Education: Athens and Owls

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(See front cover)

In Wisconsin, last week, many things occurred. An owl floated like a shadow through the shadowy woods, an old man mumbled to himself as he looked at the hills, and far more important than either, in the town of Madison, near the blue mirror of Lake Mendota, a college opened. This was the Experimental College which President Glenn Frank of the University of Wisconsin had helped insurgent Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn, onetime President of Amherst, to organize near his own bizarre and tremendous apparatus for civilizing, if not educating, the gangling youth of the Northwest. It was one of the smallest of the many U. S. colleges which began their terms last week; still, as it seemed to many, its opening remained pre-eminently important among all the others.

Madison's State Street was noisy with shy, ridiculous freshmen and upperclassmen. Most of these individuals were students at the great University; precisely 269 were students at the Experimental College. Of the 269, 119 were second year students; they would spend the next nine months in learning about U. S. civilization, preparatory to entering the Junior class of the University of Wisconsin to take B. A. degrees. The rest were the College's second batch of freshmen. They, like the 119 before them, would try to find out about the fifth century B. C. and what happened, then, in Athens.

The Experimental College began last year; four years since, Dr. Meiklejohn had sensationally resigned his Amherst presidency and he has spent most of the interval teaching philosophy at Wisconsin. President Glenn Frank liked the idea of an experimental college and apparently supposed that the spectacled, brisk, eloquent pedagog was capable of putting it into effect. He gave him a quadrangle and authority; Dr. Meiklejohn called for 120 Wisconsin youths to enter his college that he might practice his notions upon them. His first class last year numbered 119 but, no rabid mathematician, Dr. Meiklejohn was content. He gathered his neophytes and said to them: "As a venture in friendship, the college has already succeeded."

Not everyone agreed with him but nobody could say last week that the college had already failed. In externals at least it seemed prosperous. The sophomores were already wearing neat coats emblazoned with the Athenian Owl. They had had published a little booklet, couched in the serious style of those who have lost their Ernest Hemingway in a Thornton Wilderness, to say how much they liked Dr. Meiklejohn and his informal friendly teachings; they had read Zimmern's Greek Commonwealth and Glotz's Ancient Greece at Work.