Visitor

"A thoughtful student from the London School of Economics" spent five months journeying through the U. S. He stopped at colleges and universities--colleges for men, for women, for men and women, for groes,' for Indians, for divines, for business men, for lawyers--30 institutions in all. At first he was staggered by the diversity of the sights he saw. Then, gradually, he formulated comprehensive ideas about U. S. education. When he returned, lately, to England, he said to his countrymen:

"The visitor from Europe cannot fail to be amazed at two features in the American college system: first, its extreme newness and tremendously rapid growth; and second, its accessibility, at any rate as compared with England, to the sons and daughters of the mass of the people. . . .

"But when the boy gets in, he receives something entirely different from what is known as a university education in Europe. He gets, not so much an insight into ways of thinking and methods of reasoning, not so much a background of culture, as a training in 'leadership,' 'citizenship' and 'character.' This may be a desirable thing at the present point of development of the United States, but it is something quite distinct from the European conception of a university.

"The student not only gets something different, but he expects something different. In England you go to the university to develop yourself, while in America you go to the university to distinguish yourself. There you have a whole world of difference. In America a boy is always endeavoring to attain some outward sign of achievement--to make the college paper, to make one of the clubs or fraternities, to make the football team. The centre of gravity is in the world of action far more than in the world of thought.

"You get the same tendency echoed in the academic sphere. I was struck by the excellence, the vigor and the competence with which affairs relating to the world of action are handled. I found that everyone could use a typewriter and drive an automobile. I found that drives for money were made on a vast scale and with a success undreamed of in England. I found that the applied sciences, such as medicine and engineering and agriculture, and the vocational studies, such as law. are at their best taught (and learned!) far better than anywhere in England. But when it came to what one may call by contrast the world of thought, quite the opposite was the case. Pure science and the purely cultural subjects, such as classics and literature and art, are absolutely inferior in most cases, and usually neglected. The situation in regard to them is either tragic or comic. Accordingly, although one meets students who obviously show promise of becoming great engineers, great doctors, captains of industry and so forth, one rarely if ever meets a student who seems destined to become a Darwin, a Beethoven, a Shelley.

"One of the main reasons why the American university system is not going the right way to produce men of genius in art and philosophy, pure science and literature, is because diversity of character is not encouraged but suppressed; for genius is the flower of exceptional diversity. Let me explain how this suppression is brought about.

"In the first place, you have the fraternity. A fraternity is a place where a number of young men invite other young men to join them on condition that they, too, become like themselves. The resulting intellectual stagnation is called a fraternity; and in these places there is no room at all for a man who is in any way different from his fellows. Any knobs on his character are quickly knocked off. . . .

"Then there are the badges and class distinctions which abound in America, the land where class distinctions are supposed not to exist. You can often tell from a man's appearance almost everything about him. At Leland Stanford (to take an example at random) sophomores wear white corduroy trousers, juniors wear small caps, seniors wear hard Mexican hats. At Oklahoma and elsewhere, engineers wear Stetson hats and lawyers carry canes; while the ubiquitous pins and buttons show which fraternity a man belongs to and where he met his girl. The "tyranny of categories" is pushed to an extreme point and has a very important effect in reducing the individual to a mere member of a category, and robbing him of his individuality to what I consider a dangerous extent. Add to this the absence of a reasonable amount of privacy in the life of the student, and you may see what I am driving at. The desire for privacy is regarded as bad form in American colleges; and the usual rule is that everybody's door must always be open for everybody to walk in or look in at random. In the fraternities in particular, the lack 'of privacy is a .special curse. The men all keep together, eat together, wash together, play together and sing together. In practice no one's door is ever closed, even if it is permissible in theory. . .

"It occurred to me that there is no real individualism whatever in America in the sense of there being a true diversity of character and personality. For this lack the university system is largely responsible."