College Babbitts

Three hundred colleges and universities were represented by their presidents and deans at the tenth annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges last week at the Hotel Astor, Manhattan.

The first address, by President

Marion L. Burton, of the University of Michigan, was aggressive. He attacked American democracy, American materialism, American hatred of individuality as the causes of the decline of intellectual initative and independence in the American college today. Said he:

"What has the college become? It has become a thing of rushing rabbles, jazz orchestras, pep meetings, frolics, hops and schedules fitted to make the second show at the movies. The rushing rabble is inevitably driven away from the spirit of higher learning and our object is lost. In every home the powerful man of business is the hero of the day.

"What we have done is snuffed out our inner life. Democracy is partly responsible. Youth has got the impression it must go with the crowd; it must be popular. It has become terribly afraid of being different. It has been tremendously externalized and objectified. .... Students must have a sense of integrity and the courage of their convictions. . . . When in American civilization it comes to pass that the family which raises a poet, a scientist, or a teacher will be as proud as if he were a financial genius, then you can put religion as a vital factor in American colleges."

Dr. C. A. Richmond, President of Union College, endeared himself to all college instructors by speaking against the raising of their salaries. He said that teachers should have a missionary spirit, and to insure this they must be paid less than they are worth.

Dr. Frank Aydelotte, President of Swarthmore College, said that academic standards throughout the country had been menaced since the War by great increases in enrollment, making it necessary to fill in faculties with inexperienced teachers and so dilute instruction.

Dr. George E. MacLean, retiring director of the London office of the American University Union in Europe, made a plea for an extended exchange system whereby Americans may go abroad and Europeans come here. Before the War, Dr. MacLean said, few Europeans would have thought it worth while to come, but now it is different:

"A British knight has come to me for information, saying that he wanted to send his boy to this country, when his friends told him that his son couldn't get along without Oxford or Cambridge, he replied: 'I am thinking of his manhood, when the United States will be the most prominent nation in the world. He then will have more honor and prestige by being graduated from an American university than if he studied here in our own dear little island.'

"He wanted his son to study at a university of the Middle West, the great Middle West, which we must all acknowledge, even those of us who are of New England,* will soon be the most powerful section of our nation."

*Dr. MacLean is himself a native of Connecticut.