The Colleges

IN the past few years has arisen the notion that something is wrong with the colleges. From the volume of literature that this notion has produced one might infer that everything was wrong with the colleges. There is apparently no reason for this sudden flux of collegiate concern, just as it is certain that there is no rhyme to it. Perhaps it has come because never before have the American institutions of professed higher learning been so popular. Perhaps popularity and excellence run by contraries.

The criticism and defense, pro and con have come from professors, from busi- ness men, from free-lance writers in Greenwich Village or Stuyvesant Square whose closest connection with a college has been a Row ZZZ seat at the Yale-Maryland game in 1922. The undergraduate press, on its mettle, has oiled its cylinders and turned out bales of stuff. But in most cases a single college, or colleges as a whole, has had to take punishment from individuals whose position made it possible for them to lift up their voice and be sure that it would be heard.

A cursory glance at this book would lead one to believe that it is another survey by three persons whose qualifications for that survey may be indifferent. But it is not just another survey in this sense of the term, and therein lies its value. The data presented was gathered under the direction of The Institute of Social and Religious Research, which determined to go to the heart of the problem, and sound the sentiment of the mass of undergraduates. The book does not present the opinions of the investigators based upon examination of colleges, but what undergraduates who have not the power of the press behind them think about themselves.

Under the headings of Environment, Student Government, and Honor Systems, Religious Provisions and Agencies, and the like are grouped actual interviews with undergraduates of 23 colleges and universities ranging in type and geographical distribution from Yale, Amherst, and Wellesley to Grinnell, Randolph-Macon, and Wabash College. The interviews are brief, honest, and each is brought in to illustrate a specific point. Through them one is able to form a nebulous idea of the state, of thought, word and deed in the average university.

There is no editorial comment on the interviews, such as one might expect, and the editors might have seen fit to put in. It would have been easy to spoil things by inserting, at the end of the chapter on student morals, some tongue-clucking viewing-with-alarm. But no; you can read confession and revelation, and decide for yourself.

The only hint of the crusading spirit, it seemed to this reviewer, was struck in the two chapters dealing with student religion and religious organizations. Was there a faint flavor of propaganda in the assembling of the testimonials in those pages? We dare not say, since these dealt with much matter that is entirely foreign to the Harvard scene, and therefore fell upon the mind with a singular noise.

To the average undergraduate reader, the book will be interesting, since it will tell him what his sisters and cousins and, perhaps, aunts, in women's colleges, are thinking and saying about the things which trouble or amuse him most. To the serious-minded student who is bothered in turn about the health of the American undergraduate body, the book may be valuable, although the material is too fragmentary and heterogeneous to be fitted readily into a thesis mould. About all it proves, as we see it, is that the men and women of Ascalon are not like those of Gath