Middle Ages and Renaissance 245
opening day, our colonial colleges have included a large
proportion of young men with no professional or even serious
intentions. They have been complained of by their more
serious preceptors, these three hundred years. They have
committed every sort of folly and extravagance. New col-
leges have been founded, especially in the Middle West, in
order to provide a religious education for poor but pious
youths uncontaminated by the frivolous young men of Har-
vard, Yale, and Princeton—and in a few years’ time the same
class of students have flocked to the new colleges.
Doubtless there have been times, especially in the 1920’s,
when the gates were opened so wide, and standards of study
were set so low, that our colleges were inundated by young
barbarians of both sexes. The English and colonial colleges
always maintained sufficiently stiff admission requirements to
exclude young men incapable of profiting from university
learning, even when they admitted many who were unwilling
to drink at the Pierian spring. But, speaking broadly, the
pattern of the American undergraduate college was set in
England, in the sixteenth century, when the Arts course was
liberalized, and the resulting “gentlemen’s education” be-
came the normal course both for young men who intended to
study for the Church or other profession, and for those
whose parents desired only to expose their sons to learning—
to the bonae Iitterae inculcated by teachers whose pattern
was the learned, witty, and urbane Erasmus of Rotterdam.