WHAT PRICE PARADISE

The characterization of the French collegian, appearing elsewhere on these pages, strikes a note seriously critical of American universities. Inspiring is this picture of serious youth bent whole-heartedly over its books; decadent and inefficient in contrast appears America's counterpart. "The university-trained Frenchman is without peer in the world of education", ecstatically sings the Boston Post.

This conception of the University as a vast hive of little brain cells has of course great value as an antidote for the football, pleasure and leisure mad undergraduate. Before many the academic muse can only gape, sigh, and pass on. For these even the shining example of France is of no avail. All that is left to those who scorn the battle of the books is the "paradise of the shirker and the drifter". An examination, of this paradise would be interesting. To the casual observer it might well be summarized by a rough sketch depicting Don Juan in a raccoon skin coat walking celestial streets of gold. However, to one conversant with undergraduate life such a mythical place would probably contain many of the subtleties that make a college training valuable: the whimsical breaking of windows, theatres, conversation, and other things of which, it is rumored, even the studious French are not ignorant.