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COMMENT

An Aristocracy of Brains

NO WRITER ATTRIBUTED

It is pleasant to observe the increasing number of announcements, coming in the news from the colleges, which declare that the meeting, the course of lectures or the organization involved "will be open to townspeople and students." The opportunities so provided do not include admission to the regular instruction which a college conducts in its class-rooms, although that field of public service is being widely developed by collegiate co-operation with the Commission on Extension Courses. Of reference here are the special series of lectures and meetings, such as that of a course of carefully prepared war talks which is announced today from Wheaton College, or the Tuesday afternoon "faculty lectures" which have been given for several years at Williams College, with afternoon tea in the offing. These are "open to townspeople and students."

The growth of these activities is useful not merely for the contribution they make to the intellectual life of the public surrounding our colleges. The institutions themselves stand to gain by building up such a "department of the exterior." The deeper root the colleges take in the actual life and environment of the people around them the more healthy their own life as academies is bound to become. And the contribution is sometimes specific as well as general. In one New England college the course of lectures on ethical problems which a professor arranged for a series of Sunday night meetings proved so popular both among students and townspeople that the president of the college is now exceedingly anxious to have this course included in the institution's regular curriculum.

As these connections increase and multiply we should come indeed to an end of that traditional antipathy between town and gown, once so keen in a certain New England collegiate community that when one of the dormitories of the college caught fire the citizens sat out on a neighboring hillside and cheered for its burning. Boston Transcript.

The first requisite of loyalty is enthusiastic and intelligent support of the Government in its war policy. In all countries, it has been the most highly educated that have most strongly supported the war against Germany because they best realized what a defeat from that nation would mean to the world. Enthusiastic support means work, and particularly cheerful work, both in the curriculum and in the military side of the university. Intelligent support means that each man is to prepare himself for the work for which he thinks. himself best fitted. In general, for the men here that signifies preparation for military-service.   Daily Princeton

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