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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2011
The American college is a picturesque, a unique, a very vital community. Students are not out of the world—a college is not a monastery; yet it is a world of its own, with peculiar objects and traditions, with a distinct atmosphere. The catalogue shows a curriculum, a faculty, a few hundred names, and the college would seem to be lectures, study, recitations. But around all that and including it, the college is a great fraternity, a mystic circle, a cult. It is Alma Mater, a glorified personality.
1 The professional schools of a university are not included in this inquiry. College boys have there become men, and, while there is some acquaintance with students of the college, their main interests are different from the interests of undergraduates. My own experience has been gained in Amherst College, of which I was President from 1899 to 1912. It has no professional or graduate schools, is not a university, but simply a college.
