From the Academy

High upon the bluffs above the Missouri stands Park College, across the river from Kansas City. The old village of Parkville, and thousands of acres of woodland round the College, are an appropriate setting for this vigorous, venerable—for Missouri— and humane little Presbyterian institution. It is a healthy specimen of that uniquely American foundation, the small-town or rural liberal arts college, church-connected and tradition-governed.

At Park, the principal buildings, tall and massive stone halls, were erected by student labor over the generations. For Park, long dedicated to the Protestant ethic, has required since its beginning that all undergraduates, men and women, do some manual labor regularly on the campus. Only at one or two other colleges does this plan still endure, and it is weakening even at Park. In an age which is much afflicted with sentimental pity or admiration for The Workers, and which often prates vaguely of the Dignity of Labor, the actual relish for real work is dying away. “We must find our happiness in work, or not at all,” says Irving Babbitt; and though physical labor is not the only form of work, it seems to me that as exercise and discipline and economy, to have students labor physically for their college was and is a good scheme. Ruskin would have approved it.

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Russell Kirk

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High upon the bluffs above the Missouri stands Park College, across the river from Kansas City. The old village of Parkville, and thousands of acres of woodland round the College, are an appropriate setting for this vigorous, venerable—for Missouri— and humane little Presbyterian institution. It is a healthy specimen of that uniquely American foundation, the small-town or rural liberal arts college, church-connected and tradition-governed.

At Park, the principal buildings, tall and massive stone halls, were erected by student labor over the generations. For Park, long dedicated to the Protestant ethic, has required since its beginning that all undergraduates, men and women, do some manual labor regularly on the campus. Only at one or two other colleges does this plan still endure, and it is weakening even at Park. In an age which is much afflicted with sentimental pity or admiration for The Workers, and which often prates vaguely of the Dignity of Labor, the actual relish for real work is dying away. “We must find our happiness in work, or not at all,” says Irving Babbitt; and though physical labor is not the only form of work, it seems to me that as exercise and discipline and economy, to have students labor physically for their college was and is a good scheme. Ruskin would have approved it.