The Relation Between Professor and Student at Harvard.

In a recent issue, the Amherst Student, speaking editorially of what the elective system has done to bring about a greater cordiality in the relations between professor and student, and of the good effects of that greater cordiality, says, "There is some danger, however, that the present plan will revert to the former condition, and unless some efforts are put forward in all our higher institutions of learning, we may again see the professor and student living within themselves. Very recently some of the professors at Harvard were complaining that they are fast becoming exhausted by unintermitted intercourse with students." If such has been the effect on the professor of closer contact with the student, it is to be regretted; it certainly destroys the theory which demands that closer contact, for the basal principle of the theory is that the closer intercourse will strengthen, rather than exhaust, both the instructor and the instructed.

It is not probable, however, that this intercourse has had any such effect, for the article goes on to say that the warmest personal friendships between teacher and taught have grown out of such intercourse-friendships which have been a stimulus to finer scholarship and nobler manhood. It is difficult to conceive that such effects are exhausting. But a still greater proof of the approval with which the intimate relationship existing between student and professor at Harvard is found in the recent College Conference meeting, at which Mr. Roger Wolcott talked to the students of the regulations passed by the Overseers. Never before in an American college has the right of the students to discuss and understand measures for their own government been so distinctly recognized. That this was the direct outcome of the intimate personal intercourse which characterizes the relationship of instructors to instructed in Harvard University today no one can question.