“Enthusiasm!” repeated Garvin, “it was ten miles away that night. Just a handful of students, lonesomely huddled in the first few rows of seats and behind them a lighted vacancy. I tell you, Priddy, the students aren’t interested very much in pure scholarship: even many of the men who are here for a serious purpose.” “Then why do they come here, Garvin, tell me that?” I demanded. “For an education, Priddy.” “But how can they secure an education unless they are solicitous about scholarship, Garvin?” “Oh, I see what is the matter, Priddy. You imagine that because so many of us aren’t interested in scholarship, pure scholarship, we aren’t interested in education. Education and scholarship are two very different things.” “How do you argue that?” “You have the old-fashioned idea of a college,” continued Garvin. “What do you mean?” “The old New England college: the representative college of olden days, injected a love of books and the wisdom of books in their students: reams of the classic poets and prose writers: encyclopædic furnishings of the mind with the contents of a few good, stimulating books. Those were the hey-days of pure scholarship. They have existed here: but we students, today, are illustrations of an evolution in educational ideals, even if most of us don’t seem to realize it. We represent the changed temper of higher education. If I may phrase, offhand, my idea of the change,--it is that the older generation considered pure scholarship, in itself, the central aim of a college course, and to an ideal of that sort, Scholarship Nights, Phi Beta Kappas, and all such educational fashions were not only in keeping but were producers of tremendous enthusiasms. On the other hand, what seems to me to lie in the heart of the students now is the demand for scholarship,--plus _accomplishment_. It is due, no doubt, to the practical turn of the world during the last few years. I am interested mightily in scholarship when it helps towards actual accomplishment: when like a gold coin it purchases something; unlike the old notion that scholarship was a gold or silver medal, good only to decorate or dignify the person, or to be kept on exhibition.” “Are you sincere in that, Garvin?” I demanded. “If so, you should write it out in editorials, for the criticism of the professors: if you could substantiate it by concrete facts.” “Concrete facts, Priddy! Why, it would carry us into the small hours of the morning if I were to begin their enumeration. Take Ellis, for instance. You tell me that he went into the medal contest to vindicate the athletes. There is one example of the coin of scholarship purchasing something: one concrete expression of the student interest in scholarship when it leads to something practical and concrete. Can you imagine Ellis going into a literary contest that would wind up in itself, without relation to something practical to be gained by it?” “No.”