Wellesley, seniors isolate themselves from their classmates by living a mile away, in the village, in order to be in freshmen houses and pass down the traditions; they hold meetings in the smaller private houses in which Freshmen lodge; they are consulted by Freshmen on all sorts of problems, public and private, and the officers put their heads together in common council over difficult cases as gravely as the President of the United States might hold a cabinet meeting over a proclamation of war. From the student government president down, the sense of community responsibility grows to be a vital and pervasive concept, a hundred common occurrences of the day bringing it to the forefront.

Coming as I did from a small college, I have felt regret sometimes at never having had the training in administrative work which large student government and class organizations now give in colleges. Meetings are conducted always with strict regard for parliamentary procedure, so that students are sent forth equipped to take their part, in orderly fashion, in community affairs. Students become acquainted familiarly with the symbols through which organized life everywhere expresses itself. The work of the College Settlements Association within the colleges, so enthusiastically cherished there, I need not speak of, except as one more force, and that a potent one, to unite women in the service of community interests.

What the college is doing today, as Mr. Crothers so happily points out, is to enforce upon women that the idea of the family as a center is capable of extension; that the methods of cooperation which have made the family the strong unit in human evolution are capable of extension. The family stands for the idea of the protecting and uplifting of the weak, the fostering of children by parents, of the aged by their children; of common service, common devotion, of lending a hand all around as exigencies demand. More and more that which has been woman's work, the conserving element in the family, is felt by college women to be her work still; only, good-housekeeping is seen now inevitably to extend beyond the four walls of the individual dwelling. This is the present day service of the college-to give its women larger basic conceptions; not to take them out of the home, but rather to make manifest the endlessly wide ramifications of the home for common health and common well-being.

Through initiating women into the corporate life, and making

them its more efficient servants by training them to good team work, through the quickening knowledge of the sociological endeavor making for a richer community life today, through training that floods into the colleges in administrative machinery and its forms, the college of today sends forth women who are not merely idealists dreaming of the urbs beata, but in sympathy and point of view and sensitiveness of humanity ready to be active citizens of it. I conceive that no woman who has tasted the fellowship of college and its undreamed of generosity of thought can ever live so narrow or self-encrusted a life in her interests or use of money, or in her estimate of what constitutes private or public worth, as she might have lived had she not gone to college, had she not discovered the high freedom and the responsibility of the corporate life.

THE CONTROL OF STUDENT LIFE

MARY BIDWELL BREED

Adviser of Women, University of Missouri

The purpose of this paper is to consider, as frankly and as carefully as may be, the control of social life in state universities, and especially from the point of view of the women students and their interests. If there be any value in what I have to say, it is due to the fact that I speak from first hand knowledge; and, as my hearers must accept the limitations of my experience, I the more willingly accept the necessary limitation of my subject, and leave out of account the questions arising in women's colleges and in smaller instituitons generally. But, on the other hand, if it is true-as I think it is that the two most serious present problems in regard to the life of students are the problem arising from mere size and quantity, and the problem of the status of women in the higher institutions of learning, then the subject of this paper ought to have peculiar interest; for in the great coeducational universities both these problems are presented for simultaneous solution.

Let us, then, consider the social conditions in a large state university, and what there is to be controlled. The most characteristic feature of social conditions in a state university, aside from the fact of coeducation itself, is the student boarding house. Halls of residence exist at a few institutions; but there is no attempt, even where these exist, to provide for all the students in buildings controlled by the university. The Greek letter organizations usually occupy chapter houses managed by themselves, and there is a tendency for Christian Associations and clubs to rent, or own, houses for residence purposes. But in general the students live in scattered boarding houses, which in the most favorable conditions approximate to family conditions, but are often mere barracks.

A stranger in the middle-western university is perhaps most impressed by a second characteristic: Social democracy here is a condition, not a theory; and the student body is recruited from every walk in life, from homes of culture, and from homes almost illiterate. In most universities the greater number of students

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come from farms or small country towns; many of them grew up on land that was "claimed" by father or grandfather. Comparatively few are pure Anglo-Saxon; very many show a mixture of races. The girl descended from our colonial governors finds her social or academic rival in a dainty, fluffy belle whose grandfather was a peasant of the Continent of Europe. These things it is well to remember when we begin to discuss social culture and control, the graces and amenities of social life.

Nearly all of these students come from coeducational high schools, and show the somewhat precocious sophistication that too many such high schools engender. Ingenuousness is not included in the all-inclusive curriculum of the coeducational high school. One must recognize the advantages to a girl of having a sane, comradelike attitude toward young men; but one often sees a further development beyond the comrade stage. Too many girls are accustomed to a degree of personal familiarity with young men that in any other country would be unsafe-nay, disastrous. To determine how and why the crude familiarities of Tommy Atkins and his sweetheart should have penetrated in this country into social strata far above Tommy's would be an interesting social study. It is already a social fact that a large class of American girls, especially in the Middle West, is today demonstrating something new under the sun-that a certain grace and social ease, a serene self respect and an interest in intellectual things can be combined, in one person, with a code of conduct that would ordinarily be taken most charitably as evidence of coarseness and vulgarity. I pass over the occasional disasters that come to prove that men and women remain men and women, even after we have decided there never was such a thing as the Garden of Eden. And meanwhile, those of us who are old-fashioned are thankful that there are still girls and mothers who see that a practise may be degrading although it stops short of being immoral. But as the student body contains girls of every sort, so it contains very many with this twentieth century standard of conduct. I trust I am not overstating the case when I say that, on the whole, it is the less dignified code that makes headway against the older one, and that the Freshman is more apt in this respect to relax than to stiffen when she comes into the student world.

But it is not necessary to elaborate on this theme; it is only necessary to suggest it to the memory of an observant person in touch

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with present conditions. Such an one will admit, I am sure, that the university, as it is in loco parentis, must deal with a problem that lies heavily upon the thoughtful parent, and deal with it in an aggravated form, on a large scale.

You may say this is not a university question. Ten years ago perhaps it was not, but conditions in coeducation are changing. The old type of "co-ed," whose purpose was work, now occupies the background in university life. She goes on her quiet way, strong in numbers, but inconspicuous. On the other hand, every observer knows that the girl who goes to college "for a good time" is rapidly multiplying, even in the hard-working Middle West. The Middle West does work hard. To an impartial spectator, one of the most striking differences between the students in the East and in the West is the amount of time they put in over books. The average western student would be a grind in any eastern college. But into this grinding group of students enters the butterfly, the girl who goes to college to make her debut. She has the money, the wardrobe, the leisure to play her part. She joins a group of other debutantes, and they find plenty of young men to help form a miniature Vanity Fair. Writers on our educational system comment on the superseding of the old aristocratic ideas in education by the characteristically American idea of giving every man the education he wants-or rather, of giving as many sorts of education as there are men. But here is a new development of the democratic idea. The university is to be a social stalking ground. It is to be fitted up as a tree convenient for the operations of the climber. The girl from the thinly settled states, from the farm or the ranch or the small town, comes up to be initiated into a sorority and to dance six nights in the week; just as another girl, far away, comes up to make her bow before Royalty and to whirl through a London season. But the first girl's mother stays at home and economizes and wears her eyes out over embroidered frocks. And the girl stays as long as her money holds out, and then goes to teach in a place where good times are infrequent. Finally she marries back into the farm or village, and settles down to her telephone, church bazaars, and flinch parties. But she had her good time once, and knows that other girls are having theirs now. Indeed, the university student body has, in ever increasing numbers, girls of her type; and their doings-who does not know them? Who does not see and hear them by day and by night? There is a phrase that I always