“Many of you here today are about to begin your college course, and there is no department of the good life in which the Law of Increasing Returns applies with greater accuracy than to the student life of an American college. A great number of subjects are open to your choice, all of them potential sources of delight. If you find them dull, it will be because you bring dullness with you. The danger that confronts you is not the danger of bad subjects, but the more insidious danger of too many good subjects which by their diverse attractions distract the mind and prevent significant attainment of any single line.
The curriculum teems with good courses; the newspapers are crowded with news of importance; the magazines of each month contains at least one article so good that if it were written in terms of the life of some ancient city in whose long buried ruins an archaeologist had discovered it, it would be hailed as a classic worthy of study by generations of schoolboys. We suffer, in short, from an embarrassment of riches. The modern American college is too often a failure because it does not impart to the student anything that will stick to the ribs of his memory and retain real significance ten years after graduation. As I see it, our failure is due, not to the diabolism of the modern youth, but rather to a simple and innocent mistake. We try to give him and he tries to take too many good things from the intellectual banquet that the college offers. The result is a potpourri, a melange, a goulash of diversified information impossible to be assimilated and therefore impossible to be remembered.
If you will but disregard all well-meaning advice to disperse your study over a wide field, and if you will take instead something like the highly unified course of study prescribed for students in the honors course at Oxford or Cambridge, then you will realize, if in no other way, the truth of the Law of Increasing Returns. And years after graduation you will find that you will know more of what you studied in college than when you were studying it. For whatever your chosen field may be, geology or German literature or mathematics or economics or any other of the many departments that are open to you, there will come a time, a magical moment in your scholastic life, when you will feel the body of concentrated, unified, and painfully acquired knowledge within you become suddenly quick and alive in its own right. From that moment your interest will lure you and tempt you to its further pursuit. You will have acquired an enthusiasm that will grow by what it feeds upon and be to you an ever mounting joy. Around that central interest as a nucleus, other interests will organize themselves, and the distractions of the college and the city, be they good or bad, will take their natural and subordinate place in the background of your life.
Wm. P. Montague”
