The former President of Amherst College explains in the November Harper's what he meant by asserting recently that the greatest danger confronting our colleges is that of being "drawn into the common life." But the prophets and apostles of the Ku Klux Klan propose to draw them in with a vengeance. Princeton is the latest to be told that she cannot remain "in her own little eddy of oblivion while the rising tide of the greatest moral and political movement sweeps by". This particular champion of the Klan, being a lady as well as a "bishop," is naturally strong on sweeping. She points to what she believes to be the evidence that the Klan is about to sweep through the colleges of the country as it has already swept through the masses of the people.

It is a wise observer who is competent to judge a movement among undergraduates. They are not always what they seem. Their faculty of burlesque and fun-making being what it is, they sometimes appear to attack themselves to freakish agitation or to reforms that are hard to distinguish from fads, merely out of the pure joy of mystifying their elders. Hence reports that students at Harvard or Princeton or elsewhere are caught indulging in the rites of the Klan, or in improvised imitations of them, may not mean more than that a few hilarious spirits are having their thing at a passing madness. The only thing which we can be sure of in regard to undergraduates at the season of the year is that they are giving most of their thoughts, labor and hope to football. Princeton students may or may not do a little skylarking with the Ku Klux Klan, but it is certain that they are not so much interested in the talk of the Klan sweeping the colleges as they are in the immensely more vital question whether the Princeton forwards will be able to sweep through the Harvard line. The New York Times