Harvard was a political and ecclesiastical rebel, but it has carried an English school tradition. In the late President Eliot it was almost a loyalty. With Mr. Lowell it may be an acute form of colonialism to which a part of New England is strangely and perversely addict. Hence, probably, the house idea at Cambridge which would cloister the young men in Boston suburb reproductions of Baliol, Magdalene, etc. There is an endowment available for one of them. A further projection of the idea is that the athletics of the university shall be principally contests between the houses, as at Oxford and Cambridge, with university matches only with Yale.

The idea lacks only seven centuries, an aristocracy, royalty, an established church, royal characters, religious persecutions, a list of martyrs, and a national temperament for the cloister in education, pedigreed restriction in competition, a desire to wear a gown as a muffler around the neck, and a determination to get rid of the cheer leaders without killing them.

When England builds a new university it does not reproduce Oxford or try to do so. The founders would be more apt to study the University of Illinois as containing what is relevant to modern life.

This is the observation of an editorial writer in the Chicago Tribune. Why he selected the University of Illinois rather than Chicago University, in the last sentence, is not clear.

It is an interesting comment. Harvard, 1636, the first college to be established in America, naturally followed the ideas of the old world and has never forgotten her heritage. Although rebellious at times, and always inclined, to the experimental in education, she has ever found the old ways better in the fundamental principles. The University of Chicago, founded upon Western ideas, is still an overgrown child, conscious of its own physical strength but lacking in the historical background, traditions, and heritage of the older American schools.

New England still holds her supremacy in the field of education, not because of accumulated wealth, reckoned in terms of the busy mart, but because she still maintains these old-fashioned ideas that centuries of experience have pronounced worth while.

And yet the two extremes are each modifying the other. Harvard is not so medieval as the Tribune editor would have us think and the great Western universities, with their curricula covering world knowledge and world experimentation, are not dissipating their efforts to the extent that New England pedagogues imagine.

We are inclined to believe that training in general literature, in world history, in the humanities if one prefers that term, did turn out a product that was educated to an enjoyment and appreciation of life that is the exception rather than the rule in the mass product of today. Today no student can hope to master any science, the laws of banking or the laws of trade. He can only touch the outer circle in medicine or law. The fields have become too large. If he attempts too much, he scatters his energies. If he concentrates too much, he becomes a specialist with narrow horizon or a cog in complicated machinery. Better the ability given by the old training, to master any subject, than a restricted knowledge of a single field.

Perhaps Harvard has discovered that the medieval made possible the modern and still has potential power. It is by a blending of the old and the new that true progress is made. To be dubbed "Victorian" is to be considered old fashioned, conservative, and even stagnant; to be classed as "medieval" implies unenlightenment, ignorance, and superstition. Yet "Victorian" and "medieval" also connote something fundamental and worth while in the shifting educational atmosphere of the present. Occasionally a term of derision becomes a symbol of strength and mental stability. Williams Alumni Bulletin