SOCIAL WORK AND THE COLLEGE

In spite of the fact that much of the first social service in this country was started by students in universities, the value and potential effectiveness of undergraduate volunteers is still questioned. While no one can deny that more harm than good is done by haphazard and lackadaisical humanitarianism, it does not in the least follow that therefore all such impulses should be incontinently stifled.

The fault to be found is not with the theory but with the present application. Improve and revitalize the system, and the existing waste energy and effervescent sentimentalism will disappear.

In the very fact of his youth, his mental adaptability, and his considerable leisure time, the university student has a natural equipment for which older and more calloused professional social workers would cheerfully exchange years of actual experience. To a group of boys, the sum total of whose previous experience has been supplied by the sidewalks of a large city, he brings the broadening influence of an entirely novel social point of view. This, coupled with the high, if vague idealism of early manhood, is something which not even inadequate methods and weak sentimentalism can wholly cheapen. That the preservation of this idealism to the student's later life is a matter of vital importance to the community is unquestioned; that by means of an efficient system it may be transformed into immediate effective service to the objects of his benevolence is quite as true.