NEWSPAPERS CONTINUE DISCUSSION OF PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS

Further newspaper comment on the address by President E. M. Hopkins at the opening of college in September comes to Hanover daily and the ALUMNI MAGAZINE presents here another selection of editorials typifying the various attitudes taken on the subject matter of that address.

More About the "Aristocracy of Brains"

(From the Boston Transcript)

At the present time,-in Massachusetts as well as elsewhere, we find on the one hand a movement in various large colleges toward limiting the number of students in behalf of quality in education, and on the other we find an increasingly widespread demand on the part of our youth for college education, or at least for "going to1 college." There seems to be developing a bona fide academic issue of quantity vs. quality; and it would be unfortunate indeed if the solution o'f the question should be made to turn, as in some quarters an effort is apparent to make it turn, on the alleged democracy of the State university proposition or on the supposed undemocracy of the present collegiate regime in this State. For equal "opportunity" is one thing, while equal fitness to' profit by a certain kind of opportunity is another matter, and one which is not necessarily incompatible with the former.

Since President Hopkins raised the subject at Dartmouth, we hear a good deal of talk about the "aristocracy of brains," and some of it is pretty loose talk, such as President Hopkins perhaps never expected or intended to excite. This is America. We have our captains of industry; we have our great inventors, like Edison; and we have our philosophic thinkers, like Emerson or like the late Josiah Royce. We have various types of the "aristocracy o'f brains," and long may we have them. They are the varied and splendid fruit of that sort of individualism which blossoms most freely under conditions of political freedom. In a very genuine sense, such intellectual aristocracy is begotten of democracy itself, nor has true democracy any quarrel with such offspring. Why should she? No hereditary class, no fixed class of any kind with fixed privileges, comes of such genius. No menace of any sort comes of it. Nothing but profit and national honor comes of it, or can come of it. What we recognize as a virtual aristocracy of brains in our country spells nothing but service to us, and implies nothing of political domination over us. It simply spells leadership, by the divine right of fitness for leadership, by the good works of advancing civilization. And this entirely apart from collegiate questions, for many of our brainy "aristocrats" never attended or tried to enter any of our colleges.

The question of who shall get what is termed a liberal education, such as our colleges were created to give, is really a distinct and a special question. It is a question of kind, fully as much as Of degree. A boy may be highly and precociously intellectual in many directions and yet not be' the sort of boy who would particularly profit by an all-around vision of man's past and present achievements and trend. He may be a boy destined to serve the world better by not going than by going to college. Especially is this true when the youth is intensely practical and intensely technical in mental outlook. Theoretically, all may be called to the special apprenticeship known as a college course; but as a matter of fact and of nature, few are chosen, because few are fit, and few really hunger and thirst after the philosophic search for truth.

Whether we have a State university or not, and whether or not we increase the number of students in even our private colleges, it is probable that every boy and girl really designed to receive the kind of learning and training our existing colleges give, can get it now. And the "aristocracy of brains" will persist and continue to hold sway even tho-ugh every child be educated in a State university.

(From The Freeman, October 4).

When President Hopkins of Dartmouth remarked the other day that "too many men are going to college," he might with equal propriety have said that there are too many human beings on the face of the earth. The opportunities offered by our institutions of higher learning are of a piece with the other opportunities of life, and like these other opportunities, they are of course abused by a considerable proportion of the people who enjoy them. For our own part, we do not in the least sympathize with anyone who laments the loss of pearls cast before swine; we lament only the scarcity of pearls. Instead of assuming that cultural "goods'' are necessarily limited in quantity, and should therefore be rationed out (as President Hopkins says of the higher education) to "the aristocracy of brains," we assume that such goods can and should be multiplied indefinitely, and distributed freely to every one who wants them, with no questions asked. If the economic revolution holds our interest,, it is chiefly because we believe that it will open the opportunities of a rich and adventurous cultural life to all sorts and conditions of men, who have, as human beings, a right to share these opportunities and to make of them what use they please.

But What Are Brains?

( New York Tribune )

An upstanding, outspoken, citizen is President Hopkins of Dartmouth, and what he says is always well worth attending to. When he says that too many men are going to college and that the privileges of a higher education should be. restricted to an aristocracy of brains he is talking sound sense. Altogether too many boys of rich parents loaf their way through college with the aid of tutors; and while the brightest poor boys undoubtedly get their chance at a college education by working their way through with the aid of scholarships, many others not quite so smart are unable to share in a preparation for life by which they would greatly benefit. That should be the test—only those boys should go to college who can and will profit by its advantages.

Let us have an aristocracy of brains by all means, but what are brains ? Just what are the qualities to be searched for? All-around ability to make good in books, athletics and leadership might seem a fair basis for a test. But every college man will remember any number of these well-rounded souls in college days who accepted success as it came to them thus easily and never toiled hard enough to go on to real achievement afterward. The fable of the ugly duckling comes true oftener than one likes to concede. Perhaps there is something in the very lot of being queer and original, somewhat unattractive and unconventional and therefore lonely, which makes. a boy strive harder and in the end . pass his more engaging competitors.

The two factors of originality and leadership suggest the .qualities which we have in mind and which ought to enter into any mie test of: real aristocracy. But, examination papers that really test imagination are hard to conceive; and the qualities, which may make a man a great leader further on in life are hard to isolate at 18. We hope President Hopkins will return to the attack. The difficulties before him are considerable, but it is a great deal to have the problem recognized and the goal staked out.

Back to Mental Normalcy

(From The Editor and Publisher.)

President; Ernest M, Hopkins in his address to the student body at the opening of Dartmouth. College placed the abolition of propaganda at the forefront in the great needs of -the present, day and in so doing struck directly at the heart of so-called publicity: and public relations to which the tendency has been in religion, politics and business in recent years.

Urging undergraduates to commit themselves to the utter elimination of the spirit of propaganda in the affairs of this world and in the discussion of those of the . next, President Hopkins said in part:

"There could be no more genuine consecration to the principle of the search for truth than in militant opposition to and repudiation of this spirit, whether it emanates from the manufacturers' association, the offices of organized labor, the editor' column, the preacher's pulpit, or the college officer's desk. The principle and the method are invariably wrong, however worthy may be the motive."

There are many college graduates who could study Dr. Hopkins' speech to undergraduates with profit to their fellow man, for it has been to their ranks that the seeker for a propagandist invariably turns.

The army of propagandists in this country has grown by leaps and bounds until it has reached the point where every avenue of information has been poisoned. Foreign governments gave great impetus to this system of manufacturing public opinion during the war, but even before they came, the special interest press agents had established themselves here and their influence was being used to stagnate sources of honest information. Reason for their being at the beginning was founded on the old fallacy that there are two sides to every story. Their job is to see that the side of the interest that pays their salaries gets over to the public with a sugar-coating that gives it the appearance of being a news fact.

The fallacy is not in the fact that there are two sides to every story, but in that both can be true and are deserving of equal treatment.

The paid propagandists of the railroad interests boast that they have changed the opinion of the American press toward their employers in the last year. If this is true then the present attitude of the American people toward the railroads of the country may, for all we know, be built on quicksands of untruths and half truths.

Dr. Hopkins did not overemphasize the dangers of opinion founded on propaganda by making it the keynote of his address to the student body. If American news editors would give the subject the same serious thought when they are considering free-will news offerings that come to their desks it would not be long until the United States got back to normalcy mentally.

A Blow at Colleges

(From The. Louisville (Ky.) Times.)

President Hopkins of Dartmouth College says, "Opportunities of the colleges should be reserved to the aristocracy of brains."

If we get Prexy, college reservations should be strictly mental.

Then where would we get the 'rah material for the football squads and Greek letter fraternities as campus fugit?

The clothing and haberdasher founderies should rise up and condemn this Dartmouth iconoclast.

Restrict our colleges to brains and where in the world would the manufacturers dispose of those funny-looking clothes we see pictured in the magazine ads ?

The enrollment a college under his plan would be similar to the attendance of bootleggers at a "Pussyfoot" Johnson lecture.

A college boy with anything more on his mind than the handicap of that little frat cap would be carrying excess baggage. By the time he learns the ritual of the Gota Hava Dad and his class yell and the college ..yell he is about all in or out of brains.

The greatest tax on the brain of a college boy is to determine, the one he wishes to enter. As soon as he checks in his old man begins checking out. The scion of a profiteer finds it no trouble whatever to get 110 degrees Fahrenheit at college.

Ask dad-he knows.

College Problems

(From The Albany Knickerbocker Press.)

President Hopkins of Dartmouth has said one thing that is easily understandable and another that is hard to analyze, in his annual address of welcome to the student body of his New Hampshire college.

The idea that too many young men are sent to college is easily grasped. An institution like Dartmouth is always over-enrolled. It has nothing like room enough or capacity enough to take care of the boys who are pressed upon it. Its funds are to a certain degree limited, sufficient for certain essential purposes with not much beside to spare. It is obliged to consider matriculation within its precincts as a privilege which is to be allotted to those who seem deserving, and which is not at all to be awarded to chance comers. No one can truly say that he has a "right" to go to Dartmouth. There is no such right.

On the other hand, President Hopkins seeks to disclaim any purpose of shutting out from Dartmouth a deserving soul. He does not want young men who will spend their time without profit and in idleness, acquiring false standards or living, or only seeking membership in a social organization from the reputation of which they expect to profit. He will not have the higher education which is within his control restricted by any accident of birth or fortuitous circumstances of wealth.

Furthermore, he makes an essentially profound statement when he says that he seeks above all to avoid commingling the facts and symbols of intellectuality, and he hopes that under any circumstances there may be avoided the confusion of mental gymnastics and the appropriation of the ideas of others with genuine thinking.

Those who have to deal with young minds in the making will appreciate the significance of this statement. Plagiarism, conscious or unconscious, is a particular evil of bright, quick minds in the process of development. Colleges are rife with it, and it does not make the task of college officials any easier to recognize, as they must, that good minds, which need little more than development and training to speak out boldly for themselves are most often prone to stoop to copying the ideas they seem to need.

Then there is the problem of propaganda, against which President Hopkins urges militant opposition and repudiation. "Whether," he says, "it emanates from the manufacturers' association, the office of organized labor, the editor's column, the preacher's pulpit or the college officer's desk, the principle and the method are invariably wrong, however worthy may be the motive." And he is right about this. Propaganda, the specious and sugarcoated argument in favor of a pet predicament, is a gross evil of this catch as catch) can life. Some of its proponents do not know that they are being used. Others are wise enough to cover up the traces of mental pillaging. The price of such conversion is seldom in cash, but the effects are as sweeping as if it were a matter of buying and selling across the counter. The thing is an evil, and President Hopkins is entitled to credit for his wisdom in singling it out and fastening upon it the weight of his condemnation.

Probably, also, the scholar is right when he says there are too many going to college. It is quality not quantity that the nation depends upon the colleges to give it. Democracy is skidding much too swiftly toward mediocrity. It needs to be checked. It needs to stop copying and cribbing; it needs to know and to shun propaganda; it needs to abhor snobbishness or the expectation of earning reputation from association with real workers; it needs to cultivate its better side, to seek culture for culture's sake and to strive to be gentlemanly in the real and good sense. This, after all, is what most men who fought their way through life hope that their boys may acquire in the college they have dreamed of and to which they will send those bouyant youngsters.

The Mudsill Theory at Dartmouth

(From The Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal.) When President Ernest Martin Hopkins delivered an opening address to the 1,900 students enrolled at Dartmouth College he was speaking more to the nation than to the young men before him. His message was that too many men are going to college, in disregard of the fact that "the opportunities for securing an education byway of the college course are definitely a privilege and not a universal right." He spoke of the necessity of finding a working theory that would operate with some degree of accuracy to define the individuals who shall make up the group to whotti, in justice to the public good, the privilege of higher education be extended, and to specify those to whom it should be denied. He thought it would be incompatible with all of the conceptions of democracy to assume that the privilege of college education should be restricted to any class defined by the accident of birth or by the fortuitous circumstances of the possession of wealth. "But there is such a thing as an aristocracy of brains," he went on to say, "made up of men intellectually alert and intellectually eager, to whom increasingly the opportunities of higher education ought to be restricted, if democracy is to be a quality product rather than simply a quantity one, and if excellence and effectiveness are to displace mediocrity, towards which democracy has such a tendency to skid."

If this Hanover professor is within proper lines in proposing his remarkable plan to Burbank the intelligence of the race, intensively cultivating the garden of knowledge to produce a few super-men of compelling mentality and arresting the development of all the rest, then some of these municipal universities are on the wrong track in using the tax rates and duplicates as levers with which to get higher learning into the head of every youth. The plea of these institutions supported by public revenues, is that society is best served by an ever widening diffusion of the specialized knowledge imparted by universities; that the doors of these institutions should be thrown open to every young man and young woman, without reference to any other condition than ability to pass the entrance tests. But here is old Dartmouth recommending a selective intelligence process, and voluntarily lopping off the student heads of more than a hundred of its own enrollment to prove its faith in the process. If this principle were extended to every higher school there would have to be an interesting overhaul in some of the widely heralded boasts of American opportunity. Thousands of boys now working their way through college might have difficulty making the grade of qualification for admittance to President Hopkins' exclusive aristocracy of brains.

Many years ago Senator James H. Hammond came to Washington from South Carolina to preach another type of aristocracy. "In all social systems," he told his fellow senators, "there must be a class to do the mean duties, to perform the drudgery of life; that is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, refinement and civilization. It constitutes the very mudsills of society and of political, government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air as to build either the one or the other except on the mudsills. Fortunately the south has found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand—a race inferior to herself, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for the purpose and call them slaves. We are old fashioned in the south yet: it is a word discarded now by ears polite; but I will not characterize that class at the north with that term; but you have it; it is there, it is everywhere; it is eternal."

Dartmouth has revived the mudsill theory, by condemning some millions of men to intellectual darkness and drudgery that they may support that other limited and superior "class which leads progress, refinement and civilization." It is well for the nation that Abraham Lincoln came from the plain people, who were not given to intellectual snobbishness. His war shot the mudsill argument to pieces.