A Utilitarian Harvard

Among the incentives to student ambition at Harvard this year is a prize of $200 for the best paper on plumbing. What plumbing has to do with scholarship and its bearing on proficiency in Latin or football is not quite clear. Yet in a sense plumbing is a classical theme; the pipes, by which the water was conducted through the Roman baths were early examples of the plumber's art and no doubt a comprehensive academic dissertation on the subject would trace their relation to the modern bath tub.

After all, plumbing is fully as important a matter to the present-day world as Greek particles or the conditional use of the subjunctive by post-classical writers, and it ought to be a profitable study for students to specialize in. A graduate able to exchange his diploma for a plumbers union card has answered for himself at least the question, "Does a college education pay?"

But the significant thing, no doubt, is the offer of this sort of academic reward by America's greatest University. It involves a far departure from John Harvard's ideal of college training and implies a suggestive concession to utilitarian ideas of education. It is the fatal first step? Will there yet be regular courses in plumbing at Harvard and post graduate instruction in gas-fitting? Will retired bathtub manufacturers endow professorships there and steel-makers and motor car manufacturers found technical schools and establish scholarships in their lines? There are more things in a modern college education than were once dreamed of. New York World.