AFTER SUCH PLEASURES

A Boston paper recently commented in its editorial columns on what the writer considered the deporable fact that the American college campus, of a weekend, is no longer a campus but a "deserted village". The editorial says ominously that "the campus has become for some students merely a place to recuperate during the week from one strenuous round of parties and to plan the next." Yale and Princeton are coyly described as "temptingly near New York," and Harvard men are accused of scattering, presumably on masse, over the entire country. Bryn Mawr, the cathedral of wholesomeness, has girded up its skipants and is carrying the fight to the enemy. The lure of the world, the flesh, and the devil is to be overcome by more pleasing campus activities: these apparently are to consist of a glittering program of "hikes, dances and teas in the halls, hobby club meetings, and plays and athletics."

There is the germ of a good idea in these dismal remarks, but only a germ and an anaemic one at that, for it is too obvious that the writer knows almost nothing about contemporary college life, at least in any Eastern university. His little utopia, by college spirit out of Bryn Mawr, overlooks the fundamental fallacy of its existence, which is that college spirit is too worn out and decrepit to beget more than a weakling doomed to an early death--even with the assistance of Bryn Mawr. It does exist at a football game, and in a certain sentimental aura that clings round the memory of alma matter; but the conception that a university is one happy family, the members of which do the same things with equal enjoyment, went out with pompadours. People who are interested in hiking and hobby clubs will continue to hike; and no amount of artificial on a campus they consider dull.