"A cruel and unusual punishment has been meted out to the student mind at Bowdoin, New York University, and a Middle Western state university. . . . Elementary questions about the war, such as the location of Gallipoli and Saloniki, the identity of Venizelos, Viviani, Poincare, . . . were presented to certain college classes, with the result that Venizelos appeared as anything from a French general to a Mexican rebel. . . . The Dean of Bowdoin questions whether students of New England colleges are very steady newspaper readers. . . . The trouble is that if the proper names mean nothing, the reading is of limited good. The fault is in the student's own background. All these colleges are maintaining departments in modern history. . . . What are we to think of methods of teaching which shelve the present for the past, and of professors who imagine they are teaching history when four-fifths of their students do not know whether Winston Churchill or von Bethmann-Hollweg is Prime Minister of England?"--The New Republic.

Such is the established policy of weekly journals. Slam the undergraduate and especially slam the professor. Woeful indeed is such ignorance. Yet those editors of this periodical who have taken History 1 in the University should know that if Gallipoli and Saloniki are unknown to students it is not the fault of the course. It is true that the earnest student is so swamped with work in learning what men have written in the past that he must largely defer until graduation the pleasanter task of reading what they are writing now. Even so, he grows while in college; and the senior usually is not such an unintellectual beast as the undergraduate is painted.

His shortcomings are many; and no alibi for him is possible or wholesome. A total unfamiliarity with names of places and persons prominent in the daily news is inexcusable. But it is too easy in the traditional way to blame the doctor for the condition of the patient. Unfortunately the Faculty cannot pursue the student to his study and guide his mental habits at all times. To jump at the conclusion that it is the instructor fault if history is not learned is more facile than profound.

And there is at least one sign of the undergraduate's regeneration: he is showing at Harvard a decided liking for the esteemed New Republic. Its sales and far outstripping those of its competitors at local newsstands. Crisp .