A TYPICAL COLLEGE MAN

"EDUCATION:--At Mr. Wackford Squeer's Academy, Youth are boarded, clothed, booked, furnished with pocket-money, provided with all necessaries, instructed in all languages living and dead, mathematics, orthography, geometry, astronomy, trigonometry, the use of globes, algebra, single stick (if required), writing, arithmetic, fortification and every other branch of classical literature. Terms twenty guineas per annum. No extras, no vacations and diet unparalleled."

The alumni of Dotheboy's Hall are not recorded as returning to their "alma mater" for reunions nor as crowding the roads to Yorkshire on the way to championship rugby matches. Where-as today will bring thousands of "old grads" back to Yale and will see the reunion of a similar throng of Harvard men in and around the Bowl.

True, neither Harvard or Yale is a Mr. Squeer's; but there are few who have not heard old graduates telling stories of Commons and old Grays Hall that rival "the unparalleled diet" and "warm rooms" of Dickens' famous institution.

Yet these same graduates are often the leaders in the widespread criticism of American Colleges, because the good old days of the Harvard pump and coal grates are passed. In a similar tone newspapers dwell on "the strange sumptuary regulations forbidding, not the keeping of dog or gun in a student's room, but the bringing of a student's automobile within the classic shades."

Are the colleges of today so bad after all or is it merely the spirit of reform? The answer depends on the answer to the other question: Why did I go to college? or why did I send my son there? If the latter be answered for a "Key" and some more "book learning", then no one need worry; both are still to be found for the seeking. But true scholars seem to be born not made; and a true scholar and a true grind, wholly different characters by the bye, are both usually impervious to anything but their books. The fault is surely not with them.

But the critics are right. Undergraduate life is more complicated than it used to be and there are more opportunities for wasting time. Yet the same can be said for New York or Timbuctoo. The Harvard pump is not the only one that has disappeared. The critics are wrong only in lamenting the change.

A modern university is not a business college nor a secluded preparatory school, numerous opinions to the contrary, and it never should become either. Instead it offers athletics and competitions as foretastes of the keener "struggle for existence," and courses of study to equip the intellect not with facts but with methods of securing and using them. In this way it can turn out a well grounded and well proportioned man ready for the next step toward the future; provided "Barkis is willing".

For the responsibility rests on the man and depends on his character; the university is helpless against his will. He can partake of, the various college activities, including courses, and by coordinating them, develop himself into an intellectual unity with true depth of character. Or he can sit back and worship "the American god of mediocrity" without thinking or acting for himself or by himself. The most unfortunate part is that when he graduates after four years of the second sort, and he is almost sure to, he will be a "typical college man".