An Exchange with the South.

Next logical development of the exchange professorship idea in our colleges should be the establishment of an exchange between institutions of the North and the South. Harvard has already its exchanges with Europe and with a group of four Western colleges. It is time that we should give like recognition to a great section of our country which has several institutions that are the peers of many in the North. It is all too little recognized here what merit such institutions as the University of Virginia, Tulane, and Vanderbilt represent. They can receive professors from the North in all respects on a plane of equality, which, if tipped at all, is likely to move in the South's favor, by the grace of that refinement if culture for which Southerners of position have ever been famous. It is false to assume that the material problems of reconstruction after the war ever obscured from the minds of the most intelligent Southerners those things of the mind and the spirit which make for the most enduring growth. On the contrary, possessed of a great tradition in education, they have clung to it firmly.

Yet it is true that the popular recrudescence of this tradition has had to bide its time. Today an educational guide to the South cannot concern itself too exclusively with the great institutions before mentioned. They merely stand among the leaders in a section where even the masses of the people are newly turning their faces to the light of education. There has been a great increase in the numbers of students enrolled in the high schools. University extension work and summer school courses are attracting widespread attention. It is bot a matter of numbers alone. in the spirit of these students, there is also a new eagerness, remarked not only in the lower grades but more particularly by the presidents of Southern state universities. Reports of signal developments come, for instance, from such a university as that of North Carolina, which perpetuates a distinguished tradition as the first state university ever established in this county, and whose graduates have long been attaining high rank in Northern professional schools. Its president, Dr. Edward K. Graham, expresses the confidence that the new demand expressed in the South will sweep away all material obstacles now in the path of determined progress.

There would be then the evenly balanced values of contact with institutions of high rank, to be gleaned from an exchange with the South, and also for our professors the great value of contact with students, in some of the South's institutions, far more eager to learn than are those Northern students who scarcely know why they are in college. The authorities would be found busy with the enduringly important first principles of education is such institutions, and not obsessed with administrative detail and petty refinements of method. This would be an experience of value to some of our Northern professors. And if they themselves taught, and taught finely, in their Southern chairs, they would have a large opportunity for correcting some of the notions that have grown up about New England, to the detriment of our relations with many another section of the county. We might hope to achieve a new rating also in the eyes of those Southern professors who would come to the North in exchange. Their gracious courtesy has ever been open to fresh conviction. If exchange professorships can be arranged with the South we shall have much reason for mutual congratulation.