ts main support upon a basis of the classics and mathematics,
which imparted a classic and mathematical rigidity to the whole
structure. The professor was an oracle, backed by oracular textbooks;
the student's activity was restricted by a traditional association of
learning with self-restraint and outward severity of life. The
revolutionary change came with the marvelous development of the
natural sciences, compelling radical readjustments of thought both
within and without the college, the quickening of the social life
about the campus, and the sharp division of interest, together with a
multiplication of courses which made the elective system inevitable.
The consequence was, as President Wilson states it, that a
"disintegration was brought about which destroyed the old college with
its fixed disciplines and ordered life, and gave us our present
problem of reorganization and recovery. It centered in the break-up of
the old curriculum and the introduction of the principle that the
student was to select his own studies from a great variety of courses.
But the change could not, in the nature of things, stop with the plan
of study. It held in its heart a tremendous implication;--the
implication of full manhood on the part of the pupil, and all the
untrammeled choice of manhood. The pupil who was mature and
well-informed enough to study what he chose, was also by necessary
implication mature enough to be left free to _do_ what he pleased, to
choose his own associations and ways of life outside the curriculum
without restraint or suggestion; and the varied, absorbing life of our
day sprang up as the natural offspring of the free election of
studies."[96]

=The development of emotions as well as the intellect a vital concern
of the college curriculum=

Into an academic life so constituted, art, music, and the drama must
perforce make their way by virtue of their appeal to those instincts,
always latent, which were now set in action. Those agencies by which
the emotional life has always been expressed and stimulated found a
welcome prepared for them in the hearts of college youths, stirred
with new zests and a more lively self-consciousness. But for a time
they met resistance in the supremacy of the exact sciences,
erroneously set in opposition to the forces which move the emotions
and the imagination, and the stern grip, still jealously maintained,
of the old conception of "mental discipline" and the communication of
infor