^■p^-^. 
 
 
 
 Wp'i'' 
 
 
 
 S|:- 
 
 
 
 
 .¥(■.'■ 
 
 ^■'^^ 
 
 
 
 ^i:;*. i .•< V 
 
 Mm 
 
Class 
 
 Book -H ^ . 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSHi 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 
 
 A Series of Papers Setting Forth the Program, 
 
 Achievements, Present Status, and Probable 
 
 Future of the American College 
 
 With Introduction by 
 
 WILLIAM H. CRAWFORD 
 
 President Allegheny College 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 1915 
 

 ,^^ 
 
 COPTEIGHT, 1915, 
 BY 
 
 HENKY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 Published December, 1915 
 
 THE OUINN \ BOOEN CO. PKCSS 
 RAMWAr, N. J. 
 
 if^N -6 1916 
 
 ©CI.A418341 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 Introduction v 
 
 I. The Aim and Scope of the New England 
 
 College 3 
 
 President William H. P. Faunce, Brown 
 University. 
 
 II. The Place of the Languages and Literatures 
 
 IN THE College Curriculum .... 21 
 Professor Pcml Shorey, University of 
 Chicago. 
 
 III. The Place of the Newer Humanities in the 
 
 College Curriculum 41 
 
 Dean Charles H. Haskins, Harvard 
 University. 
 
 IV. The Place op the Physical and Natural 
 
 Sciences in the College Curriculum . . 59 
 Professor Edwin O. Conklin, Princeton 
 University. 
 
 V. The College as a Preparation for Profes- 
 sional Study 77 
 
 President Bush Bhees, University of 
 Rochester. 
 
 VI. The College as a Preparation for Practical 
 
 Affairs 95 
 
 President Charles F. Thwing, Western 
 Reserve University. 
 
 VII. The Present Status and Probable Future of 
 
 THE College in the East 105 
 
 President John H. Finley, University 
 State of New York. 
 iii 
 
iv CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTEa PAGE 
 
 VIII. The Present Status and Probable Future of 
 
 THE COIXEGE IN THE SoUTH 121 
 
 President William P. Few, Trinity College. 
 
 IX. The Present Status and Probable Future of 
 
 THE College in the West 131 
 
 President William F. Slocum, Colorado 
 College. 
 
 X. The Function of the College as Distinct 
 From the High School, the Professional 
 School, and the University .... 147 
 President Alexander Meiklejohn, Amherst 
 College. 
 
 XI. The American College in the Life of the 
 
 American People 171 
 
 Commissioner Philander P. Claxton, Bu- 
 reau of Education, Washington. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 The chapters included in this volume comprise 
 the papers read at a Conference on the American 
 College held on the occasion of the celebration of 
 the One Hundredth Anniversary of the founding 
 of Allegheny College. They were all specially pre- 
 pared for this particular event. In fact, the en- 
 tire programme of the conference was made out 
 before anyone was asked to read a paper. Careful 
 attention was given to selecting for a particular 
 topic the man who could speak with authority on 
 that topic. The book, therefore, is a new book, 
 and presents the freshest and most comprehensive 
 thought on the American college. 
 
 In making up the list of subjects not much 
 attention was given to the early history of the 
 American college or to the peculiar conditions 
 which favored its early development. Much atten- 
 tion, however, was given to the programme of the 
 college, its curriculum, its present status in va- 
 rious parts of the country, and its probable future. 
 In short, it was aimed to include in the volume the 
 essential things pertaining to the American college 
 as a present-day institution and as an institution 
 of promise for the future educational development 
 
vi INTRODUCTION 
 
 of America. Before finally deciding upon the 
 topics to be discussed the advice of a goodly 
 number of the foremost educators of the country 
 was carefully sought and freely given. Further- 
 more, each one of the scholarly men invited to 
 prepare a paper was asked to speak out his mind 
 freely, and assured that what was wanted in the 
 conference was a free, frank, and open expression 
 of the thought of educational leaders touching the 
 college as an institution included in the educational 
 regime of our country. 
 
 The conference had been fairly well advertised 
 beforehand in the public press. The unique char- 
 acter of the programme attracted no little atten- 
 tion. It was no surprise, therefore, that nearly 
 one hundred colleges were represented at the open- 
 ing session, nor was it a surprise that the spacious 
 Ford Memorial Chapel was more than crowded to 
 its capacity at the closing session. Not the audi- 
 ences only but the interest increased from the 
 beginning to the end. It was a matter of com- 
 ment at the close of the first session that a con- 
 ference of an unusually high order was on. The 
 speakers were at their best, and some of them 
 seemed to be better than their best. While there 
 were some striking differences of opinion as to what 
 the college ought to be, there was a fine spirit of 
 toleration throughout and much more substantial 
 agreement as to fundamentals than was antici- 
 
INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 pated. One speaker who made a strong plea for 
 the place of the physical and the natural sciences 
 in the college curriculum showed his catholic spirit 
 in saying: " No education is liberal which does not 
 introduce one to the world's best thought and life. 
 A purely classical education and a purely scientific 
 one are equally illiberal. A liberal education is 
 broad, disciplinary, and useful; it educates head, 
 heart, and hand ; it must include literature, science, 
 and the humanities; it must fit for contact with 
 the world along many lines ; it must help one to find 
 himself and to choose his work ; it must prepare 
 for the largest usefulness and enjoyment." An- 
 other speaker whose responsibility was to plead for 
 the humanities said : " The great defect with Amer- 
 ican college education is that it does not set the 
 mass of students intellectually on fire. Our col- 
 leges are only in an imperfect degree intellec- 
 tual institutions. The real rivalry is not between 
 classics and sociology, between history and chemis- 
 try, but a struggle with ignorance, materialism, 
 and superficiality for the development of the in- 
 tellectual life. . . . Some of us would prefer to 
 see students roused by literature, others by science, 
 others by economics, but the main thing is that 
 they be roused." 
 
 The European war was touched upon by sev- 
 eral of the speakers. President Rhees referred to 
 the so-called " biological defense " of the war. 
 
viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 " The tragedy of that argument," said he, " is its 
 false analogy, its blindness to what fitness and 
 progress have come to mean in the unfolding of hu- 
 man history." Professor Conklin seized the op- 
 portunity to make stronger his case by saying: 
 " One of the slight compensations for the world 
 war which is now raging is that we are likely to 
 hear less in the future of that much abused word 
 ' culture.' For half a century it has been a word 
 to conjure with, especially in academic circles, but 
 it has never had any constant meaning except that 
 of self-conscious and rather intolerant superiority. 
 As a result every cult or social group or institution 
 or nation has defined the word so as to include 
 itself and to exclude the rest of the world." Dean 
 Haskins added to the strength of his plea for the 
 newer humanities by the suggestive statement: 
 " The present European war has shown, by im- 
 pressive and even tragic examples, that the days 
 of our national isolation are over and that we can 
 no longer refrain from following closely those 
 movements of world politics to which the United 
 States has been so long indiff'erent." 
 
 If there was doubt in the minds of any who 
 attended the conference as to the present status 
 and probable future of the college in the West, the 
 doubt vanished before the striking and almost 
 colossal array of facts presented in the reports 
 from seven typical colleges by President Slocum. 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 His argument would have been even stronger if the 
 limits of his paper had permitted him to mention 
 a dozen other institutions within the same area, 
 all of which are included in the list of one hundred 
 and eighteen institutions recommended to the 
 Kultus Ministerium of Prussia by the Association 
 of American Universities, — such institutions as 
 Ohio Wesleyan, Kenyon, Lawrence, Lake Forest, 
 Wabash, DePauw, Cornell, and Drake. 
 
 Perhaps the most striking difference of opinion 
 was shown in the description of the original pur- 
 pose of the American college. The difference 
 centered about the words " cultural " and " voca- 
 tional." Even here there seemed to be a disposition 
 to see the other's point of view. A gentleman 
 whose judgment is to be respected described the 
 positions of two of the speakers on this wise : " Dr. 
 
 A. fears that any man who uses the term ' voca- 
 tion ' has surrendered to utilitarianism, while Dr. 
 
 B. fears that any man who uses the term ' culture ' 
 apart from purpose may be working in a vacuum." 
 
 One of the noticeable and significant things 
 about the conference was the strength and virility 
 of the utterances. There was no attempt to cover 
 up. On the contrary there was a straightforward 
 and open facing of the facts, with an appeal almost 
 prophetic for the things which make for life and 
 character. Here is a sample from the paper of 
 President Meiklejohn: "So far as we can bring 
 
X INTRODUCTION 
 
 it about the young people of our generation shall 
 know themselves, shall know their fellows, shall 
 think their way into the common life of their 
 people, and by their thought shall illumine and 
 direct it. If we are not pledged to that, then we 
 have deserted the old standard; we are apostates 
 from the faith. . , . We pledge ourselves to a 
 study of the universal things in human life, the 
 things that make us men as well as ministers and 
 tradesmen. We pledge ourselves forever to a 
 study of human living in order that living may 
 be better done. We have not yet forgotten that 
 fundamentally the proper study of mankind is 
 Man." A fitting paragraph to put alongside this 
 is from the closing part of President Finley's 
 paper : " If this multiple college is to be merely or 
 chiefly a place of discipline, then its tasks might 
 better be given over to the high schools, to the 
 gymnasia. If it is to be a place of special prepa- 
 ration for life, then it would better give way to 
 the professional, the technical school, the univer- 
 sity. If it is to be a place merely through which 
 to attain, in an agreeable way, social position and 
 conventional culture, to take part in contests of 
 bodily strength and skill, or to enjoy only the com- 
 panionships and friendships of living (that is, if it 
 is to be a great college, country or city, club), it 
 is perhaps hardly worth preserving as an American 
 institution. But if it is to be for the many (what 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 it has been, thank God, for the few), if it is to be 
 for all the fit, a place of understanding, of rebirth, 
 of entering the race mind, then is the college 
 which I see in prospect the most precious of all our 
 educational possessions." 
 
 The above quotations are included in this intro- 
 duction with a twofold purpose : First, to indicate 
 the general scope and spirit of the papers pre- 
 sented; and, second, to whet the appetite of the 
 reader for what follows. If the atmosphere which 
 pervaded the conference shall pervade, even in 
 some small measure, the printed page, it is con- 
 fidently believed that this volume will be regarded 
 as a real and valuable contribution to the literature 
 of the American college. 
 
 William H. Crawfokd. 
 Meadville, Pennsylvania. 
 August 12, 1915. 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 
 
THE AIM AND SCOPE OF THE 
 NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 
 
 PRESIDENT WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE 
 
 The story of the New England college is a story 
 of heroism and loyalty unsurpassed in American 
 life. It has an epic quality which lifts it far 
 above any bare chronicle of events. It sings not 
 of arms and the hero, but of heroes who, unarmed 
 and unsupported, devoted their lives to the good 
 fight for the education of the generation to come. 
 It is part of the story of Plymouth Rock and 
 Bunker Hill. To-day colleges flourish in all our 
 commonwealths, buildings and endowments multi- 
 ply. But on anniversary occasions it is good for 
 us to remember that we of the present generation 
 are in a land full of wells which we digged not, 
 vineyards and olive trees which we planted not. 
 
 The original aim of the New England college is 
 stated in a tablet on the West Gate of Harvard 
 University : " After God had carried us safe to 
 New England and we had builded our houses, pro- 
 vided necessaries for our livelihood, reared con- 
 venient places for God's worship, and settled the 
 civil government, one of the next things we longed 
 
 3 
 
4 WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE 
 
 for and looked after was to advance learning and 
 perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an 
 illiterate ministry to the churches, when our pres- 
 ent ministers shall lie in the dust." In that sen- 
 tence we have the historic order of the Puritan 
 life: first, the building of houses to shelter the 
 newcomers from the inclement sky; then the pro- 
 curing of necessary food; then the provision for 
 common worship ; then the election of magistrates 
 to execute the laws. Next came education, as a 
 thing not only " longed for," but " looked after " 
 in very practical fashion. And the reason why 
 those men desired learning was not for its con- 
 solations and delights, not because of the satis- 
 faction it might bring to intellectual curiosity, but 
 because of its concrete value in equipping the new 
 colony through all the future with competent re- 
 ligious teachers and guides. The college was thus 
 bom of the Christian faith, intended to serve for 
 the maintenance of that faith, and its aim was 
 not abstract culture, or scientific research, or the 
 increase of human knowledge, but the equipment 
 of men for their life work. 
 
 On the records of the ancient church in Provi- 
 dence, in whose meeting-house Brown University 
 holds its annual commencements, is this suggestive 
 entry of 1774 : " Voted, to build a meeting-house 
 for the public worship of Almighty God, and also 
 to hold Commencement in." Again the same pur- 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 5 
 
 pose appears in the linking of education and re- 
 ligion. The delight in learning for its own sake, 
 which marked the Renaissance in Europe, played 
 small part in our colonial history. The solving 
 of physical or metaphysical problems, which was 
 the goal of the schoolmen, was not the aim of our 
 fathers. To them learning was not, in Bacon's 
 phrase, " a terrace for a wandering and variable 
 mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect " ; 
 it was equipment for a religious vocation, it was 
 the development of men fitted for leadership in 
 times of stress and danger. The General Assembly 
 of Connecticut in 1753 declared " that one prin- 
 cipal and proposed end in erecting the college was 
 to supply the churches in this country with a 
 learned, pious, and orthodox ministry." 
 
 The founding of the University of Pennsyl- 
 vania, under the influence of Benjamin Franklin, 
 had, of course, a very different motive. The later 
 establishment of the University of Virginia re- 
 flected the ideals of Thomas Jefferson, which were 
 hardly those of the founders of the Puritan the- 
 ocracy. But in New England all the earlier col- 
 leges were the offspring of religious faith. The 
 motto of Harvard, — Christo et ecclesice, — and of 
 Yale, — Lux ac Veritas, — and of Brown, — In Deo 
 speramus, — all affinn the religious motive behind 
 the New England enterprise. 
 
 Our oldest colleges were thus both religious in 
 
6 WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE 
 
 motive and vocational in aim. But the vocation 
 for which they prepared men was one of the broad- 
 est and most fundamental character. The Puritan 
 preacher was conceived to be an authority on the 
 deepest problems of this world and that which is 
 to come. He was the chief expounder of a long 
 sacred history, embodied in a varied literature, and 
 of an elaborate religious philosophy buttressed by 
 that literature. He was also the chief orator on all 
 public occasions, he was social arbiter, political 
 adviser, leader of civic life, and in Massachusetts 
 and Connecticut he was an officer of the state. 
 Such a man must have no mere technical training. 
 He must be made to grapple with philosophical 
 problems, be versed in the languages in which such 
 problems were discussed, and must possess such 
 power of reasoning, of judgment, of expression, 
 as should equip him for his broad and varied task. 
 Mere "bread-and-butter studies" were no 
 preparation for such a life. Mere technical train- 
 ing, narrow in horizon and illiberal in spirit, was 
 beside the mark. The founders of our early col- 
 leges certainly did not conceive of them as " divin- 
 ity schools," in which men, already educated, 
 might acquire the technique of a profession. 
 Probably seventy-five per cent, of the studies 
 pursued in those colleges had no direct bearing on 
 the clerical calling — just as seventy-five per cent, 
 of the studies pursued at West Point to-day have 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 7 
 
 no exclusive bearing on the soldier's profession. 
 But the founders of our New England colleges, 
 while broad In their horizon, were definite In their 
 aim. To them a " vocation " was something divine, 
 and to prepare men for the high calling — the 
 highest on earth they conceived it to be — was a 
 noble and heroic enterprise. If the word " voca- 
 tional " has In our day acquired a narrower mean- 
 ing, it is time to rescue it from degradation. Vo- 
 cational training for the broadest and finest of 
 human vocations — such was the ideal of the early 
 New England college. 
 
 But such training, it was held from the very be- 
 ginning, might be useful for many other men 
 whose task was of broad or general character. 
 Thus the charter of Yale speaks of " fitting youth 
 for public employment both in church and civil 
 state." It was early held that what was good for 
 the minister was good also for the prospective 
 lawyer or teacher or even physician. Gradually 
 the constituency of the college widened, and then 
 the curriculum widened necessarily to meet the 
 needs of the new constituency. Gradually there 
 grew up the ideal of general culture, apart from 
 any vocational aim, as the true end and purpose of 
 the college. Latin, no longer essential to success 
 in life, was retained in the nineteenth century on 
 grounds of disciplinary and cultural value. Greek, 
 no longer necessary for professional equipment, 
 
8 WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE 
 
 was retained for its linguistic and literary value; 
 while mathematics, almost ignored at first, acquired 
 large place as a training in exactness and in rea- 
 soning power, which could not fail to deepen and 
 strengthen the mind. Gradually thus the voca- 
 tional aim was merged in the disciplinary aim, 
 and that " culture " which to the first founders 
 was only a by-product of comprehensive prepara- 
 tion for life was exalted as the be-all and end-all 
 of the college course. At the same time the theo- 
 logical element in the old curriculum was abbrevi- 
 ated, and more of the humanities, — history and 
 " polite literature," — was introduced. Thus it 
 came about that for the last hundred years the 
 New England college has been the citadel, not of a 
 definite training, but of a humane culture which 
 has exalted " useless studies " and sought simply 
 to make every student a citizen of the intellectual 
 world. It has sought, in President Stryker's 
 phrase, " not to turn steel into tools, but to turn 
 iron into steel." 
 
 Our early founders reproduced the ideal and 
 method of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, 
 which have for centuries aimed to " man the Brit- 
 ish Empire." They also brought from England 
 the idea of a college as a place of residence, where 
 boys might eat and worship and learn and live to- 
 gether under the strict and constant supervision 
 of their teachers. In sharp distinction from the 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 9 
 
 medieval universities of the continent, where stu- 
 dents migrated from place to place and teacher to 
 teacher, was the common residence required in the 
 New England college, accompanied by long lists of 
 rules, enforced by tutorial vigilance and some- 
 times by corporal punishment. A common eating- 
 place was deemed essential. Daily chapel, usually 
 held twice a day, brought the entire family to- 
 gether, and offered opportunity for paternal coun- 
 sel and for the practice of the students in public 
 speech. At night the long corridors of the dormi- 
 tory were often patrolled by professors, and some 
 New England colleges adopted the rule in force at 
 Princeton, whereby a professor might announce his 
 presence outside a student's door by a peculiar 
 stamp of his foot, which all students were forbid- 
 den, under severe penalties, to counterfeit. 
 
 Under such a regime the college was strictly 
 in loco parentis in an age when parents were sel- 
 dom accused of laxity in discipline. Hence the 
 inner story of the colleges is one of " autocracy 
 tempered by rebellion." The teachers were not 
 specialists, but men of breadth of view, of demon- 
 strated success in some calling, and of dominant 
 personality. The one great gift of the early col- 
 leges was the opportunity for the daily associa- 
 tion of callow youth with some of the leading 
 minds of their generation. When Bowdoin Col- 
 lege had no laboratories, she had on her teaching 
 
10 WILLIAM e. P. FAUNCE 
 
 staif Henry W. Longfellow. When Longfellow in 
 his turn was a student at Harvard he wrote in his 
 diary that after dining on boiled rice he " went to 
 walk with Professor Felton." Truly a dinner of 
 herbs was tolerable when followed by such a walk. 
 When Brown University's total funds had reached 
 thirty-one thousand dollars, Francis Wayland was 
 molding her structure, and the real endowment of 
 the university was thirty-one thousand dollars plus 
 Francis Wayland. Mark Hopkins could make the 
 " old log " a real substitute for library, laboratory, 
 and apparatus, and the student whom he touched 
 was awed and thrilled and inspired. 
 
 Not only were the teachers of that early day 
 often more dominant personalities than those of 
 our own time, but they had far greater opportunity 
 to enter into the student mind. Under the old uni- 
 form curriculum all the students were together in 
 every class, and the professor met them all, and 
 usually every day. Sometimes one professor 
 taught the class in several subjects, and President 
 Hopkins at Williams instructed the senior class in 
 all subjects throughout the year. Under such cir- 
 cumstances there was an intimacy of intellectual 
 acquaintance which has never been equaled else- 
 where. The total weight of all a teacher's experi- 
 ence, knowledge, conviction, was brought to bear 
 on the student who, in significant phrase, " sat 
 under him." Never, except possibly in the case of 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 11 
 
 English headmasters, like Arnold of Rugby, has 
 the world seen greater opportunities for education 
 by sheer contagion than in the early New England 
 college. The enforced intimacy surely had its 
 defects. The foibles of the teacher were obvious 
 to all. The natural impulse of youth to rebel was 
 encouraged by artificial and elaborate rules, with 
 fines and penalties attached. But education by 
 contagion, by persistent association of persons, 
 has seldom had so fine a chance as it had among 
 the New England hills. 
 
 If architecture is, as it has been called, " frozen 
 music," certainly college architecture may be 
 called congealed philosophy of life. The beautiful 
 quadrangles of Oxford, surrounded by closely ar- 
 ticulated buildings of the Gothic order, speak 
 clearly of the compactness and unity of a life in 
 which state and church are indissolubly bound to- 
 gether and both are exponents of order and beauty. 
 No such quadrangles were built in New England. 
 The only one ever projected was never completed. 
 In the Puritan college each building, independent, 
 isolated, seems to recognize no other structure on 
 the horizon. Each one delights to express the 
 independent action of some donor, the independent 
 taste of some period, or the autocratic choice of 
 some administrator. The " muses' factories," as 
 Lowell called the old-time dormitories, were not the 
 abodes of art or music or aesthetic taste. They 
 
12 WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE 
 
 sometimes became mere barracks, with no refining 
 or softening influence on their inmates. In 1878 I 
 lived in such barracks, bringing all water from the 
 college pump up three flights of stairs to my room, 
 and each morning depositing hot coals and ashes 
 from my little stove upon the wooden floor in a 
 corner of the hallway outside my door. Life was 
 bare and chill and unadorned amid such surround- 
 ings, but it furnished daily opportunity for the 
 constant impact of strong, mature personalities on 
 the unformed lives around them. Over each New 
 England college might have been written the an- 
 cient sentence : " Let us make man." The aim was 
 not to push out the bounds of knowledge in any 
 line, but so to associate the strong with the weak 
 that the strength might be infused and imparted. 
 
 What now shall we say of the more recent de- 
 velopment of the New England college? How far 
 is it true to its primal impulse, and how far is it 
 being modified by the new occasions which teach 
 new duties.'* 
 
 The relation of the college to the Christian 
 faith is still vital, but is expressed in entirely new 
 ways. Most of our colleges are now free from 
 denominational control, and the relations of church 
 and college are simply those of vital sympathy and 
 co-operation. There is nothing in the charters of 
 Yale,Amherst^ Williams, Bowdoin, or Dartmouth to 
 anchor those institutions to the Congregationalist 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 13 
 
 churches that gave them birth. If those churches 
 should lose their interest in education or should 
 become numerically feeble, undoubtedly those col- 
 leges would drift into vital relations with other 
 denominations. They exist not for the aggrandize- 
 ment of the Congregationalist churches, not for 
 propagating a doctrinal viewpoint, but as the free- 
 will offering of the churches to the cause of Chris- 
 tian education. The old days when every teacher 
 at Yale must sign the Westminster Confession and 
 look carefully after the orthodoxy of the students 
 have gone forever. But has Christianity lessened 
 its hold in consequence? On the contrary, those 
 days of creed subscription on the part of every 
 teacher were the days when French infidelity was 
 rampant in American colleges and students called 
 one another by the names of Voltaire and Paine 
 and Bolingbroke. At the beginning of the nine- 
 teenth century only two students could be found 
 in one New England college who could call them- 
 selves Christians. The orthodoxy enforced from 
 above had produced by natural reaction complete 
 skepticism below. 
 
 To-day at Wesleyan, Colby, and Brown there 
 are still some denominational restrictions that sur- 
 vive, but they grow more attenuated year by year 
 and by natural evolution will disappear. Yet the 
 Christian forces in these institutions are not less- 
 ened but rather are growing. Skepticism is no 
 
U WILLUM H. P. FAUNCE 
 
 longer the badge of culture among undergraduates. 
 In almost all our colleges the majority of the 
 students are church members and are not ashamed 
 of their faith. The foremost preachers of the 
 country visit these colleges for a single service or 
 for a residence of from one to three weeks. Chris- 
 tian associations, supported by alumni contribu- 
 tions, exist in all of them, and the secretaries are 
 often able leaders of student opinion. The stu- 
 dents are organized into committees for philan- 
 thropic, educational, and religious work in the 
 communities around them. If the devotional meet- 
 ings have dwindled within the college, as they have 
 without, the expression of Christian faith in prac- 
 tical human helpfulness has grown more pro- 
 nounced. 
 
 At several New England colleges this last win- 
 ter a series of special meetings has been held, 
 intended to move the students to personal decision, 
 and has been attended by unusually large result. 
 All pressure on the part of the Faculty has ceased. 
 Required church attendance has vanished from 
 most of our colleges. Creed subscription by mem- 
 bers of the teaching staff is not thought of. Re- 
 ligion is no longer official, imposed from above ; 
 it is the natural expression of the aspiration of 
 students and alumni. And this unofficial relation 
 of church and college is proving vastly more fruit- 
 ful in the maintenance of a Christian atmosphere 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 15 
 
 than all the old charter provisions for ecclesiastical 
 control. The experience of the New England col- 
 leges is that the oversight and ownership of a 
 college by a denomination is often wise and abso- 
 lutely necessary in the earlier years of college 
 history. But as the college approximates to the 
 university, if not in name, at least in standards 
 and ideals, the control of the church becomes less 
 helpful. Denominational control of a medical 
 school or a law school is an advantage to neither 
 school nor church. 
 
 In America the function of the church has been 
 to initiate, to start things. Its spiritual energy 
 has impelled the church to establish charities which 
 are later handed over to the state; to preach the 
 duty of caring for the sick, and then to hand over 
 that duty to the public hospital ; to lay educational 
 foundations and without complaint see that an- 
 other buildeth thereupon. The voluntary prin- 
 ciple, in education as in worship, has in New 
 England been found to vindicate itself in the course 
 of the years. If the churches weaken in numbers 
 or influence, then their influence in the colleges will 
 decay. But if they increase their powers in the 
 community, if they send their ministers into col- 
 lege pulpits, and their laymen into the ranks of 
 college officers and helpers, the non-official rela- 
 tion of church and college may prove to be more 
 helpful to both than any official control could be. 
 
16 WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE 
 
 Whatever may be true of new sections of our 
 country, this is the lesson to be drawn from the 
 educational experience of New England. Indeed, 
 each denomination should allow those ministers 
 who speak in the college vocabulary to spend a 
 considerable portion of their time in addressing 
 college assemblies. Their message is effective 
 precisely because it is non-official. They have 
 access to the student mind just because they are 
 not examiners but inspirers. Such preachers find 
 in the American college an audience more respon- 
 sive than that which assembles in any church, and 
 a task worthy of the highest human powers. In 
 the words of President Fitch of Andover Theo- 
 logical Seminary : " One of the significant happen- 
 ings of our day is the passing of the spiritual and 
 ethical control of the educated youth of America 
 out of the hands of the churches, and its center- 
 ing in the schools and colleges. It is largely true 
 that the surest and most effective method of reach- 
 ing the noblest instincts of the choicest men of the 
 coming generation is through college rather than 
 parochial preaching." * 
 
 As regards the vocational element in education 
 our colleges are now returning to their fundamental 
 principle. They are perceiving that while they 
 can never become professional schools, much less 
 trade schools, they cannot permanently separate 
 * Harvard Graduate Magazine, December, 1914. 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 17 
 
 culture from purpose. A purely abstract culture 
 having no goal in real life, unrelated to the life 
 that throbs and surges outside the college fence, is 
 really an ignis fatuus, and, if attained, a positive 
 disqualification for public service. Scholasticism 
 in college has hindered thousands of young men 
 from real achievement, and left them critical, in- 
 trospective, hesitant, incapable of swift decision 
 and whole-hearted action. The problem before our 
 colleges is to return to the original idea of educa- 
 tion as fundamental equipment for vocation, but 
 so to interpret vocation as to preserve for the col- 
 lege broad horizons, generous sympathies, insight 
 into the best that the world has said or done, and 
 profound religious faith. 
 
 No longer do we prepare men for the learned pro- 
 fessions only, but it is our task to give the broad- 
 est training for highly specialized tasks. We must 
 equip men not only for pulpit and bar, but for 
 mill and store and farm ; men who can earn their 
 living without losing their life. Our colleges must 
 see to it that the mechanician is trained in exact 
 science, and that the man who plants corn shall 
 understand the laws of heredity. We want the 
 architect to be familiar with the bequest of Greece 
 and Rome, the engineer to construct highways for 
 human progress, the mill-owner to care not only 
 for his products but for the producers. We want 
 the storekeeper to know something of the great 
 
18 WILLUM H. P. FAUNCE 
 
 trade routes of civilization, and the selectman of 
 the village to understand his relation to Magna 
 Charta and the compact signed by the Pilgrims on 
 the Mayflower. We want all modern men to see 
 their daily toil as a part of the task of rebuilding 
 the world. We want the stone-cutter to understand 
 his relation to Praxiteles and Michael Angelo, the 
 farmer to know something of Virgil's Georgics and 
 the songs of Theocritus, and the school-teacher 
 to be a student of Plato's Republic and More's 
 Utopia. Our high vocation is to receive the torch 
 of enlightenment from past generations and hand 
 it to the generations that follow. A man's vo- 
 cation is to be a good citizen, a faithful hus- 
 band, a pure-blooded father, a helpful neighbor, 
 a dynamic in his community. 
 
 One of Goethe's more far-reaching sentences is 
 this : " We exist for the sake of what can be ac- 
 complished in us, not that which can be done 
 through us." There we have the eternal antithesis 
 which haunts all educational enterprise. Are we 
 then divided into two hostile camps? Shall one- 
 half the world emphasize the things done through 
 us, while the other half emphasizes achievement 
 within, exalting culture? The New England col- 
 lege affords some reconciliation of these opposing 
 viewpoints. It declines to become a group of 
 professional schools. It declines to interpret a 
 man's vocation as the earning of his livelihood. It 
 
THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 19 
 
 will never confine itself to the technique of a single 
 profession. But it is equally averse to a vague 
 self-culture divorced from purpose. It affirms that 
 something must be done within the student in order 
 that something may be done through him. It con- 
 siders the self-realization of the student only a 
 step in the realization of the entire social order. 
 The opening of the eyes of the soul, the intellectual 
 and spiritual rebirth, is the essential thing in the 
 educational process. But this, as our fathers 
 clearly saw, is never to be attained apart from 
 the ethical purpose which makes the culture of the 
 individual an equipment for the service of the 
 state. The college still aims to equip human 
 beings not to be ministered unto, but to minister. 
 
THE PLACE OF THE LANGUAGES 
 
 AND LITERATURES IN THE 
 
 COLLEGE CURRICULUM 
 
 PROFESSOR PAUL SHOREY , 
 
 The chief lesson that I took away from my old 
 Harvard course in theme-writing was the admoni- 
 tion, " Always write about a proposition, never 
 about a word." It is a sound principle, though 
 systematically ignored by the most successful of 
 American writers, Emerson, and in what threatens 
 to be the most prolific branch of American litera- 
 ture, the literature of education. The blessed 
 word education is the sole theme of most educa- 
 tional discourses. The speaker defines or sym- 
 bolizes in that Mesopotamia his social ideal, in- 
 dignantly rebukes our present defection from it, 
 and apocalyptically prophesies its speedy real- 
 ization by the short cut of a newly revealed method 
 or a reformed curriculum. Ignoring what old 
 logicians called the circumstance — the who, which, 
 what, when, and whereby, for whom, we define 
 education in the abstract as preparation for life 
 or it may be as " a totality of co-ordinate and 
 reasoned suggestions," and then endeavor to esti- 
 
 31 
 
^2 PAUL SHOREY 
 
 mate the values of particular methods and studies 
 by more or less plausible deductions from this in- 
 determinate ideal. But obviously there is not one 
 education, there are many kinds and grades. And 
 the value and significance of any study relates it- 
 self not to education in general, but to some specific 
 type. 
 
 Nothing is easier than to praise any study to 
 its lovers and adepts, unless it be to demonstrate 
 the uselessness of any study to those who are 
 totally ignorant of it. All men naturally love 
 knowledge, and most men, like Plato's philosophic 
 dog, express their detestation of ignorance by 
 barking at what they don't know. Artem non odit 
 nisi ignarus is the apt inscription on the Kaiser 
 Friedrich Museum in Berlin. " We all," says Mr. 
 Chesterton, " have a dark feeling of resistance 
 towards people we have never met, and a profound 
 and manly dislike of authors we have never read." 
 
 To escape from these unprofitable generalities of 
 educational debate, we must narrow the vague sug- 
 gestions of a word to the definite implications of 
 a proposition or a concatenation of propositions. 
 This task is, in part, accomplished for us in the 
 assignment of our topics to-day. For a topic is 
 something midway between a word and a proposi- 
 tion. The phrasing of my topic relieves me from 
 the tiresome necessity of reminding you that I am 
 not proposing to force Greek particles or old 
 
LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 23 
 
 French epics upon the negroes of Mr. Booker 
 Washington's industrial school, or to substitute 
 Latin for vocational training in the preparation 
 for life of the seventy-five thousand boys between 
 the ages of fourteen and sixteen, whom the gap 
 between required school and permitted employment 
 turns loose upon the streets of our metropolis. I 
 don't have to explain the value of literary and 
 linguistic studies either to a Montessori mother or 
 to a Professor of Plumbing in a continuation 
 school. The American college exists, and we are 
 not to-day discussing either its abolition or the 
 possibility of making a million if you leave school 
 at the age of fourteen. 
 
 To go to college at all is to decide that you 
 can spare three or four years for studies that are 
 something more than the irreducible minimum of 
 equipment for citizenship, and something other 
 than the vocational or professional mastery of the 
 breadwinning specialty. Our theme is the contri- 
 bution of literary and linguistic studies to that 
 type of education. 
 
 Here another quicksand of futile logomachy 
 threatens to engulf us, the obsolete and now mean- 
 ingless controversy between science and classics. 
 Science has definitively won. I may deprecate the 
 extravagance of a biological colleague who tells a 
 Phi Beta Kaj^pa audience that the whole of modem 
 civilization is the expression of a single idea, the 
 
24 PAUL SHOREY 
 
 looking into nature by experiments. But even this 
 challenge cannot provoke the humanist to extenu- 
 ate the educational value of science, or deny its 
 indisputable leadership in modern life. If these 
 considerations move any undergraduate to spe- 
 cialize exclusively in the physical sciences, if he is 
 quite certain that for him as for Darwin science 
 and the domestic affections will meet all require- 
 ments of mind and heart and soul, there is for him 
 nothing more to be said. But experience and the 
 statistics of registration show that for the ma- 
 jority of students physical science alone does not 
 suffice. They wish to study man, society, human- 
 ity, and humanity's ideals of beauty, truth, and 
 goodness. And this fact at once converts the 
 obsolete and fallacious alternative classics or sci- 
 ence into the larger question of the significance 
 of linguistic and literary studies, both as a prepa- 
 ration for and an integral part of the study of 
 man. 
 
 The study of language and of literature are 
 united in my topic, and are in fact interrelated 
 and interdependent. They are not, however, iden- 
 tical. On the contrary, in the rivalries of actual 
 educational practice they unfortunately may be- 
 come adversaries. It may appear poor strategy to 
 dwell upon this dissidence while pleading the com- 
 mon cause. But the very existence of serious 
 literary study depends upon the maintenance of 
 
LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 25 
 
 the distinction. This statement tells you that if 
 compelled to wear a label or fly a flag, I should be 
 found in the camp of literature. But though I 
 shall abbreviate the plea, I do not intend to betray 
 the cause of the half of my subject which appeals 
 to me personally the least. 
 
 The place that the study of language holds in 
 a rationally ordered college curriculum is secured 
 by at least four considerations: 1) French and 
 German are indispensable tools, in every domain 
 of knowledge, as Latin is for all historical and 
 literary scholarship. 2) The technical study of 
 linguistics has the same claim to a place as an 
 option in the curriculum as any other technical 
 specialty. 3) Language is so inextricably bound 
 up with the higher intellectual functions of man 
 that some systematic and analytic study of its 
 structure and logic is for the normal student a 
 condition of the full development of his powers 
 both of thought and expression. This discipline 
 may be imparted by analytic and critical study 
 of the vernacular. But an immense experience 
 proves that some foreign language, and preferably 
 a synthetic, classical language, is the best educa- 
 tional instrument for this purpose. The pure 
 bluffs of the assertion that such generalized intel- 
 lectual discipline is a superstition of the apologist 
 for classics exploded by modern science will 
 merely damage the reputation of every psychol- 
 
26 PAUL SHOREY 
 
 ogist who endeavors to impose it upon the public. 
 Diatribes denying all disciplinary and general in- 
 tellectual values to the study of language may be 
 found in the literature of controversy. But the 
 psychologist who seriously maintains this thesis 
 only writes himself down as incompetent in his 
 own specialty. The absolute affirmation that con- 
 ceptual thought cannot exist without language 
 requires qualification and admits of debate. But 
 in practice the two are so indissolubly associated 
 that it is almost impossible to develop and im- 
 practicable to study the one apart from the other. 
 And experimental psychology, as soon as it ap- 
 proaches this higher aspect of mind, is compelled 
 to undertake in the laboratory with falsifying and 
 artificial simplifications and grotesquely undis- 
 criminating acquaintance with the material in 
 which it works experiments which observant teach- 
 ers and students of language are conducting with 
 greater precision and subtlety every day of their 
 lives. 
 
 Lastly, language is the indispensable key to 
 literature. I intend no illiberal disdain for trans- 
 lations, popular lectures, and other substitutes 
 for the best. But it cannot be the chief office of 
 the college to obliterate distinctions and solicit the 
 customer to content himself with something 
 " equally as good." Phonographs and chromos 
 have their uses. But the hearth of scholarship and 
 
LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 27 
 
 culture is not the place for the gas log. Only the 
 original text can communicate the finer shades of 
 thought, the harmonies of sound, the soul of 
 poetry and eloquence. A truly intelligent reading 
 of our own older literature, of Tennyson, Pope, 
 and Milton even, demands of the speakers of 
 the present-day American vernacular a linguistic 
 study differing only in degree from that which 
 Latin provides in a simpler and more effective 
 form. The heresy that a translation will serve 
 as well as the original, and the fallacy that noth- 
 ing short of complete mastery of a language can 
 profit by the original, have been too often ex- 
 posed to merit further respectful consideration. 
 The student of the original not only may also 
 use translations, but he is the only one who can 
 use them intelligently. And even a little knowl- 
 edge of the original language doubles their value 
 for him. 
 
 The place of linguistic study, then, is secure. 
 For the specialist it is an end in itself. For the 
 majority it is an instrument and a key, an in- 
 strument of intellectual discipline and a key to 
 the study of literature and the history of ideas. 
 Our colleagues in linguistics will view this dis- 
 tinction with suspicion, and our colleagues in gen- 
 eral literature will be impatient of it. Neverthe- 
 less it is vital. Culture and liberal education must 
 steer a safe middle course between the rocks of 
 
28 PAUL SHOREY 
 
 technical linguistics and the frothy whirlpools of 
 dilettanteism. This topic would demand a volume 
 for itself, a volume which in some sort already 
 exists in Professor Babbitt's vigorous but partisan 
 book on literature and the American college. Here 
 I can only indicate in passing what seems to me 
 the formula of judicious compromise. The domi- 
 nant aim of collegiate linguistics should be the 
 interpretation, the full appreciation, of the mean- 
 ing of great literary texts. Limitation to this aim 
 will yield if not all yet enough of the peculiar dis- 
 ciplinary values of linguistic study. More than 
 this is specialization in the science of language, 
 and from the point of view of the student of 
 literature and the history of ideas, pedantry. Less 
 than this is laxity and dilettanteism. 
 
 The application of this general principle to the 
 specific tasks of a language classroom demands 
 some discrimination and some self-restraint on the 
 part of the instructor. But it is entirely feasible. 
 The teacher who really knows the language he pro- 
 fesses to teach knows or can ascertain with 
 approximate and practically sufficient certainty 
 whether a given item of syntax, accidence, etymol- 
 ogy, or lexicography is really needed for the in- 
 telligent appreciation of the authors, or whether 
 it merely belongs to the order of facts which help 
 him to settle hotVs business, properly base oun, 
 and perfect his own private theory of the irregular 
 
LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 29 
 
 verbs. No one, of course, expects a meticulous, 
 pettifogging consistency in such discriminations. 
 But the broad general principle is valid, and 
 should hold for all collegiate teaching of lan- 
 guage, except, of course, that which is avowedly 
 practical and colloquial at one extreme, or admit- 
 tedly specialized for future students of linguistics 
 at the other. 
 
 In all this we have taken for granted that the 
 study of literature takes precedence of the mere 
 study of language, and is indeed one of the chief 
 constituents and supreme ends of a truly liberal 
 education. What else could we do? To a life- 
 long student of literature, to one who has the read- 
 ing habit, the request for an apology for the study 
 of literature is like a demand for proof of the 
 utility of the air he breathes or the water he 
 drinks. Life without letters is a living death, he 
 murmurs. " You don't play whist, young man. 
 What a sad old age you are preparing for your- 
 self," is infinitely truer in the application, " you 
 are not forming the taste for good and varied 
 reading, young man." It is impossible in twenty 
 minutes to justify an ideal and a philosophy of 
 life. The apologist for literary study in the col- 
 lege can at the most remove a few misconcep- 
 tions and repeat a few commonplaces. I need 
 hardly repeat the well-worn topics of the consola- 
 tions of literature and the praise of books from 
 
so PAUL SHOREY 
 
 Cicero to Richard of Bury, from Petrarch to 
 Ruskin and Frederic Harrison. Truisms may be 
 staled by repetition. They are not, as some epi- 
 grammatic prophets of the up-to-date fancy, 
 thereby converted into falsities. Quotations from 
 the eloquent literature in commendation of books 
 and reading would merely illustrate and adorn 
 our thesis. They would not prove it. An equal 
 array of authorities could be mustered against 
 self-stultification and the suppression of originality 
 through the abandonment of the mind to other 
 men's ideas. Scientific men repeat the epigram of 
 a great philosopher and man of science, that if 
 he had read as much as other men, he would be as 
 ignorant as they. And Hazlitt, Emerson, Lowell, 
 and a long succession of modern essayists have re- 
 written Montaigne's essay on the ignorance of the 
 learned and the futility of mere bookishness. But 
 it may be observed that they do not practice what 
 they preach. And Shakespeare's " How well he's 
 read to reason against reading " hoists them all 
 with their own petard. Lowell, who elsewhere 
 boasts himself to be the last of the great readers, 
 was reading ten hours a day, pen in hand, when he 
 praised the " gamey flavor of the bookless man," 
 and proclaimed that " one drop of ruddy human 
 blood is worth more than all the distillation of the 
 library." 
 
 But why make a study and task work of what 
 
LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 81 
 
 should be a delight? Why force our tastes and 
 strain our apprehensions in conformity to outworn 
 traditions and dogmatic conventions? An enter- 
 taining essay of the witty novelist James Payn gives 
 trenchant expression to the feeling that we can- 
 not always live on the heights, but must occasion- 
 ally let ourselves down to a scrofulous French novel 
 and a hammock. The ingenious Mr. Balfour has 
 made an acute and plausible plea for the second- 
 rate book as nearer to us, and therefore often more 
 practically helpful and instructive, than the mas- 
 terpiece. And the small fry of contemporary 
 story-tellers, journalists, and minor critics inces- 
 santly denounce the tyranny of the books that no 
 gentleman's library should be without, insist that 
 modern man must find his chief solace and enter- 
 tainment in the literature that portrays the pass- 
 ing panorama of the life that now is, and affirm 
 that we shall best realize both the pleasures and 
 the profits of reading by yielding ourselves un- 
 critically to the spontaneous appeal of what most 
 easily interests and attracts our relaxed moods and 
 our natural taste for bathos. They might as well 
 say that a perpetual surfeit of chocolate sundae 
 and cream cakes will meet all the ends of alimenta- 
 tion as well as a varied and substantial diet of 
 wholesome food. It is only the accumulated and 
 compounded interest on the acquisitions of a studi- 
 ous youth that will make reading a lifelong and 
 
as PAUL SHOREY 
 
 dependable joy which no vicissitudes of fortune 
 can take away. 
 
 If this pleasure were purchased at some price 
 of disciplinary pain in youth, it would only follow 
 the general law of life and education. But the 
 popular notion of the special distastefulness and 
 futility of the schoolroom inculcation of literature 
 belongs to the type of commonplaces that owe 
 their vogue not to their truth but to their flatter- 
 ing of ordinary human nature and their conven- 
 ience as texts for the ready writer. " If ten gentle- 
 men," says old Ascham, " be asked why they forget 
 so soon in court what they were so long learning 
 in school, eight of them, or let me be blamed, will 
 lay the fault on their ill handling by their school- 
 masters." Except in the schools of Utopia, all 
 subjects are liable to be badly taught. But we 
 specially resent mediocre teaching of literature be- 
 cause of the more poignant contrast there between 
 the actuality and that which might, or we fancy 
 might, have been. " Farewell, Horace, whom I 
 hated so," cries Byron. But in fact Byron did not 
 hate Horace in the least. And feeble as the teach- 
 ing of language and literature at Harrow school 
 may then have been, it was that and that only which 
 made possible the wider reading in the Latinized 
 literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
 turies that formed Byron's mind and informed his 
 writing. 
 
LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 33 
 
 " Nothing that my tyrants knew or taught I 
 cared to learn," boasts the rebellious Shelley in the 
 Revolt of Islam. Yet where, save under the 
 tyranny of an English classical schoolroom, did 
 he learn to construe the ode of Pindar from which 
 the poem takes its motto, the Lucretius from which 
 he drew the philosophy of Queen Mab, the 
 ^'schylus that inspired Hellas and Prometheus Un- 
 bound, the dirges of Bion and Moschus on which 
 he patterned Adonais, the Virgil which reread in 
 his summer walks amid the Italian hills he trans- 
 muted into the Witch of Atlas, the Plato that was 
 the chief inspiration of his maturer life and poetry, 
 the Sophocles clasped to his bosom in death beneath 
 the Tyrrhene wave? And Shelley here is but the 
 type of the ungrateful graduates who denounce 
 the salutary restrictions of the schoolroom be- 
 cause they were sometimes irksome to the spirit of 
 youth or have been outgrown in maturity. Of 
 course the forbidden books seem more attractive 
 than the prescribed task work. And of course the 
 ripened mind discovers meanings in the old school 
 texts which the schoolmaster did not perceive or 
 despaired of imparting. But these peevish con- 
 trasts afford no just measure of the value of the 
 collegiate study of literature. To judge of that, 
 we must compare the graduate who has received 
 this imperfect initiation with the utter helpless- 
 ness and bafflement in the presence of a great 
 
84 PAUL SHOREY 
 
 library of the man who is launched on the infinite 
 sea of literature without compass or guide, who has 
 no chart in his memory of the main routes and cur- 
 rents, who has no conception of the humanistic tra- 
 ditions and accepted values, no standards of refer- 
 ence for agreement or dissent; the man who has 
 never learned through the critical reading under 
 guidance of a few good books something of the 
 principles of interpretation that are essential to 
 the right understanding of any book. Col. Hig- 
 ginson once wrote a paper entitled, " Ought women 
 to learn the alphabet?" The question assigned 
 me to-day is. Ought college students to learn 
 to read? The mere " literacy " of tlie statistician, 
 the ability to spell out words and catch impressions 
 or prejudices from the yellow headlines, is not 
 reading. A large part even of non-literary educa- 
 tion consists mainly in teaching those who think 
 that they can read that they cannot. The study 
 of the law, for example, is largely the learning to 
 read with nice appreciation of the force and bear- 
 ing of every word and qualification on the defini- 
 tion and determination of human relations and 
 rights. And one-half of the mastery of every 
 science is the substitution in a limited field of the 
 exact and discriminating reading of the expert for 
 the slovenly, confused, and equivocal reading of 
 the layman. Now the collegiate study of litera- 
 ture, the slow critical reading of a few of the 
 
LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 35 
 
 world's masterpieces under competent guidance, 
 is just learning how to read the book of human 
 experience outside of the specialized sciences real 
 or imaginary. 
 
 The sciences emerged and were differentiated 
 from the less determined thinking of Greek philos- 
 ophy, and now that our faith in absolute meta- 
 physics is gone, the sciences merge and find their 
 limit in the vast ocean of common sense and hu- 
 manistic tradition of which the world's best liter- 
 ature is the expression. Literature is, so to speak, 
 the residuary legatee of all the stores of experi- 
 ence, the discriminations of thought, the a?sthetic 
 sensibilities that science has not yet been able to 
 catalogue, subdue, systematize, administer, and 
 annex. The serious and sincere study of great 
 literature not only serves to develop and refine sen- 
 sibilities which exclusive devotion to the discipline 
 of physical science may leave to atrophy, but it is 
 the best, the only sure corrective to the chief 
 source of modern fallacy, the preposterous and 
 premature claims of the inchoate and as yet 
 pseudo-sciences. We all acknowledge, even when 
 we do not greatly esteem, the first service. Every- 
 body recognizes that four years in a chemical 
 laboratory may not, in Matthew Arnold's classical 
 example, teach a boy that " Can you not wait 
 upon the lunatic " is not a felicitous equivalent of 
 " Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased." 
 
36 PAUL SHOREY 
 
 Or to adopt and adapt from Mr. Bailey's recent 
 book on Milton a less obvious illustration, a man 
 may be able, as Renan complimented Pasteur on 
 doing, to distinguish unfailingly the right hand 
 acid from the left hand acid and yet fail to appre- 
 ciate the difference between Wordsworth's 
 
 " Negro ladies in white muslin gowns " 
 
 and Milton's 
 
 "Dusk faces in white silken turbans wreathed." 
 
 The aesthetic value, then, of literary study is con- 
 descendingly admitted. Its intellectual service, 
 both to the enlargement and the clarifying of our 
 thought, is overlooked. Matthew Arnold's phrase 
 about the best that has been thought and said is 
 almost too hackneyed even for allusion. But as 
 Socrates once observed, so long as fallacies are re- 
 peated, we must meet them with truisms. Goethe, 
 De Quincey, Ruskin, Emerson, Arnold, and Morley 
 in their attempts to define literature all say essen- 
 tially the same thing. " Society," says Emerson, 
 " has at all times the same want, the need of one 
 sane man with adequate powers of expression, to 
 hold up each object of monomania in its right 
 relation." Emerson, the hero worshipper, personi- 
 fies this function in one representative man. Ar- 
 nold generalizes it as culture. " Culture," he says, 
 
LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 37 
 
 " is always assigning to system makers and sys- 
 tems a smaller share in the bent of human destiny 
 than their friends like." 
 
 Here you have the real ground of the hostility to 
 serious literary study as a part of the college cur- 
 riculum sometimes manifested by the system mon- 
 gers, the prophets of pseudo-science, the pedagog- 
 ical psychologists, the men of one trade-mark idea 
 who are seeking to dominate the education and the 
 intellectual life of our time. Literary culture 
 resembles travel and the frequentation of good so- 
 ciety in that it acquaints us with many ideas and 
 harmonizes them not by the goose-step of a system, 
 but through the give and take of civilized inter- 
 course and the adjustments of common sense and 
 right feeling. It is not good for an idea to live 
 alone and get accustomed to having its own way 
 always. A small quantity of gas, physicists tell 
 us, would expand to infinity in a vacuum. And 
 something like this happens to any lonely little 
 idea that finds lodgment in a vacuous and system- 
 building brain. And the harm extends not merely 
 to the intelligence but to the feelings. For just 
 as water boils too easily in a thin and rarefied 
 atmosphere, even so does the little pot soon hot of 
 the sentimentalist who is the predestined prey of 
 the system monger boil and slop over at tem- 
 peratures which only diffuse a genial warmth 
 through a mind restrained by the circumambient at- 
 
38 PAUL SHOREY 
 
 mospheric pressure of the world's best traditional 
 thought. I should violate my own principles if 
 I treated metaphors and similes as arguments. In 
 the brief space assigned me, I could not even glance 
 at many of the topics pertinent to my theme. Still 
 less could I prove anything. I can at the most 
 suggest some of the ways in which precision and 
 breadth of literary culture in youth may serve to 
 counteract the chief intellectual disease of our 
 time. When four of Benedick's five wits go halt- 
 ing off from the encounter with Beatrice, we 
 attribute his discomfiture to the intuitive quick- 
 ness of Beatrice's woman's wit. But it is not 
 solely Miss Agnes Repplier's native cleverness that 
 has enabled her to overthrow in controversy some 
 of the world's most pompous authorities in social 
 science, history, and diplomacy, and make their 
 arguments look sick and silly in what Lord Mor- 
 ley calls " the double light of the imaginative and 
 practical reason." It is largely because year after 
 year she has been steeping her mind in the common 
 sense of the world's best books, while they have 
 been reading only dissertations, documents, proto- 
 cols, and the erudite treatises of their colleagues. 
 And to-day the adequacy of our President for his 
 heavy burden, our restful and grateful confidence 
 that he will never fail to speak the sane, con- 
 siderate, and nobly representative word for Amer- 
 ica, is mainly due to the fact that though a pro- 
 
LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 39 
 
 fessor, he is not a professor of a pseudo-science, 
 nor even a narrowly exclusive expert in his own 
 special field of so-called political science. It is due 
 mainly to his lifelong devotion to the study of 
 " mere literature." 
 
THE PLACE OF THE NEWER 
 
 HUMANITIES IN THE COLLEGE 
 
 CURRICULUM 
 
 DEAN CHARLES H. HASKINS 
 
 The group of studies which I have been asked 
 to represent in this conference, the so-called newer 
 humanities, comprehends, as I understand it, his- 
 tory and the various social sciences of economics, 
 political science, and sociology. These differ from 
 the natural sciences in that their subject-matter is 
 man and human society; they differ from the hu- 
 manities in the older sense of the word not only 
 in their newness, but also in their immediate rela- 
 tion to the social and political life of the present- 
 day world. It is, indeed, possible to deny them 
 the name of humanities altogether, if we limit our- 
 selves to the narrower and merely aesthetic con- 
 notation of the term as concerned only with litera- 
 ture as an art of beautiful expression. If, how- 
 ever, we take humanity in its historic contrast 
 with divinity as the study of human affairs and 
 interests • in contradistinction to theology, or 
 if we take it in its Latin sense of humane and 
 liberal culture {humanitas), we shall find good 
 
 41 
 
42 CHARLES H. HASKINS 
 
 warrant for its extension to these more modem 
 constituents of a liberal education. 
 
 That these studies are a comparatively recent 
 element in the American college is a fairly ob- 
 vious fact. The oldest of them, history, was kept 
 subordinate to philology and theology until well 
 into the nineteenth century and did not win an in- 
 dependent place in our colleges, with a few notable 
 exceptions, until well after the Civil War. Eco- 
 nomics secured a foothold somewhat later, political 
 science later still. Thirty years ago a term in 
 Guizot's History of Civilization or Freeman's 
 General Sketchy a term in some brief economic 
 text, and a term on the Constitution of the United 
 States constituted the sum and substance of the 
 instruction in this group of subjects in a fair 
 average of American colleges, where classics and 
 mathematics were still required and the natural 
 sciences already well established. These brief 
 courses were given by the president, by the pro- 
 fessor of philosophy, or by anyone else who had a 
 vacant period or a broad back for college burdens, 
 very rarely by one who had any special training 
 whatever. The " fourteen-weeks " epoch in Amer- 
 ican education lay heavily upon all new subjects 
 and most heavily upon the newest. 
 
 How all this has changed within a generation is 
 a matter of common knowledge. New chairs have 
 been established, special professors appointed, and 
 
PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 43 
 
 courses developed with some freedom and generally 
 with wisdom. The process has gone on most 
 rapidly in the universities, both state and private, 
 often more slowly in the independent colleges, 
 where the tradition of the older subjects is 
 stronger and the need of response to popular de- 
 mands less immediate, so that any generalization 
 must take account of the unequal development of 
 such instruction in different institutions. Never- 
 theless, if these subjects have not fully come to 
 their own in all colleges, the time has arrived when 
 we can take account of stock and ask ourselves 
 what are their real claims upon college authorities, 
 what is their place in college education. Indeed, 
 these questions have been asked many times al- 
 ready, and one cannot even now hope to give 
 them a new or a final answer. 
 
 We must first of all disclaim any necessary an- 
 tagonism between the newer humanities and the 
 older, or between the humanities in general and 
 science. No single group of studies is sufficient 
 to occupy the whole field of education for any 
 individual, and each group shades into the other. 
 History has intimate relations to language, litera- 
 ture, and the fine arts; economics has its mathe- 
 matical and its psychological aspects ; while the 
 methods and the results of modern science are of 
 ever increasing importance in the study of all 
 questions which concern the state and society. 
 
44 CHARLES H. HASKINS 
 
 Much of the progress of knowledge in our gen- 
 eration has been achieved in those borderlands 
 where two or more subjects of inquiry meet, and 
 the future scholar, as well as the general student, 
 needs none of those water-tight bulkheads between 
 different disciplines which the academic world has 
 sometimes considered necessary for its safety. 
 Least of all is the college a place for that in- 
 tellectual arrogance and self-sufficiency which 
 would limit the really significant in educa- 
 tion to Greek or chemistry or economics or 
 any other subject. All subjects are not of 
 equal value, but no subject is of supreme or 
 exclusive value, and none can be wisely studied 
 in college or elsewhere apart from its relation to 
 others. 
 
 Among the various studies which contend in 
 healthy rivalry for recognition at the hands of 
 students and of college authorities, the newer 
 humanities occupy a central position, intermediate 
 between the older humanities on the one hand and 
 the natural sciences on the other. Their subject- 
 matter is human, their method scientific. Taken 
 broadly, they comprehend the whole range of or- 
 ganized human interests in the past and in the 
 present, and subject them to critical analysis in 
 the search for truth. They cannot experiment, 
 only in part can they observe; dependent upon 
 indirect methods for their knowledge of the past, 
 
PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 45 
 
 whether recent or remote, they must employ the 
 most penetrating criticism and laborious and im- 
 partial sifting of evidence. Applying the critical 
 and exact methods of science to the rich and 
 varied material of human life, they appeal to 
 imagination and sympathy at the same time that 
 they train the judgment and enrich the under- 
 standing. If our curriculum is to have a center 
 or core, it may well be sought in this great con- 
 necting group of subjects, which, by joining the 
 study of literature to the present and bringing the 
 student of nature into touch with the world of 
 man, furnish a natural corrective to the one- 
 sidedness of a training which is purely literary or 
 purely scientific. 
 
 Central with respect to the other subjects of 
 the curriculum, the newer humanities are unique 
 in their relation to social action. It is their dis- 
 tinguishing characteristic that they deal with or- 
 ganized society and especially with the state, and 
 thus constitute the necessary preparation for in- 
 telligent participation in social and civic activity. 
 They give a body of knowledge acquired nowhere 
 else, and they are unique in training the judgment 
 upon political and social facts. They are thus 
 practical, not in the narrower sense as leading to 
 a livelihood, but in the larger sense of preparing 
 for life. This preoccupation with practical mat- 
 ters is sometimes made the occasion for reproach. 
 
46 CHARLES H. HASKINS 
 
 but it is a reproach which, if properly understood, 
 the social sciences are quite willing to bear. " In 
 whatever it is our duty to act, those matters also 
 it is our duty to study," said Thomas Arnold, and 
 he cannot be accused of being an educational 
 Philistine. 
 
 If all this seem somewhat abstract, there is an- 
 other set of reasons why the newer humanities 
 should have a large place in the curriculum, 
 namely, that students are interested in them. We 
 may believe with Mr. Dooley that undergraduates 
 should study only what is " onpleasant " ; the 
 effect of this has too often been that the under- 
 graduate refuses really to study at all. Whatever 
 his concern with more remote or abstruse themes — 
 and I do not mean in the least to disparage their 
 importance — he is likely, if he is normal and 
 healthy, to read the newspapers and to take an 
 interest in what is going on about him. He bears' 
 of wars and rumors of wars, of social questions 
 and political problems, and he realizes, or ought 
 to realize, that these are questions which concern 
 him and will depend in some measure upon him for 
 their solution. In a democratic society with active 
 public discussion, healthy young men cannot fail 
 to want to know about the life of the world in 
 which they live and their relations to it. Given the 
 students' interest, it is the function of the college 
 to guide and broaden and develop that interest un- 
 
PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 47 
 
 til it eventuates in intelligent citizenship and in- 
 telligent leadership. 
 
 This is a well-worn theme which ought now to 
 require no elaboration, but I may be permitted to 
 illustrate it in one of its aspects. The present 
 European war has shown, by impressive and even 
 tragic examples, that the days of our national 
 isolation are over and that we can no longer re- 
 frain from following closely those movements of 
 world politics to which the United States has so 
 long been indifferent. Whether we like it or not, 
 we must prepare to make decisions on matters of 
 grave international import which will compel us 
 to reconsider traditional policies, to develop new 
 ones, and to examine questions of war and peace in 
 the light of actual fact and not of sudden impulse 
 or abstract theory. Such a crisis finds us as a 
 people extraordinarily ignorant of history, of in- 
 ternational law, and of those economic conditions 
 which shape international policies ; and it finds us 
 even more deficient in an international habit of 
 thought and in the sense for foreign affairs. In the 
 formation of an enlightened, just, and far-sighted 
 public opinion in international matters the colleges 
 must take the lead. The response during the 
 present year to courses and special lectures bear- 
 ing upon these subjects shows that our students 
 are ready to do their part, but much remains to be 
 done from the side of college authorities to guide 
 
48 CHARLES H. HASKINS 
 
 and deepen this interest in the direction of a 
 sane and intelligent international-mindedness. It 
 is particularly upon the departments of history, 
 government, and economics that this new obliga- 
 tion falls, and it is a national duty to give them 
 adequate opportunities. 
 
 I am well aware that there is an obvious danger 
 in the over-emphasis of the immediate and the 
 actual, and that we are already beginning to see a 
 certain thinness and lack of depth in some of our 
 instruction, particularly on the side of applied 
 economics, sociology, and descriptive political sci- 
 ence. Some college instructors in these fields lack 
 perspective and breadth and thoroughness of train- 
 ing, and it is not surprising that their defects are 
 magnified in their students to the point of con- 
 tempt for the past and its contributions to culture, 
 and of a blind faith in the saving virtue of mere 
 information in political and social matters. The 
 narrowness of the supposedly practical is in the 
 long run more dangerous than the narrowness of 
 the idealist, since this can always be in some meas- 
 ure corrected by contact with the everyday Tvovld 
 of later life, while the outlook and vision which 
 one misses in college days are generally lost for 
 good. " Why," it may be asked, " spend the 
 precious time of the college upon the contents of 
 the newspapers and magazines? If our students 
 study the same problems as the man in the street. 
 
PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 49 
 
 what doth it profit them to go to college? Let us 
 subscribe for more periodicals and put the boy to 
 work ! " The answer to this lies not in a different 
 subject-matter but in a different treatment. The 
 social sciences must be approached, not as material 
 for a momentary sensation or occasional debate, 
 but as requiring thorough study and hard thinking 
 and as needing to be seen in their larger relations 
 to human experience. Against the treatment 
 which is merely informational and descriptive 
 must be set the careful analysis of scientific 
 economics and the science of government ; undue 
 absorption in the ever-insistent but fugitive pres- 
 ent must be prevented by the enlarging and hu- 
 manizing study of the thought, the literature and 
 the achievements of the past. 
 
 Fortunately, through the study of history the 
 newer humanities can supply, from their own 
 ranks, the corrective to many of these evils. His- 
 tory offers not only a body of information con- 
 cerning the past life of the race, but also a method 
 of inquiry upon which the social sciences rest, and 
 a genetic point of view by which the present can 
 be measured and understood in its relations to the 
 past out of which it has come. History stirs the 
 student's imagination, steadies his judgment, and 
 serves as the intermediary between literary studies 
 on the one hand and the social sciences on the 
 other. The time has come when we might as well 
 
50 CHARLES H. HASKINS 
 
 admit frankly, however much we may deplore the 
 fact, that for the great body of our college stu- 
 dents the classics have lost their hold as the basis 
 of general education, and that for the present gen- 
 eration the chief opportunity for giving the back- 
 ground and breadth of view which our conceptions 
 of culture still demand is to be found in the study 
 of history. For most of our students the great 
 avenue to the feeling and experience of the race 
 lies through the vital study of the historic past, 
 approached not as something dead or remote but 
 as something full and rich, varied in its interest 
 and many-sided in its appeal, through which alone 
 we can hope to understand the present which it 
 has produced. Even in so modern a subject as 
 history, it is necessary to resist those ultra-moderns 
 whose historical interests are circumscribed by the 
 past few years or who, under the specious theory 
 of apperception, would devote so much of our study 
 to the recent and the local as to crowd out the 
 larger and more humane study of the past and 
 obscure the unity and continuity of its history. 
 Historical near-sightedness must not deprive us 
 of the base-line which the remoter past affords 
 for an intelligent study of the present, and even 
 the most materialistic of historians must, In dealing 
 with historical facts, take account of their mass as 
 well as of the inverse square of their distance. To 
 the real teacher of history the whole of the past 
 
PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 51 
 
 is alive and no part is too remote to touch the 
 imagination and understanding of his students. 
 
 There are obviously important questions respect- 
 ing the relations of the newer humanities to one 
 another as well as respecting their collective place 
 in the college curriculum, but in neither case can 
 they receive a final answer or one of universal ap- 
 plication. Much will inevitably depend upon the 
 traditions of the college, upon its resources, upon 
 the personality of its different professors, as well 
 as upon the changing position of various studies 
 as instruments of education. For reasons which 
 have already been indicated, history must always 
 be largely represented, as furnishing the materials 
 and the methods of the other subjects of this group 
 and as affording the necessary background and 
 connections with other fields. The scientific study 
 of government, always closely connected with his- 
 tory on the one hand and with law on the other, 
 has recently shown a tendency to emphasize its in- 
 dependence from history and its relations with law. 
 As a subject of undergraduate study, however, its 
 legal aspects are of less significance than its his- 
 torical ones, and its professors have especial need 
 of a broad historical training, while at the same 
 time they must be ever ready to bring their stu- 
 dents into touch with the concrete reality of actual 
 government. The inevitable development of sepa- 
 rate instruction in political science must not be al- 
 
52 CHARLES H. HASKINS 
 
 lowed to obscure its intimate relations to history. 
 Economics has gone further than political science 
 in the direction of distinct organization and has 
 secured general recognition as a separate depart- 
 ment with a growing body of instruction and a 
 growing appeal to the American undergraduate. 
 Here again, however, the tendency to short courses 
 on current problems must be resisted by emphasis, 
 on the one hand upon the economic history which 
 shows their genesis, and on the other hand upon the 
 more scientific and disciplinary aspects of the 
 study as seen in the analytical processes of eco- 
 nomic theory and the exact training of economic 
 measurements. The close connections of eco- 
 nomics and government must likewise not be for- 
 gotten. The latest arrival in this group of sub- 
 jects, sociology, has a less certain position, owing 
 partly to its newness and partly to its vastness. 
 There are even those who insist that its newness is 
 an inherent quality and that its vast programme 
 of co-ordinating scientifically all social knowl- 
 edge is fundamentally impossible of execution. 
 Without entering into this question, it may be 
 suggested that, for the present, sociology as 
 an undergraduate study is valuable chiefly as giv- 
 ing a significant point of view, and that, until Its 
 content and method are more thoroughly worked 
 out, undergraduates cannot to advantage substi- 
 tute extended elections in this field for the more 
 
PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 53 
 
 highly organized and clearly defined social sci- 
 ences of economics and government. 
 
 Nowhere does the personality of the teacher 
 count for more than in the study of the newer hu- 
 manities, for nowhere is the content of instruc- 
 tion more varied and its methods more flexible. In 
 the somewhat ambitious Amherst plan of introduc- 
 ing freshmen to the whole range of the humanistic 
 sciences the whole responsibility rests, and must 
 rest, upon the professor in charge. No book or 
 set of books has envisaged that vast and unsolved 
 problem. If we simplify the task by subdividing 
 it, the problem has been transformed, not solved, 
 and a new and difficult problem of co-ordination 
 has been added. The unity of the newer humanities 
 is in danger of disappearing with the multiplica- 
 tion of departments and courses, and their cultural 
 value is correspondingly weakened unless some serir- 
 ous counteracting effort be exerted towards corre- 
 lating the student's attainments in diverse fields. 
 It should be observed in this connection that no 
 subjects lend themselves better to some form of 
 tutorial instruction, and none stand in greater need 
 of the co-ordinating final examination at the end 
 of the undergraduate course to which such instruc- 
 tion can with much profit be directed. If, as many 
 of us believe, the universal American practice of 
 awarding degrees upon the basis of a mere ac- 
 cumulation of isolated credits is wrong, both in 
 
64 CHARLES H. HASKINS 
 
 principle and in its results, the evils of the sys- 
 tem are greatest in those subjects where there is 
 not, as in mathematics and many branches of sci- 
 ence, a progressive correlation inherent in the 
 nature of the subject, but where, as in the more 
 descriptive fields of English literature and history, 
 the order and advancement of courses is more or 
 less fortuitous and the later courses do not de- 
 pend upon the earlier in any such close sequence 
 of necessary prerequisites. The demand that the 
 candidate for the bachelor's degree show some defi- 
 nite result from his college education beyond the 
 scoring of a certain number of units of credit is 
 most imperative where the courses of the senior 
 year do not involve and test his whole previous 
 training. A comprehensive final examination 
 which shall accomplish this object presupposes a 
 considerable amount of co-ordinating instruction 
 for each student, and this of course calls for addi- 
 tional expenditure of energy and of money. 
 
 The fact is that our teaching of the newer hu- 
 manities has been and is too cheap. No studies are 
 more intimately dependent upon the library, yet 
 what college has done for its library what it has 
 done for its laboratories, or furnished duplicate 
 copies of reference books as it furnishes duplicate 
 apparatus and laboratory supplies, or provided 
 assistance and supervision for its students in the 
 library as it gives them without question to its 
 
PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 55 
 
 students of science? How many colleges have 
 developed professorships of history, government, 
 economics, and social science in proportion to their 
 departments of chemistry, physics, biology, geol- 
 ogy, and astronomy? And how far do we require, 
 or pei-mit, in these departments the same thorough- 
 ness of teaching and individualization of instruc- 
 tion which is demanded in other fields? The new 
 problems which the teachers of the newer humani- 
 ties have to face require far greater resources if 
 they are to be wisely solved for the benefit of the 
 student and of the country, resources of libraries, 
 of materials for study, and above all of men. 
 Moreover, the work of professors in these fields is 
 not now confined to college walls, for they are 
 called in increasing measure to render service in 
 local and national affairs as expert advisers and 
 as leaders of opinion. Within reasonable limits, 
 such contact with the actual world enriches and 
 vitalizes the work of the classroom, but the burden 
 is often a severe one, and the college must be will- 
 ing to carry its share in this labor for the com- 
 munity by relieving such masters from academic 
 routine and by guarding their leisure as men of 
 learning and wise counsel. 
 
 Finally, in all discussions of the value of dif- 
 ferent studies and their place in college education 
 we must beware of proceeding abstractly, as if we 
 were dealing with a hypothetical undergraduate, 
 
56 CHARLES H. HASKINS 
 
 without taking sufficient account of the different 
 reactions of different students to the same sub- 
 ject. We hear, for example, that the function of 
 mathematical training is to develop the power of 
 abstract reasoning, while we know that in a large 
 number of instances it develops nothing higher 
 than ingenuity. The delicate power of literary 
 appreciation which the study of Greek produces 
 among the elect few becomes with others merely a 
 matching of words against words and of the forms 
 of inflection against the corresponding sections of 
 the grammar. So history can become a mere jum- 
 ble of meaningless dates and events or a vague and 
 pleasant — and often false — notion of progress. 
 Wc must not forget that one student's imagination 
 may be stirred by poetry, another's by history, 
 another's by engineering. One may learn thor- 
 oughness and scientific accuracy from a Greek 
 grammar, another in the chemical laboratory. We 
 cannot guarantee the reactions of any individual 
 to any subject. The most that we can do is to 
 place before him a sufficient variety of significant 
 fields of learning and a body of vigorous, alert, 
 and enthusiastic teachers, and trust to Providence 
 for the results. If he is really stirred and stimu- 
 lated in any direction, we ought to be thankful. 
 The great defect in American college education 
 is that it does not set the mass of students intel- 
 lectually on fire. Our colleges are only in an im- 
 
PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 57 
 
 perfect degree intellectual institutions. The real 
 rivalry is not one between classics and sociology, 
 between history and chemistry, but a struggle with 
 ignorance, materialism, and superficiality for the 
 development of the intellectual life. We are wrest- 
 ling against principalities and powers, against the 
 rulers of the darkness of this world, and we need 
 help from every quarter. Some of us would prefer 
 to see students aroused by literature, others by 
 science, others by economics, but the main thing is 
 that they be aroused. The first business of the 
 American college is to make its students intellec- 
 tually keen about something; what that is, is a 
 matter of less moment. Only — and here I come 
 back to the newer humanities — as the world exists 
 to-day, many students are likely to be moved only 
 by studies which have some immediate and obvious 
 relation to their own time, and to them the social 
 sciences make an appeal which we cannot and must 
 not disregard. It is the part of wisdom to take 
 advantage of this legitimate interest, to offer it 
 food to feed upon and wise and competent guid- 
 ance, to discipline it by thorough and exact 
 methods, to broaden it by a wide and humane 
 knowledge of other nations and other times, and 
 to steady it by a sane appreciation of the best 
 things that have been said and done in the world. 
 So shall the social sciences be humane as well as 
 new, human as well as scientific. 
 
THE PLACE OF THE PHYSICAL 
 
 AND NATURAL SCIENCES IN 
 
 THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 
 
 PROFESSOR EDWIN G. CONKLIN 
 
 From the beginnings of colleges and universities 
 down to the present time some form of what wc 
 now call science has held a well-recognized place 
 in every plan of liberal education. In the Uni- 
 versitas Studii Generalis of Paris, which was the 
 mother of modem colleges and universities, the 
 " Trivium " included grammar, logic and rhet- 
 oric, and the " Quadrivium " arithmetic, geometry, 
 astronomy, and music. Under the influence of 
 Galileo and Newton physics, or what was long 
 known as natural philosophy, was introduced into 
 the curriculum. 
 
 Thus mathematics, astronomy, and physics have 
 been represented in colleges and universities from 
 their very beginnings, and even to this day they 
 occupy in many institutions a more secure and 
 more honorable position than is accorded to the 
 newer sciences of chemistry, geology, and biology. 
 
 59 
 
60 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 
 
 The quality of learning is not strained. The 
 spirit of real scholarship is broad and eclectic and 
 great scholars in all ages from Aristotle to those 
 who sit on this platform have had the open mind, 
 the sympathetic heart, the helping hand for all 
 branches of human learning. But the great growth 
 of sciences and of industries based upon them and 
 the great demand for technical education which 
 characterized the past century has caused many 
 persons to fear that liberal learning is endangered. 
 And so there has grown up a conflict between those 
 who represent the older system and those who ad- 
 vocate the new over the place of the physical and 
 natural sciences in institutions of liberal learning. 
 
 The agitation for the introduction of the sci- 
 ences of chemistry, geology, and biology Into our 
 colleges and universities, and for the teaching of 
 all sciences by the laboratory method rather than 
 by lectures and demonstrations, began in force 
 about the middle of the nineteenth century. Up 
 to that time chemistry was rather a subject with 
 which to amaze the spectator than a serious study 
 to instruct the student, while geology and espe- 
 cially biology were more frequently taught as 
 branches of natural theology than as natural 
 sciences. 
 
 In 1848, in an old frame building on the Charles 
 River in Cambridge, Louis Agassiz opened the first 
 scientific laboratory in America for the instruction 
 
THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 61 
 
 of students by the laboratory method. His labora- 
 tory of zoology thus antedated all other teaching 
 laboratories in this country. But although Agas- 
 siz taught zoology from a scientific point of view- 
 it was still generally regarded as a part of 
 natural theology. At a time when laboratory in- 
 struction required justification and popular sup- 
 port he said, " The laboratory is to me a sanctu- 
 ary ; I would have nothing done in it unworthy of 
 the great Author," — truly a noble and beautiful 
 sentiment, but an evidence that science was still 
 looked upon as a handmaid of religion rather 
 than as an independent subject of teaching and 
 research. 
 
 And it was against this very conception of sci- 
 ence as a subject worthy of study for its own sake, 
 and worthy of a place in the college curriculum 
 because of its cultural value, that the representa- 
 tives of the older systems of education objected 
 most strenuously. Mathematics and physics had 
 long occupied an unquestioned position in the cur- 
 riculum, but the newer sciences seemed to many 
 purists in education to be less pure than the older 
 ones. And no doubt many scientists went too far 
 in the condemnation of the older systems of educa- 
 tion, while many classicists went too far in the con- 
 demnation of the new. If advocates of the newer 
 learning proclaimed with pride, " We are the peo- 
 ple and wisdom was born with us," representatives 
 
62 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 
 
 of the older learning answered with scorn, " We are 
 the people and wisdom will die with us." 
 
 Each of us must be aware of a tendency to 
 believe that the experience and training which were 
 beneficial for us must be the best possible for others. 
 Also we magnify the importance of that which 
 we have known by deprecating the value of that 
 which we have not known. And it is an interesting 
 fact which requires no comment that those persons 
 who are most certain that the newer sciences have 
 little or no cultural value are always those who 
 know little or nothing about them. 
 
 Thus the warfare went on between the scientist 
 and the classicist during the latter half of the 
 nineteenth century and occasionally echoes of it 
 are heard even to this day. But the demand for 
 instruction in science comparable to that in other 
 fields of learning became too great to be success- 
 fully resisted and gradually it was admitted to the 
 college curriculum, but, as it were, by the back 
 door. The scientific goats were not allowed to 
 mingle with the academic sheep, but in the larger 
 universities separate scientific schools with sepa- 
 rate faculties and student bodies were established, 
 such as the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, 
 the Shefl^eld Scientific School at Yale, and the 
 Green School of Science at Princeton ; while sepa- 
 rate scientific courses having diff^erent requirfr- 
 ments for entrance and for degrees than in the 
 
THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 63 
 
 case of the academic courses were organized in 
 many other institutions. 
 
 For many years this sharp distinction between 
 academic and scientific faculties and students was 
 maintained, but gradually this distinction has 
 broken down and now the sheep and goats are gen- 
 erally indistinguishable except that at Commence- 
 ment the former are branded " A. B." and the lat- 
 ter " B. S." 
 
 II 
 
 Having thus briefly sketched the historical de- 
 velopments by which the physical and natural 
 sciences came to have a place in the college cur- 
 riculum let us now consider the more fundamental 
 question as to whether they ought to be there. The 
 physical and natural sciences now form a well- 
 recognized and firmly established part of the cur- 
 riculum of every higher institution of learning. 
 Indeed, in not a few institutions scientific studies 
 overshadow all others and we have passed from the 
 condition of a generation ago, when science was 
 merely tolerated in the curriculum, to one in which 
 the question is frequently asked whether we are not 
 in danger of losing our classics and humanities. 
 
 What are the net results of all these changes? 
 Are we losing In our colleges and universities high 
 ideals of scholarship and culture? Is the material 
 
64 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 
 
 and sordid character of the age, which is fre- 
 quently proclaimed and decried, the result of in- 
 creased attention to science in the schools? Does 
 science appeal largely to the material interests of 
 men while leaving untouched their intellectual and 
 spiritual interests? Is a scientific education 
 synonymous with a technical one, and is it the 
 purpose of such education to make technicians 
 rather than men? 
 
 I believe that all these questions may be and 
 should be answered in the negative; that the cul- 
 tivation of the sciences has done more for the 
 intellectual than for the material interests of men ; 
 and that the natural sciences have rightfully taken 
 their place in the curriculum alongside of the 
 classics and the humanities as subjects of liberal 
 culture. 
 
 No education is liberal which does not introduce 
 one to the world's best thought and life. A purely 
 classical education and a purely scientific one are 
 equally illiberal. A liberal education is broad, 
 disciplinary, and useful; it educates head, heart, 
 and hand ; it must include literature, science, and 
 humanities ; it must fit for contact with the world 
 along many lines ; it must help one to find himself 
 and to choose his work; it must prepare for the 
 largest usefulness and enjoyment. 
 
 One of the slight compensations for the world 
 war which is now raging is that we are likely to 
 
THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 65 
 
 hear less in the future of that much abused word 
 " Culture." For half a century it has been a word 
 to conjure with, especially in academic circles, but 
 it has never had any constant meaning except that 
 of self-conscious and rather intolerant superiority. 
 As a result, every cult or social group or insti- 
 tution or nation has defined the word so as to in- 
 clude itself and to exclude the rest of the world. 
 Like orthodoxy, which Bishop Warburton said " is 
 my doxy, heterodoxy is another man's doxy," so 
 culture has been defined as my cult, while all other 
 cults are philistinism. In particular the high 
 priests of education and the Levites in charge of 
 the Ark of Culture have always felt called upon 
 to smite the Philistines hip and thigh. 
 
 But however the word culture may have 
 been used and abused we all agree that ideally it 
 stands for something real and good. It is no ex- 
 clusive possession of a single cult. It is no single 
 definite object, but a general and rather indefinite 
 ideal. There are many kinds of culture, but each 
 and all may be regarded from the standpoint of the 
 individual or from that of society; the former we 
 call education, the latter civilization. Viewed from 
 either of these aspects I believe that it can be 
 shown that science is one of the most valuable and 
 most important forces in modern life. 
 
 Much has been said and written of the debt of 
 civilization to the natural sciences, but it is per- 
 
66 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 
 
 haps impossible for any of us to realize the extent 
 of that obligation. No catalogue of the material, 
 the intellectual, the moral, and the social changes 
 wrought in human society by science and the scien- 
 tific method could possibly be complete and none 
 could convey any adequate conception of the sum 
 total of the debt which mankind owes to science. 
 It is no exaggeration to say that the chief differ- 
 ences between ancient and modern life are due al- 
 most entirely to this one factor. Literature, 
 philosophy, and art the ancients had which will 
 compare favorably with that of any age, but sci- 
 ence they did not have except in its merest begin- 
 nings. 
 
 The wonderful material changes wrought by sci- 
 ence, such as the developments of steam, electric- 
 ity, and great engineering enterprises and the con- 
 sequent increase of comforts and enlargement of 
 human experience; the remarkable growth of the 
 applied sciences of chemistry, physics, biology, and 
 geology ; and perhaps most of all the revolutionary 
 changes in medicine, surgery, and public health 
 which have followed a scientific study of the causes 
 and remedies of various diseases, are liable to blind 
 us to other great achievements of science, which 
 if less material are none the less real and valuable. 
 
 1. First among; all the contributions of science 
 to civilization stands the emancipation of man 
 from various forms of bondage. Science has to a 
 
THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 67 
 
 large extent freed civilized man from slavery to 
 environment; it has well-nigh annihilated time and 
 space, it has levied tribute upon practically the 
 whole earth to supply his wants, it has taught him 
 how to utilize the great resources of nature, and to 
 a large extent it has given into his hands the con- 
 trol of his destiny on this planet. 
 
 But the highest service of science to culture has 
 been in the emancipation of the mind, in freeing 
 men from the bondage of superstition and igno- 
 rance, in helping man to know himself. We can 
 never fully realize the terrors of a world supposed 
 to be inhabited by demons and evil spirits, a world 
 in which all natural phenomena were but the ex- 
 pressions of the love or hate of preternatural 
 beings. But we may gather from history and from 
 present-day ignorance and superstition some faint 
 idea at least of the ever-present dread, even amidst 
 happiness and joy, of those who feared Nature 
 because they knew her not, of those to whom the 
 heavens were full of omens and the earth of por- 
 tents, of those who peopled every shadow with 
 ghosts and evil spirits and who saw in all sickness, 
 pain, adversity, and calamity the cruel hand of a 
 demon or the evil eye of a witch. 
 
 It is frequently assumed that the decline of 
 superstition is due to the teachings of religion 
 or to the general development of the intellectual 
 powers of man, and there is no doubt that to a 
 
68 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 
 
 certain extent this is true. The general advance 
 of the intellect, in so far as it is associated with 
 truer views of nature, is unquestionably inimical 
 to superstition ; yet the persistence of such a super- 
 stition as that concerning witchcraft through 
 periods of great religious and intellectual awaken- 
 ing, the almost universal belief in it throughout 
 the golden age of English Literature, the statutes 
 of all European countries against the practice of 
 witchcraft, sorcery, and magic, some of which re- 
 mained until the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury — all these things show that however religion 
 and general intelligence may have curbed its cruel 
 and murderous practices, the downfall of this 
 superstition could be brought about only by a 
 more thorough knowledge of nature. The com- 
 mon belief that insanity, epilepsy, and imbecility 
 were the results of demoniacal possession neces- 
 sarily led, even in enlightened and Christian com- 
 munities, to cruel methods of exorcising the de- 
 mon, and the final disappearance of this super- 
 stition (if it may be said to have disappeared even 
 at the present day) is entirely due to a scientific 
 study of the diseases in question. 
 
 The same might be said of any one of a hun- 
 dred forms of superstition, which like a legion of 
 demons hedged about the lives of our ancestors. 
 As false interpretations of natural phenomena, 
 only truer interpretation could replace them, and 
 
THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 69 
 
 what centuries of the best literature, philosophy, 
 and religion had failed to do science has accom- 
 plished. Science is, as Huxley has said, organized 
 and trained common sense, and nowhere is this bet- 
 ter shown than in its rational, common-sense way 
 of interpreting mysterious phenomena. No doubt 
 much still remains to be accomplished; the unsci- 
 entific world is still full of superstition as to 
 natural phenomena, but it is a superstition of a 
 less malignant type than that which prevailed be- 
 fore the general introduction of the scientific 
 method. 
 
 Furthermore the cultivation of the natural sci- 
 ences has done more than all other agencies to 
 liberate man from slavish regard for authority. 
 When all others were appealing to antiquity, the 
 Church, the Scriptures, Science appealed to facts. 
 She has braved the anathemas of popes and church 
 councils, of philosophers and scholars in her search 
 for truth; she has freed man from ecclesiastical, 
 patristic, even academic bondage ; she has unfet- 
 tered the mind, enthroned the reason, taught the 
 duty and responsibility of independent thought 
 and her message to mankind has ever been the mes- 
 sage of enlightenment and liberty, " Ye shall know 
 the truth and the truth shall make you free." 
 
 2. But science has not only broken the chains 
 of superstition and proclaimed intellectual eman- 
 cipation, she has enormously enlarged the field of 
 
70 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 
 
 thought. She has given men nobler and grander 
 conceptions of nature than were ever dreamed of 
 before. Contrast the old geocentric theory which 
 made the earth the center of all created things 
 with the revelations of modern astronomy as to 
 the enormous sizes, distances, and velocities of the 
 heavenly bodies ; contrast the old view that the 
 earth was made about six thousand years ago — 
 5,675 last September, to be exact, and in six literal 
 days — with the revelations of geology that the 
 earth is immeasurably old and that not days but 
 millions of years have been consumed in its mak- 
 ing; contrast the doctrine of creation, which 
 taught that the world and all that therein is re- 
 cently and miraculously were launched into exist- 
 ence, with the revelations of science that animals 
 and plants and the world itself are the result of 
 an immensely long process of evolution. As Dar- 
 win so beautifully says, " There is grandeur in 
 this view of life with its several powers having 
 been breathed by the Creator into a few fonns or 
 into one, and that whilst this planet has gone 
 cycling on according to the first law of gravity, 
 from so simple a beginning endless forms most 
 beautiful and most wonderful have been and are 
 being evolved." There is grandeur in the revela- 
 tions of science concerning the whole of nature — 
 grandeur not only in the conceptions of immen- 
 sity which it discloses, but also of the stability of 
 
THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 71 
 
 nature. To the man of science, nature does not 
 represent the mere caprice of god or devil, to be 
 lightly altered for a child's whim. Nature is, as 
 Bishop Butler said, that which is stated, fixed, 
 settled; eternal process moving on, the same yes- 
 terday, to-day, and forever. Men may come and 
 men may go, doctrines may rise and disappear, 
 states may flourish and decay, but in nature, as 
 in God himself, there is neither variableness nor 
 shadow of turning. The all too prevalent notion 
 that nature may be wheedled, cheated, juggled 
 with, shows that men have not yet begun to realize 
 the stability of nature and indicates the necessity 
 of at least some elementary scientific training for 
 all men. " To the solid ground of Nature trusts 
 the mind that builds for aye." 
 
 3. Science has changed our whole point of view 
 as to nature and man, and science cannot there- 
 fore be eliminated from any system of education 
 which strives to impart culture. It is not prin- 
 cipally nor primarily in its results, however great 
 they may be, that the chief service of science is found, 
 but rather in its method. In a word the method of 
 science is the appeal to phenomena, the appeal to 
 nature. To the scientist the test of truth is not 
 logic, nor inner conviction, nor conceivability and 
 inconceivability, but phenomena or what are com- 
 monly called facts. The steps of this appeal to 
 phenomena are first observation or experiment ; 
 
72 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 
 
 then induction, hypothesis, or generalization, and 
 finally verification by further observations, experi- 
 ments, and comparisons. The methods of science 
 have now invaded to a greater or less extent all 
 domains of thought, — philosophy, literature, art, 
 education, and religion, — and the unique character 
 of the method of science may not be fully appre- 
 ciated except upon comparison with prescientific 
 or non-scientific methods. 
 
 Of course one need not expect to find any proper 
 appreciation of the scientific method among the 
 ignorant, but it is amazing how such appreciation 
 is lacking among many otherwise intelligent and 
 cultivated people. We daily see cases where the 
 test of truth is the appeal to superstition, to senti- 
 ment, to prejudice, to inner conviction, in short 
 to anything rather than to facts. The world is 
 full of people who know nothing of the value of 
 facts or of evidence, whether it be with regard to 
 such general themes as religion, education, gov- 
 ernment, society, personality, or more special 
 ones such as diseases and methods of treating 
 them, vaccination, animal experimentation, food 
 fads, and the like. 
 
 Consider for a moment the art of healing, as 
 contrasted with the science of medicine; the vari- 
 ous " schools of medicine " and much more those 
 who never went to school appeal not to carefully 
 determined, accurately controllable phenomena, but 
 
THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 73 
 
 largely to sentiment, prejudice, and superstition. 
 The same is true of the " fake " science which 
 flourishes mightily in the daily papers, and espe- 
 cially is it shown in the hypotheses, discoveries, 
 and dogmas of those who determine the laws of 
 nature from introspection and construct the uni- 
 verse from their inner consciousness. 
 
 Every little while there arises a new and bril- 
 liant Lucifer who draws after him a third part of 
 the hosts of heaven. Though he appears under 
 many guises, such as Divine Healer, Christian Sci- 
 entist (Heaven save the mark!). Spiritualist, The- 
 osophist, Telepathist, the main tenet of his belief is 
 always the same, — a revolt against the scientific 
 method of appealing to phenomena. 
 
 One of the hardest lessons of life is to learn to 
 see things as they are. We tend by nature to put 
 ourselves into everything we interpret. We see 
 things not as they are but embroidered round and 
 covered over by our fear or love or hate. Our 
 emotions blind our judgments and not Infre- 
 quently reduce us to the level of irrational beings. 
 There are thousands of intelligent men and women, 
 among them many graduates of colleges and uni- 
 versities, whose opinions regarding the most im- 
 portant questions of their lives are shaped by 
 sentiment and prejudice and convention rather 
 than by a study of facts. And it is this which 
 makes possible blind loyalty whether to college or 
 
74 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 
 
 party or church, and bhnd prejudice and hatred 
 between classes and races and nations ; it is this 
 which arouses war and destroys the monuments 
 of civilization. It is this refusal to see things as 
 they are that destroys character and peace and 
 progress. 
 
 What is the remedy for such a state of affairs? 
 What can be done by our colleges and schools to 
 improve this really dreadful condition? How 
 can individuals be taught the value of facts? 
 There is probably no better way than by incul- 
 cating the methods of science, by the first-hand 
 appeal to phenomena. The appeal to facts is the 
 very foundation of science, and it is a method in 
 which every person should receive thorough and 
 systematic training. Even this will fail in many 
 cases where inherited tendencies are too strong 
 to be overcome by training, but at least it will 
 help to promote a spirit of open-mindedness, sin- 
 cerity, and sanity. 
 
 To me it seems that there is no part of an 
 education so important as this, none the lack of 
 which will so seriously mar the whole life. Of 
 course it is not claimed that all scientists best 
 illustrate the scientific method nor that it may not 
 be practiced by those who have not studied sci- 
 ence, but that this method is best inculcated in 
 the study of the natural sciences. Science not 
 only appeals to facts, but it cultivates a love of 
 
THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 75 
 
 truth, not merely of the sentimental sort, but such 
 as leads men to long-continued and laborious re- 
 search; it trains the critical judgment as to evi- 
 dence ; it gives man truer views of himself and of 
 the world in which he lives, and it therefore fur- 
 nishes, as I believe, the best possible foundation 
 not only for scholarship in any field, but for citi- 
 zenship and general culture. 
 
 But culture is not some definite goal to be 
 reached by a single kind of discipline. There is 
 no single path to culture and the great danger 
 which confronts the student of the natural sciences 
 is that his absorption in his work may lead to a 
 narrowness which blinds him to the larger sig- 
 nificance of the facts with which he deals and unfits 
 him for association with his fellow-men. A techni- 
 cal education which deals only with training for 
 special work without reference to foundation prin- 
 ciples may be useful and necessary but it cannot 
 be said to contribute largely to culture. What 
 teacher has not been surprised and pained by the 
 fear which some students exhibit that they may 
 waste an hour on some subject the direct financial 
 value of which they do not see, — students who 
 fail to grasp general principles, to take a broad 
 and generous view of life, to appreciate good work 
 wherever done? The scientist no less than the 
 classicist or the humanist should know the world's 
 best thought and life. Life is not only Jcnouing 
 
76 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 
 
 but feeling and doing also, and other things than 
 science are necessary to culture. The day is for- 
 ever past when any one mind can master all sci- 
 ences, much less all knowledge ; there can never be 
 another Aristotle or Humboldt ; nevertheless in the 
 demand for broad and liberal training the greatest 
 needs of scientific work and the highest ideals of 
 culture are at one, and this Institution can serve 
 no more useful purpose than to stand in the future, 
 as it has done in the past, for the highest, broad- 
 est, and most generous views of learning and of 
 life. 
 
THE COLLEGE AS A PREPARA- 
 TION FOR PROFESSIONAL 
 STUDY 
 
 PRESIDENT RUSH RHEES 
 
 We are constantly reminded of the fact that 
 modern higher education is the outgrowth of a 
 medieval demand for more thorough training for 
 professional careers — in theology, in law, in medi- 
 cine, and in teaching. And it is true that the 
 foremost of the medieval universities gained dis- 
 tinction as schools for training for one or others 
 of these professions — Bologna for law both civil 
 and canon, Salerno for medicine, Paris and in 
 large measure the ancient English universities for 
 theology — while all of these maintained faculties 
 of arts, whose masters became the teaching guild 
 for all of Christian Europe. 
 
 It cannot be regarded as accident, however, but 
 as a conclusion from experience, that in most of 
 those universities the faculty of arts early came 
 to be more than a colleague or rival of the other 
 faculties. It soon developed into an ally of the 
 others, and, particularly in the English univer- 
 sities, the primate among them. The courses 
 
 77 
 
78 RUSH RHEES 
 
 of study for theology and law early recognized 
 the value of a prior training of their students under 
 the faculty of arts ; and special concessions were 
 made in the time required for degrees in the case 
 of students who enrolled under these faculties 
 after being graduated in arts. 
 
 Nor can it be truly deemed accidental that, 
 when the colonists in New England and Virginia 
 made the first beginnings of higher education in 
 America, with the avowed purpose of training 
 youth for the ministry, for law, for medicine, 
 and for public service, they planted in the wilder- 
 ness not schools of theology or medicine or law, 
 but modest copies of the English colleges in 
 which their founders had gained their own train- 
 ing in general liberal culture. 
 
 In accordance with the precedents with which 
 the founders of Harvard and Yale were familiar 
 in their English college life, and for the further- 
 ance of the primary purpose which actuated the 
 founding of those first New England colleges, 
 chairs of divinity were indeed established in Har- 
 vard in 1638 and in Yale in 1741. In 1755 the 
 charter of Kings College (now Columbia) pro- 
 vided for a professorship of divinity, but no ap- 
 pointment was ever made. During all the colonial 
 period, however, practical preparation for the min- 
 istry was for the most part obtained by means of 
 the instruction and example furnished to aspirants 
 
PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 79 
 
 for the ministry by leaders in that profession, 
 who took the young theologues into their homes 
 and churches as virtual apprentices. A similar 
 apprenticeship system was relied upon for the 
 training of physicians and lawyers. In the ex- 
 igencies of their pioneer life the founders of our 
 American colleges selected instinctively the school 
 of liberal culture as the indispensable factor 
 in higher education, and left to a later time 
 the development of schools for professional 
 training. 
 
 Not until the closing years of the colonial 
 period did that development make its appearance. 
 
 As early as 1750 lectures on anatomy were 
 given in Philadelphia by Dr. Thomas Cadwallader, 
 and in 1765 Dr. John Morgan and Dr. William 
 Shippen, Jr., founded a school of medicine in that 
 city, which was attached to the College of Phila- 
 delphia, now the University of Pennsylvania. In 
 1763 the governors of Kings College in New York 
 voted to provide instruction in medicine as soon as 
 funds could be procured, and in 1767 a Medical 
 School was established with six professors, the first 
 medical degrees being awarded to two graduates 
 in 1769. The Harvard Medical School was 
 founded in 1782. Since that time the growth of 
 schools of medicine in our country has been abun- 
 dant if not appalling. 
 
 The first school organized to give instruction in 
 
80 RUSH RHEES 
 
 law was founded bj Topping Reeve in Litchfield, 
 Connecticut, in 1784, and it flourished for many 
 years, graduating over a thousand students. In 
 1792 a chair of law in Columbia College was 
 created, and in 1793 James Kent was chosen to fill 
 it. He held the post until 1798, when through fail- 
 ure of the legislative grant which had provided 
 the salary the chair was discontinued. 
 
 In 1823, however, Kent again became professor 
 of law in Columbia College, and held the post 
 until his death in 1847. The Harvard Law School 
 dates from 1820, though its vigorous life did not 
 show itself until 1830. 
 
 The year 1784 saw the establishment of the first 
 Theological Seminary in America — that of the 
 Dutch Reformed Church, in New Brunswick, New 
 Jersey. Since that time many schools for minis- 
 terial education have been founded, and more of 
 them have been independent of affiliation with col- 
 leges or universities than have had such academic 
 connections. 
 
 The modern developments of applied science 
 have brought into being many very strong schools 
 for training in various branches of engineer- 
 ing, a development prophetically foreseen in the 
 later years of the eighteenth century, but essen- 
 tially a nineteenth-century growth. Even more re- 
 cent is the development, now progressing rapidly, 
 of special colleges for the training of teachers, 
 
PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 81 
 
 to which many students resort who have first gained 
 a bachelor's degree in arts or science. 
 
 I have oflPered this cursory sketch simply to re- 
 mind you of the relative lateness, as well as of the 
 recent luxuriousness, of the growth of institutions 
 for distinctly professional education. 
 
 I now desire to call attention to an interesting 
 feature of that development. Many of the schools 
 for theology, medicine, and law which appeared 
 during the nineteenth century not only had no 
 connection with any faculty of arts or liberal cul- 
 ture, but made hesitating if any demand for col- 
 lege training as prerequisite for admission to the 
 professional courses. 
 
 This attitude of independence or indifference 
 found some historical justification in the practical 
 parity of the faculties of theology, medicine, and 
 law with the faculty of arts in the typical medie- 
 val universities, and it characterized until quite 
 recent times the attitude and practice of most of 
 the professional faculties which were developed by 
 our older colleges in the course of the development 
 of a genuine university organization. Not only 
 so, but a singular inconsistency sometimes ap- 
 peared, namely a readiness on the part of pro- 
 fessional faculties In our emerging universities to 
 receive students in their classes with less rigid 
 scrutiny of their preliminary education than the 
 college — or arts — faculty were exercising. 
 
88 RUSH RHEES 
 
 Recent years, however, have seen two note- 
 worthy developments in professional education in 
 America : A very great broadening of the concep- 
 tion of professional education, which has given 
 to the work of these schools a more generally 
 scientific, as distinguished from a narrow voca- 
 tional or technical, character; and a decided stiff- 
 ening of requirements for preliminary education 
 both in extent and in quality. The former of 
 these tendencies is a natural consequence of a 
 higher conception of the importance of the sci- 
 entific basis for professional competency, and a 
 more alert academic conscience. It has brought 
 about a marked increase in the personnel of the 
 force of instruction essential to the maintenance 
 of such professional schools, a growing demand 
 that incumbents of professorships in such schools 
 be acknowledged leaders in the scientific aspects 
 of their specialties, and that they be men who are 
 willing to make teaching their vocation, not simply 
 their avocation. This recent development has also 
 involved a great increase in the extent and costli- 
 ness of the equipment for professional education. 
 As a consequence there appears a strong tend- 
 ency to concentrate effort for the betterment 
 of teaching in theology, law, and medicine 
 upon schools which are organized as depart- 
 ments of strong universities, or may become such 
 by affiliation. 
 
PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 83 
 
 The tendency to increasing vigor in the defini- 
 tion and administration of entrance requirements 
 shows two aspects which are of great interest to 
 the American college. There is on the one hand a 
 slowly growing demand for a bachelor's degree, or 
 its clear equivalent, as a condition of admission to 
 some of the leading professional schools. And 
 where this rigid requirement is not enforced, there 
 appears in its place a requirement of the successful 
 completion of one, two, or three years of the cus- 
 tomary college course.' 
 
 Herein we see a revival of the preference granted 
 to Masters of Arts by the faculties of theology 
 and law in several of the medieval universities, 
 or a desire to put admission to American univer- 
 sity schools of law and medicine on a basis equiva- 
 lent to that furnished by the completion of the 
 course of study in a German gymnasium or a 
 French lycee. 
 
 On the other hand there appears to be growing, 
 especially in the demands of faculties of medi- 
 cine, a tendency to push back into the college 
 course something of the narrowness of profes- 
 sional outlook and interest which belongs of neces- 
 sity to the professional school. 
 
 Now, what meaning have these developments for 
 the American college? On the one hand the 
 growth of professional schools in equipment of 
 men and material facilities, and in scientific thor- 
 
84 RUSH RHEES 
 
 oughness, which is placing them in the plane of 
 worthy constituent membership in a group of uni- 
 versity faculties, seems to not a few to point to a 
 coming readjustment of American education, in 
 which the old-time college, which served well the 
 needs of our pioneer life, shall give way for a 
 more modem adjustment of secondary to higher 
 education. On the other hand the tendency on 
 the part of several of our most richly endowed 
 and equipped professional faculties to declare 
 that their superior service is to be reserved 
 for a select class of students, who qualify for 
 the privilege by obtaining first a bachelor's 
 degree, gives a notable testimony to the value 
 which leaders in professional education place 
 upon the effects of a thorough course in liberal 
 culture. 
 
 Let me call attention at this point to the essen- 
 tial features of college education as we in America 
 have developed it. The American college either by 
 the invitation of attractive opportunity for elec- 
 tion, or more commonly by a more or less definite 
 prescription of studies, opens for its students doors 
 of outlook upon many different sides of life and 
 phases of truth. The college degree presupposes 
 that its holder has gained some acquaintance with 
 at least several of the great departments of col- 
 lege instruction : namely, foreign languages ; the 
 mathematical, natural, and physical sciences — both 
 
PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 85 
 
 as to facts and as to scientific method ; the history 
 of the political development which has given us our 
 institutions ; economic and social science ; philos- 
 ophy — the endeavor of the human mind to appre- 
 hend somewhat of the meaning of existence ; and 
 literature — the record of the high creative attain- 
 ments of human thought and insight. No student 
 is likely to have entered upon all these branches 
 of study, every graduate has given his attention 
 to several of them. 
 
 Now each one of these branches of college study 
 appeals to a different sort of intellectual interest, 
 and awakens a different kind of intellectual alert- 
 ness ; and as studied in college each introduces the 
 student to the value and delight of learning, quite 
 apart from any consideration of the subsequent 
 utility of the subject-matter of the studies pur- 
 sued. I 
 Obviously it is important that the years spent 
 on the study of Greek or Latin or German or 
 French should endow the student with the ability 
 to use these foreign tongues for reading or con- 
 versation. But even more significant than that 
 ability is the experience which the study of for- 
 eign languages gives of the understanding of ideas 
 unfamiliar to the student's thought, expressed in 
 words and constructions strange to his mind, which 
 picture conditions of life and ideals of conduct 
 and endeavor quite foreign to his experience. 
 
86 RUSH RHEES 
 
 This study stretches the boundaries of his under- 
 standing and sympathy, and begets in him, if it 
 succeeds with him at all, a power of intellectual ad- 
 justment to unanticipated conditions and ideas, 
 and a power of appreciation for truth appearing 
 in strange garb, that not only enrich the man's life, 
 but immensely enlarge his ability to be of use in 
 dealing with other men. For, after all, the great 
 task of human fellowship in work and in social re- 
 lations is the task of translation. The greatest 
 need of my life of human intercourse is ability to 
 understand what another man means who does not 
 think in my way or speak with my shibboleths, 
 and ability to express my thought in terms 
 that will convey and not obscure it to another 
 mind. 
 
 Similarly the study of science and of history 
 enlarges the borders of a man's life, and deepens 
 the wells of his understanding, quite in addition 
 to the mastery he may gain of the facts and 
 hypotheses and methods of any particular science, 
 or the familiarity his study may give him with the 
 story of any given people or period of history. 
 And such broadening increases rapidly with each 
 additional science or historical epoch with which 
 the student gains acquaintance. 
 
 Quite different and more deepening is the en- 
 largement which comes to the mind with the pur- 
 suit of philosophical inquiry and the study of the 
 
PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 87 
 
 history of human thought. While the man who 
 enters the treasure house of literature, and makes 
 friends with the great minds of the ages, has en- 
 riched his life with enduring wealth of intellectual 
 comradeship, and has also risen to a higher out- 
 look upon life and all its concerns, whence he 
 can see things in more just proportions, and 
 judge questions with more equitable judgment, 
 than is possible for the man of rigid professional 
 training. 
 
 It is not only impossible, but it is undesirable 
 that any man should be asked to gain for himself 
 each one of these varied enlargements of life ; for 
 the effort would frustrate itself by substituting 
 superficial intellectual indulgence for serious in- 
 tellectual work. But the significance of college 
 training lies in the fact that these avenues of 
 interest and human enlargement are opened to the 
 college student, that each man of necessity enters 
 upon two or more of them, and that in each one 
 of them he follows a path that leads him to a 
 larger knowledge of truth, without conscious con- 
 cern for the practical uses of that truth. 
 
 I say without conscious concern for the practical 
 uses of that truth. For with the amazing de- 
 velopment of the applications of science and all 
 learning to the practical problems of our modem 
 life there are few branches of intellectual inquiry 
 that do not contribute greatly to some practical 
 
88 RUSH RHEES 
 
 undertakings which men follow as vocations. The 
 study of chemistry and biology in college may 
 be, and should be, directly serviceable to gradu- 
 ates who enter medical schools. The college 
 studies of history and philosophy may be, and 
 should be, directly serviceable to men who go for- 
 ward to prepare for the ministry or the law. But 
 there is importance in the detachment from con- 
 cern with practical uses which characterizes the 
 college man's pursuit of learning. That detach- 
 ment constitutes one of the most valuable items 
 in his education, one of the most effective influ- 
 ences for intellectual breadth and intellectual sym- 
 pathy. For it carries his thought out to interests 
 and realities that are beyond and above his own 
 life, and furnishes a wide horizon in which to see 
 the relations and proportions of his more personal 
 undertakings and concerns. 
 
 This brings me to the essence of the subject 
 which has been assigned to me, and gives oppor- 
 tunity for avowal of my faith in the present and 
 future value of the American college. 
 
 I believe that the American college contributes 
 to preparation for professional study an influence 
 for intellectual maturity which no other agency 
 has to off'er. By intellectual maturity I do not 
 mean simply developed intellectual power, for pro- 
 fessional studies as at present conducted have no 
 superior in that respect. I mean by intellectual 
 
PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 89 
 
 maturity a well-balanced judgment, a sense of pro- 
 portion in the estimate of truth, and ability to 
 see facts in larger and more remote as well as in 
 nearer and obvious relations. It is a maturity 
 like that which a man gains from travel in foreign 
 lands, like that which the varied experiences of 
 city life bring to the man country bred. It depends 
 on ability to see particular truths from the vantage 
 point of a wide outlook, and to estimate them with 
 the broad sympathy of understanding which is be- 
 gotten by interest in other phases of truth. 
 
 Such breadth of outlook and sympathy of under- 
 standing come to the student of theology or law 
 who knows something of the facts and methods of 
 natural or physical science. They are given to a 
 student of medicine or engineering by some knowl- 
 edge of literature and some understanding of 
 philosophy and philosophic method. 
 
 College education cannot guarantee that intel- 
 lectual maturity will be found in all wearers of 
 college degrees — for some students never get their 
 blinders off, so as to see truths in wide relations. 
 But college education offers the most promising 
 means for such intellectual emancipation. There- 
 fore I hold it to be a peculiarly important and valu- 
 able preparation for professional study. 
 
 This service cannot be so well rendered by an ex- 
 tension of the secondary school, after the pattern 
 of the German or French practice. The medieval 
 
90 RUSH RHEES 
 
 course in arts was not a preparatory school, 
 though its value as a preparation for work 
 under other faculties was early recognized. The 
 independence of interest, the detachment of en- 
 deavor, which belong to the best college work, con- 
 tribute in essential ways to the maturing influences 
 which give college study its value as a prepara- 
 tion for later professional courses. If I mistake 
 not, herein lies part of the secret of the peculiar 
 sanity, the balance of judgment, and the sense of 
 proportion which characterize English scholarship, 
 even when in laborious mastery of details and in 
 Wealth of erudition it falls short of German and 
 French attainments. I am convinced that for our 
 future good the emphasis we have placed on studies 
 for liberal culture in the atmosphere of an insti- 
 tution of higher learning, borrowing our practices 
 from England, should be strengthened, and not 
 abandoned. 
 
 Another contribution which college education 
 makes to preparation for professional study is 
 corollary to this maturity of mind to which I have 
 just alluded. Let me call it a developed intellectual 
 instinct against rash generalizations and against 
 over-confident logical conclusions. I shall doubt- 
 less lay myself open to charge of transgressing 
 my own law, if I confess that I know of no more 
 misleading influence in our intellectual life than 
 logic. That generalization is rash. Its justifica- 
 
PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 91 
 
 tion lies in the fact that it challenges consideration, 
 critical, modest, and teachable, of the premises of 
 which impeccable logical procedure makes use. I 
 know nothing more pathetic than the dogmatic de- 
 liverances of metaphysical theologians concerning 
 what can be true in the world of nature, except- 
 ing the dogmatic assertions of men of science who 
 wander into philosophy's domain and seem wholly 
 unaware that in that strange field their impressions 
 and speculations have lost all the authority that of 
 right inhered in their scientific observations and 
 inductions therefrom. We have heard and seen 
 much these recent months of the so-called biological 
 defense of war. The tragedy of that argument is 
 its false analogy, its blindness to what fitness and 
 progress have come to mean in the unfolding of 
 human history. The sensitive intellectual con- 
 science, quick to discern such fallacies, and repudi- 
 ate premises which issue in false conclusions, is 
 bred by such varied studies and such detached 
 interests as the college of liberal culture offers to 
 its students. 
 
 Another value of college training as a prepara- 
 tion for professional study I find in that facility 
 of translation to which I have already referred as 
 one of the most essential qualities of the broadly 
 educated man. It is needless that I enlarge fur- 
 ther upon it; enough to call to mind the growing 
 importance, with the increase of men practicing 
 
92 RUSH RHEES 
 
 our varied professions, of ability on the part of 
 leaders in professional life to convince and lead 
 what I may call " lay " opinion. Experience has 
 demonstrated that that power of translation, of 
 expressing new truth in familiar terms, is one of 
 the natural products of college education. 
 
 One other contribution is indirect rather than 
 obvious, and it is even more broadly human and 
 less professionally significant in its value than 
 either the maturity of mind or the sensitive intellec- 
 tual conscience, or the power of translation to 
 which I had just called attention. I mean the 
 resources for richer intellectual living which a man 
 acquires when he has traveled far enough and 
 widely enough in the world of the mind to be at 
 home in different places and with different inter- 
 ests, and when he has entered somewhat into the 
 fellowship of great thoughts and great lives of 
 other times and other climes. 
 
 In conclusion, let me reaffirm my belief that how- 
 ever much of accident due to pioneer conditions 
 may have entered into the origins of our American 
 colleges, the riper development of our intellectual 
 life is to come to our country by nourishing, by 
 cultivating, by pruning if need be, and by guiding 
 the work of the American college, so that the 
 unique service which can be rendered to national 
 wisdom and national power by the matured mind 
 and judgment of men who have pursued truth with 
 
PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 93 
 
 some detachment from every consideration but the 
 love of it may be the privilege of the coming gen- 
 erations, as it has been of that which is now join- 
 ing here in celebration of a century of fidelity to 
 its ideals by an American college. 
 
THE COLLEGE AS A PREPARA- 
 TION FOR PRACTICAL AFFAIRS 
 
 PRESIDENT CHARLES F. THWING 
 
 And what are practical affairs? What are the 
 forces, the movements, the concerns which we call 
 practical? The practical represents those powers 
 often called utilities, which are embodied in ma- 
 terial forms, or which represent those forms. The 
 practical is a force which makes its appeal to the 
 eye, to the ear, to the touch. The non-practical 
 may seem to make its appeal to the eye, as 
 Raphael's Madonna or a Greek marble, or to the 
 ear, as a noble piece of music, but these make their 
 appeal through the outer organ to the inner sense 
 or sensibilities. The practical finds its supreme 
 achievement in a material civilization. Its stand- 
 ards are scales and yardsticks ; its results are 
 embodied in tons, square feet, and cubic yards. 
 Its ends are primarily quantitative. Its atmos- 
 pheres are the lust of the flesh, the lust of the 
 eyes, and the pride of life. At its highest its re- 
 sults are seen in the center of the metropolis, as, 
 for instance, of that part of London known as 
 the Bank, a microcosm of the forces of the world. 
 
 95 
 
^ CHARLES F. THWING 
 
 At its worst its results are seen in the selfishness 
 and the sensualism of a mind disintegrated, of a 
 conscience corrupted, of a will weak for right and 
 strong for wrong. This microcosm may apply to 
 the individual or to the community, as seen in the 
 court of Louis XV. 
 
 The practical man is the man who has an eye 
 for the main chance, who casts an anchor to the 
 windward, who seeks to be safe, who avoids risks, 
 who likes comfort. He may believe in education, 
 but if he does, he believes in it chiefly because edu- 
 cation helps him to make more rather than to be- 
 come more; who, if he believes in the church, be- 
 lieves in it for this world and not for other- 
 worldliness; who wishes the community to be well 
 housed and properly fed ; and who would improve 
 humanity by comforts and by material forces 
 rather than by ideas. This man has imagination, 
 but it seldom rises above the fifth story of the five 
 senses, and sometimes not above the " third story 
 back." He has no sky, no horizon, no " intima- 
 tions of immortality," either in life's prose or life's 
 verse. He may read poetry, but it is rather Walt 
 Whitman than Wordsworth. He hears no sky- 
 larks, he sees no Grecian urns, he has no vision 
 from peaks of Darien. 
 
 The college has nothing to do with practical 
 concerns, says one. It is utterly remote from 
 such mundane considerations and relationships. 
 
PREPARATION FOR AFFAIRS 97 
 
 The college is a monastery placed far away from 
 the world. The college is a pliilosophy like Hegel's, 
 which is said to be a system shot out of pure space. 
 The college buildings should be put either on Mt. 
 Sinai peak or in an African desert. Its chief in- 
 habitant should be Browning's Grammarian. 
 
 Such is the interpretation of one who believes 
 that the college has no relations at all with prac- 
 tical concerns. The college should be unpractical. 
 It should embody what a great teacher of mathe- 
 matics is said to have said upon writing a formula 
 upon the blackboard : " Thank heaven that can 
 be put to no use ! " The unpractical man, in con- 
 tinuation of the type of the unpractical college, 
 is he who fails to adjust ideals to forces, who 
 declines to relate causes to effects, or effects to 
 causes, or conditions to conclusions, either re- 
 mote or immediate. 
 
 In these two interpretations so unlike, so almost 
 contradictory, wherein lies the truth? As often 
 happens, the truth does lie in the mean, not only 
 as executive strength, but also as veracity. The 
 college has to recognize that man is a citizen of two 
 hemispheres, the material, the visible, the audible, the 
 tangible ; the immaterial, the invisible, the inaudible, 
 the intangible. He is not so much a contradiction, 
 as Pascal says, as he is a union of opposites. He 
 is, indeed, as Pascal does intimate, somewhat akin 
 to the brutes, but he also is somewhat akin to 
 
98 CHARLES F. THWING 
 
 the angels. He is the subject of greatness and the 
 victim of baseness. He may be a reed, the weakest 
 in nature, but he is a reed that thinks. If he in- 
 habit one hemisphere alone, he is only one-half a 
 man. By living in both he becomes the whole, 
 the spherical man. 
 
 It is of course acknowledged that what we call the 
 purely intellectual hemisphere the college should 
 train. The college should do for man to-day what 
 Socrates did for Plato and Plato for his disciples. 
 It is to adopt and to use the Athenian, and not the 
 Spartan, type of education. It is to give acquaint- 
 ance with the truths of life; to orient the student 
 into a world of citizenship ; to lead one back into 
 the sources of civilization, and from those sources 
 to create resources ; to help one to discern and to 
 direct the tendencies of which he is a part, and 
 always and everywhere to create life in his own 
 bosom. It is to develop the non-material, the 
 spiritual elements of the community and of the 
 person. 
 
 But it is also — and right here is the crux of our 
 problem — to seek to discipline that part of the 
 material hemisphere of man which lies closest and 
 nearest to the non-material. On this material side 
 it is to accomplish five results : first, it is to teach 
 one to think, to think clearly; second, to teach 
 one to appreciate, to appreciate sympathetically; 
 third, to teach one to apply truth, to apply truth 
 
PREPARATION FOR AFFAIRS 99 
 
 usefully ; fourth, to teach one to work, and to work 
 thoroughly; and fifth, to teach one to enjoy, and 
 to enjoy fully. 
 
 First, to teach one to think, and to think clearly. 
 To think is the most precious intellectual result of 
 the college. Thinking is an art. It is, of course, also 
 a science. But for the college man it is primarily 
 an art. An art is learned by practicing it. Think- 
 ing is, therefore, learned by thinking. It repre- 
 sents habits of intellectual accuracy, discrimina- 
 tion, comparison, concentration. Such habits are 
 formed by being accurate, discriminating, and by 
 the actual concentration of the mind. A course 
 in education promotes such thinking better than 
 a course in business. For education represents 
 orderliness and system in intellectual effort. The 
 effort proceeds by certain graduated steps, from 
 the easy to the less easy, from the difficult to the 
 more difficult. The purpose is to train in the 
 valuation of principles, which underlie all service, 
 and not in the worth of rules, which are of special 
 and narrow application. The man trained only in 
 business of one kind is not fitted to take up business 
 of a different kind. The broadly trained man is 
 prepared to learn business of any kind, and if busi- 
 ness of one kind has been learned, he is able to 
 leave it to take up work of another kind without 
 difficulty. The practice of any art should make 
 the one who practices this art a better thinker 
 
100 CHARLES F. THWING 
 
 in it ; but this advantage relates in a large degree 
 to one who has first approached the art through 
 thinking. 
 
 I suppose it may be said that the man who is 
 self-educated is usually very narrowly educated. 
 He is educated along and in certain lines. He is 
 educated, so to speak, tangentially. His thinking, 
 too, is usually tangential. It lacks comprehensive- 
 ness and a sense of relations. It has force, and the 
 endeavors which spring out of it are forceful ; but 
 breadth is sacrificed. To do away with such 
 tangential education is the purpose of the college. 
 Education should be made a curve. It should 
 possess symmetry. The college represents a fine 
 communal force which best draws that curve. 
 Tangents are individual. 
 
 Also, on the material side, college is to teach 
 one to appreciate sympathetically. Provincialism 
 is, despite our so-called cosmopolitanism, one of 
 the curses of modem life. Our cosmopolitanism is 
 often merely superficial. The college is to teach 
 this semi-materialistic man and provincial that 
 there is a spiritual world above what he sees and 
 hears. It is to bring him into relationship with 
 every side of life's polygon. It is to help him to 
 become a citizen of the world and to be properly 
 at home in any society. 
 
 Third, the college on the material side is also 
 to help each man to apply the truths he receives, 
 
PREPARATION FOR AFFAIRS 101 
 
 the powers which he represents, usefully unto the 
 highest. One does not forget that one of the great- 
 est of modern scientists was Lord Kehdn. A pure 
 scientist he was, but every telegram which goes 
 under the sea bears in essence the power of Kelvin, 
 and every ship sailing the seas sails it more safely 
 by reason of Kelvin's compass. 
 
 College men of liberal training have founded the 
 United States Geographical Survey, the Weather 
 Bureau, and many agricultural and experimental 
 stations. Let it be not forgotten that Eli Whit- 
 ney, the inventor of the cotton gin, was a graduate 
 of Yale College of the Class of 1792, and that 
 Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the electric tel- 
 egraph, was also a graduate, eighteen years after. 
 
 Fourth, education, on its material side, is to 
 teach one to work and to work thoroughly. It is 
 as popular as it is, I fear, honest to declaim 
 against our mechanical looseness and slackness. In 
 every building, we know that the hidden founda- 
 tions do not go deep enough, that sand takes the 
 place of cement, putty of lead in the plumbing, 
 weak wooden beams for iron girders, cotton for 
 wool, and canvas for leather in the furnishing. We 
 know that too many workmen seek to give the 
 least labor for the most pay. The close of the 
 eight-hour day finds the laborer with overalls off 
 and coat on, ready to go home. Now in all prac- 
 tical concerns education should teach a man to 
 
102 CHARLES F. THWING 
 
 give an equivalent for what he receives. Educa- 
 tion teaches him that in practical concerns, to 
 be honest in his service, to be no shirk, to seek 
 for every man's rights and his own duties, as well 
 as for the other man's duties and his own rights, 
 to be a workman so just, so careful, so considerate, 
 so thorough, that even the gods may approve of 
 his handicraft. The college should be a hard task- 
 master in order to train its man to serve and to 
 live as ever in his " great taskmaster's eye." 
 
 Fifth, on the material side also, the college is to 
 train the student to enjoy life fully, thoroughly, 
 to enter into all cubical relationships of the length, 
 the depth, the height of being. The college should 
 train this man to find delight in the oratorio, and 
 not to limit his pleasure to rag-time, or to " It's 
 a Long Way to Tipperary." It should help him 
 to find satisfaction in an art museum, and not to 
 teach him that the pictorial art does not go beyond 
 the " movies." It should help this graduate to have 
 resources in books and not to be obliged to build 
 a laboratory in his cellar to escape nocturnal dull- 
 ness. It should help this business man, manufac- 
 turer, merchant, chemist, banker, farmer, to see 
 the infinite relations of his work, to feel its poetry, 
 to be stirred by its imaginations. 
 
 If the college on its material side can give these 
 great teachings, — to think clearly, to appreciate 
 sympathetically, to apply usefully to work thor- 
 
PREPARATION FOR AFFAIRS 103 
 
 oughlj, to enjoy beautifully, — it has done much, 
 very much, to enlarge, to deepen, to heighten, to 
 enrich, to strengthen, life's practical concerns. 
 
 The four qualities most needed in practical con- 
 cerns one might say are judgment, energy, tact, 
 patience. They are the foundation on which the 
 four-square house of business is built. The college 
 helps to construct each of these walls. It builds 
 the wall of judgment, for it trains one to see, to 
 discriminate, to relate, to infer. It builds the wall 
 of energy, for it creates and it conserves strength, 
 enlarges resources, dissipates fear, and enriches 
 power. It builds the wall of tact, for it trains the 
 gentleman. It builds the wall of patience, for it 
 lifts the heart away from the impact of to-day 
 onto the appreciation of yesterday and the vision 
 of to-morrow. 
 
 I In a word, I would have this graduate in a ma- 
 terialistic age serve that age by being an idealistic 
 materialist. In a merchandise age I would have 
 him serve his age as an idealistic merchant. In an 
 industrial age I would have him serve his age by 
 being an idealistic industrialist. In an age of 
 steel I would have him put the strength, the flexi- 
 bility, the adaptiveness of steel into his mind, the 
 coolness of steel into his eye to see truth justly, 
 the heat of steel into his heart to feel warmly for 
 all men, and the power of steel into his whole char- 
 acter, that he may give strength unto all. 
 
THE PRESENT STATUS AND 
 
 PROBABLE FUTURE OF THE 
 
 COLLEGE IN THE EAST 
 
 PRESIDENT JOHN H. FINLEY 
 
 The great president of a great university in 
 the East, whom you are to have the good fortune 
 to hear to-night, spoke a few days ago with dis- 
 paragement of the industry of a Latin student who 
 had found that the conjunction " et " was used by 
 Virgil in the ^neid 5,932 times (as I recall), and 
 of the thesis of a New York candidate for the 
 doctor's degree who discussed the interjections 
 (nineteen in number) which appear in certain 
 poems of Terence. With such an admonitory 
 word concerning meticulous scholarship fresh in 
 mind, I dare not undertake to note the permuta- 
 tions of the entrance requirements of the Eastern 
 colleges, nor attempt to record the ephemeris of 
 their curricula in the northern heavens, where fair 
 Harvard sits like Cassiopeia in her eternal chair, 
 where the six binary Pleiads of Columbia shine, 
 and where Amherst glows like Capella with a 
 spectrum which, it is claimed by some, most closely 
 resembles that of the sun of our daily existence, 
 105 
 
106 JOHN H. FINLEY 
 
 and is thought by others to resemble Capella only 
 in the respect that the light of that star is forty 
 years in reaching our planet. 
 
 Yet I realize that it is only such meticulous 
 studies of the stars in the academic skies which 
 will enable us to make any accurate prophecy, that 
 is, enable us to determine the ephemeris of to- 
 morrow. 
 
 We are informed by astronomers that there is 
 a clearly discernible movement on the part of the 
 stars of heaven, a " star-drift " towards a certain 
 star ; as I recall, a star in the constellation of Canis 
 Major. That is the supreme ultimate fact of the 
 physical universe. And by analogy what is really 
 of concern to us is not as to just what positions 
 the several colleges in the northeastern heavens 
 hold to-day or will hold to-morrow, but as to the 
 direction in which they are moving, as to what is 
 the universal and ultimate goal of their move- 
 ment. 
 
 We seek the Canis Major, that is, the " place of 
 understanding," the ultimate. We wish to know 
 its azimuth and right ascension, or, better, its 
 terrestrial latitude and longitude. 
 
 Job sought it, saying: " Surely there is a vein 
 for silver and a place for gold where they find it " ; 
 and after giving poetic intimations of courses in 
 meteorology, geology, chemistry, physical geog- 
 raphy, and engineering, which led towards it, he 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 107 
 
 asks In tired refrain : " But where is the home of 
 wisdom and where is the place of understanding? " 
 
 Man, he added, has taken iron out of the earth, 
 
 He has melted brass from the stone, 
 
 He has made a deep shaft, 
 
 He has swung suspended afar from men. 
 
 He has searched for stones in darkness, 
 
 He has carved the flint, 
 
 He has cleft the rock. 
 
 He has bound the stream from overflowing. 
 
 He has seen every precious thing. 
 
 He has searched even into the shadows of death. 
 
 And yet, Job cries after his summary : " Where 
 is the place of understanding? " 
 
 Since Job's day, man has succeeded in doing 
 many things which only God could then do in his 
 designing the place which no falcon had seen and 
 which no lion had passed by ; 
 
 For man has made a weight for the winds; 
 
 He has decreed whether rain shall fall upon him; 
 
 He has found the way of the lightning; 
 
 He has looked and talked to the ends of the earth; 
 
 He has beheld the infinitesimal; 
 
 He has divided the invisible atom; 
 
 He has learned what is burning in the hearts of the stars. 
 
 And still it is asked : " Where is the place of under- 
 standing? " 
 
 It is a long way from the observations of Job 
 
108 JOHN H. FINLEY 
 
 to those of William James, but we find in this 
 dearly lost philosopher an intimation as to the 
 status or prospect of the college, in his part of 
 the heavens, which it is my part to sweep in these 
 few moments. With a comforting certitude, Wil- 
 liam James says that a college is a place where 
 one learns to know a good man when one sees him. 
 It is, after all, only the positive form of Job's 
 definition of understanding: — James's is to dis- 
 cern the good ; Job's was to " depart from 
 evil." 
 
 Whether the definition by James is of status or 
 prospect is not clear, but it reveals by implication 
 the general location of the ultimate, the Eastern 
 college which is or is to be. 
 
 When I first passed up over the Laurel Hills of 
 Western Pennsylvania, a little way to the south 
 of this place from the west into what was the 
 east of a quarter of a century ago, to enter its 
 first university, Johns Hopkins, the colleges were, 
 I think, closer to Job's definition than James's in 
 that more attention was given to protecting from 
 the evil than to aggressive discerning of the good. 
 
 And the institutions were not then classified ac- 
 cording to magnitude or brilliance into Alpha and 
 Beta stars, though there was appreciation of the 
 fact that one star did differ from another in glory. 
 There was no spectral analysis then. If there had 
 been it would have been discovered that the mag- 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 109 
 
 nesium of philosophy and the sodium of mathematics 
 and the calcium of language appeared in about the 
 same proportions in all. The stars were just plain 
 stars, instead of composites or compounds of units. 
 There were no great constellations even, such as 
 now bestud our academic skies — star clusters with 
 a dominant Alpha star of liberal arts and pure 
 science holding in close and imperious relationship 
 schools of medicine, law, engineering, pharmacy, 
 veterinary surgery, dentistry, domestic science, 
 etc. ; no solar systems with their planetary wan- 
 derers, the university extension lecturers ; no moons 
 to take up the wondrous tale of wisdom in even- 
 ing courses ; no brilliant comets, those interna- 
 tional exchange professors, who startle all our eyes 
 in the winter season of the East. And the great 
 "Milky Way" of the General Education Board 
 and the Carnegie Foundation was not yet arching 
 the dome, with nourishing and incalculable wealth. 
 
 Seeing all this college development, which I 
 have borrowed an astronomical figure to intimate ; 
 seeing the curricular moons and stars which have 
 been ordained, and the provision of laboratory and 
 dormitory, field and gymnasium, I exclaim after 
 the manner of the Psalmist : What precious thing 
 is man that Thou art so mindful of him, and the son 
 of man that Thou visitest him even in the Fresh- 
 man Dormitory ! 
 
 The most impressive scientific lecture I ever 
 
110 JOHN H. FINLEY 
 
 heard, so far as I now remember, was in the broken 
 speech of that great Scandinavian scientist, Ar- 
 rhenius, who told how life was propagated, carried 
 from planet to planet, from star to star, — the im- 
 migrant star-dust evolving in new sequences of life 
 on each new star-shore. So is life developing in 
 its own peculiar and infinite sequences in each of 
 these colleges, though it was propagated by the 
 same immigrant, life-giving dust. And there is no 
 considerable generalization possible. 
 
 When I first knew of the Eastern colleges they 
 seemed all, or most of them, to have foundations 
 after the fashion of the heaven which John 
 saw in his apocalyptic vision. Need I recall the 
 sequence? The first foundation was of jasper, 
 the second sapphire, the third chalcedony, the 
 fourth emerald, the fifth sardonyx, the sixth sar- 
 dius, the seventh chrysolyte, the eighth beryl, the 
 ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprasus, the eleventh 
 jacinth, the twelfth amethyst. What I mean is 
 that the foundation stones or disciplines were 
 specifically stratified and identified. There was, 
 however, no agreement as to the size of the stones 
 till President Butler came with his College En- 
 trance Examinations and insisted that if sapphire 
 was used it must be so many units long and so many 
 cubits wide, and if there were a Virgilian amethys- 
 tine top stratum it must be of certain cubic con- 
 tent. It was simply a dimensional standardiza- 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 111 
 
 tion of the intercollegiate mind. But it was a 
 great step forward. 
 
 The elementary and secondary schools were still 
 free to use chrysolyte or chrysoprasus, sardius or 
 sardonyx, in whatever order they chose, or to make 
 concrete of their precious stones if they preferred. 
 And newer and sjmthetic disciplines, as contrasted 
 with what Avere known as the " natural disciplines," 
 were also included in the dimensional or syllabic 
 tables. 
 
 Coincident with this prescription of content, 
 there came the definition of the time-unit. So uni- 
 versally has this unit, known generally as the Car- 
 negie unit, been adopted, that I have intimated 
 that it might well be included among the tables 
 of weights and measures which appear in the arith- 
 metics : 
 
 4j5 minutes make an " hour " 
 5 " hours " make a " week " 
 
 36 " weeks " make a " unit " 
 
 15 " units " make a " matriculant " 
 5 " matriculant " hours (for one year) make 
 a point or count 
 
 60 points or counts make a degree. 
 
 Here, then, is the status reached by the col- 
 leges in the East : we have entrance requirements 
 standardized as to content and time. 
 
 But while the length and height and depth of 
 the several foundation stones have been prevised 
 
112 JOHN H. FINLEY 
 
 and adopted, and while twelve foundation years, 
 elementary and secondary, are indicated in the 
 specifications of practically every Eastern college, 
 there is now a greater variety in the foundation 
 material: chrysoprasis, which is Greek, is seldom 
 used ; sardius, which is Latin, is no longer uni- 
 versal. Instead are found stones of disciplines of 
 more recent origin : sedimentary rocks, deposited 
 by modern experience, synthetic stones, made in 
 scientific laboratories. Indeed, the secondary 
 school builders, who are engaged in the laying of 
 foundations for life as well as for college — and 
 mainly for life — are more and more insistent that 
 whatever is used for the life foundations shall be 
 accepted as suitable material for the college en- 
 trance: Greek or biology. 
 
 There is prejudice against synthetic articles 
 which are " just as good." There is a prejudice 
 in favor of the old labels. Cottonseed olive oil 
 may have the carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen in the 
 same proportions as the oil produced from the fruit 
 of Minerva's tree; terra cotta (man-cooked earth) 
 may be more lasting than marble God-composed, 
 reenforced concrete than building stone, but it is 
 only slowly that inherited appraisements are modi- 
 fied. 
 
 This admission of new disciplines in the sec- 
 ondary period, with selective liberty, has resulted 
 in enrichment, as in the case of the college cur- 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 113 
 
 riculum, but there are signs that asterism or con- 
 stellating is setting in these as in the collegiate 
 system. I have no prophecy to make here except 
 of a thought which came to me in midocean last 
 year — out where provincial and national consid- 
 erations are less disturbing — the thought that if 
 we could but bring together and into comparison 
 the content of what each people thinks it most es- 
 sential that its children should receive, up to the 
 age of sixteen, let us say, through formal teaching 
 out of its own experience and that of the race — 
 what information, what discipline — we should, 
 after eliminating that which is local and peculiar 
 to each people, reach the race's educational founda- 
 tions. We should find what are accounted the vital, 
 elemental, conscious tuitions of what President 
 Butler calls the " international mind," of the race 
 mind, which, as a poet-teacher, Woodbury, has put 
 it, has been " building itself from immemorial time 
 out of this mystery of thought and passion, as 
 generation after generation kneels and fights and 
 fades, takes unerringly the best that anywhere 
 comes to be in all the world, holds to it with the 
 cling of fate, and lets all else fall into oblivion." 
 I believe that though this formal tuition, which 
 every people gives to its children, is colored by 
 prejudice and restrained by tradition and dis- 
 torted by individual ignorance and selfishness, it 
 yet gives a clear indication of the disciplines and 
 
114. JOHN H. FINLEY 
 
 knowledges by which the race is to rise. It is that 
 genius of the species which, as Maeterlinck says 
 of plants, is to save it from the stupidity of the 
 individual. It is that which gives one confidence in 
 a democracy, in the great, deep instincts of the 
 race. 
 
 Upon these deep racial foundations are these 
 colleges East or West to be built and not upon an 
 incidental art or upon elected fragments of this or 
 that, valuable as they may be as a basis for certain 
 life occupations. 
 
 New disciplines are to be admitted to these 
 foundations ; the new racial acquisitions must be 
 gradually embodied as a result of the new uses 
 which the race is making of this earth and uni- 
 verse, but their values must be tested, whether 
 you use the figure of nutrition or stress and strain. 
 
 There is need, incidentally, of a great labora- 
 tory for the study of such nutritive values, such 
 intellectual physics, entrance qualitative analysis, 
 — for such studies as Thorndike, of Columbia, for 
 example, is carrying out. 
 
 I hold to the Apocalyptical figure a moment 
 longer, until I have said that we are now at one of 
 the many gates into the place of understanding 
 (for as there are many gates pictured for the 
 place of ultimate happiness, so are there many 
 for this place but set each at the same founda- 
 tional height). 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 115 
 
 And if I, unable to describe, in any detail or in 
 any reliable generalizations, the colleges of the 
 East as they actually are, tell you, having led 
 the way to their gates, what I see them to be in the 
 prospect or in probable future of my confident 
 hope, and any assisting effort that I can give, if I 
 can point you to the place in the heavens to which 
 they are moving, I beg you will let that be my 
 contribution to this symposium. 
 
 The multiple " place of understanding " is the 
 place not only of better compensation, of higher 
 specialization, of longer days, of longer years, or 
 nights as well as days, but the place where the 
 world is " reborn in the young soul " (to quote my 
 poet-teacher again), where the pollen of the past's 
 richest, noblest flowering is caught into a fresh- 
 blown mind — a mind which would have been sterile, 
 without these microspores, these microcosmic seeds 
 scattered from a rich world mind ; — the place 
 where through disciplines, and knowledges, the lit- 
 eratures, sciences, and arts, one enters into a race 
 mind, goes out into the bush as the Australian 
 youth with the sage of his tribe to learn its solemn 
 secrets, — that is, into an understanding of the 
 " continuing sacrifice " through which one age has 
 fed the next, one culture has given its fruit to an- 
 other, one mind has lighted a generation, while 
 burning itself out. 
 
 And the curricula are to be molded not primar- 
 
116 JOHN H. FINLEY 
 
 ilj by pedagogists, but by great poets and philoso- 
 phers of science, the transfigurers who will fuse 
 the knowledges through new interpretations, bring 
 to youth a world literature, an all-embracing sci- 
 ence, a synoptic, social gospel, and a practical 
 philosophy, whose supreme end, as Kant said, is to 
 find " the method of educating and ruling man- 
 kind." Precursors and transfigurers, who will con- 
 vert atom and molecule, ion and electron, root and 
 blossom into spiritual phenomena and forces, even 
 as he who first dreamed of the atomic theory and 
 laid aside his own affairs to learn the nature of 
 things (natura verum) and relate them to the na- 
 ture of the gods (natura deorum). I do not ven- 
 ture to predict the detail of these curricula, but I 
 do know that they will not be gerrymandered by 
 softness or narrowness or numerical avarice. 
 
 They are to be curricula of personal salvation 
 (for I borrow the intimation of C. Hanford Hen- 
 derson's answer to the august question, " What is 
 it to be educated? " that " education and personal 
 salvation are one and the same thing "). ^•' 
 
 I have been impressed, rereading Dante's 
 " Divine Comedy," by the wonderful discrimina- 
 tion shown in providing for the punishment of 
 souls lost or in limbo. There is not a prescribed or 
 elective number of objective standard units of 
 agony to be endured. Such an inferno or purga- 
 torio would have made his great epic as uninterest- 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 117 
 
 ing and colorless as the average college catalogue. 
 No. His punishments take character of the souls 
 of the men who are suffering. Their tasks are 
 fitted to their soul's needs. They are not simply 
 doing things, pursuing purgatorial and infernal 
 vocations ; they are working out their soul's salva- 
 tion or their soul's eternal torment. 
 
 And that curriculum of salvation is to be vitally, 
 daily related with the earth life, the home, the 
 community, the state, the world, — ^with the race 
 mind. 
 
 These colleges are not to be like unto the col- 
 leges which Samuel Butler describes (in that satire 
 " Erewhon " which Augustine Birrell has called the 
 best of its kind since Gulliver) — the Colleges of 
 Unreason, where the principal study was " hypo- 
 thetics," where they argued that to teach a boy 
 merely the nature of things which existed in the 
 world around him would be giving him but a narrow 
 and shallow conception of the universe, which it 
 was urged might contain all manner of things 
 which were not now found therein, and where they 
 spent their time in imagining all sorts of utterly 
 strange and impossible contingencies, conversing 
 even in a hypothetical language and having, in- 
 deed, to maintain professorship of Unreason and 
 Evasion in order to preserve vested opinions 
 and traditional creeds out of which the race has 
 risen. 
 
118 JOHN H. FINLEY 
 
 For the colleges which I am describing are to 
 be ready, alert, to weave into their curricula what 
 the new human uses of the world add to the race's 
 consciousness so far as it can be interpreted and 
 is vital to be preserved. 
 
 I had once to defend a college course which was 
 conventionally so uncultural that it was necessary 
 to open the windows. It was a course in public 
 health. Going one day to the laboratory I had diffi- 
 culty at first in staying in the room. A half-dozen 
 college men were standing around the carcass of a 
 cow that had died or had been put to death because 
 of tuberculosis. "Uncultural?" I said. "These 
 young men are preparing themselves to perform the 
 duties of an office which is the nearest of all our ex- 
 isting public functions to those of the most sacred 
 official in ancient life." We have the highest 
 classical prototype for them. He was the harus- 
 pex who examined the entrails of animals in order 
 to divine the will of the gods. These young men 
 were examining the interior parts of a cow in order 
 to interpret the laws of God to men. If Virgil 
 had only put this into his Goorgics, the process 
 might have risen to cultural dignity. 
 
 If this multiple college is to be merely or chiefly 
 a place of discipline, then its tasl<s might better be 
 given over to the high schools, to the gymnasia. If 
 it is to be a place of special preparation for life, 
 then it would better give way to the professional, 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 119 
 
 the technical school, the university. If it is to be 
 a place merely through which to attain, in an agree- 
 able way, social position and conventional culture, 
 to take part in contests of bodily strength and 
 skill, or to enjoy only the companionships and 
 friendships of living (that is, if it is to be a great 
 college, country or city, club), it is perhaps hardly 
 worth preserving as an American institution. But 
 if it is to be for the many (what it has been, thank 
 God, for the few), if it is to be for all the fit, a 
 place of understanding, of rebirth, of entering the 
 race mind, then is the college which I see in pros- 
 pect the most precious of all our educational pos- 
 sessions. 
 
 I am not sure that I have made it sufficiently 
 clear in outline or curriculum so that you can even 
 tell (to borrow an observation of Gilbert Chester- 
 ton's) whether it is a " cloud " or a " cape," a 
 star or a light upon earth. And this would be an 
 unhappy attempt at definition if I left you in 
 doubt, for, as Chesterton has further said, the 
 most dangerous ideals are those which may be 
 taken for something practical and the most danger- 
 ous practical things are those which are taken for 
 the ideal. 
 
 But I assure you that the thing I see is a 
 " cape " and not a " cloud," that it is something 
 substantial which will build itself impregnably not 
 alone on some " cape sublime " frowning upon the 
 
laO JOHN H. FINLEY 
 
 idle foam of time, but in whatever latitude or longi- 
 tude colleges stand with such a purpose as that 
 which I have tried to define, — there gather great 
 souls as teachers. This is the prospect that I have 
 in hope and desire for the colleges of the East. 
 
THE PRESENT STATUS AND 
 
 PROBABLE FUTURE OF THE 
 
 COLLEGE IN THE SOUTH 
 
 PRESIDENT WILLIAM P. FEW 
 
 The development of American institutions of 
 higher education is one of the outstanding facts of 
 our time; but this development has largely taken 
 place within the last fifty years. And while this 
 development in other parts of the country has 
 been going on, the educational history of the 
 Southern States has been interrupted by the 
 devastations of civil war, by the nightmare of re- 
 construction, and by long, tedious years of con- 
 valescence. 
 
 For a good part of the past half-century educa- 
 tional conditions in the Southern States have there- 
 fore been altogether chaotic. The circumstances 
 considered, however, much has been ace )mpHshed 
 by self-sacrificing and high-minded men and 
 women. These willing and capable workers for 
 their devotion to great causes and for their per- 
 sonal qualities deserve high rank among Amer- 
 ican teachers of their generation. But they have 
 
 121 
 
122 WILLIAM P. FEW 
 
 been hampered by lack of material and educational 
 equipment. 
 
 In these impoverished and confused times 
 it has been difficult to standardize our South- 
 ern colleges at the level of the best educational 
 thought and practice. But towards this end sev- 
 eral causes have steadily worked. Such has been 
 an organization, for example, like the Association 
 of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the South- 
 ern States, begun nineteen years ago with a mem- 
 bership of six colleges and now composed of all the 
 stronger colleges and preparatory schools. This 
 association exists for the promotion of better edu- 
 cational standards and ideals, and it has from the 
 beginning been an influence for good. 
 
 Another such agency is a movement started by 
 the Southern JNIethodist Church seventeen years 
 ago. In the year 1898 the General Conference of 
 this church created an educational commission to 
 consist of ten practical educators who should have 
 full authority to formulate minimum requirements 
 for admission and graduation, these requirements 
 to be enforced by all colleges affiliated with the 
 church. Since that date the commission has met 
 at least once during each quadrennium and has pre- 
 scribed standards by which all colleges affiliated 
 with this church have been classified. 
 
 A third agency, important though its Influence 
 on college standards has been indirectly exerted, is 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE SOUTH 123 
 
 the General Education Board of New York. This 
 board has set up no educational standards to which 
 colleges that would seek its aid must conform. 
 But it has made wise and statesmanlike efforts to 
 strengthen some of the more promising colleges ; it 
 has had on exhibition in its office carefully col- 
 lected data on Southern colleges ; and it has done 
 something towards bringing Southern colleges into 
 contact with educational methods and men in other 
 parts of the country. All of these things have had 
 a tendency to lift the general level and so to raise 
 the educational standards of Southern colleges. 
 
 Still another agency is the Carnegie Foundation 
 for the Advancement of Teaching. The Founda- 
 tion adopted a definition of a college and a stand- 
 ard of entrance requirements, and declined to put 
 on the Foundation any institutions that did not 
 conform to its standards. The desire to be placed 
 on the Carnegie Foundation has influenced very 
 few Southern colleges to raise their standards. 
 But the Foundation has exerted a still more potent 
 influence. President Pritchett made a thorough- 
 going study of American colleges and published the 
 results. He gave each college a rating on the basis 
 of its admission requirements. This publication 
 had a wide circulation and exerted an unprece- 
 dented influence. 
 
 The last agency which I shall mention, and the 
 one which is intrinsically the most interesting and 
 
124. WILLIAM P. FEW 
 
 ultimately the most important, is the small number 
 of individual institutions that have, through all the 
 cross purposes and warring forces of our years 
 of educational wandering, been courageous enough 
 and far-seeing enough to stand and call aloud, as 
 the voice of one crying in the wilderness, for a bet- 
 ter order of things, and that have not hesitated to 
 sacrifice in so great a cause the prestige of num- 
 bers and the more immediately satisfying compen- 
 sation of tuition fees. These colleges have stood 
 as beacons of light along the hard road of progress 
 and as bulwarks of strength against which the in- 
 tellectual confusions, and even at times the surging 
 passions of the hour, have dashed themselves in 
 vain. To such colleges — and they have been found 
 in all parts of the Union, North and South — the 
 country owes a debt of gratitude it can never pay. 
 Such forces as these, though different in origin 
 and different in the method and sphere of their 
 operation, have all been working together towards 
 one end, — the making of stronger, better equipped, 
 and more serviceable institutions of the higher 
 learning throughout the Southern States. And 
 they have all been strengthened by the new pros- 
 perity and hope that in recent years have come to 
 Southern people. Improvement is now everywhere 
 evident and is sure, I think, to go on rapidly. 
 Movements in our time when once set forward are 
 apt to be quick and far-reaching in their results. 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE SOUTH 125 
 
 The South has already a number of colleges that 
 in standards of work, in ideals of excellence, and in 
 the quality of the men who teach and the quality 
 of the men who are taught are thoroughly respect- 
 able, even when judged in the light of the great 
 colleges of the world. Colleges of this sort are of 
 inestimable value in Southern civilization. They 
 will set the pace for the intellectual life, and 
 through their influence on the lower schools and 
 through the leaders of the people that they sup- 
 ply will have a large share in shaping and molding 
 the structure of our entire civilization. The col- 
 leges themselves are being rapidly refashioned and, 
 in a period of flux and change now, they are never- 
 theless taking a setting and direction that are apt 
 to fix their character and work for many years to 
 come. 
 
 Southern colleges, then, coming into their 
 period of growth at a time when colleges in 
 other parts of the country have reached ma- 
 turity, have the extraordinary opportunity to 
 develop in the light of the experience of others. 
 We ought to learn from the mistakes of 
 others as well as from their successes. And 
 the future of our colleges will depend on how well 
 we learn our lesson. Especially must we learn 
 how to bring the processes of education eff^ectively 
 to bear on a larger proportion of students. The 
 growing importance that secondary concerns hold 
 
126 WILLIAM P. FEW 
 
 in the thought of undergraduates is more and more 
 tending to obscure the true ends of a college course. 
 If we will take command of the situation before 
 the tyranny of public opinion is fastened upon us 
 by students, young alumni, and communities 
 taught to demand this sort of entertainment at 
 the hands of colleges, then I beheve it will be pos- 
 sible for us to shift the center of interest from 
 athletics and other equally irrelevant undergradu- 
 ate absorptions to the intellectual pursuits and 
 wholesome recreations that are proper to college 
 life. This shifting of the center of gravity will be 
 helped by adequate regulation and due subordina- 
 tion of athletics; by demanding strict attendance 
 upon college duties ; by exacting a reasonable 
 amount of intellectual work; and by enforcing 
 rigorous standards of scholarship. In developing 
 our colleges we have the chance to put upon self- 
 cultivation and wholesome living an emphasis they 
 do not now usually get in American colleges. 
 
 Our opportunity consists partly too in strength- 
 ening the personal element in education and 
 thereby attaining the end for which colleges pri- 
 marily exist, that is, to bring the right kind of 
 teacher into sympathetic and helpful contact with 
 the right kind of student under conditions that 
 will make for the highest success and happiness of 
 both teacher and student. The pioneer stage in 
 American education has passed. The propaganda 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE SOUTH 127 
 
 for enlarged and improved educational machinery 
 and organization has won. In nearly all of our 
 states education as an opportunity for every youth 
 has been achieved. The watchword henceforth is 
 to be not more education but better. And this 
 better education, we all concede, can only come 
 through better teachers. How to get better teach- 
 ers is a question much discussed. "Higher 
 salaries," says one. " Better technical training," 
 says another. " More expensive equipment in 
 buildings, laboratories, libraries, playgrounds," 
 say still others. 
 
 But success in this difficult field, I believe, lies 
 rather in magnifying the office of the teacher, and 
 in giving to education itself a larger meaning and 
 mission for our whole national life. Hirelings 
 never can give the truest service. The measuring 
 of a man by the wage scale can never lift teaching 
 above a stale and unprofitable business. 
 
 Over against this conception we now have the 
 opportunity to set the doctrine of the teacher as a 
 worker at the hard tasks of society, as a builder 
 of civilization, who, if he be efficient enough, may 
 become a shaping, transforming influence like 
 Moses or Socrates. Thoughts and aspirations are 
 after all the greatest forces in civilization, and 
 from educators and those they educate must come 
 this high leadership of ideas and ideals in the serv- 
 ice of the republic. The measure of the teacher's 
 
128 WILLIAM P. FEW 
 
 influence is not the amount or quality of intellec- 
 tual nourishment that we may dole out to docile 
 youth, but the kind of guidance he gives to indi- 
 vidual minds, to communities, and to states and the 
 moral energy that he succeeds in producing. And 
 teachers of this higher sort can never be bought. 
 
 Expert training is not our supreme need, either. 
 For teachers, our schools of all grades need not 
 simply experts in the several branches of learning, 
 but men and women of ideas and power. The too 
 exclusive use of scholarship tests in the selecting 
 of teachers is, in my judgment, one of the gravest 
 defects in modem education, especially in our 
 American colleges and universities. Men and 
 women of ideas and originating power are needed 
 at all times, but they would seem to be especially 
 needed in times of unsettlement and rapid change. 
 And in spite of all misgivings, most competent men 
 actually at the work of upbuilding and rebuilding 
 Southern civilization believe that we are standing 
 now at the very threshold of a new era of growth 
 and development. The belief itself, even if it were 
 not so amply justified by the facts, would tend to 
 produce the expected result. An age of hopeful- 
 ness is apt to be an age of achievement. 
 
 I do not underestimate equipment and organiza- 
 tion, but I would emphasize the fact, which is so 
 often overlooked in our time, that these things are 
 of no value except in so far as they furnish the 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE SOUTH 129 
 
 means by which competent men and women may 
 work effectively. The one sure way to promote the 
 welfare of the state and nation is to build sound- 
 ness into the mind and character of the youth of 
 our country. Those who have command of this 
 source of power must not mistake themselves or be 
 mistaken by others for innocent pedagogues and 
 school-keepers. Affording as it does opportunity 
 for the exercise of creative ability and for a high 
 order of usefulness, life for us teachers, we ought 
 to feel, is not a weak and passive thing, but a great 
 and noble calling. 
 
 Despite some superficial appearances to the con- 
 trary and despite some real difficulties that must be 
 overcome, I am convinced that this section has the 
 best chance in America to build up at least a few, 
 I will not say big, but genuinely great educational 
 institutions within this generation. And therefore, 
 I think there never was in the history of the world a 
 more inviting field for teachers with building power 
 than right here and now ; and this sort of teacher 
 is going to be developed and held not by institu- 
 tions that put their faith in size, in numbers, in 
 big material resources, but rather by those that are 
 dedicated to sound ideas and disciplined by sacri- 
 fice in the causes of men. For it is never the ma- 
 terial but the ideal that abides and commands. 
 
 The greatness of our colleges will depend upon the 
 elevation of the teaching profession, and the eleva- 
 
ISO WILLIAM P. FEW 
 
 tion of the teaching prof ession does not depend upon 
 higher salaries, better technical training, or more 
 elaborate equipment, but upon giving it the proper 
 dignity and importance in our life. This involves 
 a new and truer popular understanding of educa- 
 tion. And education we must come to regard not 
 as an agency for making skilled wage-earners or 
 experts in knowledge, but for developing men of 
 moral and intellectual competence. This defin- 
 ing of education to include not merely the train- 
 ing of the hands or the mind but the shaping 
 of the whole personality lifts the teaching pro- 
 fession into a great art in which excellence is as 
 well worth striving for as in poetry or architecture, 
 and in which success is perhaps harder to achieve ; 
 for this art deals with the most difficult as well as 
 the most precious material in the world. 
 
 And I have the faith to believe that at least some 
 of our colleges will go this way to greatness. 
 
THE PRESENT STATUS AND 
 
 PROBABLE FUTURE OF THE 
 
 COLLEGE IN THE WEST 
 
 PRESIDENT WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 
 
 The college has a well differentiated character 
 and history in the educational evolution of the 
 United States. It was the earliest organized insti- 
 tution for the higher learning in the country, and 
 has so maintained its position and continued its 
 contribution to the moral and intellectual life of 
 the nation that, as has been said of it by our ablest 
 expert, it is " the most permanent factor in our 
 educational system." 
 
 Successfully it has borne adverse criticism, 
 wisely adjusted itself to the growth of methods 
 while broadening its range of subjects whenever 
 reasonable demand has arisen; but no foundation 
 has so persistently and consistently held to its main 
 purpose and its high ideals as the American col- 
 lege. Universities, technical education, public 
 school systems, have passed through distinct modi- 
 fications, while with its dominating ethical and in- 
 tellectual purpose it has steadily and persistently 
 maintained its unifying ideal. 
 
 131 
 
132 WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 
 
 The all-controlling end of the true college has 
 been, is and always must be, to train men. It 
 exists primarily to produce persons of character 
 and intelligence, who as such can hold successfully 
 the position to which they are called, and do well 
 the work for which they are especially fitted. 
 
 The English colleges from which the American 
 sprang, seeking to discover truth by means of 
 scholarship, with their tutorial system and more 
 than a score of presidents for three thousand 
 students, have made the spirit of their training 
 individualistic in order to produce leaders in the 
 political, social, religious, and intellectual life of 
 that empire. The Oxford and Cambridge colleges 
 have been the center of " the humanities," because 
 of their intellectual and moral discipline. Affirm- 
 ing that these studies appeal directly to " the finer 
 instincts and affections," they have produced fully 
 developed men with noble sentiments and strength 
 of character. These colleges are the mothers of 
 commanding leaders and great movements. With- 
 out them England's political, ethical, and religious 
 life would have been unspeakably less powerful. 
 The English college is the representative of the 
 strength of her character and her institutions. 
 
 It was this that Lord Bryce so strongly em- 
 phasized in his memorable address, when the 
 Rhodes Scholarships were established at Oxford, as 
 he urged that there should be the utmost possible 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 133 
 
 degree of efRciency in equipment and instruction 
 for scientific education; but he insisted still more 
 strongly that to subordinate the interests of the 
 humanities to those of science is deliberately to 
 dethrone the essential function of the college. He 
 agreed that there should be a scientific foundation 
 for every department of industry in its appli- 
 cation to the arts of life, but said that this 
 is not the primary function of the college, 
 which has a much more fundamental and essential 
 part to play in the creation of the leadership of 
 the nation. 
 
 The mission of the college has been and always 
 must be, in the old world and the new, in the East 
 and in the West, to train men, by means of teach- 
 ing, to be servants of humanity. The great busi- 
 ness of the college is to teach, and by teaching to 
 fit its students to become serviceable in the life of 
 the world. 
 
 It is not so much what it teaches and how many 
 subjects; but something it must teach so that its 
 graduates shall be strong to serve, and powerful 
 enough to battle the evil of the world, and con- 
 struct virtue in the characters of men and women. 
 This was why the Oxford College taught the hu- 
 manities, why the famous University of Salerno 
 had but one faculty ; while both alike sought to 
 create scholars who should " serve their fellow- 
 men." 
 
1^ WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 
 
 The main purpose of the German gymnasium 
 and university is to discover truth and to make it 
 known in all its relations ; the English and Amer- 
 ican college has always sought to discover truth 
 by scholarship and train men for service. This 
 must ever be its exalted function, and its perma- 
 nency is conditioned upon remaining true to its 
 birthright and the highest of all educational pre- 
 rogatives. To be false to the sacred trust which 
 the college has placed in the keeping of its trus- 
 tees and faculties is not only to sell one's birth- 
 right for pottage, but it is a sacrifice of the most 
 momentous issues in the whole educational move- 
 ment. 
 
 The college by no means assumes that it alone 
 has assigned to it the ethical training of the lead- 
 ers of the nation ; but it stands as no other in- 
 stitution by its traditions, its history and ideals, 
 as a foundation whose dominating end is the prepa- 
 ration of students for intellectual and moral leader- 
 ship. This is the noblest of all missions in the 
 training of the youth of a nation. 
 
 If the American college loses sight of this sacred 
 duty, it becomes false to its trust, recreant and 
 faithless before the most essential of all the ends 
 for which an educational movement can exist. All 
 attacks upon its function, all would-be modifica- 
 tions of its range and scope, and of its four years 
 of opportunity for study and spiritual growth, are 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 1S5 
 
 the outcome of a misconception of the end which 
 led to its foundation. 
 
 Lord Bryce's position is the true one. There 
 should be the utmost possible degree of efficiency 
 in scientific education; but to subordinate purely 
 intellectual and moral discipline to the interests of 
 science is not only to dethrone the essential intent 
 of the college, but to miss the pre-eminent function 
 of education. 
 
 Whatever the changes that have and must con- 
 tinue to come in subject and method, the end for 
 which our fathers planned and toiled in founding 
 Harvard College and those which followed should 
 be conserved in the East and West, for the sake 
 of the preservation of the nation and holding it 
 to its mission in the life of the world. Three 
 things were written large in the history and gov- 
 ernment of these early New England colleges: 
 " piety," " morality," and " learning," all of them 
 essential for " the public weal." 
 
 The status and future of the Western college 
 must be tested by those purposes for which it was 
 established and developed in England and America. 
 
 The maintenance of the college in the West de- 
 pends very largely upon conformity to what it 
 has been in the East, and upon the realization of 
 the exalted aim which called it into existence, and 
 which has been its genius in years gone by. 
 
 For this reason it is exceedingly important that 
 
136 WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 
 
 with self-respect it should stand independently 
 upon its own feet, and refuse to be driven from its 
 noble purpose by those who are interested, for 
 good and sufficient reasons, in other types of edu- 
 cational foundations. 
 
 The attempt to modify its curriculum, to take 
 away from it one or two years of the time which 
 it must have for perfecting its work, is a mark of 
 subserviency which is unworthy of its past history 
 and its future possibilities. 
 
 The questions growing out of the length of 
 time it takes a student to prepare himself for his 
 life work, the forcing upon it of what is called the 
 " practical side of education," and the demand for 
 shortening preparation, especially when all this is 
 done at the expense of the college, are fraught 
 with gravest danger and serious consequences, not 
 only to the college but to the best life of the 
 nation. 
 
 A comparatively few years ago in the West the 
 opinion was widely promulgated that the day of 
 the college was past ; that it was to be crushed 
 between the secondary school and the university; 
 that it was a sort of unnecessary luxury and that 
 the day was not far distant when it must close its 
 doors, discharge its faculties, and say to its eager 
 young men and women : " There is nothing further 
 that we can do for you, our mission is ended." 
 That issue has been successfully met, quietly, ear- 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 137 
 
 nestly, and deliberately. The men who agitated 
 this conception have either disappeared or for the 
 most part have passed into silence, while the lead- 
 ers of the college movement are standing with inde- 
 pendence and self-respect, unmoved, courageous, 
 and hopeful, declaring that the college is just 
 entering on its largest mission and its most im- 
 portant work. 
 
 The same independence, far-sightedness, and 
 self-respect should come into play in meeting the 
 new form of attack upon its integrity, in the 
 present advocacy of the so-called " Junior Col- 
 lege." This is another demand that it should take 
 a secondary place in the educational movement, 
 step aside from its high office, and abrogate its 
 unsurpassed opportunity for service. To yield to 
 this new attack is but a step in the path which 
 leads ultimately to its obliteration, and thus to lose 
 sight of the most important element in the educa- 
 tional movement in America. 
 
 No inteEigent person questions the place that 
 professional and technical education has taken and 
 must assume in the development of the nation. We 
 must not forget also that there is enormous danger 
 in the tendency which loses sight of what the Eng- 
 lish college conserved by its study of the humani- 
 ties, which, as Lord Bryce says in the address to 
 which reference has been made, " appealed thor- 
 oughly to the finer instincts and affections." It is 
 
138 WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 
 
 the old problem of the proper adjustment in the 
 development of the individual between what is 
 physical and that which is spiritual. It raises the 
 question as to whether a nation given over to love 
 of the material side of life, or, if you please, of 
 mere science, is to find its true destiny. Is love 
 of learning for its own sake, of literature, of 
 poetry, of art, of philosophy, of ethics, and, most 
 of all, of religion to sink into the background and 
 lose its place of commanding pre-eminence? 
 
 In meeting this issue, as is being done in the 
 West at the present time, on the whole with dis- 
 tinct success, it is recognized that four years in 
 college is not necessary so much for certain courses 
 of study as it is essential for giving opportunity 
 for that intellectual and moral growth which is 
 absolutely requisite in the production of trained 
 men and women. The law of growth as established 
 by the Creator bears even more fully upon the 
 development of a human soul than it does upon the 
 production of crops from the soil or animals on 
 the face of the earth. Forced growth in the evo- 
 lution of character is suicidal. 
 
 In discussing the present status and probable 
 future of the college in the West, one must con- 
 sider it in the light of what it has been in the past, 
 and whether it can and will maintain its efficiency, 
 its strength, and its peculiar character. Its 
 value and its stability are conditioned upon con- 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 139 
 
 serving its primary mission of producing trained 
 men for leadership. 
 
 One answer to this inquiry can be found in ex- 
 amining the condition of its physical and financial 
 standing. Without income and equipment it can- 
 not possibly do its work or fulfill its high preroga- 
 tive. Reference will be made to only a few typical 
 Western colleges, as illustrating the position taken 
 in this paper. 
 
 It is not maintained that all the colleges of the 
 West are fitted for the work to which they are 
 called. Many of them ought never to have been 
 instituted, as is true of other educational estab- 
 lishments. Others have so far departed from that 
 to which they were called that they cannot recover, 
 and should drop out of existence. Some have been 
 founded on too narrow a basis to be of any distinct 
 value. 
 
 If, however, it can be shown that there are cer- 
 tain colleges holding vantage ground of strategic 
 importance which are doing effective work and 
 carrying out the ends for which they were founded, 
 it will establish the proposition that these and 
 others like them should be maintained at all haz- 
 ards. Moreover, there is not time to do more than 
 refer to this limited number of institutions. What 
 is maintained is that there are colleges in the West 
 that rank with the best in the country, which are 
 holding true to the traditions of the past and ful- 
 
140 WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 
 
 filling the intent of these well-difFerentlated and 
 independent institutions of higher learning. Ex- 
 amination will be made of seven only, which hold 
 widely separated geographical positions, and which 
 are admirably and wisely located so as to be centers 
 of large and commanding influence. 
 
 The first is Beloit College in Wisconsin, founded 
 for the purpose of carrying out the conceptions 
 which established New England institutions. It 
 possesses endowment funds of $1,400,000 and 
 buildings and equipment which have cost in the 
 vicinity of $520,000. These have steadily in- 
 creased during the past twenty or more years, and 
 it has a group of 375 students, with an able and 
 well-trained faculty. Its standards are such that 
 colleges of its own type in the East accept its 
 examinations. It has fulfilled in a marked degree 
 the intellectual, moral, and religious purpose for 
 which it was established in that section of the 
 country. 
 
 The second is Carleton College in Minnesota, 
 founded by the early settlers with a distinctly re- 
 ligious as well as educational motive. It has passed 
 through years of struggle and heroic devotion. At 
 present it occupies a place of influence in its im- 
 portant location. It had last year 456 under- 
 graduate students, and its endowments have in- 
 creased in the last seventeen years from $250,000 
 to a little over $1,000,000. Its grounds, buildings, 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 141 
 
 and equipments have a value of $565,000. Every 
 college and university of the East is very glad to 
 welcome as undergraduate or graduate student 
 those who have passed the examinations at this in- 
 stitution. Its influence locally and nationally is 
 already making itself felt in ways of which its 
 founders would approve. 
 
 The third is Colorado College, located in the 
 heart of the Rocky Mountain region, in a city pre- 
 eminently well fitted to be a college town. It also 
 was founded by the early pioneers for a very dis- 
 tinctively ethical and religious purpose. After 
 years of severe effort and many discouragements, 
 having made its standards the same as those of the 
 leading institutions of New England, it began its 
 advance movement. It has an endowment in care- 
 fully invested funds of $1,042,000, and has spent 
 $968,000 upon buildings, equipment, and its li- 
 brary of 87,000 volumes. It has a faculty which 
 will compare favorably in teaching power and in- 
 tellectual strength with the faculties of other lead- 
 ing colleges of the country. Its graduates are 
 received into the professional schools and universi- 
 ties of the country. Its students to-day number 
 708. 
 
 The fourth typical institution is located in the 
 center of Iowa: Grinnell College. It, too, was 
 founded by men of high character and rare devo- 
 tion. It has held with great tenacity to high 
 
14a WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 
 
 ideals in its undergraduate work, and it has a 
 faculty of unusual ability, which numbers among 
 its members men of scholarship, whose publica- 
 tions are known throughout the scientific and edu- 
 cational world. It possesses an endowment of 
 $1,305,000, and an investment in buildings, equip- 
 ment, and library of $764,000. Its students num- 
 ber 663, and its educational standards are as high 
 as those of any of the other colleges to which 
 reference has been made. 
 
 The fifth foundation is situated in the state of 
 Ohio: Oberlin College. Few institutions in the 
 world have had such a record of loyalty to religion 
 and intellectual standards as has this foundation. 
 It, too, was established by thoughtful men pos- 
 sessed of a spirit of unusual self-sacrifice. Its 
 regular undergraduate students number something 
 over 1,000. It possesses an endowment, includ- 
 ing its last gift, of over $3,000,000, and has 
 an investment in equipment and buildings of 
 $1,409,000. 
 
 The sixth is in California : Pomona College. Its 
 early history is largely a repetition of what has 
 already been said in regard to the others men- 
 tioned. Its standards are also recognized by the 
 older institutions of the East, and it holds a place 
 of strategic importance in its large and important 
 commonwealth. Its students last year numbered 
 515, and its endowment at the present time is a 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 143 
 
 little over $1,000,000. It hag an investment in 
 equipment and buildings of $467,000. 
 
 The last institution is in the state of Washing- 
 ton: Whitman College. It holds an important 
 situation in the new Northwest. Its beginnings 
 were practically the same as those of the other 
 foundations which have been enumerated. Its 
 ideals, aims, and purpose are tho^e distinctly of 
 the historical colleges of the country. Its faculty 
 has the same rare devotion, and it, too, holds a 
 position with high standards corresponding to 
 those of such colleges as Allegheny, Williams, and 
 Amherst. It had last year an endowment of 
 $663,000, an investment in buildings and equip- 
 ment of over $300,000, and an enrollment of 450 
 students. 
 
 Here are seven educational organizations that 
 have stood loyally to the historic standards, ideals, 
 and purposes of the college. They have refused to 
 yield to the demands that have been made and are 
 still being made for a modification of courses and of 
 the time occupied in the training of their students. 
 They bold to the four years necessary for gradua- 
 tion. There are in them 4,057 students. Their 
 Invested funds, the income of which is used for 
 current expenses, amount to $9,353,000, and the 
 total cost of their buildings and equipments has 
 been $5,012,000, making a gross valuation of en- 
 dowments and equipments of $14,365,000. They 
 
144s WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 
 
 possess faculties that in scholarship and academic 
 attainments will rank with those of such institu- 
 tions as Williams, Amherst, and Bowdoin. Five 
 of them are on the list of accepted institutions of 
 " The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement 
 of Teaching." All have been recognized by the 
 " General Education Board." Their graduates 
 have won high distinction in the leading schools of 
 medicine, law, journalism, theology, and science. 
 Many of them are on the faculties of such institu- 
 tions as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, 
 and Leland Stanford Jr. Universities. Others 
 have become leaders at the bar, in the pulpit, in 
 medicine and surgery. An unusually large num- 
 ber are statesmen of the highest order, and no 
 group of colleges in the world has sent as many 
 in proportion to their graduates into foreign ser- 
 vice under missionary boards, as physicians, teach- 
 ers, clergymen, and administrative officers. Their 
 influence in the life of the world and of our own 
 nation is of inestimable value. They have all now 
 reached a point in their history where it is impos- 
 sible to think of their disintegration or of their 
 going backwards, either in their material pros- 
 perity or in their academic standing. It may well 
 be doubted whether there are seven colleges in the 
 world that are to-day doing as much for the moral, 
 religious, and intellectual leadership as are those to 
 which reference has been made. If one desires to 
 
THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 145 
 
 know the status and future of the college in the 
 West, he has but to visit and critically study the 
 present work of these seven typical colleges, to 
 come in contact with their faculties and students, 
 to examine their equipments, and, above all, to 
 trace the history of their graduates in the life of 
 the nation and of the world. 
 
 Without doubt all of these institutions could use 
 to great advantage larger endowments and equip- 
 ments and increased faculties. Practically every 
 one of them is suffering from the stress and strain 
 of restricted income and there is no institution in 
 America which could be aided to greater advantage 
 than these colleges and those that are like them, 
 if one cares for the moral, religious, and intellect- 
 ual standards of the nation. 
 
 In spite of these limitations, they are render- 
 ing a service of incomparable value and are holding 
 to those conceptions and ideals which have made 
 the Enghsh college a power in the history of 
 the British Empire, and the American college a 
 force in the creation of the best leadership in the 
 country. 
 
 Their past history, however, is not comparable 
 with the possibilities of their future service. The 
 almost irresistible movement towards the domina- 
 tion of material things, the power of wealth, the 
 struggle for preferment, are tending in many ways 
 towards lowering of ethical standards, and against 
 
14^0 WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 
 
 that which Lord Bryce has said are the essential 
 qualities in the making of a nation. 
 
 Without such influence as they exert political 
 and moral decline will come to this people as it has 
 to others. The holding of the nation to the " finer 
 instincts and aff^ections " which make for strength 
 of character carries with it the glory and sanctity 
 of a commonwealth. 
 
 It still holds true that the great business of the 
 college is to fit its students to be serviceable in 
 the life of the world, and so to " serve their fel- 
 low-men." Its effort must ever be to discover 
 truth by scholarship, and train men for service. 
 This is its birthright, and this is also the noblest 
 of aU educational prerogatives. The university 
 and the technical school have a mission of far- 
 reaching significance. There is also a well-defined 
 and differentiated mission for the college, which, if 
 lost sight of, destroys its raison d'etre. 
 
 No college to-day has fully risen to the impor- 
 tance or the privilege of its opportunity. It needs 
 to guard itself with great care in order that it 
 may realize its errand to humanity, but that it is 
 rendering a service of incomparable and inestimable 
 value there can be no doubt. 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE COL- 
 LEGE AS DISTINCT FROM THE 
 HIGH SCHOOL, THE PRO- 
 FESSIONAL SCHOOL, AND 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 PRESIDENT ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 
 
 I MUST begin this paper by asking a question — 
 a question addressed to the audience. The answer 
 is a matter of vital concern to me. I wish to ask 
 you whether from one statement which I shall give 
 another logically follows. If we say that every- 
 thing that could be said about the American col- 
 lege has been said, does it follow that there is noth- 
 ing more to say? My own opinion is that it does 
 not follow at all and I appeal to the science of logic 
 for justification. That science tells us that what- 
 ever has been said in one way can be said again in 
 another, and that perhaps just such translation 
 into other forms is the chief task of what we call 
 thinking. And especially logic tells us that what- 
 ever has been said in affinnative terms may often, 
 to great advantage, be expressed in negative terms. 
 
 If it is truly said that " John is in Boston," it 
 is also safe to remark that " John is not in New 
 147 
 
148 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 
 
 York," and this latter statement may be of much 
 greater importance to some of John's friends. 
 There is, of course, a difficulty, namely that it is 
 hard to exhaust the content of the negative judg- 
 ment. When once you start on this process the 
 trouble is not to find something to say but to tell 
 where to stop in the illimitable expanse which lies 
 before you. It is well enough to say that John is 
 not in New York, but if you proceed to tell all 
 the places in which John is not, considerable time 
 must be allowed for the operation. While, there- 
 fore, I insist that this logical principle be accepted 
 in order that I may have a subject to talk about, 
 I beg the audience not to be terrified by its pos- 
 sibilities. For general purposes, logical principles 
 must be applied sparingly and with discretion. It 
 is quite possible to have too much of a good 
 thing. 
 
 But the one point on which I do insist is that in 
 spite of all the wisdom of these ten wise men who 
 have preceded me there is still something left to 
 consider. They have told you what the college is. 
 I may try to tell you what it is not. They have 
 told you what the college has, what it does, what 
 it has accomplished, what it dreams, what it will 
 be in the days to come. Somewhere within the field 
 of what it has not, what it does not do, what it has 
 not done, what it does not dream, what it will not 
 be — somewhere within this field, for which one 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 140 
 
 might claim infinite time, there lies the subject of 
 this paper. 
 
 If, then, we were with any fullness to define the 
 function of the college in negative terms it would 
 be necessary to show and to explain that the col- 
 lege is not a high school, not a professional school, 
 not a university, nor any part thereof. But every- 
 one knows that there are many kinds of high 
 school, many types of professional school, many 
 separate schools within a university. If we should 
 discuss each one of these " separatim et seriatim," 
 showing that the college is not any one of them, is 
 different from them all, I fear that the consequence 
 for you would be much weariness of the flesh and 
 great vexation of the spirit. But again the kindly 
 science of logic will hurry to our rescue. That 
 science has another valuable principle, viz., that 
 there is no sense in denying a statement unless 
 someone has asserted it. What assertions, then, 
 of the identity of the college with other institu- 
 tions are just now being made with sufficient in- 
 sistence to demand our attention.'' There are 
 teachers who seem to find little difference between 
 the college and the high school, but their lack of 
 perception is not very important. We are just 
 emerging from a period in which the college has 
 been regarded as a part of the university and has 
 been identified with the whole in essential attitude 
 and spirit. But the day of that confusion is 
 
150 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 
 
 rapidly closing. The one confusion which does to- 
 day threaten our understanding of the function of 
 the college is that which identifies it with the pro- 
 fessional school, wliich declares that there is no 
 genuine education which is not really professional, 
 which characterizes the belief in a " liberal educa- 
 tion," separate from and independent of vocational 
 and professional study, as an idle creation of dream 
 and fancy. In these pragmatic days such a con- 
 fusion as this is likely to spread far and wide. It 
 is not the only instance of pragmatic thinking 
 which just now threatens the clarity of our edu- 
 cational policy, but it is an especially dangerous 
 one because it strikes at the very roots of all our 
 liberal teaching. Amid these days of celebration 
 and study of the American liberal college, I should 
 like to smite as hard as I can hit at this heresy 
 which denies the very belief on which that college 
 is built. 
 
 The heresy is hard to meet just now because in 
 a sense it catches us off our balance. Under the 
 influence of the university ideal the colleges had 
 been saying to their students, " Study anything 
 you like ; all knowledge is good ; in fact, all knowl- 
 edge is equally good ; make your choice, follow 
 your bent ; if only you keep going in any direction 
 a liberal education is assured." But as against 
 this, we are seeing more and more clearly every 
 day that the content of a liberal education is not 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 151 
 
 thus indefinite and indeterminate, that there is an 
 intellectual culture which one must master if he is 
 to travel the way of liberal education. And in our 
 enthusiasm we have been crying: "Back to the 
 good old college of earlier days, away with the 
 extravagances of election and specialization, let us 
 return again to the fathers, to the requirements 
 which they established, to the college which they 
 founded." And here it is that the subtle and dan- 
 gerous heresy finds its opportunity. " Do you 
 wish definite and coherent requirements.'' " it asks. 
 " Very well, you will find them in the professional 
 school." And if we protest that these are not the 
 requirements that we had in mind, that they are not 
 liberal but technical, then there descends upon us 
 a crushing and bewildering argument. " You wish 
 to return to the spirit and practice of the old 
 colonial college," it says ; " very well, do so, but 
 first recognize that the college which you imitate 
 was itself a professional school. The colonial fore- 
 fathers were not wasting idle dreams on this airy 
 nothing which you call ' liberal training.' They 
 needed ministers for their churches and so they 
 founded colleges to train those ministers. The 
 colleges which they established were in essential 
 purpose schools of divinity, schools to train young 
 men for the profession of the ministry. They 
 were devised for a special purpose and the fore- 
 fathers were shrewd enough to see to it that that 
 
152 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 
 
 purpose was realized." And from this assertion 
 as its premise, the argument proceeds to its con- 
 clusion. 
 
 " The old college was professional in spirit ; then 
 so too should we be who imitate it in spirit. But 
 the old college intended to train for only one of 
 the professions. To that end all its courses of 
 study, all its methods of teaching, were adapted. 
 It will never do to give the same courses of study, 
 the same teaching, to the boys who are planning 
 for other professions. Loyalty to the old college 
 demands that for each profession its own special 
 system of preparation be devised; we in our day 
 must do for lawyers, engineers, physicians, archi- 
 tects, for each of these what the fathers in their 
 day did for the students of divinity." So by the 
 argument the college becomes simply a collection 
 of professional schools ; liberal education as a thing 
 apart has disappeared. And we arrive at a new 
 definition of the American liberal college, — it is an 
 institution which some people had mistakenly be- 
 lieved to exist. 
 
 In considering the effect of such an argument as 
 this it is necessary to take into account the second- 
 ary result as well as the primary. The first effect, 
 as in the case of all honest conflicts with convincing 
 arguments, is that you find yourself knocked down. 
 The second stage of the experience, however, re- 
 veals two facts: (1) that you can get up again, 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 153 
 
 and (2) that you are not hurt, indeed that you are 
 rather exhilarated by what has happened. This 
 secondary stage is proof positive that you have 
 not been hit by anything solid. At this time, it 
 is in order to inquire what it was which, at the 
 moment of impact, gave such an impression of 
 solidity. 
 
 The most interesting feature of the argument is 
 that the premise on which it depends is not true. 
 The premise asserts that, in the sense in which we 
 now use the term, the colonial college was a pro- 
 fessional school. But it was not, nor was it in- 
 tended to be. The supposed evidence for the asser- 
 tion is simply a confusion as to the meaning of 
 another statement which is true. There is no doubt 
 that one of the primary motives of the founders 
 of the early colleges was to provide for the educa- 
 tion of the clergy. But the assertion under dis- 
 cussion is not identical with this, nor does it follow 
 from it. And apart from questions of inference, 
 the plain facts of record concerning the purpose of 
 the founders forbid the suggested interpretation of 
 their intention. He who would hold to this inter- 
 pretation must maintain two assertions concerning 
 our colonial forefathers: (1) that they did not 
 mean what they said, and (2) that they did not get 
 what they paid for. My impression is that the 
 antecedent probability is in both cases strongly 
 against my opponent. 
 
154 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 
 
 With regard to the purpose which the colleges 
 were intended to further, there are clear expres- 
 sions in the charters under which they were estab- 
 lished. The assertion under discussion is that these 
 colleges were established to give professional train- 
 ing to ministerial students. The charter of Har- 
 vard College, granted in 1650, defines the aim as 
 " for the advancement of all good literature, arts, 
 and sciences." The new articles of 1780, re- 
 viewing the achievements of the college, say 
 " in which University many persons of great 
 eminence have, by the blessing of God, been 
 initiated in those arts and sciences which qualified 
 them for public employments both in Church 
 and State.^^ 
 
 The charter of Yale University, the Collegiate 
 School of Connecticut, describes it as a school 
 " wherein youth may be instructed in the arts and 
 sciences, who through the blessing of Almighty 
 God may be fitted for Public employment both in 
 Church and Civil State." The charter of the 
 Academy and Charitable School in the Province of 
 Pennsylvania approves the project, " hoping that 
 this academy may prove a nursery of wisdom and 
 virtue, and that it will produce men of dispositions 
 and capacities beneficial to mankind in the various 
 occupations of life." The charter of Kings Col- 
 lege in New York provides for the instruction and 
 education of youth in the learned languages and in 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 155 
 
 the liberal arts and sciences. The announcement 
 reads in part as follows : 
 
 " A serious, virtuous, and industrious Course of Life 
 being first provided for, it is further the Design of this 
 College, to instruct and perfect the Youth in the 
 Learned Languages, and in the Arts of Reasoning ex- 
 actly, of Writing correctly and Speaking eloquently; 
 And in the Arts of Numbering and Measuring, of Sur- 
 veying and Navigation, of Geography and History, of 
 Husbandry, Commerce, and Government; and in the 
 Knowledge of all Nature in the Heavens above us, and 
 in the Air, Water, and Earth around us, and the vari- 
 ous Kinds of Meteors, Stones, Mines, and Minerals, 
 Plants and Animals, and of every Thing useful for 
 the Comfort, the Convenience, the Elegance of Life, 
 in the chief Manufactures relating to any of these 
 things; And finally, to lead them from the Study of 
 Nature, to the Knowledge of themselves, and of the 
 God of Nature, and their Duty to Him, themselves, 
 and one another; and every Thing that can contribute 
 to their true Happiness, both here and hereafter." 
 
 Surely this is a strange course of study for a 
 divinity school 1 
 
 One of the most illuminating cases is that of 
 Brown University. The expressed Intention of the 
 founders of Brown University was " to establish a 
 seminary of polite literature subject to the Gov- 
 ernment of the Baptists," and beyond question they 
 
156 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 
 
 were planning for the education of their own can- 
 didates for the ministry. But does this mean that 
 they planned to give professional theological train- 
 ing in the college? If so, why is it specified that 
 youth of all religious denominations shall be ac- 
 cepted? Was it intended that Congregationalists 
 and Episcopalians should become Baptist minis- 
 ters? And why is it so definitely stated that " the 
 Sectarian differences of opinions shall not make any 
 Part of the Public and Classical Instruction "? Is 
 it customary in a divinity school to forbid the dis- 
 cussion of the tenets of the sect by which the school 
 is established? There was no such restriction 
 when the first divinity school was established at 
 Andover in 1807, for then the project was de- 
 layed until the founders could agree what creed 
 should be taught, and until it had been voted that 
 each professor should assent to the creed which the 
 Hopkinsians had prepared. Is there not a different 
 motive here from that expressed in the charter of 
 Brown which says, " Into this Liberal and Catholic 
 Institution shall never be admitted any Religious 
 Tests but on the Contrary all the Members hereof 
 shall for ever enjoy full free Absolute and unin- 
 terrupted Liberty of Conscience"? In 1770 the 
 trustees of the new college in Rhode Island voted 
 " that the children of Jews may be admitted to the 
 institution and intirely enjoy the freedom of their 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 157 
 
 own religion without any constraint or Imposition 
 whatever." Was It In order that they might be 
 prepared for the priesthood of their own church, or 
 was It In the hope that the free and unhampered 
 dialectic of their own Jewish faith might bring 
 them eventually Into the Baptist pulpit? 
 
 I have given only a few quotations from the 
 charters and early statutes, but on these we may 
 safely rest the case as to the purpose of the 
 founders of the colonial colleges. Some people are 
 saying to-day that the Intention was to give tech- 
 nical training for the ministry. The charters say 
 that the colleges were established to give teaching 
 in literature, the arts, and sciences, with the ex- 
 pectation that this teaching would be of value both 
 in church and state, in all the various occupations 
 into which young men might go. For my own 
 part, the evidence of the charters is the more con- 
 vincing. I am Inclined to think that the colonial 
 forefathers knew what they meant and meant what 
 they said. 
 
 But now for the test of the work done. What- 
 ever they said, did the colleges actually train men 
 for the ministry In the sense In which professional 
 schools are now preparing them for separate occu- 
 pations? In his book on Educational Reform, 
 President Eliot records that In the ten years from 
 1761 to 1770 the percentage of ministers among 
 the graduates of Harvard College was twenty-nine, 
 
168 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 
 
 among those of Yale thirty-two, and among those 
 of Princeton forty-five. In the first thirty-nine 
 classes graduated from Brown only twenty-five per 
 cent, of the members entered the ministry. Now 
 what shall we say of the seventy-one per cent, at 
 Harvard, the sixty-eight per cent, at Yale, the 
 fifty-five per cent, at Princeton, and the seventy-five 
 per cent, at Brown.'* These men were planning to 
 practice law, medicine, teaching, business. Why did 
 they go to a divinity school? Did they think that 
 a man who is ready for the ministry is ready for 
 anything.'' The statement is perhaps true, but 
 hardly relevant. I venture to suggest that their 
 real opinion was that expressed in the charters we 
 have quoted, viz. : that the education which the col- 
 lege gave was regarded as of value to a man what- 
 ever the profession into which he might go. If it 
 be urged that there were no other schools to which 
 they could go, I should reply that in that case, if 
 they had wanted something else, they would have 
 made protest long and loud, and would have de- 
 manded changes in the old colleges or the estab- 
 lishment of new ones. But a record of the attitude 
 of the lay graduates of our colleges is not one of 
 fault-finding and protest. Rather have they shown 
 unswerving loyalty and gratitude, and because of 
 their faith in the college and its teaching, they 
 have poured out the wealth which has enlarged the 
 college to proportions of which its founders never 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 159 
 
 dreamed. Benefactors and graduates alike have 
 believed in non-professional education, and have 
 believed they were receiving it. He who says that 
 they have paid for professional education says 
 that they have paid for what they thought they 
 were not getting. Knowing them as I do, I find the 
 statement hard to accept. 
 
 The point just made presents itself in another 
 form when viewed in relation to present condi- 
 tions. To the old college there went students plan- 
 ning to enter all the professions, and they found 
 there the education which they sought. Of what 
 professional school is it true to-day that candidates 
 for the other professions go to it for training? 
 Are there many law students in the medical schools, 
 many engineering students in the divinity schools, 
 many architects in the schools of music? Would 
 it not be a new type of engineering school which 
 should attract forty-five, fifty-five, seventy, or 
 seventy-five per cent, of students going into other 
 professions ? I think that if we found an engineer- 
 ing school of that type we should begin to give it 
 ferent function from the one we had assigned it, 
 another name, should recognize it as having a dif- 
 should take away from it the name " professional " 
 and call it " liberal," a school in which are to be 
 found studies and teaching of value to a man what- 
 ever his profession may be. To call such a school 
 technical or professional is simply to twist terms 
 
160 ALEXANDER MEII(XEJOHN 
 
 out of all resemblance to their ordinary meanings. 
 It indicates a confusion of thought which demands 
 more careful analysis of the argument than we have 
 yet given. It will be worth while to examine it 
 more closely. 
 
 The argument as it stands is one of the most 
 common types of fallacy. It says, " The colonial 
 college prepared men for the ministry ; hence it did 
 nothing else. It is the argument " a is b, hence 
 a is only b," or again, it is, " if an object have 
 a given quality, then it has no other quality." 
 " Charles Darwin was an Englishman, hence of 
 course he was not a biologist." " Spinoza was a 
 grinder of lenses, hence he cannot have been a 
 philosopher." But Darwin was a biologist in spite 
 of the argument ; and Spinoza did dominate the 
 thought of Europe, even while grinding lenses in 
 his garret. The trouble with the argument is that 
 the conclusion does not follow; there is no logical 
 connection between conclusion and premise. A 
 may be b and yet be also c and d and e as well. A 
 college may be a good place for a young man who 
 plans to enter the ministry and may yet have quali- 
 ties and purposes of which that statement is in 
 no sense an adequate description. It may well be 
 that its value for ministerial students is only one 
 phase of its total and fundamental function. That 
 this is true is already apparent from its appeal to 
 students of other professions. If we can now de- 
 
[xUB FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 161 
 
 fine this total appeal, the confusion should dis- 
 appear and the modicum of truth which the argu- 
 ment contains should separate itself out from the 
 vast error in which that truth has been involved. 
 
 The real motive of the founders of the early col- 
 leges, so far as it concerned students for the min- 
 istry, appears in the account given by Walter 
 Cochrane Bronson in his History of Brown Uni- 
 versity. The Baptists, he tells us, were eager to 
 have a college under their own control, to which 
 their ministerial students might go. But why,'* 
 Was it because they were not sufficiently supplied 
 with ministers, or that the candidates were unable 
 to secure the technical training needed for their 
 profession? Not at all. The reason, he tells us, 
 was that at the time Brown was established " there 
 were only two Baptist ministers in all New Eng- 
 land who had what is called a liberal education; 
 and they were not clear in the doctrines of grace." 
 Now in accordance with the custom of the time, 
 the leaders of the denomination could easily pro- 
 vide for the professional training of their boys by 
 placing them in the charge of older men who 
 regularly gave such instruction to their appren- 
 tices. But they recognized that the denomination 
 could not hold its own, could not achieve its pur- 
 pose in the community unless its ministers were 
 men of power and intelligence, men who could lead 
 and dominate the men about them. And so the 
 
163 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 
 
 Baptist Church provided for the education of its 
 young men who were candidates for the ministry. 
 Did it provide for their technical theological in- 
 struction? The charter of the college specifically 
 denies this. The purpose was to educate minis- 
 ters, — but in what sense? Our opponents have 
 interpreted the purpose as that of educating men 
 to be ministers. The real purpose was that of 
 educating ministers to be men. And at the same 
 time by the same methods they were educating 
 lawyers to be men, and teachers, physicians, and 
 business men to be men. The same argument which 
 proves the old college to have been a divinity school 
 would prove it to be a law school, a medical school, 
 a school of pedagogy, a business school. But the 
 argument proves too much. There is a limit to the 
 number of different things a single thing can be. 
 The old college did educate ministers just as it 
 educated candidates for other professions, but it 
 did not give to each of these groups a different 
 education. It was dealing with something common 
 to them all, and so it gave to them all the same 
 instruction, — the culture of a liberal education. 
 
 I think it is clear that the issue we are discuss- 
 ing rests upon the interpretation of a phrase — 
 " founded for the education of ministers." There 
 is no doubt that the phrase expresses in large meas- 
 ure the purpose of the early colleges. But what 
 does it mean ? It is amazing to see how, in the face 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 163 
 
 of definite records to the contrary, this statement 
 has been taken to mean that the colleges were 
 schools of divinity. But the phrase admits of an- 
 other interpretation which has the advantage of 
 agreeing with the records. What does it mean to 
 teach a minister? Does it mean only to teach him 
 to be a minister? He has many other things to 
 learn besides that. He is taught by his wife, 
 taught by his children, by his friends, and by his 
 enemies. But the caddie who teaches him to play 
 golf does not thereby become a member of a faculty 
 of divinity ; he may even not be a professor of re- 
 ligion. A school for the deaf does not necessarily 
 teach deafness, nor does a school for foreigners 
 usually teach them to be foreign. A school for 
 anybody may undertake to teach him what he needs 
 to know. Our colonial forefathers were persuaded 
 that ministers as well as other men need knowl- 
 edge of things outside their profession, need knowl- 
 edge of the arts and sciences, and it was that belief 
 which found expression in the colleges which they 
 established. 
 
 The argument which we have been attacking has 
 told us to follow the example of the colonial col- 
 lege. If I understand at all the purpose of the 
 modern liberal college that is just what it is doing. 
 There is a vast difference in intellectual content as 
 between the old college and the new, but the two 
 institutions are at one in the belief in the value 
 
164 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 
 
 of knowledge as the guide of human life, and in 
 the conviction that certain elements of knowledge 
 are of common value to all men whatever their 
 differences of occupation or trade. 
 
 I should like to have the privilege of attempting 
 one last restatement of this conviction in positive 
 terms before this paper is closed. 
 
 In the old colonial community, the clergyman, 
 as in lesser degree the lawyer and the teacher, was 
 the man of ideas. He was no mere teacher of the 
 gospel and tender of the parish. While his people 
 lived their lives it was his task to reflect upon their 
 living, to formulate the beliefs on which it was 
 based, to study the conditions by which it was 
 molded, to bring to clearness the problems by 
 which it was faced, to study the moral, social, 
 economic, political situations of which it was con- 
 stituted. It was his part and the part of men of 
 like intellectual development to attempt to under- 
 stand the lives which other men were living with 
 lesser degrees of understanding. It was his task 
 to serve as prophet and seer, as guide and coun- 
 selor of his people. 
 
 It was for this task that the liberal college in- 
 tended to prepare him. And in these latter days, 
 as the scope of education has been extended more 
 and more broadly, the same liberal education has 
 been given to great numbers of our young men, 
 whatever the professions they are planning to 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 165 
 
 enter. At the present time a very small percent- 
 age of our college graduates become ministers ; 
 more than half of them enter into some form of 
 business occupation. But whether they are to be 
 in business or in the ministry, the same education 
 must be given them, since the new community has 
 the same need as had the old of understanding 
 itself, of stating itself in terms of ideas. 
 
 This fundamental belief of liberal education can 
 be stated in terms of two principles. The first is 
 shared by both liberal and technical teaching. The 
 second applies to liberal education alone. The 
 principles are these: (1) that activity guided by 
 ideas is on the whole more successful than the same 
 activity without the control of ideas, and (2) that 
 in the activities common to all men the guidance by 
 ideas is quite as essential as in the case of those 
 which different groups of men carry on in differen- 
 tiation from one another. 
 
 The first principle applies to all higher educa- 
 tion. We recognize that human deeds may be done 
 in either of two ways, — first, by habit, by custom, 
 by tradition, by rule of thumb, just as they always 
 have been done; or, on the other hand, under the 
 guidance of study, of investigation, of ideas and 
 principles by wliich men attempt to discover and 
 to formulate knowledge as to how these activities 
 can best be done. Now all higher education, liberal 
 or professional, rests on the belief that on the 
 
166 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 
 
 whole an activity which is understood will be more 
 successful than one which is not understood. 
 Knowledge pays ; intelligence is power. 
 
 The liberal school and the professional are, how- 
 ever, separated by their choice of the activities 
 which each shaU study. Every professional school 
 selects some one special group of activities carried 
 on by the members of one special trade or occupa- 
 tion and brings to the furtherance of these the 
 full light of intellectual understanding and guid- 
 ance. The liberal school, on the other hand, takes 
 as its content those activities which all men carry 
 on, those deeds which a man must do in virtue of 
 the fact that he is a man ; and within this field it 
 seeks to achieve the same enlightenment and in- 
 sight. The Hberal college would learn and teach 
 what can be known about a man's moral experience, 
 our common speech, our social relations, our politi- 
 cal institutions, our religious aspirations and be- 
 liefs, the world of nature which surrounds and 
 molds us, our intellectual and esthetic strivings 
 and yearnings — all these, the human things that 
 all men share, the liberal school attempts to 
 understand, believing that if they are understood, 
 men can live them better than they would live 
 them by mere tradition and blind custom. But 
 one of the terrible things about our generation 
 is that the principle which it accepts so eagerly 
 in the field of the vocations it refuses and 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 167 
 
 shuns in the deeper things of human living. I 
 have known fathers, planning for the training of 
 a son, who would see to it that in the preparation 
 for his trade every bit of knowledge he can have is 
 supplied him. If the boy is to be a dyer of cloth, 
 then he must study the sciences that understand 
 that process. All that can be known about the na- 
 ture of fabrics, the constitution of dyestuffs, the 
 processes of application and development of the 
 dye — not one bit of all this may be lacking from 
 the teaching of the boy. To put him into the shop 
 without that knowledge, to let him learn by imita- 
 tion, pick up the rule of thumb, follow the ways of 
 master workmen of the trade — to do that would be 
 to make him only a workman, one who can do what 
 has been done, can do what he is told to do. But 
 the father is not content with this. His boy must 
 understand and know the trade so that he may be 
 the leader and the guide, may give the orders rather 
 than obey them. But how often the same father is 
 unwilling that his boy attempt to understand his 
 own religion, his own morals, his own society, his 
 own politics ! In these fields, surely the father's 
 opinions are good enough! Keep the boy's mind 
 at rest regarding his religion and his economics ; 
 what has been believed before had better still be 
 believed! It may be bad for business, may inter- 
 fere with a boy's success if he becomes too much 
 interested in the fundamental things of life I And 
 
168 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 
 
 so such parents invite us to leave the universal 
 things, the things most sacred and significant, to 
 blindness, to the mere drift of custom, to tradi- 
 tion, and rule of thumb. And here it is that the 
 liberal college again asserts its loyalty to the men 
 who founded the older institutions. Those men 
 had intellectual faith ; they believed that it is worth 
 while to know the life of man, and so they studied 
 it and taught it to their pupils. I know that I 
 speak for the teachers and the administrators of 
 the liberal college here represented to-day when I 
 pledge anew our loyalty to the men in whose foot- 
 steps we follow. So far as we can bring it about 
 the young people of our generation shall know 
 themselves, shall know their fellows, shall think 
 their way into the common life of their people, 
 and by their thought shall illumine and direct it. 
 If we are not pledged to that, then we have deserted 
 the old standard ; we are apostates from the faith. 
 But I think that a good many of us are still loyal. 
 We welcome every new extension of vocational in- 
 struction. We know that every man should have 
 some special task to do and should be trained to do 
 that task as well as it can possibly be done. The 
 more the special trades and occupations are guided 
 and directed by skill and knowledge the more will 
 human life succeed in doing the things it plans to 
 do. But by the same principle we pledge our- 
 selves to the study of the universal things in human 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 169 
 
 life, the things that make us men as well as min- 
 isters and tradesmen. We pledge ourselves for- 
 ever to the study of human living in order that 
 living may be better done. We have not yet for- 
 gotten that fundamentally the proper study of 
 mankind is Man. 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE IN THE 
 
 LIFE OF THE AMERICAN 
 
 PEOPLE 
 
 COMMISSIONER PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 
 
 From the beginning we of the United States 
 have believed in the education of the college no 
 less than in that of the elementary school. North 
 and South and in the ever-expanding West as 
 our frontier has moved across the continent, we 
 have felt the need of men and women with the 
 education of the college for social, industrial, 
 civic, and religious leadership. The consciousness 
 of this need has become clearer as industries have 
 become more numerous and extensive, church more 
 free, religion more comprehensive, and society and 
 state more democratic. Scientific discovery, labor- 
 saving invention, commercial expansion, facility of 
 travel and intercourse, literary activity and the 
 growth of the spirit of criticism have brought 
 a clearer recognition of the value of all education. 
 Increase in wealth, most rapid in the last half 
 century, has made it possible for us to establish 
 and maintain schools in some degree at least in 
 proportion to our recognition of their value. 
 171 
 
m PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 
 
 True to our Anglo-Saxon ideals, we have in our 
 efforts to supply our need for schools welcomed 
 the assistance, alike, of individuals, churches, 
 benevolent societies, and of the Federal Govern- 
 ment, States, and smaller political units. All 
 these agencies have worked in generous rivalry 
 and with hearty good will towards one common aim. 
 Public and private schools, of whatever grade, 
 have all been schools of and for the people. They 
 have differed chiefly in their means of support. In 
 a very real sense all our schools have been and are 
 public schools. In reality we have no private 
 schools. Whatever the source of their income and 
 the form of their control, all our schools have been 
 and are, in all things essential, governed by public 
 opinion and popular sentiment, the great control- 
 ling forces in all democracies. Their only purpose 
 and function have been and are to serve the public 
 by preparing children and youth for life, for wise 
 and noble living, for intelligent useful work, for 
 the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, and 
 in so far as may be, for eternal destiny. It is 
 the glory of our schools that they exclude none 
 because of social rank, religious creed, partisan 
 political affiliations, economic conditions, or race. 
 Private schools, even the most select, seldom ex- 
 clude any who will conform to their standards of 
 conduct. Church schools welcome youth of all 
 creeds and of none. For the poor there are free 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 173 
 
 tuition, scholarships paying all or part of their 
 expenses for living, loan funds on the most liberal 
 terms, and opportunities to pay their way by labor 
 of many kinds. Fortunately all kinds of useful 
 labor done with worthy purpose are regarded as 
 honorable. Social recognition and highest honors 
 frequently go to those who pay their way even by 
 menial service. Even in those States in which 
 white and colored children must attend separate 
 schools, there are schools for all, and the tendency 
 grows stronger from year to year to make the 
 schools for the children and grandchildren of 
 former slaves as nearly as possible equal in effi- 
 ciency to the schools maintained for the children 
 and grandchildren of the former masters. Demo- 
 cratic, or striving to be democratic, in all else, 
 we are striving to be democratic in education also ; 
 and our democracy grows broader and stronger 
 and finer and richer and more tolerant and more 
 all-pervasive as the years go by. 
 
 Is it too much to claim for the American college 
 that it has been the chief force in our American 
 life making for industrial efficiency, economic de- 
 velopment, sane and safe democracy, social purity 
 and refinement, religious freedom, spiritual culture, 
 and higher idealism? In the upward striving and 
 onward march of the American people from the 
 time when a few thousands, mostly sons and daugh- 
 ters of the poor, landed on the shores of Virginia 
 
174 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 
 
 and New England till now, when after three short 
 centuries they fill the space between the double 
 oceans, a hundred million strong, peoples from all 
 the ends of the earth, of all creeds, tongues, and 
 races, living in peace in half a hundred self-govern- 
 ing States, united in one great democratic republic, 
 the freest, strongest, and wealthiest, and most pro- 
 gressive nation the world has ever known, the col- 
 leges have played their part faithfully and well. 
 Without them and their influence the story of our 
 life would have been quite different in most par- 
 ticulars. How different, it is impossible to imag- 
 ine. Read the story of religious leadership in the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Call the roll 
 of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, 
 of the Continental Congress, and of the Constitu- 
 tional Convention. Visit the halls of the College 
 of William and Mary, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, 
 and Harvard, and note how many of the leaders 
 in the great events connected with the birth of the 
 nation are claimed as their sons. 
 
 Through Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, 
 Madison, Monroe, the Adamses, Webster, Calhoun, 
 Benton; Cooper, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, 
 Hawthorne, Bancroft, Motley, Taylor, Emerson, 
 Lanier; Gray, Dana, Leconte; Parker, Dwight, 
 Beecher ; Whitney, Morse, and hundreds of others 
 of their day and later whose names are known to 
 all, the colleges have made direct contributions of 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 175 
 
 incalculable value to all phases of American life. 
 But the contributions made through the lives of 
 hundreds of thousands of their students less well 
 known, and by their indirect influence on the lives 
 of millions of earnest men and women who never 
 entered their halls, have been greater still. Great- 
 est of all has been the influence of the spirit of 
 freedom and democracy, idealism and service, and 
 devotion to truth which has pervaded them all and 
 inspired the communities to which they have min- 
 istered. In plain living and high thinking the 
 colleges and college men and women have led the 
 way. 
 
 Not two decades had gone by since the first 
 landing of the pilgrims in New England, and 
 the colony was still small and weak, and, but for 
 the sterling character, strong faith, and fixed pur- 
 pose of the colonists, still uncertain as to its fu- 
 ture, when the school was founded which later 
 became Harvard College and Harvard University. 
 For many decades Harvard was a typical small 
 college, with cheap buildings, little equipment, 
 meager income, small faculty, and few students. It 
 was rich only in the love and devotion of its friends, 
 its idealism, and its purposes. But the Harvard 
 of the seventeenth century, even its poverty, served 
 the pioneer people of this Eastern coast and met 
 their demands as hundreds of small and strug- 
 gling pioneer colleges, some of them struggling 
 
176 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 
 
 unto death, served fresh water and backwoods 
 communities through two centuries of pioneer life. 
 
 The population of Virginia was still small, 
 though its territory was large and indefinite 
 enough, when Their Majesties' Royal College of 
 WilHam and Mary was founded in 1693, to become 
 in the next century the training ground of democ- 
 racy, the inspiration of the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence, and the inalienable rights of man. Only 
 these two. Harvard and WilHam and Mary, sur- 
 vive from the seventeenth century. From the first 
 quarter of the eighteenth century we have Yale 
 and Washington College, in Maryland. From the 
 second quarter we have the University of Penn- 
 sylvania, the Moravian Seminary and College for 
 Women in Pennsylvania, Princeton, originating 
 in the " Log College," and Washington and Lee, 
 known in those days as Liberty Hall. From the 
 third quarter we have Columbia (Kings College), 
 Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth. These twelve 
 antedate the beginning of the Revolution. 
 
 From the last quarter of the century we have 
 Hampden-Sidney, Washington and Jefferson, 
 Dickinson, University of Pittsburgh, Georgetown, 
 St. John's College, The College of Charleston, 
 Williams, Tusculum, Blount (now the University 
 of Tennessee), Washington (the last three founded 
 in the same year and all in the valley of East 
 Tennessee), Union, University of North Carolina, 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 177 
 
 Transylvania, Marietta, University of Vermont, 
 and Middlebury. A total of seventeen survive 
 from these twenty-five years of revolution and the 
 inauguration of our government. This fact alone, 
 that during these twenty-five years of stirring 
 events our fathers established almost a score of 
 colleges that have lived and grown until now, is 
 sufficient evidence of their belief in the value of the 
 college in a democracy of the kind they were try- 
 ing to build. At the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century there were twenty-nine schools which are 
 still counted among our colleges and universities, 
 and there were probably as many others which 
 no longer exist. Not a bad showing for a strug- 
 gling group of pioneer rural States with a total 
 population of little more than five millions. It is 
 significant that five of the twenty-five were west 
 of the Alleghanies. Of the twenty-seven which 
 date from the eighteenth century three are now 
 State universities. 
 
 Continuing our count, from the first quarter of 
 the nineteenth century we again have twenty-nine, 
 ten of which are west of the Alleghanies. Among 
 them is Allegheny College, fortieth in the list. 
 Five of the tvrenty-nine are now State schools. 
 From the second quarter of this century we have 
 113, of which nine are State or National schools, 
 and from the next decade ninety-one, of which five 
 are State schools. Of the 567 colleges and univer- 
 
178 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 
 
 sities reporting to the Bureau of Education in 
 1914, 262 had their beginning before the war be- 
 tween the States. The decade of the war and re- 
 construction gives us eighty-two, of which fifteen 
 are State or Nationah The large increase in the 
 number of State schools in this and the following 
 decade is due in large measure to the passage of 
 the First Morrill Act in 1862, appropriating pub- 
 lic lands for the use of Colleges of Agriculture 
 and Mechanic Arts. This Act gave impetus to 
 the growing sentiment for public education and 
 schools of all grades free to all and supported by 
 public taxation. From the next three decades we 
 have eighty-two, sixty-seven, and eighty-six, re- 
 spectively, and from the last decade of the nine- 
 teenth century fifty-six, a total of 291 for the 
 four decades, fifty of them State, National, munic- 
 ipal, or distinctly technical. From the first 
 decade of the twentieth century we have only 
 twenty-seven new institutions, of which six are 
 State or technical, and from the next four years 
 only four, of which one is a university with no 
 college department yet organized. 
 
 These are the numbers of those which survive. 
 Some have died, some have been united with other 
 schools, some have given up the struggle to main- 
 tain themselves as colleges and have taken names 
 which indicate more accurately the work they do. 
 There are still some that call themselves colleges 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 179 
 
 or universities but are not listed as such by the 
 Bureau of Education. 
 
 That we have had and still have more colleges 
 than we need, that many have been founded un- 
 wisely, that many have, because of lack of means, 
 been unable to do the work they honestly tried to 
 do, that many have functioned chiefly in boom- 
 ing real estate — all may be conceded. But what 
 does it matter.? This kind of extravagance is 
 probably inseparable from a young and exuberant 
 democracy such as ours has been. All have served 
 a good purpose. Even the fake institutions have 
 served to develop the critical spirit, and their 
 power to deceive is a tribute to the faith which 
 the people have in the college and the things for 
 which it stands. 
 
 In the Report of the Commissioner of Educa- 
 tion for 1892, 600 colleges are listed; in the 
 Report for 1895, 694; for 1900, 677; for 1905, 
 633 ; for 1910, 618 ; for 1914, 567, an average now 
 of one college for 175,000 of total population. 
 The number of colleges will probably continue to 
 grow less for many years. A word later about 
 the reasons for this. 
 
 Of the 567 colleges listed in the Report of the 
 Commissioner of Education for 1914, ninety-five 
 are under National, State, or municipal control; 
 thirty-two are under denominational control, and 
 144 are non-sectarian. Ninety-two are colleges 
 
180 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 
 
 for women, 145 are colleges for men, and 330 are 
 co-educational. 
 
 So much for the colleges of the past and the 
 present. It would be a pleasant task to dwell on 
 the various phases of their work and of their 
 benign influence on American life. But their past 
 is safe, and I am just now more interested in their 
 future. What changes are necessary to enable our 
 colleges to adjust themselves to the new conditions 
 and demands which have arisen, to use their means 
 and energies more economically, and to render full- 
 est and best service in the larger and more com- 
 plex life upon which we have entered? 
 
 First. I suggest that the colleges which have 
 preparatory departments should begin at once to 
 prepare to abandon them or to organize them as 
 separate schools, with their own teachers and de- 
 pendent upon their own resources. 
 
 There was a time when there was need for the 
 preparatory school or department at all or most 
 colleges. Schools in which boys and girls could 
 be prepared for admission to any college with 
 respectable standards were few. The public high 
 schools of four years based on eight years of ele- 
 mentary schooling are of recent date. There was 
 a large gap between the work of the public schools 
 in most communities and the work of the fresh- 
 man class in any good college. Private prepara- 
 tory schools were costly and many were inefficient 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 181 
 
 and unsatisfactory. But these conditions have 
 changed rapidly in the last fifteen years. There 
 are now in the United States nearly fourteen thou- 
 sand public and private high schools, fully ten 
 thousand of which have courses of full four years. 
 These are found in cities, towns, and rural com- 
 munities alike. In the ten thousand four-year 
 high schools are enrolled more than a million stu- 
 dents. Many of these high schools are better 
 equipped with buildings, laboratories, and teach- 
 ers than most of our colleges were a generation 
 ago. Practically all are capable of giving the 
 preparation required for admission at most col- 
 leges. If some of the public high schools fail to 
 give the desired amount of Latin or Greek, they 
 give more of other subjects; and most of the pri- 
 vate high schools, of which there are more than 
 two thousand, are able to give full preparation in 
 these languages. For many reasons the public and 
 private high schools are better and more desirable 
 than the preparatory schools of the colleges. 
 
 Still 354< church and non-sectarian colleges re- 
 port preparatory departments with approximately 
 forty-three thousand preparatory students. The 
 same colleges enroll less than sixty thousand regu- 
 lar college students. The total number of their 
 preparatory students is more than two-thirds the 
 number of their regular college students. In 
 many colleges the number of preparatory students 
 
18^ PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 
 
 is two, three, four, or five times the number of 
 college students. Why should these colleges con- 
 tinue to divide their means and energies and bring 
 more or less confusion into their work that they 
 may add 354 high schools to the fourteen thou- 
 sand which we already have, more than ten thou- 
 sand with courses of four years, and give to forty- 
 three thousand boys and girls instruction little dif- 
 ferent from that received by a million and a quar- 
 ter other boys and girls in the high schools? 
 
 These colleges are as a rule not among the 
 stronger and richer. Most of them have much 
 less income and equipment than they need for 
 their legitimate college work. Many of them have 
 lower standards of admission than are justified by 
 the work now done by the better public and private 
 high schools. Some of them admit students to their 
 freshman classes with much less preparation than 
 can be had in the high schools. Of the ninety-two 
 colleges for women, sixty-eight maintain prepara- 
 tory departments. These report 6,873 prepar- 
 atory and 8,045 regular college students. Prac- 
 tically all these colleges have very meager incomes. 
 Why should they stint their college work that they 
 may add sixty-eight tomorethan ten thousand high 
 schools open to girls and able to prepare them for 
 admission to the freshman class of any of these col- 
 leges ? The eight thousand students in their prepar- 
 atory classes is inconsiderable in comparison with 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 183 
 
 the seven hundred thousand girls in the public 
 and private high schools. And it should be remem- 
 bered that many, probably most of the students in 
 the preparatory classes of colleges of all kinds, 
 never enter the college proper. To the extent that 
 this is true they are not in reality preparatory 
 schools, but only abnormal high schools for general 
 education. 
 
 Nor are most or all these colleges with prepara- 
 tory departments found in the States which have 
 fewest good high schools. Iowa reports 592 public 
 high schools with 45,877 students and 85 private 
 high schools with 3,614 students, yet 21 Iowa 
 colleges report preparatory departments with a 
 total of 1,820 students. The same colleges report 
 less than twice this number of regular college stu- 
 dents, and all need larger incomes and better 
 equipment for their legitimate college work. 
 Pennsylvania reports 886 public high schools with 
 enrollment of 84,453 students, and 138 pri- 
 vate high schools with 12,935 students. But 22 
 Pennsylvania colleges maintain preparatory de- 
 partments for 2,601 students. Ohio reports 811 
 public high schools with 77,324 students, and 75 
 private high schools with 4,336 students, yet 28 
 Ohio colleges support preparatory departments 
 for 3,039 high-school students. New York reports 
 666 public high schools with 133,736 students, and 
 237 private high schools with 17,081 students, yet 
 
184 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 
 
 11 New York colleges give some kind of high- 
 school education to 3,393 boys and girls in their 
 preparatory departments. Eleven Indiana col- 
 leges, 27 Illinois colleges, 26 Missouri colleges have 
 preparatory departments. There seems to be no 
 longer any good reason for this policy, however 
 necessary it may have been formerly. 
 
 Second. All colleges which now require for ad- 
 mission less than the preparation that can be had 
 in four years of good high-school work should 
 raise their standards to this point at once or as 
 early as the majority of the communities served by 
 them can be brought to maintain good high schools 
 with courses of four years. There is now little 
 reason, and there should soon be none, why any 
 institution calling itself a college should do high- 
 school work or admit students who have not had 
 four years of work in a good high school or its 
 equivalent. Within the last ten years and espe- 
 cially within the last five years there has been 
 a very general movement for higher standards. 
 Half the colleges of the country or more have 
 within these years raised their standards of admis- 
 sion, on paper at least, by an amount represented 
 by one, two, or three years of high-school work. 
 But not all of these have raised their standards of 
 graduation by an equal amount, and bachelor de- 
 grees still have a very uncertain and indefinite 
 meaning. There is need of some general agree- 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 185 
 
 ment as to the terms on which these degrees shall be 
 given and as to what they shall mean. 
 
 Third. Colleges requiring or accepting for ad- 
 mission units in any subject should build their 
 work in that subject on the work accepted for ad- 
 mission, and not on a smaller amount. The total 
 amount of work in any subject should be the sum of 
 the work accepted for admission plus the full num- 
 ber of years of college work. Units of prepara- 
 tion should not be counted both for admission and 
 for graduation. As nearly as possible college work 
 should be in the line of the preparatory work and 
 in substantial groups, so that the colleges may be 
 relieved of the necessity of doing through a series 
 of groups a large amount of more or less discon- 
 nected high-school work. 
 
 Fourth. Two hundred or more of the smaller 
 colleges should, I believe, become junior colleges, 
 attempting to do only two or three years of col- 
 lege work, preferably only two years. These 
 junior colleges should require for admission the 
 same degree of preparation as is required by the 
 standard four-year colleges and should not attempt 
 to maintain preparatory departments. They 
 should, on the other hand, concentrate all their 
 energies, means, and equipment of buildings, 
 laboratories, libraries, and teaching force on doing 
 well and in a large and strong way the work of 
 the first two college years. For the work of in- 
 
186 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 
 
 struction they should employ men and women of 
 the best native ability, good scholarship, and the 
 highest skill in teaching. The instructors should 
 have a comprehensive grasp of the principles of 
 education, its aims and ends and its relations to 
 life. They should be whole-souled men and women 
 with sympathy for boys and girls at this most 
 critical period of their life, with high ideals and 
 power to inspire them to the best. Here more 
 than elsewhere are needed teachers answering to 
 Daniel Coit Gilman's description, " tall men, broad- 
 shouldered men, sun-crowned men," or women like 
 unto them. In these years the personality of the 
 teacher probably counts for more than at any other 
 time, as did the kind of personal contact which 
 students had with the principal members of the 
 faculties of the old-time colleges, but which they 
 no longer can have in the larger colleges of to-day, 
 nor with men of the highest ability in most of the 
 smaller colleges as they are now organized. Ideals, 
 inspiration, desires, and enthusiasms may count 
 for more here than technical knowledge of sub- 
 jects, however accurate and thorough. For two 
 years of college work these schools with compara- 
 tively small incomes might hope to pay a few 
 teachers of the kind I have tried to describe suf- 
 ficient salaries to hold them for this most impor- 
 tant work, and to equip laboratories and libraries 
 adequately, so that a minimum of the time of the 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 187 
 
 students would be lost. The importance of this 
 will be better understood if it is remembered that 
 more than sixty out of every hundred who enter 
 college leave at or before the end of the second 
 year, never to return. What college does for 
 them must be done in these two years, for many of 
 them in one year only. 
 
 After finishing the two years of the junior col- 
 lege, students should, of course, be advised to go for 
 the last two years of college work to the larger and 
 richer colleges which are able to equip their labora- 
 tories and libraries and to employ large numbers 
 of specialists for the more technical work of these 
 3^ears, Can there be any doubt that under these 
 conditions many more would enter and remain 
 through these advanced classes than now do or that 
 the sum total of results of the four years in col- 
 lege would be much larger than it now is for most 
 students? For most students the two years of 
 junior college work might be made almost the full 
 equivalent of what is done now in three and the 
 better preparation and the stronger impulse gained 
 would insure better results in the last two years 
 also. 
 
 Of course this better type of work in the smaller 
 junior colleges would soon compel the larger col- 
 leges to make like provision for their first and 
 second year students, who are now too often 
 crowded into over-large classes or sections and 
 
188 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 
 
 given into the hands of young and inexperienced 
 teachers quite different from the ideal set forth 
 above and seldom come in contact with the larger 
 and more experienced men and women who make the 
 reputation of the colleges. Some of these younger 
 and more inexperienced teachers do prove to be men 
 and women of the best type and make good when 
 they have had more experience, but many only 
 prove themselves to be unfit. 
 
 That you may understand still better the need 
 for this reorganization of our colleges, let me 
 call your attention to the following significant 
 facts : 
 
 In 1892 the 600 colleges reporting to the Bu- 
 reau of Education had property and endowment 
 amounting to $200,541,375, a working income of 
 $17,034,614, 11,432 professors and instructors, 
 122,403 students. In 1914 the 567 reporting had 
 property and endowments amounting to $849,296,- 
 071, a working income of $102,156,401, 31,312 
 professors and other instructors, and 334,978 stu- 
 dents. The increase in twenty-two years was more 
 than three hundred per cent, in property and en- 
 dowment, five hundred per cent, in working income, 
 nearly two hundred per cent, in instructors and 
 in students. The figures for property and endow- 
 ment and for working income are most remarkable. 
 But most of the increase in property and in income 
 as well as in instructors and students has been in 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 189 
 
 a small per cent, of the Institutions and the differ- 
 ences In wealth and size are now much greater 
 than they were twenty-two years ago. 
 
 In 1914, 29 colleges do not report their Incomes, 
 and 45 report Incomes less than ten thousand 
 dollars ; 92 report working Incomes between ten 
 and twenty thousand dollars, and 80 between 
 twenty and thirty thousand dollars. Including 
 in the count those not reporting incomes, as all 
 except two or three should be, we have 246 col- 
 leges with working incomes less than thirty thou- 
 sand dollars. Forty-six having working Incomes 
 between thirty and forty thousand dollars and 46 
 between forty and fifty thousand dollars. There 
 were in 1914, therefore, 328 colleges having work- 
 ing incomes less than fifty thousand dollars. Sixty 
 per cent, of the colleges and universities had six 
 per cent, of the total of annual working Incomes, 
 ten per cent, of the total property and endowment, 
 and twelve per cent, of the college students ; forty 
 per cent, had ninety-four per cent, of the total of 
 working incomes, and eighty-eight per cent, of 
 the students. Twenty-six Institutions, each having 
 $600,000 or more working Income, had thirty-six 
 per cent, of the total of working incomes, and 
 eighteen per cent, of the students. Again, ninety- 
 three of the colleges having working Incomes less 
 than fifty thousand dollars had less than fifty regu- 
 lar college students each and ninety-nine had more 
 
190 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 
 
 than fifty but not more than one hundred such stu- 
 dents, a total of 192 colleges with not more than 
 one hundred regular college students. 
 
 In the average college with 50 students 35 
 will be in the first two years and 15 in the 
 last two. In a college of 100 students, 70 will be 
 in the first two and 30 in the last two years. The 
 expense for teaching the 15 and the 30 will 
 be more than the expense for teaching the 35 
 and the 70. If the two higher classes were sent 
 away to the larger and richer colleges, the number 
 of students in the lower classes might be more than 
 doubled and the total attendance increased more 
 than fifty per cent, without additional cost for 
 teaching and equipment, and all students, those 
 remaining and those sent away, would be better 
 taught. But the better teaching in the lower 
 classes and the larger number of students attracted 
 to and held in these classes thereby would result 
 in more general support, larger endowments, and 
 more adequate incomes for the colleges. 
 
 In most instances these junior colleges should 
 be affiliated more or less closely with one or more 
 stronger colleges to which they would send most 
 of their students. Many students from the same 
 junior college would thus find themselves in 
 the higher classes of the same institution, and 
 would rejoice in keeping up in the larger institu- 
 tion the spirit of the college from which they came 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 191 
 
 and in which they received their ideals and inspira- 
 tions. They would think of themselves, both while 
 in the senior college and in after life, as of the 
 college in which they spent the earlier years of 
 their college life. Thus the junior college need 
 not fear losing its place in the affections of its 
 students. 
 
 I have dwelt on this matter of the junior college 
 because it seems to me to be a matter of very 
 great importance and because I know how difficult 
 it is going to be to bring many institutions that 
 should transform themselves into junior colleges 
 to break away from the traditional four years. 
 Yet a beginning has already been made and there 
 are now a score or more junior colleges in the 
 country. Unfortunately most of them still do two 
 or more years of high-school work. This work, 
 I feel sure, they will abandon soon. On the 
 other hand, some of the city high schools are 
 adding two years of college work and calling them- 
 selves junior colleges. There are a dozen such in 
 California. 
 
 Fifth. Fifty or seventy-five colleges with in- 
 comes between fifty and one hundred thousand dol- 
 lars should follow the example of Allegheny and 
 Amherst and limit themselves to one, two, or three 
 Well-organized groups of subjects, doing four 
 years of earnest work in these, and striving to 
 attain in them a higher degree of excellence than 
 
19a PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 
 
 is possible with the larger and more diversified 
 curricula of most modern colleges. If this were 
 done students would then be able to select the col- 
 lege in which the best opportunities might be had 
 in the subjects and group of subjects in which 
 they were most interested. Classes in the general 
 subjects would thus come to be made up of select 
 students. Abler instructors would be attracted by 
 the opportunity of doing better work than can be 
 done with classes in which many of the students 
 have no interest in or ability for the subject. A 
 finer and better spirit would pervade the entire 
 school and the results obtained would be more 
 satisfactory in every way. Fortunately this 
 is no longer a matter of mere theory or sur- 
 mise. The two colleges already referred to and 
 some others have already demonstrated its practi- 
 cabihty. 
 
 When the readjustments here set forth have 
 been made, as I believe they will be made in the 
 next few years; when we have reorganized our 
 twelve years of elementary and secondary school- 
 ing on a basis of six years of elementary and six 
 years of high school, as we are now beginning to 
 do ; when we learn to promote teachers with their 
 classes in the elementary school so as to preserve 
 the continuity of teaching from year to year, as 
 we do not do now, and when we have learned to 
 demand a little better preparation on the part of 
 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 193 
 
 all teachers both in the elementary school and in 
 the high school, we shall, I feel sure, be able to 
 send boys and girls to college with the equivalent 
 of two years in advancement over that which they 
 now have and with much greater power of initia- 
 tive and independent thinking, and to gain the 
 equivalent of another year in the four years of col- 
 lege work. This, with the fuller development of a 
 few of our graduate schools made possible by their 
 large and rapidly increasing incomes, and with the 
 raising of standards in our professional and tech- 
 nical schools, now well under way, will enable us 
 not only to give better preparation to the young 
 men and women upon whom must rest the duties 
 and responsibilities of leadership in our own coun- 
 try ; it will also enable us to rise to the opportunity 
 offered us and the responsibility thrust upon us 
 by what is now taking place in Europe, and to 
 assume world leadership in education. Attract- 
 ing to our schools thousands of young men 
 and women from all countries of the world, we 
 shall be able to inspire them with the spirit of our 
 democracy and to teach them a higher philosophy 
 than they have been able to learn from the mili- 
 tary despotisms, aristocracies, and feudalisms of 
 the Old World. 
 
 Our own democratic republic with its two hun- 
 dred millions of people and its thousand billions 
 of wealth within the next fifty years, with its 
 
194i PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 
 
 larger and more complex industrial and political 
 problems and its finer and richer culture, and a 
 world civilization to be rebuilt on broader and safer 
 foundation, call us to the task and hearten us for 
 its accomplishment. 
 
Mi'n!^.^,^^ O"" CONGRESS 
 
 020 407 405 7 
 
 ■m 
 
 :-■. ■.■■:.:..<:.■■:.. 
 
 
 
 
 1 -' • 
 
 ■ ■'T:? 
 
 ' . ■ :;■■■■ 
 
 ■■; ^■.■■;^ 
 
 
 
 - '.1 
 
 .■'i'.V'Sf;"-