A Western professor arises to point out that it is unnecessary to become alarmed over the excessive intellectualism of our college students. The Chicago incident has left a large and lurid trail across the newspapers, but speaking roughly (as they so often seem to-do out there) almost anything is possible in Chicago. The professor is much more concerned over that vast and impassive army which fills the colleges everywhere, but which appears so stolidly to resist any impression on the intellect at all; and in his remarks one catches a sudden sense of the dismay with which the teaching profession must have heard the suggestion that our young men are over weighted with brains. There are so very many of them who do not speak fifteen languages.

It has seldom been a difficulty of the colleges that their students think too much, and the capacity of the average undergraduate to withstand information is one of his most engaging, if also his most exasperating, characteristics. But it is not quite enough to score him off on that account as a "bonehead". It is partly at least the failure of a traditional form of education to impress him with its value. It seems almost a fault in the colleges that they are so organized as to impress upon the freshman that scholastic achievement doesn't get him anywhere, and it is almost a virtue in the freshman that he so successfully acts on that verdict.

It was not the fact that they were so highly educated which destroyed those unpleasant young men in Chicago, but precisely the fact that theft colleges failed to educate them at all. They read the books, but they did not grasp the idea. A large majority of undergraduates also do not grasp the idea the difference is that they don't read the books. The results are far less dramatic, but they are, as the professor points out, even more serious because they are so much more widespread. New York Tribune.