The setting of the college surprised us, for, if there was one thing that we had expected more than another, it was that Kansas would prove absolutely flat. Yet here we were on a mountain top--at least they call it Mount Oread--with the valley of the Kaw River below, and what seemed to be the whole of Kansas spread round about, like a vast panoramic mural decoration for the university--a maplike picture suggesting those splendid decorations of Jules Guerin's in the Pennsylvania Terminal in New York. I know of no university occupying a more suitable position or a more commanding view, although it must be recorded that the university has been more fortunate in the selection of its site than in its architecture and the arrangement of its grounds. Like other colleges founded forty or fifty years ago, the University of Kansas started in a small way, and failed entirely to anticipate the greatness of its future. The campus seems to have "just growed" without regard to the grouping of buildings or to harmony between them, and the architecture is generally poor. Nevertheless there is a sort of homely charm about the place, with its unimposing, helter-skelter piles of brick and stone, its fine trees, and its sweeping view. It was principally with the purpose of visiting the University of Kansas that we stopped in Lawrence. We had heard much of the great, energetic state colleges, which had come to hold such an important place educationally, and in the general life of the Middle West and West, and had planned to visit one of them. Originally we had in mind the University of Wisconsin, because we had heard so much about it; later, however, it struck us that everybody else had heard a good deal about it, too, and that we had better visit some less widely advertised college. We hit on the University of Kansas because Kansas is the most typical American agricultural state, and also because a Kansan, whom we met on the train, informed us that "In Kansas we are hell on education." In detail I knew little of these big state schools. I had heard, of course, of the broadening of their activities to include a great variety of general state service, aside from their main purpose of giving some sort of college education, at very low cost, to young men and women of rural communities who desire to continue beyond the public schools. I must confess, however, that, aside from such great universities as those of Michigan and Wisconsin, I had imagined that state universities were, in general, crude and ill equipped, by comparison with the leading colleges of the East.