GOOSE STEP EAST AND WEST

So many new and excellent things have come out of the West that it seems quite unnecessary for Westerners to cover what must be a conviction of inferiority with continued examples of territorial pre-eminence, Western institutions and ideas, especially in the educational field, no longer require justification.

It is consequently somewhat surprising to read the expressed opinion of Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, president of Leland Stanford, if correctly quoted in the daily prints, to the effect that Western universities are superior to Eastern universities, because Eastern universities "isolate themselves with one type of mentality."

It is immediately obvious that when Dr. Wilbur says "university", he really means "college", for even a superficial examination of the personnel of Eastern graduate schools must show that their students are drawn not from one state or one class of society, but from all over the world; and that this cosmopolitanism must reflect itself in the thought of any given institution. There can hardly be any such thing as a single type of mentality.

As to Eastern colleges, Dr. Wilbur's point may be well made, although here too the same objection holds. It is certainly true that Eastern institutions, as he states, draw their students from a group of preparatory schools whose typical product remains essentially unchanged; but Dr. Wilbur has taken no notice of the large numbers of high school graduates who form the vast majority of all college groups, and whose mentalities must be at least as varied as those of the general population of the region from which they come.

Any comparison of Eastern and Western institutions to determine superiority seems unproductive, both because of the utter impossibility of reaching a decision, and because any such modern judgment of Paris would be rather less than unprofitable: and a comparison based on nothing more vital than a mistaken notion of mental cosmopolitanism seems particularly empty.