Education: Athens and Owls

(See front cover)

In Wisconsin, last week, many things occurred. An owl floated like a shadow through the shadowy woods, an old man mumbled to himself as he looked at the hills, and far more important than either, in the town of Madison, near the blue mirror of Lake Mendota, a college opened. This was the Experimental College which President Glenn Frank of the University of Wisconsin had helped insurgent Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn, onetime President of Amherst, to organize near his own bizarre and tremendous apparatus for civilizing, if not educating, the gangling youth of the Northwest. It was one of the smallest of the many U. S. colleges which began their terms last week; still, as it seemed to many, its opening remained pre-eminently important among all the others.

Madison’s State Street was noisy with shy, ridiculous freshmen and upperclassmen. Most of these individuals were students at the great University; precisely 269 were students at the Experimental College. Of the 269, 119 were second year students; they would spend the next nine months in learning about U. S. civilization, preparatory to entering the Junior class of the University of Wisconsin to take B. A. degrees. The rest were the College’s second batch of freshmen. They, like the 119 before them, would try to find out about the fifth century B. C. and what happened, then, in Athens.

The Experimental College began last year; four years since, Dr. Meiklejohn had sensationally resigned his Amherst presidency and he has spent most of the interval teaching philosophy at Wisconsin. President Glenn Frank liked the idea of an experimental college and apparently supposed that the spectacled, brisk, eloquent pedagog was capable of putting it into effect. He gave him a quadrangle and authority; Dr. Meiklejohn called for 120 Wisconsin youths to enter his college that he might practice his notions upon them. His first class last year numbered 119 but, no rabid mathematician, Dr. Meiklejohn was content. He gathered his neophytes and said to them: “As a venture in friendship, the college has already succeeded.”

Not everyone agreed with him but nobody could say last week that the college had already failed. In externals at least it seemed prosperous. The sophomores were already wearing neat coats emblazoned with the Athenian Owl. They had had published a little booklet, couched in the serious style of those who have lost their Ernest Hemingway in a Thornton Wilderness, to say how much they liked Dr. Meiklejohn and his informal friendly teachings; they had read Zimmern’s Greek Commonwealth and Glotz’s Ancient Greece at Work.

The freshmen were indistinguishable from all other freshmen. Queer and foolish in their actions, they scuffed off to their collegiate rooms a mile away from the “hill.” Here they would play their victrolas, tinkle their absurd pianos, sing perhaps a parody of a song whose heroes should be Frankie and Meiklejohnnie, and even, it may be, pin sad pennants to their walls. Yet, in the next year, unlike the freshmen at Harvard, the freshmen at the University of Wisconsin, or most other freshmen in the U. S., something might happen to these freshmen that would change their minds. Reading about the bright city on whose finest temple an owl perched, like a symbol of tragic and sagacious hunger, they might, in some strange way, grow to know something more about Milwaukee or St. Paul. They would perhaps laugh at Aristophanes instead of shouting his silliest lines to a football team; Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus might teach them something about how men may be forlorn and heroes. They, like Herodotus, would see the eternal and astounding spectacle of a fantastic king marching an army through wild mountains by the sea; later, they would hear of the careless youth of Athens who “had never tasted war.” Some would imitate not Oscar Wilde but Alcibiades who sliced the noses off of the gods before he sailed to war, in Sicily, across a stormy sea. They might share Plato’s dream of a fair, impossible republic and they might share too his memory of Socrates, a strange fellow who was continually talking and who, before he drank poison bravely, looked out of the windows of his jail at the hills of Athens.

Not unlike Socrates, Dr. Meiklejohn prefers to be a philosopher before a small group of strained young faces, than before a half a thousand listless, far-away faces in a giant lecture hall. He would rather be an organ-grinder’s monkey than a bandleader’s baton. He has staked his reputation on a small college with a limited course of instruction, thorough within itself; and if that be poison, there is still Columbia, Cornell, California, Michigan, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, etc.

A thousand other colleges also went on opening parade last week, from the University of Maine at Orono to the University of Southern California at Los Angeles. Some had new trappings of professors, buildings, courses; most merely brushed up their fustiness.

Princeton had Col. Augustus Trowbridge, physicist, as dean of the graduate school, to succeed Andrew Fleming West, resigned. Harvey L. Lutz, famed in Europe as a public finance expert, went from Stanford University.

Columbia, as usual, registered the most students; more than 21,000. The university intends to emphasize science research and teaching more than ever.

Yale’s most notable acquisition is F. d’Herelle, bacteriologist, discoverer of bacteriophages.

Pennsylvania, with admission requirements made harder than ever, enrolled 1,100 freshmen, a third of its applicants.

Cornell has $2,000,000 women’s residential halls in construction, excavations for men’s dormitories, a new water supply, a new bridge over a gorge, two new bells among its chimes.

Brown has abandoned special caps for freshmen. Said John Collier, famed hurdler and president of the Cammarian Club (most potent undergradiinte organization): “Other colleges to which we look up have done away with caps and we are merely emulating them.”

Ohio State for the first time has a dean of men, John R. Johnston, last year at the University of Pittsburgh.

Mt. Holyoke’s new dean, Mrs. Alice B. Frame, was for the past six years dean of Yenching University at Peking. She was born at Harpoot, Turkey, of a missionary family.

Vassar’s entering class includes daughters of five college presidents, viz: Anne Comfort, daughter of William W. Comfort, president of Haverford; Anna M. Crocker, daughter of Mrs. Anna M. Crocker, onetime president of St. Mary’s College, Dallas, Tex.; Louise MacCracken, daughter of John MacCracken, onetime president of Lafayette, and a niece of Dr. Henry N. MacCracken, president of Vassar; Suzanne Elliott, daughter of President Edward C. Elliott of Purdue; and Elizabeth Watson, daughter of Charles Watson, president of American University, Cairo, Egypt.