The effect was irresistible. It was like the changing of a current in an electric battery. The eyes of the cadets, despite the fact that they were at attention, sought the eyes of their fellows; their faces relaxed, then broke into a smile. By the time they reached the mess-hall the whole corps was laughing, and their sense of humor had swept away the sense of anger and pride. This was the beginning of the restoration of the traditional West Point discipline. The campus had spoken to the classroom. “GROWN-UP” COLLEGIANS It is through an understanding of this spirit of the campus that the work of American undergraduates can be adjusted to modern demands. The work of the classroom and examination-hall makes for democracy, while the social life of the college makes for conservatism and aristocracy. Campus life is increasingly difficult to understand because of its growing complexity. The material needs of our time have created a class of undergraduates bent on becoming specialists, and these men have increasingly less time for either college work or college life; for them the undergraduate course is something to be hurried through as a short cut to professional efficiency. Even athletics and college affairs have only a slender hold upon these utilitarian specialists. They have a “grown-up” look on their faces as, eager for scientific research, they rush to and fro between their rooms and their laboratories. Undergraduate life is now likewise influenced by the influx of students who are not the sons of college men, but who come from homes the chief ideals of which have been derived from counting-rooms and laboratories, from brokers’ and railroad offices. These students, scions of a property-getting class, in conjunction with the social and the scientific students in college, help to change the classical traditions. They emphasize the campus side of college life more than that of the lecture-room. Their eyes are upon the stadium rather than upon the library; the delights of scholarship influence them less than ambition for leadership and the importance of “making good” in student affairs. They are in college for “popular” reasons, and too often fail to learn how to think. But they are eager, versatile, adaptable, with a ready capacity for social adjustment and modern expression. COSMOPOLITAN LIFE AT COLLEGE Furthermore, the student world has been subdivided until it is a wholly different thing from what it was fifty or even twenty years ago. While in the seventies the college student knew every man in his class, in the large institution to-day an undergraduate will meet in the college yard scores of classmates who are perfect strangers, and to whom he has no more idea of speaking than to persons whom he has never seen before. The student who has been brought up always to dine in a dinner-coat will have for his table-companions men who have never owned a dress-coat and who see no immediate prospect of needing one.