THE BEST COLLEGE

With the announcement of a gift of $ 125,000 by Mrs. William Lowell Putnam for the promotion of scholarship through contests between various colleges an entirely new field of intercollegiate competition is opened up. No longer will the undergraduate desirous of contributing to the fame of his college or of winning renown for himself be forced to direct his energies to athletic achievement or to be content with the vague assurance that in devoting himself assiduously to his studies he is somehow adding to the intellectual prestige of his Alma Mater and storing up future treasures for himself. It is Mrs. Putnam's intention that the scholar who aids his college to victory over a rival by writing an excellent competitive examination paper may feel that he is contributing as directly to the college's glory as the halfback who scores a winning touchdown in the big game of the season. If the experiment receives the publicity it seems destined to attract, the brilliant student also can no longer complain that his efforts are unrewarded by outside attention.

The greatest danger involved in the new plan of intercollegiate scholastic competition is, perhaps, that it will be taken too seriously. A comparison of the ten best divisional examination papers at Harvard and Yale in English, or in any other subject, with appropriate prizes provided for the college which is deemed to have struck the higher average could scarcely in itself be detrimental to the best interests of education. A certain amount of glory attached to the victorious college an to the individual victors is also desirable as an incentive to greater academic effort. The glory thus won by the victorious college is, however, all too easily converted into an assumption of definite educational supremacy. And no sense of educational values could be more false than that which would judge the relative merits of two colleges, or even of corresponding departments in two colleges, on the comparative grades obtained by ten of their respective representatives in a single, albeit general examination. For one thing such judgment further enhances the cardinal importance of examinations and grades a the criteria of education. For another it sets up a definite, tangible measure of comparative educational progress at best a matter of wide interpretative possibility and individual temperament.

If Harvard and Yale can compare the efforts of their leading students on the same examinations without the accompaniment of glowing press accounts, and without creating the impressions that the results obtained are to be regarded as a criterion of the educational efficacy of the two colleges the cause of undergraduate scholarship in both should be greatly benefited; if not, a new distortion of values in the American college will be in the process of development.