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A GREATER WORK at the beginning of the year and then pursued until completed. For many years after these changes were introduced, College periodicals routinely listed all the electives which individual students had chosen.108 There is little evidence that the students who enrolled at Gettysburg in the 1890s and early 1900s were dissatisfied with this limited elective system. Every alert college also had to decide how it would react to Eliot's proposal in 1890 to shorten the undergraduate course of study to three years. In justifying this further departure from long-accepted ways, Eliot explained that the liberal arts college was being threatened by the longer time now required for graduate and professional studies. Making it possible for students to complete their course in three years by coming to college better prepared and by taking more than the standard course load while enrolled would increase the college's chances for survival. In the long run, it would also force an improvement in the quality of secondary education, which was another of Eliot's objectives. The alumni editor of the College Monthly was quick to react to what he described as "this radical intention." Writing in the October 1890 issue, he maintained that a three-year course would offer "an opening for superficial work" and put "a premium on the undue haste and foolish scramble that are becoming so much, and too much a part of our American life." If time is to be saved, it should be accomplished somewhere else. "This thing of searching for more liberty, wider range of freedom in thought and action," he insisted, "approaches perilously near something like misrule." Returning to the same topic in the April 1891 issue, he insisted that "there is a great deal of silent but powerful influence exercised by such colleges as our own, that wisely adhere to the time honored and always useful curriculum which is largely classical in character, to the maintenance of a natural and sensible average of age in its student constituency, - an influence of good, always." It soon became evident that Eliot's proposal was not about to alter the traditional four-year college course, either at Gettysburg or elsewhere. One of the major goals of the university was to make learning an active exercise for students. Few, if any, of the Gettysburg faculty ever took issue with this goal. Both Milton Valentine and Harvey W. McKnight embraced it in their inaugurals. College publications subscribed to it. An editorial in the April 1893 issue of the College Monthly declared that "the great need of the college student of to-day is that 108The 1893 catalogue listed all of the available elective courses. It could be argued that the bachelor of science program which the College introduced earlier provided an elective for students. 27