A dozen years pass, and the institution wants to become respectable.  It is just as with the individual:  the man, at first, is absorbed in money-getting, and when he has it, yearns for respectability.  Now getting respectable, for a college or university, is called “raising the standard of scholarship.”  Let this not be misunderstood:  painstaking, infinitely laborious, accurate scholarship is a noble aim, well worth the consistent effort of a lifetime; but there are two sides to raising the standard of scholarship.  Does an educational institution exist for the sake of its reputation, or to serve its constituency?  If it seeks to advance its reputation at the expense of its fullest and best service to those who need its help, is it not recreant to its duty and opportunity?

Well, in the mood cited, the institution raises and standardizes its entrance-requirements and generally excludes special students.  One readily sees why:  it is much easier to work with the regularly prepared freshman, he fits much more smoothly and comfortably into the machinery of the institution.  Many a wise teacher will admit, nevertheless, that the best students he ever taught and the ones whose lives he is proudest of having influenced, were often men and women, thirty, forty, fifty years of age—­teachers who suddenly realized that the ruts of their calling had become so deep they could no longer see over them, ministers awakening to the fact that they had given all their store and must get a new supply, business men aware of a call to another field of action—­ working with a consistent earnestness the average fledgling freshman cannot imagine—­he is not old enough; yet generally the tendency is to exclude such students, unless they will go back and do the arduous, and often for them useless, work of preparing to pass the examinations for entrance to the freshman class.  That, too, is all wrong.

The American college and university stands to-day at the parting of the ways:  this generation will largely determine its future.  If the American college and university ever becomes a social club for the sons and daughters of the rich, an institution making it easy for them to secure business and professional opportunity and advancement, to the exclusion of their poorer fellows, it may be as necessary to disestablish the foundations of our great universities, as statesmen in Europe thought it necessary to disestablish the monastic foundations at the close of the middle age.  They, too, began as educational institutions.  If, on the other hand, the American college and university remains true to its task, if it keeps its doors open and its spirit democratic, if it seeks to render ever larger service to the great public and to develop moral leadership for American democracy, then, indeed, it will go ever forward upon its noble path.

XXI

DEMOCRACY AND SACRIFICE