They are. Within the past three years the degeneration of every cultural activity has been persistently rapid. _The Lampoon_ alone resists, and it is marked by its satire on all the new movements. The Socialist Club was founded in 1909. Its boast that it included the active intelligence of the college was always a gross exaggeration, but it was in itself active and intelligent. This year it is practically dead; free, incisive thinking has gone out of fashion. The Dramatic Club started at about the same time with high ideals and even higher achievement. Its record for the past two years has been one of protracted failure. (There is some excuse; other organizations have taken some of its most talented actors.) The activity is too “detached” for Harvard men of the brave new stripe. Even more disastrous has been the career of _The Harvard Monthly_—_The Atlantic Monthly_ of the colleges—which was founded about thirty years ago and has had on its boards such men as George Santayana, Professor George P. Baker, Robert Herrick, Norman Hapgood, and a host of other distinguished men. It always lacked popular appeal, but there were always enough men at Harvard to produce a superior magazine and almost enough readers to make the production worth while. Within the last few years it has been found almost impossible to keep the _Monthly_ going, and its dissolution is imminent. It may combine with _The Advocate_, another paper of other ideals, once graced with infinite wit, now failing because that too is out of fashion. It is possible that these activities may revive, that succeeding generations will take up the slack. That is the work of individuals. The creation of a receptive body is the work of the college, and that has been forgotten.
And if you ask what the Harvard man is doing, what he is talking about, while these activities are being ruined before his eyes, the answer is not merely as Mr. Stearns gave it, that the Harvard man talks smut. So do most other men. The terrible thing is that the Harvard man talks very little else that is worth listening to. Lectures, cuts, assignments, exams, and shows; baseball, daily news (a mere “Did you see that?” conversation), steam engines; girls, parties, class elections, piffling nonsense—that is the roster of the college man. I am terribly conscious of the intolerable stupidity of “intellectual” conversation; I do not wish that conversation at college should consist of nothing but considerations of the Fourfold Root. But it does seem rather unfortunate that the men who are, theoretically, to be the leaders of the next generation, should never talk or think about art, should have _no_ interest in ideas, should be ignorant of philosophy and impatient of fine thinking, should use their own tongue as a barbarous instrument, should be loud and vulgar of speech, commonplace in manner, entirely lacking in distinction of spirit and mind.