Colleges Again

ANOTHER champion has risen in behalf of the much-championed colleges and their undergraduates. Mr. Hawes, a national secretary of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, has drawn on his long experience with American institutions of higher learning to conclude, so he says, that the undergraduates of today are very much like their fathers, and that there is no real cause for alarm among social thinkers in the mental and moral condition of the youth of the land.

This is a comforting thought, but it might be more comforting if it had not been thought before and so often that it seems really to need no more crusaders to champion its truth. There has come from the presses lately a steady stream of literature, all of which maintains, in effect, that the colleges are all right, and do not deserve the criticism leveled at them by a number of people which is certainly less than the number now refuting the criticism.

Where this theory that the colleges are going to the demnition bow-wows arose, no one knows. Neither can anyone mark with assurance the origin of its counterpoint. But that both have been overdone, anyone connected with any college will tell you. Of course, there is something wrong with the colleges and the undergraduates; if there were not, they would not be normal. But whatever dislocation there may be, is not, as has been assumed by the protagonists in the discussions, the kind that permanently warps the subject. One cannot help arriving at the conclusion that a good deal of powder has been wasted on what is truly a decoy duck