It will doubtless be conceded by fair-minded persons generally that in many institutions of North America athletics are being over-emphasized, even as in some institutions practical and scientific education is emphasized at the expense of liberal training. It is difficult, however, to generalize concerning either of these subjects. Opinion and judgment vary almost as widely as does the point of view from which persons note college conditions. A keen professor of one of the universities where athletics too largely usurped the time and attention of students, justifiably summed up the situation by saying: The man who is trying to acquire intellectual experience is regarded as abnormal (a “greasy grind” is the elegant phrase, symptomatic at once of student vulgarity, ignorance, and stupidity), and intellectual eminence falls under suspicion as “bad form.” The student body is too much obsessed of the “campus-celebrity” type,--a decent-enough fellow, as a rule, but, equally as a rule, a veritable Goth. That any group claiming the title _students_ should thus minimize intellectual superiority indicates an extraordinary condition of topsyturvydom. During the last twelve months, however, I have talked with several hundred persons, including college presidents, professors, alumni, and fathers and mothers in twenty-five States and provinces of North America in relation to this question. While occasionally a college professor as well as parent or a friend of a particular student has waxed eloquent in dispraise of athletics, by far the larger majority of these representative witnesses have said that in their particular region athletic exercises among students were not over-emphasized. [Illustration: University Hall, University of Michigan] Yet it is evident that college athletics in America to-day are too generally limited to a few students who _perform_ for the benefit of the rest. It is also apparent that certain riotous and bacchanalian exercises which attend base-ball and foot-ball victories have been very discouraging features to those who are interested in student morality. In another chapter I shall treat at some length of these and other influences which are directly inimical to the making of such leadership as the nation has a right to demand of our educated men. In this connection, however, I wish to throw some light upon the student side of the athletic problem, a point of view too often overlooked by writers upon this subject.