at
every field has its valuable practical applications; to train the coming
generation of experts, and any country needs not only a handful of
distinguished leaders but a great body of well-trained men and women
who, when the emergency arises, stand ready to meet it; and last but not
least, to inspire a recognition of what scholarship is and a respect for
it in the minds of the general students, few of whom, by the most
generous stretch of the imagination, can be regarded as scholars
themselves, but whose influence in their generation throughout the
country is a very important factor. Our nation needs a respect for
expert knowledge and it needs a respect for intelligence, and our
college graduates can do more than any other group to develop this
respect.

* * * * *

We have taken up three of our four lessons as these affect the
university: the emphasis on youth, the need of mobilization and team
play, and the need of leadership. There remains the fourth factor, a
high, clear-cut aim.

The most serious charge against the American undergraduate in the past
has been the lack of a sense of responsibility. We now know from their
war records that the sense of responsibility lay latent in thousands of
these boys and was only awaiting an impulse sufficiently strong to
arouse it.

President Hibben of Princeton, who ought to know the American
undergraduate if anybody does, said recently: "Young men are capable of
far greater amounts of intensive work day in and day out than we had
dreamed of; capable of greater concentration of mind upon their tasks.
They respond more quickly than we have conceived to the call of duty.
The sense of responsibility is there latent, and we teachers must
endeavor to quicken and to appeal to it. We have seen that when the
occasion comes these young men rise to meet it."

We can't very well stage a world war for the purpose, and I don't think
we need wait for any such crisis to bring it out. There is in every
normal, wholesome-minded student some motor nerve that can be touched in
such a way as to release that type of coordinated energy which we call a
sense of responsibility. This all goes back to knowing our men and women
and establishing human contacts and human confidences.

In spite of individual disappointments, and as a college dean, I have
had my share, I am confident that the normal young American either
already possesses as a motive force some worth-whil