The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-03-16
HADLEY TALKS ON STUDENTS
(Contlnued from First Page.)

two There has been some newspaper
 discussion as to certain utterances of President Eliot and President lRoose- welt of Harvard. Some people have
 said that they were in agreement. 9th
 CTS have said that they differed. The
 truth is they neither agreed nor differ
 ed. They were talking about separate things. President Eliot was thinking
 of university where the students were predominantly of the graduate or pro
 fessional type. President Roosevelt
 was thinking of one where the students
 were predominantly of the undergrad
 uate or non-p professional type. II you have a university of the former in
 mind you do right to prohibit football It takes time and is a subtraction from
 professional energy. But if you have
 university of the latter type, you do wrong to prohibit football. The time and attention given to football are not
 taken away from the studies. They are taken away from forms of amusement
 and dissipation whose good is far less
 and whose evils far greater than foot | ball is or is likely to be.
 Again, if you have university com
 posed predominantly of professional students, you do right to let them
 study what they please. They have reached a point where they can adapt
 their studies to a different end. If you
 have a university composed of non-pro-
 fessional students, you do wrong to let them study what they please. They have no definite end to which they are able to adapt things. They look to you
 for guidance. It is indeed wise 10 give them considerable freedom of choice. 1t
 is better to give the guidance in the
 form of advice than in the form of
 fixed curriculum. But the doctrine that
 the student can study anything he
 pleases in the high school, and make proficiency in those indiscriminate stud 1 ies a basis for entrance to college, and then spend two or three or four years
 at college getting what is supposed to
 be general culture is not in the judg- ment of most of us either sound or a safe one. Not intellectual culture, but intellectual dissipation-and perhaps
 some other forms of dissipation-repre- ents the normal result of such a pro-
 cess.
 I take it the problems in whose dis
 cussion you are most interested are those that affect the undergraduate or
 non professional students; partly be- cause these students constitute two thirds of our list at Yale, and partly
 because their solution is more difficult
 and uncertain than the others. When we left the old curriculum and l introduced the elective system we or course made some mistakes. From the extreme of indiscriminate compulsion, whereby a an was made to study lit | tie of everything, we passed to the ex- | tree of indiscriminate freedom, which allowed him to study little of any thing. We nave, I think, realized that mistake. We see that the only justifi- cation of q good elective system Will be | that it should teach more than the sys- | tenn that 1t supplanted. l am confident, not only from my own observation, but from the testimony of parents, that If we compare the classroom work or to- day with that of twenty or thirty or forty years ago we shall find that the students do ore studying and the teacE1- CTS do more teaching. This increase of l interest has produced increased con tact between teachers and students, Many parents are afraid to send their sons to a large college, such as Yale IS
 now, because they say they will see Hess of their instructors than in small college. My experience is that they see great deal more. The students in
 Yale thirty years ago, in their inter-
 course with the faculty tended to look at them a good deal in tue same criti- cal way that a man scans his opponent in contest-between the bars of his visor as it were. The men of to-day, in very large measure, look at their ir-
 structors as helpers toward common end.
 For not only is there increased inter est-there is increased intelligence in
 this cooperation.
 | Another thing which we are begin- ming to recognize and utilize is the pub lie purpose in college training. If
 man thinks that he is sent to college to
 get culture the aim Is a little indefinite and rather demoralizing Culture as
 an end of education is, after all rather 1 a selfish idea. It is not one that ap- | peals to the boys of the best class.
 Public spirit is a better one. If you tell a boy that he is given liberty, not
 to serve himself, but to serve the pub l lie, he is ready to take that view and assume the responsibilities that go with | it. He will arrange his course intelli- gently if he understands that that course is being made test of tue lines
 in which he can best serve his fellow
 men. He will do hard and even disa- greeable work if he knows that that i hard work is an incident of his duty go
 society. He is content to accept high ideals and difficult standards If he can
 be sure that the standards have been set intelligently and blat the ideals are | highly patriotic and far-sighted. To
 boy taking up his college course in this
 spirit the very difficulties of the work
 increase the affection with which he looks upon the place. You know the old Harrow song:
 "The time will come as the years go by
 When your heart will thrill at the thought of the hill,
 And the pitiless bell with it's piercing cry"
 There is the same poetry in American
 college life. Some people have thought
 that it was bound up with the old dor
 mitories and tine old fence But it can
 center around new dormitories and new
 fences as long as the public spirit is there. Some have thought that it was