“The idea that going to college is one of the inherent rights of man,” President Lowell wails, “seems to have obtained a baseless foothold in the minds of many of our people. To select the fit and devote our energies to them is our duty to the public for whose service we exist.” And President Comfort of Haverford bemoans how the diversions which are college life “have cut deep into the serious purpose for which the colleges exist.” Obviously the searching of the heart concerning the values of a college education does not reach to the essentials of the academic tradition. The ancient notions remain ineffable and inviolable. They presume that students exist for the sake of the school, not the school for the sake of the students. Hence the inquiry treats only of who shall be admitted to the sacred fane and by what steps. That in any issue between system and student, the system might be wrong is inconceivable. The pedagogues, like the prohibitionists, find it unbelievable that their engines of grace can be tools of darkness; that they fail, not because those to whom they are applied are intransigently bad, but because their own methods and ideals are intransigently false.... As I see them, the ideals and methods which are dynamic in our institutions of higher learning are false. They are false to the students, false to the social purpose which nourishes them, false to the inward nature of education itself. They are false because they are irrelevant. And they are irrelevant because they are for the most part unabsorbed survivals from a pre-industrial past in an industrial age. But in the eyes of the academicians the failure of the colleges is caused by the deficiencies of the environment, not by their own inherent incapacities. To save themselves, therefore, they reaffirm anew the invidious ideals of a bygone social economy, and appeal to a persisting snobbism to offset their own growing desuetude. So they complain about the elevation of going to college into an “inherent right” and about the droves of undergraduates whose heedless ways cut deep into “the serious purpose” for which college exists. II But if a new “inherent right” has been born into the world, if undergraduate life is in conflict with the “serious purpose” of higher education, the causes thereof are better understood and faced than ignored or belittled. For they are constant causes, and their scope and intensity do not lessen with the days. Though the colleges remain tangent to the realities, they have been far from untouched....