EDUCATION AND SOCIAL NEEDS

The conference of universities which opened yesterday intends, according to Elmer E. Brown, Chancellor of New York University, "to see how we can adjust our higher education to our social needs." Disregarding present economic conditions, the educators will study as topics the University in relation to economic and governmental changes; and the university's relations to new spiritual values. They will seek a definite program of education by which college graduates may exert constructive influence on society. The "great influx if students" in all colleges during the postwar decade, is Brown feels, the great opportunity fir university ideals and for the university mind, trained to a broad and intelligent outlook, to be an important social influence.

Indefinite as the plans of the conference seem to be, it is only fair to make an estimate if the nature and amount of influence that the university graduate can exert. Knowledge of facts, although it is the basis if college instruction, has, despite all pragmatic objections a purely intrinsic value. It is path or the lesson of tolerance and the ideas of his own generation which the college graduate has absorbed that can have any social effect. This is the idea of Kotsching when he speaks of youth "yearning after a now conception of the world, a Weltanshauung which will give a new point of departure for the establishment of a new order."

Although this is probably true of the average college student, the huge vagueness of his ideal in its undoing. He is as unpractical as any young intellectual who voted for Norman Thomas, honestly inspired by a shadowy Utopianism. The same lack of practically applies to the conference. They would erect ideals and plan remedies for a distant future of which they have no conception, forgetting how useless it is to reform something that does not exist and may never exist. Overestimating the influence of the university on society they ignore that society, and hopefully strive to establish theories for an unknown future.