SHADES OF JEREMIAH!

The beginning of Commencement Week is a particularly appropriate occasion on which to stop, for a moment, and cast a sentimental glance backward. The Senior, about to take a last bathetic farewell of all that has gone to make up his University Atmosphere for Four Long Years, may be pardoned if, for the moment, he counts himself educated, and gives to Alma Mater all the credit for Making Him What He is in regard to Culture and Intelligence.

A certain Western professor, however, disturbs this idyllic revelry by shouting rudely that not only are college students neither intelligent nor cultural, but that they have no desire to be; and the New York "Herald-Tribune", in an editorial which is reprinted herewith, completes the sacrilege by insinuating that the college itself is responsible for this barbaric state of intellectual apathy.

Both generalities have a magnificent dramatic sweep, and both contain elements of truth. Just why seventy-five per cent of all college students go to college is one of the eternal mysteries which high Heaven and Conan Doyle alone can solve. For the most part, it seems due to tradition, a sense of the irreducible social minima, and a praiseworthy spirit of noblesse oblige; or it may be a vague present satisfaction of future desires, a faint, presaging indication of that moral awakening which in the opinion of a prominent school of psychological thought the final development of the perfect mind.

Whatever the reason or the combination of reasons for his coming, it is obvious, as the Herald-Tribune almost points out, that once the candidate has involuntarily located himself with the academic gates, the logical thing for his official and self-constituted advisers to do is to acquaint him with the value of a liberal education, both in itself and as a means to other ends. This is done by a variety of methods, chief among which is an exaltation of the theory of "mens sana in corpora sane", and a reduction of the learning process to a series of wholly mechanical formulae the passing of so many examinations equals a bachelor's degree.

Fortunately, the light has broken in during the past few years from several different directions, and a replacement of the true emphasis is generally in order. But at the present rate of progress it will a very long time indeed before the majority of students come to college with serious purposes and before the majority of colleges give their graduates anything more than a delicately superficial gloss of intellectual cultivation.