DECRIES NARROWNESS OF COLLEGE STUDENT

Perhaps I am venturesome in presuming to subscribe what course a college publication should follow in filling its columns. I am not a college man, and can scarcely call myself educated in the routine sense since I spent but eighteen months in the high school at Norway, Maine, and no time at all in elementary or grammar grades. The investment of the family resources in a country newspaper kept me from college.

But I have had much to do with college men, and carry several degrees and a much prized Phi Beta Kappa membership from William and Mary College. So I am deeply interested in colleges as intellectual centers and as factors in our national life. They are often under fire--the faculties are always too conservative or too radical; the courses too abstract or too forward in the eyes of critics. To me the defect is rather in the student than in the instructor. I mean by this that the tendencies in most American institutions of learning is for the student to set himself too far apart from the community; to make himself an aristocrat, not of letters but in a narrow view of life, limited to chapter politics and strivings for student leadership, not on lines of mental development, but of boyish rivalries elevated to undue importance, forgetful of the world he must face when the four years' course is ended. The usual student in the American college is lamentably minus as a coming citizen. He does not read the newspapers. His current knowledge is of the slightest, his interest in the questions of the day, save in rare instances, is nil. In backward China, in progressive Japan, in France and Germany, the student must be reckoned with in public matters. Here he cuts no figure at all. There is too much "Tom Brown at Oxford" and too much of the "Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green" in his composition. The result is that the student leaves college encased in a coating of social silica that has to be cracked off by contact with the world, and the process is often painful. He is not treated seriously during his college years because he does not treat himself seriously as a man should who enjoys his opportunities. True, too many young men are sent to college not enough go!

The college press could do much, if beside giving college news at it primarily should, it furnished students with intelligent summaries of what is going on; did something to take the "boy" out of their minds, impressing them with the responsibilities of knowledge and of the life ahead of them. The college is maintained at great cost for the intellectual benefit of our land. The period spent there ought not to be regarded as a sporting event with a little of the classics sandwiched in between like a lettuce sandwich. Above all they should get less college "life" in their heads and more college learning; be taught to use and appreciate the realities of life, rather than to play with or at them.

The college press can perform a most valuable service by enhancing this view and so giving the student that much less to get over after he leaves the halls of his Alma Mater