Colleges and the Liberal Spirit

(From the New York Evening Post)

President Hopkins' address to the students of Dartmouth at the opening of the college year might well be echoed upon every college and university campus. Seldom has the mission of our institutions of learning been so happily presented. In particular, what he had to say about liberalism is of the utmost timeliness. Drawing a broad line between the illiberal liberalism which arrogates all virtue to itself and the true liberalism which is marked by the open mind, President Hopkins scored the false liberals as doing more damage to the honored name they appropriate than could be done by all the forces of reaction combined. This is a strong statement, but no stronger than the facts warrant. People who see the dogmatism that characterizes the pseudo-liberal naturally exclaim: "If this is liberalism, give me something else."

Some persons will be deeply puzzled by President Hopkins' words. How, they will ask themselves, are we to square a liberalminded utterance like this with the picture of colleges and universities that Upton Sinclair has drawn in "The Goose Step?" Since it is unbelievable that a goose-stepping press would twist a goose-stepping address into a condemnation of the goose-stepping spirit, it cannot be that the president of Dartmouth is misreported. He must actually have spoken in praise of liberalism. Yet the trustees did not hold a special meeting and dismiss him. It must be admitted that any one who thinks of our colleges and universities as seats of bigotry will have enormous difficulty in understanding how the Hopkins address could have been delivered. Yet nowhere could it be more appropriately pronounced than upon a campus. Despite the occasional instances of interference with freedom of speech, our colleges and universities as a whole are what institutions of learning always have been—the home of the open mind and the liberal spirit. President Hopkins' address is at once a reminder of that fact and a summons to keep the banner flying.