Perhaps the shortest

and simplest statement setting forth the true inwardness of the Selective Process system of admissions would be that it is intended to get into Dartmouth the kind of men Dartmouth wants, and to keep out the men upon whom the college doesn't feel justified in spending its time. After one has said that, everything depends on definitions. What does Dartmouth regard as the kind of men it wants?

President Hopkins went into the question thoroughly in his winter address to the Boston alumni. He was insistent on getting the whole matter out of the realms of "whispered discussion" and innuendo, into the light of clear understanding. His major postulate was that the college hoped above all things to avoid falling into the rut which would result from seeking men of a single standardized type—which seemed to him, and still seems, the too probable result of making admission depend on a set of inelastic or arbitrary standards, such as would arise from attention to a man's scholastic record exclusively, or from the requirement of a single academic examination for admission.

Naturally the scholastic achievements of the applicant are of the first importance; but the point is that they are not of exclusive importance and further that they are not to be judged with accuracy on the basis of a single set of examination books. The College is not indifferent to what young men have done in the way of improving their minds; in fact that is what it is chiefly concerned to discover, for the determination of their fitness to seek further mental improvement at Hanover. The first and great commandment is that the applicant shall seem to have a mind worth cultivating and that he shall have revealed a disposition to cultivate it. "But," said the president, "we desire at Dartmouth an undergraduate body made up of men with varying characteristics and varying points of view"—since, as Walter Bage- hot once remarked, a large part of education depends on "the impact of youthful mind on youthful mind." It is felt to be desirable to attract men who, in addition to giving evidence of mental alertness and eagerness to expand, have records for some other form of achievement, "whether this achievement be musical, literary, managerial, or in other forms." In short, let us get young men who have shown some sort of gumption, to resort to an expressive New Englandism, as well as a zeal for good marks. The Selective Process seeks to discover the gumption.

The principal propensity to combat appears to be that which would impute to the Selective Process the function of a sort of "smoke-screen" (to quote Dr. Hopkins' metaphor) behind which to assemble undergraduates whose "other achievements" are athletic. Athletic prowess certainly will not be accounted unto any applicant for unrighteousness, provided his gifts in.the intellectual direction are satisfactory—but neither will it be accepted as a levamen probationis offsetting his scholastic deficiencies One has to contend against the impression produced by the sporting writers of the country's press, who conceive of the colleges as chiefly important on the gridiron, diamond, track, hockey-rink and so on. Such outgivings las those of Mr. Hugh Fullerton early in the winter season, implying that the world had never heard of Dartmouth until it began to produce winning football teams, represent with reasonable accuracy the professional sporting writer's restricted point of view and further tend to give to the thoughtless a feeling that the Selective Process is merely a convenient means for recruiting the football squads. The fact is that the Selective Process is meant to get in the sort of men the College feels justified in spending its time and effort on, with intent to develop useful citizens of the United States, and is not a mere adjunct of self-advertisement designed to procure, from year to year, young men who later will be pictured and written up by our army of Fuller tons and Cunninghams as worthy of inclusion in the All-America teams.

One must remember all the time that, to the eager journalists who oversee the sporting pages, the athletic by-product of the American colleges is the one phase of academic activity that is interesting. Apart from their journalistic specialty, the colleges are to them empty names. The same is true to a vast proportion of the general public, which hears of the colleges only during the brief athletic seasons and solely through the medium of the sports writers. For such, also, the college in all other aspects simply does not exist. Hence the alleged overemphasis on this element—but it is not over-emphasis by the colleges themselves, or even by their alumni. So far as the Selective Process goes, athletic interest figures no more prominently in the qualifications of the applicant than does any other form of special interest in which the candidate reveals excellence. There is probably no method for disabusing the casual mind of this fixed delusion, since it is only on the side of intercollegiate sport that such take any note whatever of collegiate institutions. One can only point out the, fallacy of assuming that colleges do nothing but play games, knowing that a very large part of the population will continue to make that very assumption.

Passing from that phase of the problem, consider for a moment the very curious argument that the Selective Process is in some mysterious way inimical to the attraction of "scholarship." Those who advance this argument usually assume that the more familiar method of selection, based on the rank attained in a general examination for admission to college, does insure an undergraduate body more remarkable for its scholarship than one assembled after investigating a variety of other elements in addition to what has been done during the course of study in preparatory schools. From a somewhat extended observation of the student bodies in a number of colleges depending on the examination system we are unable to say with truth that their scholastic quality is especially impressive. The examination system, to be quite frank, seems to let in just about as many dunces as any other. In fact it was this very deficiency which led to the adoption of a different system at Dartmouth in the hope of weeding out the idlers in advance. One grows a little tired of this unwarrantable insistence that examinations will tend to confine college admissions to the riper scholars, because as a matter of fact they do no such thing anywhere.

It is moreover possible that confusion arises from inexact definitions of scholarship, both as applied to the students and as applied to the faculties who teach them. Just what is meant by this honorable word? Is it to connote a sort of intellectual Four Hundred, implying a form of mental snobbery? Is the ideal college one whose faculty is manned exclusively by men of national distinction in special branches of learning, and whose students are the cream, only, of the country, considered on the sole basis of their power to command Phi Beta Kappa rank at every intelligence test? Or is the ideal more nearly attained by the college which seeks to provide teachers gifted in the difficult art of making young men want to learn, and which selects its students with an eye chiefly to their likelihood of being amenable to such inspiration? Dr. Hopkins touched on this point in his Boston address, saying that everything depends on who is defining "scholarship" and on what terms are being used in making that definition. "If the work of the College continues to be as fruitful as it has been in arousing the interest of its men in mental effort," he concluded, "I am not concerned as to the nomenclature by which it is described."

This world is an intensely practical place, and the individual's job is to get as much out of his fleeting residence in it as he can, while giving to it as much aspossible in return. The Art of Living Together may well be specified as embodying the great end and aim of educational training. That is what Dartmouth College is anxiously striving to teach, to as many young men as it can handle with good effect. It is therefore making a strenuous effort to insure, so far as ingenuity may do so, the excellence of the raw material which it is trying to fit into the scheme of things—the American scheme of things, we may add. America is not Europe, and its educational system is therefore distinctly different. It is aiming at a different goal. But one thing is becoming very clear indeed, and that is that it is simple folly to waste time on young people who will not respond in reasonable degree to the sort of effort which an American college is making. In consequence there is an eager search for some method which will tend to restrict the costly process of the higher education to those who will benefit thereby; and the Selective Process is felt to promise better by far than any previously tried.

If the charge is that we are not fitting ourselves to turn out a small race of super-scholars, that charge is true enough —but it should be added that this is not what we want to do. It is not what we conceive to be the country's primary need. To provide a numerous race of educated men—gentlemen, if you will not misunderstand a useful but much-abused word—who will fit into the American picture and bear an intelligent hand with the incessant problems of the American public, is probably irreconcilable with the ideal of such as would make the college education a perquisite of the exceptional few. But the former is what we conceive to be the duty of the college—whatever may be true of the universities—in the present age and condition of the United States of America.

Whatever the ultimate aim, the first need is of young men with promising brains and a will to make use thereof. The possession of the brain and the existence of the capacity to use it we prefer to judge from data more comprehensive than a single set of examination books or the unsupported certificate of a professional educator can afford. Hence the Selective Process. And we close, as we began, with the assertion that this process is meant to get into Dartmouth the kind of men Dartmouth wants— which means the kind of men any other sensible college wants—while keeping out the kind that no college can well afford to consider as promising material on which to operate.

Attention should be directed to the valuable work which for the past year or two has been going on at Hanover under the direction of Dr. W. R. P. Emerson '92 with respect to a survey of the general health of undergraduates and a general correction of diet and other habits in the case of men who are underweight, or otherwise handicapped. There are doubtless limitations to the process of dealing with the human body as a standardized machine, but these do not prevent the dealing with it short of those limitations. The proper feeding of the human body, the appropriate treatment of its complex mechanism to keep the same in repair—or better, to enable it to keep itself from needing repair—by directing the attention of careless and indifferent persons to matters of rudimentary hygiene, are matters in which thoroughly scientific work may be done and done with profit to all concerned. Too much has been left to haphazard in past years, and the revelations contained in Dr. Emerson's successive reports, as printed in this MAGAZINE, are highly important. They reveal for one thing that about half the men in the average class show a clear need for supervision in order to bring them up to proper physical fitness; and they further show that, when given such intelligent supervision, improvement is immediate and rapid.

The major defects seem to be in the matter of food and rest, with more or less attention demanded by men whose throat and nasal passages require treatment, and not a little requirement in the matter of dentistry. Whether or not any other college has assailed this problem with the same determination revealed at Dartmouth we do not know; but we have no hesitation in saying that such a movement is everywhere as seriously desirable if the easily attainable percentage of physical fitness is to be sought. One has to overcome a natural inertia on the part of men who have assumed that they were "well enough" for all practical purposes and who were inclined to let matters "ride," as the saying is. It is bound to take some years of practical demonstration to awaken the mass of us to the fact that young Americans can very easily correct trifling deficiencies, to their lasting benefit in later years. Such demonstration, however, Dr. Emerson's work is rapidly developing.

Just how far it is possible to expect of the American undergraduate college an abstract interest in the intellectual life for its own sake? The criticism is leveled at our colleges that they do too little to inspire young men with the sort of intellectual zest that is assumed to be inspired in English universities, and in Europe; but in the curiously different circumstances that surround the higher education in the United States at present, can we ever hope to do such a thing— admitting for the sake of argument that Oxford does it, and the Sorbonne, and so forth?

It is not too violent an assumption that our problem is different, even after making allowance for the wasters and "life- members" and what-not, who are to be found in colleges abroad as well as here. The fact remains hardly susceptible of dispute that there is more genuine intellectual zest among university men overseas than among American undergraduates. A university graduate is more readily recognized by his walk and conversation in England than here. Students in Oxford and Cambridge are left much more to their own devices than we in America have persuaded ourselves we can profitably do. In fine, the American college is usually treated as a sort of super-school —a high school magnified and extended —even when it is not an outright part of the public school system, as is the case with state universities.

Certain differences seem for the present to make this inevitable, in the case of American colleges when contrasted with the greater universities abroad, most notably of all the character of the student body. In America, every one goes to college, now, who can afford it. In England the tradition—it may be breaking down since the war—is that university training is mainly for "gentlemen" and for those who are eager scholars, rather than for such perfectly ordinary young folk as, among us, crowd the hundreds of higher educational institutions. Moreover this is still a young country and cultivation is not by any means assessed at the rate of value which it maintains in very old countries with a well developed leisure class and certain rooted ideas of "classes" in general, which are foreign to the whole American theory. Before rushing to an unflattering comparison between the American college and the British university, it may be well to reflect on the different needs in this country, the very different material which we work upon, and the probability that, if British and European institutions had our problem, they might find themselves forced to assail it in very much the way that we do here. In effect, one is trying to compare things which are in so many ways dissimilar that comparisons, besides being odious, are inappropriate.

It is more probable that with the lapse of time we shall grow to a better estimate of purely cultural schooling, and shall come to have our share of materials for ripe scholarship. At present we are, as a solid fact, making super-schools out of our colleges because that is what our circumstances seem still to demand. It takes a certain kind of machinery to deal with a certain brand of raw material. Thus far, so much of that material is so little inclined to purely intellectual living that college tasks are treated, of necessity, as obligatory day by day, instead of left to the volition of the student, who in Oxford may study or not at his own pleasure so long as he obeys the college rules, eats the required number of meals "in Hall," wears (or carries) his gown when etiquette demands it, and pays due heed to parietal regulations—having little to do with his intellectual estatewhich the proctors are supposed to enforce. We may have attained the state where a selected few students in upper classes can be given this liberty of choice in the use of their time; but it is hardly to be disputed that to throw it open to all would work a much greater mortality among our undergraduates than it appears to do in Oxford and Cambridge— though even there it is greater than most casual critics seem to assume.

The American style of college, in other words, differs from the English style primarily because it serves a very different purpose and has a very different student body to work upon. The results are quite naturally different also. It may not follow that either one is inferior to the other. Comparison is difficult owing to the essential variations in the species and in the work sought to be done.