Fact and Comment

The Christian Science Monitor makes the following comment on the annual report of President Hadley of Yale:

The annual report of President Arthur T. Hadley of Yale University is conspicuous for the veto he puts on the scheme to triplicate an academic plant that already is hampered by being duplicate. That is to say, he apparently would rather see evolve some way to unify the college and the Sheffield Scientific School than to start in and raise an additional endowment and set up a "third college" with less study of mathematics and the classic languages. On the other hand, it is plain that he looks with some favor, at least, on a closer approximation to the English university ideal, with the university in control of the teaching and the small college (within the university) doing much for youth on the cultural and social sides. Like Princeton, following the lead set by Woodrow Wilson, Harvard that of A. Lawrence Lowell, and Amherst that of Alexander Meiklejohn, Yale is beginning to react favorably on the popular demand that in some way culture, scholarship and intellectuality be restored to a dominant place in the American national academic ideal, from which it has been ousted by athletics, fraternity excesses and premature specialization in order to get a living promptly after graduation.

It is on this note that President Hadley strikes most insistently in his report. He urges alumni and parents to see to it that their influence counts with students in favor of serious living while in college, and against waste of opportunities. He would have the extra-curriculum activities of the institution truly educational, so that the net result of residence for four years within academic walls would be drawn from "the greatest intensity of intellectual life."

Encouragement for those educators who thus believe may be drawn from the reports that come of the effect of the war on undergraduates in the colleges and universities of the United States. President Meiklejohn of Amherst recently said that, judging by his own experience this term, teachers of ethics and moral idealism were to be forced by the students to answer deeper questions on living and duty than ever before had been put to them by youth.