THE DIPLOMATIC GESTURE

The final week of college brings bandstands and graduates and pulchritude to the Yard. It makes new graduates out of time-honored students and it annually imports a certain select group of great men to be graced with new titles and immediately released to the world even fuller-fledged legends than before they came. For this is the time when academic sanctity deserts the cloisters of the American college, and when the square-cut military jaw or the hardened business countenance is to be seen under the mortar board of the Doctor of Letters. Generals, statesmen, merchants, lawyers, and engineers have their innings. They hear a few well-chosen words recounting their achievements and receive a few more letters which they will never use after their names.

For it is unlikely that Mr. Elihu Root will ever use or refer to his degree from the University of Bucnos Ayres, or from any one of the twenty-one other universities who have honored him with a degree. Nor does it seem likely that the University will lose much of its prestige or reputation through the accident which brings Gustavus Adolphus. Crown-Prince of Sweden, to Cambridge today instead of next Thursday. It is more a gesture than a service or a reward, it is a fitting part of the great American passion for gestures.

As such it would be but harm! and a little diverting. But as in several other things, this nation carries many of its passions to extremes. The same popular Hero-worship that endows a shrewd financier with the halo of a gold-dispensing. Maecenas only too often gives a successful murderer all the attributes of a Nietzschean superman. And the American university would often be just as logical in giving an honorary degree to the wizard with a sawed-off shotgun as it is in bestowing its academic laurels on a merchant prince. That public opinion is a shallow wench whose favors are as easily won with gold as with merit is a platitude which American universities have too often failed to appreciate.

Some sort of recognition of public services by educational institutions lies at the basis of the raison dietre of all higher education. It is not until a university can in some such way establish a vital relationship with the community in which it exists that it will thrive. And the value of an academic degree is very little lessened by its award to a man whose achievements are not to be listed in the academic category. But as soon as such non-academic achievements are accepted on the standard of popular favor, the game becomes not diverting but ridiculous, and a little bit dangerous. Diplomacy is better applied elsewhere than in the awarding of diplomas.