occupied at Oxford by the professors' lectures. In the colleges of
Canada and the United States the lectures are supposed to be a really
necessary and useful part of the student's training. Again and again
I have heard the graduates of my own college assert that they had got
as much, or nearly as much, out of the lectures at college as out of
athletics or the Greek letter society or the Banjo and Mandolin Club.
In short, with us the lectures form a real part of the college life.
At Oxford it is not so. The lectures, I understand, are given and may
even be taken. But they are quite worthless and are not supposed to
have anything much to do with the development of the, student's mind.
"The lectures here," said a Canadian student to me, "are punk." I
appealed to another student to know if this was so. "I don't know
whether I'd call them exactly punk," he answered, "but they're
certainly rotten." Other judgments were that the lectures were of no
importance: that nobody took them: that they don't matter: that you
can take them if you like: that they do you no harm.

It appears further that the professors themselves are not keen on
their lectures. If the lectures are called for they give them; if
not, the professor's feelings are not hurt. He merely waits and
rests his brain until in some later year the students call for his
lectures. There are men at Oxford who have rested their brains this
way for over thirty years: the accumulated brain power thus dammed
up is said to be colossal.

I understand that the key to this mystery is found in the operations
of the person called the tutor. It is from him, or rather with him,
that the students learn all that they know: one and all are agreed on
that. Yet it is a little odd to know just how he does it. "We go over
to his rooms," said one student, "and he just lights a pipe and talks