AMERICAN AND BRITISH UNIVERSITY STUDENTS COMPARED BY MR. HAROLD J. LASKI, IN THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN

The average undergraduate at Oxford or Cambridge is far superior to the typical American college student, while the American graduate schools greatly surpass those of the English universities, according to an article by Mr. Harold J. Laski, lecturer in the Department of History at the University, which appeared recently in the Anglo-American number of the "Manchester Guardian."

"That almost 600 colleges, varying in size from 40 students to the 12,000 of Columbia, should have the right to grant degrees," writes Mr. Laski, "would seem evidence of an enthusiasm lacking in Great Britain. But that is not, in fact, the case. The number of really first-class colleges is proportionately small; and the work done in them, for at any rate the first two years, does not go beyond the work of the last two forms of a good English public school. It is only in the third and fourth years of his university education that the American undergraduate can be compared with the English student."

Radical Difference In Students.

After describing the methods of American universities, Mr. Laski continues: "The result is a student and a university radically different from the English model. The American student, I should judge, has a wider range of facts at his disposal than the English undergraduate; but his thinking apparatus is less keenly trained. His teachers tend to become mere lecturers whom he does not know outside the class room. He is so hampered by the number of lectures he must attend that he has little time for independent thought. His reading is largely the reading necessary for his specified courses; he has neither time nor energy for exploration for its won sake. There is on plethora of clubs for discussion; when these exist they are mainly social in their nature. There is not the stimulus to originality which a good man can get at Oxford or Cambridge. On the other hand, there is more equality of treatment; the passman does not fall into the slough of ignorant content which the English universities offer him. In the result the average man fares better than he does in England, while the progress of the man of genuine capacity is sacrificed to this doubtful relic of Jeffersonianism.

American Professor a Machine.

"The result on the American professor is very marked. He tends to become a mere lecturing machine, whose inadequate income makes his leisure a seed-time for the growth of text-books. He does not know his students in the way in which an Oxford professor knows them.... The student does not come to his home.

"Nor must one neglect the great oases in the desert. Lecturers like those of Haskins and Kittredge at Harvard, of Farrand at Yale, of Morse Stephens at California, of Gildersleeve at Johns Hopkins, have marked a great epoch in American education. They have been something more than careful digests of accessible information. There has gone into them the living blood of rich personality, and the student is a different personality for having heard them. And there are special subjects, like psychology and logic, which are taught in America with a like and equipment unequalled in England."