Parents Accountable

PARENTS ACCOUNTABLE.

The Bad Traits of Some College Students Traced Home.

To the dean of a large college, who has most to do with students and their parents in all academic sorrows, says Le Baron R. Briggs, dean of Harvard college, in the January Atlantic, it soon becomes clear that parents are accountable for more undergraduate shortcomings than they or their sons suspect, and this after liberal allowance for faults in the college and its officers. "I have spent an hour today with Jones' father," said a college president in a formidable ''case of discipline." "I have conceived a better opinion of the son after meeting the father," and the experience is repeated year by year. Five minutes or two minutes with a father or a mother may reveal the chief secret of a young man's failure or misconduct and may fill the heart of an administrative officer with infinite compassion. "You say he gambles," says a loud, swaggering father. "Well, what of it? Gentlemen always play cards." "I told my boy," says a father of a different stamp, "that I did not myself believe in [what is commonly called "vice"], but that if he went into that sort of thing he must not go off with the crowd, but must do it quietly in a gentlemanly way."

Hereditary and home influence less palpable but quite as pervasive and nearly as demoralizing is that of the trivially biographic mother who, while a dozen men are waiting at the dean's office door, assures the dean that her son, now on trial for his academic life, "was a lovely baby," and who, so to speak, grows up with him then and there, tracking him step by step, with frequent countermarches, to his present station, or of the father who is tickled by the reminiscences of his own youth that are evoked when his son is caught stealing a poor shopkeeper's sign, or of the father who suggests that the college should employ at his expense a detective against his son, or of the father who at a crucial moment in the life of a wayward son goes to Europe for pleasure (though, to do him justice, he has been of little use at home), or of the father who argues that his son's love of drink cannot be hereditary, since he himself straightened out before his son was born.