In a special article to the Herald-Tribune, Miss Mildred Adams discusses in detail the aims and methods of the new Department of Psychology at Brown University, and of the new course in psychology to be given at the University next year by Dr. Morton Prince '75. The article follows in part:

The mental, spiritual and emotional needs of students are to become matters for psychological study at Brown University. With this announcement, made last week by President W. H. P. Faunce, Brown joins a movement that, since the war, has been quietly spreading among the most progressive colleges of the country. If it develops as it has started this movement may have a marked influence on our future as a people. It is called "mental hygiene" and deals with the mental perturbations, emotional ups and downs, the behavior--in and out of class of college students.

For some ten college generations there has been increasingly competent provision for the physical health of students. Yet in spite of gymnasiums and compulsory athletics, physical examinations and infirmaries, certain ills continued. Each term some students would "break down" for no apparent reason. The Dean's office would be overcrowded with men whose delinquencies were the despair of their professors. Too many students, hand-picked for scholarship, failed through some hidden cause no physical examination could uncover. Once in a tragic while a student crime brought publicity of an unwelcome kind and awakened in the public mind a distrust of all colleges.

Sin Demands Study

Presidents, deans and students' boards wrestled with the problem, lectured and scolded and disciplined, knowing their measures inadequate but doing their best. Then the psychiatrist offered his services, and it began to be apparent that these outbreaks of "original sin" were really problems of personality demanding the skill of men trained in the tangled ways of mental and emotional disturbances.

Brown University will formally begin its work in mental hygiene when the fall term stants. The work will be done under the medical department, of which Dr. Alexander M. Burgess is head. Dr. Arthur H. Ruggles, head of the Butler hospital, will organize the work, and associated with him will be Dr. Charles A. MacDonald of the Harvard Medical School and Dr. Paul Ewerhardt.

Not Pseudo-Science

President Faunce points to the human helpfulness of the new department. "This movement," he says, "is not to be confused with a kind of pseudo-science, morbidly interested in dissecting the student's mind rather than in helping a human being. The chief troubles of students as of all young people lie deeper than the mere physical. Students struggle with fears, repressions and other obstacles that are revealed to very few even of those who know them best. They come to college and are faced at once with the necessity of readjusting their lives to a new set of traditions, a new perspective. They need help in that very delicate task.

"Few persons comprehend the problems of adolescence. Youth is blamed instead of understood. Many of our problems of discipline and punishment need understanding, sympathy, psychological aid. The swift changes in the industrial order in the last twenty years have meant equally swift changes in the social order, and lives must be adjusted to meet them. Even older people are dazed, and too often young people are thrown completely off their balance."

Change Hard on Young

Dr. Faunce, who was a Baptist minister before he became President of Brown, spoke of the students need for spiritual guidance. He said that the change in standards of belief, the spiritual unrest of the age, is particularly hard on young people, and that he has known more than one case of breakdown from a warring of old beliefs against new teachings; an inability to think things through and arrive at an acceptable solution. Brown is calling a new spiritual counselor in the person of the Rev. O. T. Gilmore.

Dr. Arthur H. Ruggles, who is to organize the Brown work in mental hygiene, has been consultant in mental hygiene at Yale. His job, as he describes it, is "an endeavor to synthesize the whole human being, to insure the functioning of the whole individual." He says that body and mind, nerves and emotions must all be working together in karmony if a man or a woman is to live and work efficiently. There must be no hidden fears no gnawing worries, no black depressions or hysterical gayety.

Yale Men Examined

In most of the colleges that have realized this need the psychiatrist gives lectures in mental hygiene and acts as consultant for all sorts of student perplexities. Frequently he works under the department of health and has the complete cooperation of that department. At Yale all students receive thorough physical examinations and intelligence tests when they enter. So when a student consults Dr. Ruggles, whether he comes of his own accord or is sent by a member of the Faculty, he is preceded by the records of his physical condition and of his mental equipment.

"The thing we are particularly interested it: is the clearing up of what look like simple troubles before they have had a chance to get complicated," said Dr. Ruggles. "We want to teach the ways and the habits of mental and emotional health. If we can do that we may be able to prevent that most tragic waste; the breakdown of a finely trained mind."