sifted out
afterward, if they prove unworthy of their opportunity: not a bad
method, by the way.

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 univer