FOR FEWER COLLEGE FAILURES

In yesterday's New York Times Dr. Frankwood E. Williams, Medical Director of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, is quoted as laying the blame of student collapses to college authorities. Dr. Williams emphasizes a very delicate educational problem Mal-adjustments, abnormalities, and unbending regulations, result in extreme cases, in insanity and suicide and, in more common instances, in the warping of a man's entire mental balance.

Colleges exist for the normal individual, and although they sometimes admit those that are far from normal, they make no provision for any personal eccentricities. They weed out those who are not adjusted to their scale by the very strictness of their rulings. The average student does not realize that there are many men in college who suffer from morbidness and emotionalism of all sorts. They are round pegs in square holes, and the college lifts no finger to aid them.

Supposedly a college is a place of enlightenment, an institution that will further mental development. Unfortunately it carries its educational inspiration only a limited way at present, and leaves many unaided who only need careful and thoughtful handling to bring them safely through. Psychiatrists say it is quite possible to readjust these fewer and more nervous temperaments, to warp the rules rather than the minds of those who do not conform to them. As yet no mental hygiene expert has been given the necessary, authority by a college office, and only the normal temperament is properly developed in the large American universities.