"Now and again," one young man told me, with a sardonic smile, "we get a country boy who eats with his knife. He may be a mighty good sort, but he isn't civilized. When a fellow like that comes along, we take him in hand and tell him that, aside from the danger of cutting his mouth, we have certain peculiar whims on the subject of manners at table, and that it is better for him to eat as we do, because if he doesn't it makes him conspicuous. Inside a week you'll see a great change in a boy of that kind."
Not only is the cost to the student low at the University of Kansas, but the cost of operating the university is slight. In the year 1909-10 (the last year on which I have figures) the cost of operating sixteen leading colleges in the United States averaged $232 per student. The cost per student at the University of Kansas is $175. One reason for this low per capita cost is the fact that the salaries of professors at the University of Kansas are unusually small. They are too small. It is one of the reproaches of this rich country of ours that, though we are always ready to spend vast sums on college buildings, we pay small salaries to instructors; although it is the faculty, much more than the buildings, which make a college. So far as I have been able to ascertain, Harvard pays the highest maximum salaries to professors, of any American university--$5,500 is the Harvard maximum. California, Cornell, and Yale have a $5,000 maximum. Kansas has the lowest maximum I know of, the greatest salary paid to a professor there, according to last year's figures, having been $2,500.
Before leaving New York I was told by a distinguished professor in an eastern university that the students he got from the West had, almost invariably, more initiative and energy than those from the region of the Atlantic seaboard.
[Illustration: The campus seems to have "just growed."... Nevertheless there is a sort of homely charm about the place, with its unimposing, helter-skelter piles of brick and stone]
"Just what do you mean by the West?" I asked.
"In general," he replied, "I mean students from north and west of Chicago. If I show an eastern boy a machine which he does not understand, the chances are that he will put his hands in his pockets and shake his head dubiously. But if I show the same machine to a western boy, he will go right at it, unafraid. Western boys usually have more 'gumption,' as they call it."