A FOREIGNER, attending, in an American university, an assembly of student speakers, will be justified in concluding that the university exists for nothing but so-called "student activities." The real purpose of the university will not be mentioned, for usually our undergraduates live two lives-distinct; one utterly non-academic. The non academic is for them the real; the scholarly an encroachment. The student who regards the scholarly as paramount is deficient in "allegiance to his university." Athletics meanwhile, which should play a necessary part in the physical, and therefore spiritual, development of 2 on all students, are relegated to ten per cent. Those noctes, coenaeque deum of history and poetry and philosophical discourse, to the memory of which the older generation reverts with rapture, have faded in this light of common day. In the hurry of mundane pursuit the student rarely halts to read, rarely to consider; rarely to discuss the concerns of the larger life. President Schurman has recently said that there has been no decline of scholarship in the people's universities; but only in the older institutions of the East, to which rich parents send their sons with the view to the advantages of social position; and that in the people's universities the social standing of students has never cut so much figure as scholarship, The assurance is comfortable; but it obscures the issue. If by "social standing" the President of Cornell means' position in the coteries of wealth, fashion," conviviality, it may be that "social standing" bulks larger in the older university than in the university of the state. But the fact is, that in student esteem, East and West, social standing means no such thing: it means the position achieved by prominence in non-academic "campus" activities. And in student esteem such prominence cuts a far more important figure than that of either wealth or scholarship. Such prominence has been gaining ground for fifteen years. So long as the social pressure of the or |