immature human beings at that. Youthful exuberance is not hard to distinguish from moral obliquity. The crude and cruel practises of hazing, while still heard of occasionally, are much less frequent than they once were, and it is the improved tone of student opinion, even more than the strict prohibitions of college authorities, that is influential in bringing this about. The morals of undergraduates, while by no means beyond criticism or improvement, are far better than those of the world at large. No parent need worry unduly over the college life of any well brought-up son, unless, indeed, he is so lacking in sense as to provide the boy with a large allowance, a valet, a bulldog, and an automobile; but in that case, the parent must not blame the college. He is conspiring to the best of his poor, philistine ability against his son's getting any good out of college life, and is helping the boy get ready for a life of useless, perhaps vicious selfindulgence.

Good college teaching and good college discipline ought to work together to develop a pleasure and a satisfaction in intellectual labor for its own sake. To gain the habit of working with keen pleasure in one's work is an inestimable blessing,