A contemporary that we have always very highly "esteemed" (we believe that is the correct term, but we are new in the profession) is now proceeding to fill us with awe. It announces that it is going to circulate privately among its friends, a series of brochures that "will answer big questions." We wish we could do that; but our cotemporary has already engaged the only editor we know of who can. For our poor part, we are apt to encounter in any country grocery some question too big for us to answer. But the answers our esteemed cotemporary is going to send out may occasionally help us in telling how a big question that we don't profess to be able to answer, looks to us. We have already had some help of this kind from the editor in question: on many subjects his glowing imagination has thrown such high lights that we have found places of shadow before unsuspected.
The matter reminds us of Horace Greeley's proposition to issue "for the people," a series of pamphlets for five cents each, to contain only "the pure truth." He did not say where he was going to get it.
Decency and the Stage
In the present agitation regarding decency on the stage, it is probably safe to assume that the proponents for license or liberty or freedom or whatever they call it, admit that there are some necessary acts and places which should not be represented on the stage. Now would it not clarify discussion if the said proponents were to draw the line between such inadmissible matters and those that should be admitted? We have never happened to see such a line drawn.
What Is the Matter with the American Colleges
Everybody in every one of them seems to know that something is the matter, but nobody in any seems to know just what, much less, then, a remedy for whatever it is.
Some say it is the suppression of the individual, the glorification of the average. Others say it is college yelling and athletics. Yet others, that it is vocationalizing and the deadly practical. Still others call it the proletariat of the doctorate, the fad of the faculties for immature or imitation research.
Can it be that it is all these things and several more, particularly all those that exist in contrasted pairs, such as discipline and required work according to the standard of the mean, and at the same time, elective studies and the freedom of the city? Or simultaneous college yells and doctor's dissertations. And can it be that all these grow out of a single actual condition which is common to all American higher education, and which compels it to be "lower" at the same time that it is "higher"? For in the present organization of practically every American college and university that condition actually does exist.
It exists by virtue of the fact of the housing in the same dormitories and fraternity houses, and mixing in the same class rooms and laboratories, and providing with the same teachers and deans, and ruling by the same regulations and gum-shoe committees, of dependent preparatory students and independent advanced students.