Unfortunate Vassar.

That harm as well as good may come from too frequent mention in the newspapers, no one will deny. Vassar College, the pioneer college for women, is an instance where much real harm has come from a cheap newspaper notoriety due to this very fact that it was the first in the field to afford collegiate instruction for the weaker sex. How the college is suffering from the cause may be learned from the following, which an exchange prints:

"The gibes and jests at the expense of Vassar college and Vassar college girls, which thoughtless paragraphers and would-be humorists produce with tiresome redundance, while not establishing the reputation of the authors as wits, are said to be having a disastrous effect upon the college itself. One of the Vassar professors is quoted by a New York paper as saying that the college has not more than half the students it had ten years ago, and the cause of the falling off he ascribes to the fact that the college and its students have become a standing target for the small wits of the country. "Vassar," says the professor, "has become a thing to poke fun at. Half the new jokes about the girls are put upon Vassar students. Their doings are ridiculed, exaggerated, falsified, and the very name of Vassar is a synonyme for feminine foolishness The conse-quence is that girls are beginning to dislike to go there. I wouldn't be surprised to see the doors of the college shut in five years more. The newspaper paragraphers will have done it."