Indiana University - Arbutus Yearbook (Bloomington, IN)

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if A Memorial Stadium pay homage to the concrete and stone and athletic prowess and yearly output of the present. Lately there has been a great hue and cry about the growth of our University. The University is becoming too large! It is nothing but an educational fac- tory ! They ' re trying to sell learning by the yard ! — and many other such dire wails rise from the ranks of the erudite. We shudder to think of the awful possibilities attending the accumulation of any gen- eral knowledge by the hoi polloi. They might ridicule some of the intellectual idols and fetishes out of the tabernacle. There is a doctrinary difference between an American and a European uni- versity, just as much as there is a difference between the railroad trains, attitudes toward birth control, and the methods of eating spaghetti on the two continents. For, while the European university is typically a composite of colleges, a group of idea- tionally unrelated schools, the American university is so fundamentally one big, Prof. Paul McNutt Making Address [Page 20]

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I IT is a professional tradition of year-book editors that the object of their dreams and nightmares must have a theme. The idea seems to be that it should be some imperishable moral lesson, drawn from the trials and joys of a college year, as supposedly represented in the annual itself. With its notorious reluctance to violate convention, the 1925 Arbutus falls in line with the contemporary yearly eulogies and does its little bit by advancing the thought of the New I. U., the I. U. that doesn ' t take time to gaze idly adown the vistas of the years, in a vain search for questionable glory, but prefers to [Page 19]

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Washington Hall homogeneous institution that the meaning of the term university has been al- tered. And under the fine old precept of the will of the majority, this sort of university may rob the old one of its very name and call it a Scholarship Shop or Intellectual Inn, after the modem advertising fashion of exposition. There is, no doubt, cause for alarm in the educational trend, with its obvious glorification of the average student and disregard of bookishness and pedantry. Still it is the inevitable offshoot of a democracy, where the guiding principle is that the people know what is good for them. If they don ' t, they never appre- ciate hearing about it. It isn ' t the business of the 1925 Arbutus to advance any pros or cons on that interesting hypothesis. But this book was published on the honest conviction that Indiana University isn ' t half bad and that its policy of standardized service to the greatest number is much more its field than specialized stimulation for the few. 1 m [Page 21]