ANOTHER DOCTOR PRESCRIBES

For a number of years in an increasingly persistent belief has prevailed that all is not well with American universities. Many criticism and almost as many remedies have been offered through the press by men interested in educational affairs. One recent writer believes the trouble to be that universities are spending billions for buildings and giving only loose change to professors. Another believes that college entrance requirements are at the bottom of the accumulation of woes. And now comes Abraham Flexner in the Atlantic Monthly for October who avows that the trouble lies in the fact that the term university has no definite meaning in America as it has on the Continent and in Great Britain. It can mean almost anything, since no copyright, legal or traditional, protects its use. Some American universities, the writer asserts, are nothing but "a chaotic mixture of primary, intermediate, industrial and theological classes." Others are "educational department stores with a kindergarten at one end and Noble Prize winners at the other, with all possible forms and varsities of schooling and training, practical and professional, in between, and a mail order annex besides."

Out of all this chaos, Mr. Flexner evolves seven classifications for American universities, the last of which he dubs "athletic and social organizations." Some of the categories are little more than mere trades, almost devoid of intellectual content, while on the other hand some go to the very limit of intellectuality. The remedy he suggests is that the different colleges choose to do different things in their severally appropriate ways.

A standardization of American universities would perhaps be unwise, but surely no mistake would be made by rendering it impossible for a college to confer the A. B. or S. B. degree for work which includes courses in hotel management, in swine husbandry, and in making and marketing of ice cream as is the case in certain universities of the Middle West.

Another improvement in the modern American university which the writer suggests is the separation both educationally and geographically of the college and the graduate school. Such a proposal at Harvard would meet with decided disapproval, if not by graduate students, at least by undergraduates.

One of the strongest points of Harvard's present educational system is the admission of properly qualified undergraduates to graduate courses where they can begin to understand as never before the stimulating power of great minds.