NEW LAMPS FOR OLD

In the latest issue of "Harpers," John R. Tunis, famous for his keen attacks on modern college foibles, directs a satirical barrage against the "Modern Intellectual." He presents as a composite of certain characteristics in colleges today a fictitious professor in a fictitious western university, both devoid of tradition and culture, and both supremely materialistic in outlook. Easterners will experience a smug satisfaction in this confirmation of their oft-voiced contempt for western materialism, but a more critical examination will reveal a disconcerted irony in Mr. Tunis's glowing praise for the dusty culture of the East.

Far from being an apologist for eastern methods, Mr. Tunis offers for examination two educational systems exactly opposite in their ideals. By his juxtaposition and treatment of his subjects he intimates that one is as undesirable as the other, that the ideal university should not be characterized either by scholasticism or by modernism alone, but by a close correlation of the two. He adds weight to the recent lament of John Erskine in the "American Scholar" that colleges make no attempt to vitalize their inanimate culture with injections of modernity.

Eastern colleges should find little comfort in Mr. Tunis's article, for they must admit both the charges to a certain degree. Although most eastern universities possess many courses of undeniably modern scope, the general tendency is to look into the past with such absorption as to be blinded to its relation with the present. No denial of the accusation of materialism is conceivable in face of the huge construction work at Harvard and Yale and its contagious effect on the attitude of smaller colleges. But in general, it may be said, that their position is far less discouraging than that of the western university described by Mr. Tunis. For they, unlike Western universities, possess the tradition, cultural curriculum and modern equipment on which the ideal mean must necessarily be based.