To what has been written

and printed already concerning the report submitted to the President of the College by Professor Leon B. Richardson, on the subject of his recent investigations in this country and England with regard to collegiate education, it is in order to add that with the appearance of the full text early in February there was included in the extant literature on this general topic one of the most comprehensive' and painstaking studies yet made. The book as it stands is a neatly printed volume of 282 pages, bound in paper. It is divided into three sections and closes with a summary. Exclusive of the latter, there are thirtyfive chapter headings.

This work is of such importance that it should be read—and unquestionably will be read—by every earnest student of American educational problems. The magnitude of the book and the impossibility of providing enough copies of it for general circulation will presumably compel the majority of our alumni to be content with a summarization of it which Mr. Richardson has already published through the columns of this MAGAZINE—but it is really a pity that has to be so. In a brief space it is hardly possible to do real justice to the matter which so crowds over 280 pages of none-too-large type with so much real meat. Interest in this publication was indicated by advance inquiries from practically every college of note in the country. Those who are sufficiently concerned may obtain copies of the complete report by applying through the office of the Treasurer and enclosing $1.50 —while they last.

For the layman—that is the alumnus not himself in direct contact with teachers' problems—the great interest will be found in the chapters discussing the things laymen are most concerned about, such as the general purpose of colleges, the criticisms of it as commonly made, and the three major handicaps against the ordinary student—which are cited as (a) his lack of "background"; (b) social life, as bodied forth by fraternities and other activities not connected with scholastic labors; and (c) athletics. These all figure in the first section of the book.

The second section is practically given up to the study of the British universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge, London, Durham, and the outlying "provincial" institutions, as well as those in Scotland. Canada is also included in this section.

The third assails the concrete problems of curriculum, with suggestions and a frank discussion of the obstacles and then proceeds to analyze methods of instruction (lectures, recitations, small divisions of the class, the tutorial system)—leading up to the highly important topic of examinations, with special reference to the so-called "comprehensive" examination as a means for discovering how much a student really knows of a subject as a whole, rather than what he remembers of some recently studied part. There is also a discussion of the training of teachers, of "learning vs. thinking," and the proper place of the undergraduate voice in shaping the policy of the College. It will thus be seen that for purely general readers, the interest is likely to centre in the initial section whereas for professional educators the interest will be sustained throughout and will reach a climax, presumably, in the third.

It is not the purpose here to augment what has been said already in the way of comment on Professor Richardson's general conclusions. But if we have not already done so elsewhere, let us quote at least his admirable- summation of a college's full duty: "The College must do other things than train the intellect, but it must see to it that such intellectual training is never lost sight of as its guiding principle. Our aim may therefore be stated as 'the stimulation and development of those gifts of intellect with which nature has endowed the student, so that he may become, first, a better companion to himself through life, and, second, a more efficient force in his contacts with his fellow man.' " And then let us with special approval quote one more sentence, of which we believe there is especial need at this time, to the "effect that the so-called "thinking," which is. mere "rambling speculation unchecked by knowledge of, or respect for, underlying fact," is a vice which at present is growing alarmingly, not only among college students but among the American people as a whole.

By no means all of this is new. It is to a large extent an orderly restatement of material long ago assembled in scattered and diffuse form, but now brought to a focus and combined in a distinctly valuable essay on the process of higher education for use in a great and growing country. The difficulty of applying standards elsewhere in vogue is the greater because there is nowhere else, and certainly not in England, anything resembling the situation in America. Of this phase of it much has been said elsewhere and heretofore, and still more will be said in a moment.

In his addresses before the alumni in varioujs sections this winter, President Hopkins has indicated his belief that the college should above all provide the appropriate environment for the natural growth of what the student has in him —another phrase expressing a thought which is, to a great extent, the thesis of Mr. Richardson. If we may venture yet a farther trope, the idea of the college is to provide a salubrious intellectual climate, as well as enlightened methods of intellectual agriculture, for the steady and indeed irresistible growing of the crop. A great deal must be done by the natural processes, and the great thing is to open the way for them instead of imposing handicaps. One gathers that in trying to assist nature one may easily hamper nature and not give nature a fair chance. All this study has for its aim and object the discovery of what will assist, and what will not assist, the perfectly natural development of American youth into the attainable perfection of citizenship— wherein a man "becomes a better companion to himself and a more efficient force in his contacts with his fellow men."

By a concatenation of factors, among which we may include God's grace, wise management and last, though by no means least, the loyal co-operation of the alumni, Dartmouth College has been brought to a position of which no one twenty-five years ago would have ventured to dream. The "little college" has become great—both numerically and otherwise. It has something over 2000 students. Its faculty has doubled in ten years' time. Its physical plant has expanded, as of course it was bound to do in response to the demand of numbers upon it. The standards have been raised and are still rising.

Now all this is a source of genuine pride—and a wholly proper pride. The thing that may too easily escape us is a realizing sense that, with all this to lookback upon, and all this to be proud of, and all this to be grateful for, Dartmouth College today stands only on the threshold of her opportunity. It rests primarily with her alumni, who have attended her thus far with loyal devotion and aid, to say whether the opportunity shall be availed of to the full.

What has been done is really the preliminary work. The machine has been set up and tested. It has given samples of its product. It is a handsome machine and the samples satisfy. But the real work for it to do lies ahead; and it is our immediate purpose to stress the inexorable duty which falls to us, the alumni of this noble institution, to enable it to do its full duty by making use of what we have built up. If we rest content with past achievement, it will go for nothing. Beware of misapprehending what has happened. The goal has not been attained. Say rather that at last we are steamed up and ready to start.

The budget for this current year is about a million and a quarter dollars. If we are to expend that much money—and every effort has been made to economize, without impairing the effective operation of the mechanism—we shall have to raise that much money from all the available sources. Those sources are the yield of the meagre endowment that we have, the payments for tuition, for rooms and board, various opportune gifts—and the Alumni Fund. The latter, an essential factor in building the College up, is a no less essential factor in keeping it going. The most careful estimates that circumstances permit indicate that, if the alumni can manage to raise $90,000' this coming season as the official quota of this Fund, there is a chance that we may approximate a fairly even break between income and outgo. That $90,000 is a small proportion of the $1,250,000 which the College must spend—but it is an absolutely vital part. It means the vast difference between closing the year with a clean slate, or going about that much in the hole.

It is probably needless, after all that has been said in past years, to educate the alumni of Dartmouth to the appreciation of the Fund's primary necessities. By this time, surely, we all know all we require to know about it. We know that it represents the interest on an imaginary endowment, which we individually raise every year as a much easier burden than the provision of an underlying endowment would be. We have slowly come to figure it as a part of our individual budgets at home. We have been strengthened in our readings and our willingness to sustain this Fund by the amazing revelation of the College's growth in size and repute, until it stands as one of the great colleges of the country. What remains, as we see it, is to urge not liberality so much as promptitude. The need for liberality we all know. The importance of promptitude in answering the call we may not fully appreciate.

Look at it this way: Here is a necessity to raise $90,000 before the end of June. Very well, we will raise the $90,000. We can do it and we shall do it. We will do it sometime between now and—ah, brother, wait a bit! That's the very point! We run a risk when we postpone inevitables in that well-meaning fashion. Incidentally, we increase what business men call the "overhead." In other words, if we wait we shall necessitate a systematic assault by the class agents, and that means added cost in postage, telegrams and so forth, so that of every dollar finally collected the College gets a smaller part than it should. If what you want is to get every penny for the College that you can, be swift to answer. And of course that's what you do wish. You cannot well wish anything else.

The experience of the world indicates that an overhead expense in such a drive as this of ours can seldom be much under 5 per cent and is more commonly 6 per cent. In other words, of every dollar collected, the College will actually receive at the end something like 94 or 95 cents; or of every $100 collected, it will cost about $6 for the expenses of collection, so that the College can expect not more than $94. The argument we are trying to make is that whatever cuts we can make in this overhead by springing promptly to our fountain pens and chequebooks is, as you might say, "all velvet." Besides, there is the saving of wear-and-tear on the class agents—men who cheerfully give valuable time, worth much more than most of us ever give in mere money, in order to put. this thing across.

It is the fashion to delay such things, and it is a bad fashion. It would be worth several thousand dollars to Dartmouth if only someone could say the right word to make every man of us an instant and ready respondent when the call arrives for pledges and contributions. In these paragraphs we are striving to say the one right word—to get home to you, not only the imperative necessity of contribution, but also the imperative necessity of promptness. You may say it oughtn't to cost $6, or nearly that, to collect every sloo—but it always does and it always will until we all get the habit of replying at the very first volley. Circumstances may make it necessary for one to withhold for the time the actual payment of what he gives—but surely nothing prevents an instant and cordial statement of what that is going to be; and if only this can be stated together with a definite fixing of the convenient date, there would be a prodigious saving to the machinery of the campaign.

Reader, this annual Alumni Fund comes pretty close to being a matter of practical religion. It has made Dartmouth great. The College couldn't have stood where it does today without it. The glow which we all feel at seeing it stand there is answer enough to the query whether this thing is worth while, and earnest enough of what Dartmouth can be made to mean to us and to all men if we keep enthusiastically at it. "Eventually—why not now" applies to many other things than wheat flour advertising. It is the very essence of an Alumni Fund campaign such as is now in progress.

One who knew Dartmouth in the days before it began to expand, say in the late 80s and early '9os, will find it hard to conceive of an effort in those days to promote the institution of community music by the occasional production of an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan, with faculty members figuring actively in the cast of singing-actors. The attempt would have been disastrous, one fears, even assuming that one could have found professors and professor's wive's able to sing and act. The change that has come over the College in the past decade or more is better illustrated in no other way than this, for the impossible of the '9os is the very enjoyably possible now. In the situation there may be somewhat less of awe than used to attend the faculty's estate, but this doubtless fits into the niche of things as they are more readily than would have been true in times when one's acquaintance with members of the faculty was almost exclusively official and when, although professors were vaguely understood to have their human side and to be constituted much like other men, there was little to invite one to suppose that their pleasures and talents were akin to those of ordinary mortals.

It is grateful and comforting, as used to be said of a famous brand of cocoa, to discover erudite critics approving Dartmouth College as the one outstanding exponent of the Aristotelian golden mean. That, if we may accept as reasonably accurate the dicta of the New YorkTimes, has been lately admitted by Professor Moore—who, from the forum of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, speaks of college radicalism and seeks to represent the two extremes as well as the middle of the road by resort to- collegiate symbols. He appears to define a radical as a Columbia man, a hidebound conservative as a Yale man, with Dartmouth occupying the enviable position between.

The Times proceeds with a rather pachydermatous humor to dissect the professorial estimate, saying:

"This conclusion is reached in the following manner: You ask the undergraduate what he thinks of alleviating poverty by social legislation, what he thinks of loose sexual morals and what he thinks of Soviet Russia. If he is against them all or even says so, he is a predestined Yale man. If he is for them all, his place is Columbia. Just how one qualifies for Dartmouth is not so clear, but to aspiring Hanoverians something like this may be recommended: 'Upon mature consideration, my answer to all three questions is, Yes—and No!' It takes time, to be sure, thus to register mature deliberation. But at Yale the answers are even more deliberate. The Columbia men speak up promptly, from which Professor Moore deduces that 'they use their brains more quickly.' "

All of which is entertaining in a mild and not altogether displeasing way to Hanoverians, who are thus held up to the world as not rushing madly to either horn of the radical-conservative dilemma, but as occupying the position of stable equilibrium midway between. The reassuring quality is found chiefly in the fact that it sets a different estimate from that which would write down Dartmouth under President Hopkins as a place unduly hospitable to social vagaries. It is pleasant to find that hasty and altogether unjust assertion combated. The one serious drawback to the position taken at Dartmouth with respect to hearing the apostles of Liberalism set forth their doctrines to the top of their bent, has been the headlong desire on the part of some of the wildest extremists to rush up to President Hopkins and kiss him with fervor on both cheeks, as a reward for his kindness and hospitality. That has been embarrassing at times, because it betokened an exaggerated idea of what such hospitality implied. Evidently Professor Moore, speaking before the Advancers of Science, has formed no such mistaken impression. Dartmouth is open of mind. Dartmouth is willing to hear the case argued. Dartmouth decides on the merits—and not, as the Columbians do because a proposition is novel; or, as the Yalensians do, because it is ancient.

This in turn reminds us that not many months ago the Nation (New York) turned its delighted gaze toward Hanover and expressed an amazement equal to its gratification ,that a college with a conspicuously conservative board of trustees could be so tolerant of liberal thinkers. The policy has been so much more tolerant than that of Michigan and Pennsylvania that the uninformed outsider might think the college was run by a most unusual board. "As a matter of fact," muses the Nation's editor, "the list of Dartmouth trustees reads like a page from 'The Goose Step';. Lewis Parkhurst, treasurer of Ginn and Co.; Henry B. Thayer, president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co.; Albert O. Brown of the Amoskeag Savings Bank; Prof. John K. Lord, former professor of Latin; Dr. John M. Gile, surgeon; Henry L. Moore, retired treasurer of the Minnesota Loan and Trust Company; Clarence B. Little, president of the First National Bank of Bismark, N. D.; Fred H. Howland, president of the National Life Insurance Company; ex-Gov. Fred H. Brown, and Charles G. Du Bois, president of the Western Electric Company. That such a board of trustees can control a genuinely progressive educational institution is proof that no generalization about capitalist control of our univerties can explain all the reaction and suppression."

It suffices, taking all these remarks together, to convince us of the essential soundness of the course which has been steered in these hectic times by the present pilot of the college destinies. We are obviously in midchannel, at a safe and satisfactory distance from both the dangerous promontories. If we have not taken the precaution to stuff the ears with wax, we are at least by way of listening to the Sirens in the judicial state of mind supposed to be possessed by sedate musical critics. The idea is to learn to know the weeds from the wildflowers by actual experience, in the very sage belief that if you make too great a mystery of the weed it may acquire a factitious importance greatly exceeding its deserts—whereas if you make it familiar at first hand, it is certain to inspire the proper degree of contempt.

Nevertheless it awakens a sort of surprise to find this openness of mind and this desire to "be shown" attributed primarily to Dartmouth as the outstanding type. One might almost have looked for it somewhere in Missouri.

Early Spring scene on the Campus