New York Post on College Discipline at Harvard.

We recommend the following to the attention of the students:

"The action of the Harvard College Overseers in adopting a minute providing for a certain modification of the policy pursued by the president and faculty for some years past, is one of those interferences by outsiders with college management which must always, on general principles, be more or less regretted. For the overseers are, to all intents and purposes, outsiders-the representatives of alumni who live all over the country-and are intended to be what their name indicates-a sort of council to keep an eye on the doings of the faculty and students. They are, for the most part, men who live in or near Cambridge, and are generally men of high standing in their own callings, and an excellent body of advisers on any subject to which they may give their full attention.

"However desirable it may be that this change should be made, we feel sure that a very large number of those who have given any attention to American colleges as a moral influence will wish it had been made by the faculty rather than by the overseers. That the faculty should be overborne on a matter of discipline by an outside body having no share in the management, is certainly calculated to aggravate the most serious defect of our collegiate system. Nothing does so much to prevent a "collegiate education" as it is called, in our day and generation, leaving marked and lasting effects on the character and tastes of young men who graduate, as the low esteem in which they hold the professor-that is, the small importance they attach to their opinions about everything relating to the conduct of life-everything, in short, outside the special subject which the professor teaches. It is a rare thing to find a graduate of one of our leading colleges who has brought away any respect for the faculty in any character but that of men of learning. As men of the world, or as social or moral philosophers, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that he contemns them and contemns their calling. Now and then a professor of unusual force or shrewdness or attainment, keeps his place in the memory of his old pupils as a guide, philosopher, and friend; but as a general rule, our American graduates, and especially those who succeed in life afterwards, are apt to remember their college days mainly as days of fun with their classmates, and very rarely as days of instruction from men of stronger minds and longer experience.

"If it be said that the professors of any particular college are not competent to regulate its discipline and curriculum, we answer that they are in that case unfit for their places, and that better men should be found, and better salaries paid, if necessary, to get them, and not that the government of the college should be handed over to persons burdened with other cares, and whose chief attention is given to other subjects."