College Reading

The question what college students read has perennial interest. One undergraduate of an Eastern university sorrowfully answered an inquirer: "They don't read at all." He was ruling out, of course, the prescribed reading--which seems to provoke many students to an incurable hatred of literature--and also the skimming of newspapers and periodicals, which all do more or less. It is with the latter that a recent survey of 453 students in the political science courses of the University of Michigan concerned itself. The results are summarized by Professor Kirkpatrick in School and Society.

It appears that nearly every one of these devotees of political science reads a daily paper. Their own university publication, The Michigan Daily, leads all the rest. Serious weekly reviews have only, twenty readers out of the 453. In magazines the taste shown is very like that of the homes from which these young men came. There are thirty-two readers of The Atlantic Monthly. But of The Saturday Evening Post there are 270.

All this, of course, is only a feeble glimmer of light on a dark problem. No one expects to find many mighty readers in college. But there ought always to be at least a few in each class. It is their golden opportunity. And there are many who hold, in the midst of the endless discussions of the higher education, that the one thing which colleges may yet do is to teach the boys to read.

Can it be taught except by example, or by turning a youth loose in a library? The most athletic readers in college usually, teach themselves. When Charles Summer's light was observed to burn late every night in the Harvard Yard, it was no professor, we may be sure, but an inward impulse and appetite that drove him to his long and delightful intercourse with the mester spirits of literature. --New York Times.