HIGHEST LEARNING

Those who have been crying from the house-tops in protest against American universities' "compromises with babbittry" can momentarily forego their jeremiads to join in hallelujahs. The existing colleges have passed before the judgement seat and have been found wanting. Now Dr. Flexner, who led the prosecution, is himself to head an "Institute for Advanced Study," which will attempt to supply just what he believes the colleges lack.

Intellect will be the chief qualification for admission to the Institute, the search for knowledge its primary purpose. In the choice both of students, who are all to be post-graduates, and of faculty, no account will be taken of race, religion, or sex. If first-rate professors a cannot be found immediately in some departments, the subjects will be omitted for the present. Gifted research men will be relieved of all teaching and allowed to concentrate on work in the laboratory or library.

The importance of the Institute will lie largely in the intellectual quintessence which will presumably he distilled by the association of first-rate scholars. Such a view of the function of a university is not uncommon in England. But Oxford and Cambridge, through their undergraduates and through the University Members of Parliament, keep in direct contact with the life of the nation. These vitalizing connections the proposed Institute will lack.

Dr. Flexner's Institute may be able to provide an ideal atmosphere for genuine scholarship. Perhaps it will become a place to which college professors can return at intervals for "recreative" study. But such an exclusively intellectual community runs the danger of becoming absorbed in its own abstract ratiocinations. If the Institute can attract great teachers, however, their presence will keep it from being nothing more than a society for Bibliolatry.