RADICALS IN COLLEGES.

The too common idea of colleges as "hot-beds of Bolshevism" indicates a popular failure to understand the most important function of a university. Above all, the undergraduate must learn to apply himself to his work and to choose between the various ideas and theories which are presented to him in the classroom and outside. It is all very well to protect the preparatory school youth from pernicious doctrines, but if the college student is to be guarded from the danger of standing on his own feet, it is hard to see how he is ever to learn to think for himself.

The chief trouble with our American colleges is not that they have too many radical thinkers; it is that they have not thinkers enough. To expel instructors from our faculties as "dangerous" to the youth of the nation, is not only to belittle the intelligence of undergraduates, it is to encourage a lack of intelligence. Agitators can be disproved better by analysis and argument than by force. Force is an acknowledgment of the failure of a better weapon. Discussion brings out what good there is in new ideas, and, if it is real discussion, shows up what is bad.

Colleges ought to be laboratories for experimentation in discussion and thought. Radicals are valuable to any college community because they challenge and make us justify the existing order. If radicals are needed to stir students from their lethargy, to make them think and analyze the important subjects of the day, let us have more of them, If they didn't exist the world would decay from too much self-satisfaction.