A VOICE FROM BRYN MAWR

Another answer to the old query, "What is the matter with the colleges?" is proposed by a Bryn Mawr alumna in a recent communication to the Nation. She answers it with another question: "where is the whole panorama of college and university life in America today among men as well as women, is the courage and mental grasp to see what that is new in a rapidly changing world needs championing and support?" In humbler but more outspoken phrasing, she charges the colleges with conservatism and blindness to the radical movements of the country. Such a suggestion is refreshingly unconventional. We have become accustomed, during the last few years, to hear warnings from press and political sources against the menace of perverting young minds with radical doctrine. The college mind, we have been told again and again, lacks the necessary perspective to make it a competent judge of human affairs. So now, when we hear that not enough college graduates are advocates of the newer movements, and that this sad state of affairs is due to mental cowardice in the colleges, we are pleasantly shocked.

The writer opens herself to a palpable counter-thrust. If college men are not numbered among the labor agitators, the Non-Partisan Leaguers, and other active ultra-modernists, is it necessarily because they have failed to consider these new movements? Such a conclusion smugly assumes that the movements are necessarily right, and that a failure to champion them is due to sheer ignorance. It is not beyond imagination to suppose that the college student might think otherwise, and that he shuns them not so much from ignorance as form too much knowledge.

Yet the Bryn Mawr suggestion leaves us not altogether comfortable. When we recollect an incident of two years ago, in which a little group of willful Freshmen broke up a Bolshevist meeting in Roxbury; when we think of the audiences--or the absence of audiences--at certain voluntary addresses on modern problems, or remember the difficulties that the Liberal Club has met with in getting recognition among undergraduates perhaps we are not as open minded as we like to believe. It is only by thoughtful consideration of each new movement as it arises, that we can ward off such charges as those suggested in the Nation.