flexibility is involved in all growth.  The student community, is, after all, in most institutions the prime object of interest.  A few foundations exist for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, instruction being incidental; in most institutions, however, instruction is the foremost and absorbing function, and the student’s welfare is, therefore, the controlling factor.  In western colleges, where the edge of hunger for knowledge has not yet been dulled by opportunity, it is not an unknown thing for a committee of students to wait on a president or chancellor and announce the failure of some professor to prepare himself for recitations by fresh study of his subject.  It would be well if students in eastern colleges would sometimes put on a similar boldness; they would help heads of colleges out of very trying difficulties with well-meaning but incompetent or indolent professors.  Undergraduate popularity is often illusive and unstable, but undergraduate perception of incompetency is often very keen and discriminating.

But whether admitted to, or excluded from the government of the college, the student community plays a part not always recognized in its educational influence and work, and many men receive more influential impressions from the atmosphere in which they live and the men with whom they associate during their college career than from their instructors.  Nothing is so pervasive as an atmospheric influence, and, in its way, nothing is so important.  It is significant that foreign students rarely speak of Oxford without commenting on its atmosphere; something in the air of the old town which, although intangible in its operation, is a positive factor in the educational result.  Specific courses of instruction are less numerous than in many other places, and such instruction as is offered is often defective in methods and spirit; but the life of the place is adjusted to intellectual work; the library facilities are great, the traditions which seem to be part of the very structure of the colleges are liberalizing and make for generous culture.  In such an air it is easy to study by one’s own impetus and to develop in ourselves the passion for perfection.  Culture is so different from training or favoring the acquirement of knowledge that it is so often totally lacking in men who have carried both processes to great length; it is indeed rarely conveyed, though it may be greatly aided, by definite instruction.  It cannot be said of the great mass of college graduates that they are men of culture.  Culture comes, in a sense, by indirection, a man absorbs it and furnishes the conditions for its growth, but he cannot receive it directly from his teachers.  There are, in every college, teachers, who stimulate culture in students not so much by reason of their scholarship as by reason of their attitude toward what they know.  For culture is always a personal quality; a ripeness which comes from the generous enrichment of a man’s nature by contact with the best things.  In certain atmospheres men ripen, as in certain others they remain hard and unaffected.