Disagreeable as these things are, they are inconsidered trifles beside the change of attitude which has taken place in regard to the serious work of the college. I cling, in spite of successive disillusions, to the belief that _the function of the college is to create a tradition of culture_: it is not to create gentlemen or scholars unless it can effect the combination of both, and it is certainly not to prepare men for success _in business_. Success in life is a different matter. College should not spoil a man for life; it should enable him to appreciate life, make him “able and active in distinguishing the great from the petty.” That is what culture means; and that is precisely what Harvard has decided not to do. Emphasis there has borrowed from emphasis everywhere. The advantage of President Lowell’s system of course grouping is that the undergraduate is no longer able to take 17 uncorrelated courses and achieve a degree; he must know a good deal about one thing at least. But aside from the obvious fact that a great many freshmen are incapable of choosing their life work and choose what is easiest for them, the group system has a terrible defect. It has come about that men choose their group from worthy or unworthy reasons and consider that they have acquired all the good of a college career if they have done creditable work in that particular group. The other courses are merely “fillers.” The majority of men are content to concentrate, to narrow their interests, and the whole meaning of college, which is to prepare the way for future enlargement of sympathies, has been lost. Figures cannot be cited for or against this assertion. But some tendencies now discernible at Harvard may be illuminating. First, the scholar has emerged. He has become respectable; he has also become a specialist, Economics, Government and the practical sciences being the favored groups. Second, there has grown up a great and loud contempt for the dilettante and æsthete. I hope these words will not be misunderstood. The dilettante at Harvard is any man who writes, thinks, talks well, is not particularly athletic and does not go to the moving-picture shows which have become the chief attraction at the Harvard Union. (This last, by the way, is not fantasy but fact; the “movie” has proved the great agent for class solidarity at Harvard). An æsthete at Harvard is one who has any diversity of interests and activities. At Harvard it is almost a crime to be interested in art, anarchism, literature, music, pageantry, dancing, acting; to write poetry or fiction, to talk English, to read French (except de Maupassant) for pleasure. Mr. Eric Dawson, whose article in _The Yale Lit_ I have already quoted, advises the Yale man to keep it darkly secret “if he cares for etchings, prefers Beethoven to Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and Meredith to Meredith Nicholson.” It is a terrible commentary on Harvard’s intellectual life that the words should be applicable now.