WHICH COLLEGE FOR THE BOY? LEADING TYPES IN AMERICAN EDUCATION BY JOHN CORBIN AUTHOR OF " AN AMERICAN AT OXFORD," ETC. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 1908 COPYRIGHT 1908 BY JOHN CORBIN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published April rgo8 TO GEORGE HORACE LORIMER 227617 CONTENTS I. PRINCETON : A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY . 1 II. HARVARD : A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY . . 37 III. MICHIGAN: A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY 91 IV. CORNELL : A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY . . 124 V. CHICAGO : A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT 155 VI. WISCONSIN : A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY . 185 VII. THE FARMER'S AWAKENING . . . . 211 VIII. THE SMALL COLLEGE VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY 244 IX. THE QUESTION OF EXPENSE , 273 ILLUSTRATIONS The Medical School, Harvard University (page 44) . Frontispiece The Library, Princeton University 8 Blair Hall, Princeton University 16 The Fitz Randolph Gateway, Princeton University . . 22 North College, Princeton University .... 30 " The Yard," Harvard University 60 The Harvard Union, the University Club-House . . 62 The Agamemnon of ^Eschylus being acted by Harvard Stu- dents in the New Stadium ...... 80 University Hall, University of Michigan .... 94 The Library, University of Michigan 110 Cornell University, North Part of Campus from Sage Tower . 130 Reading-Room, Cornell University Library ... 138 Goldwin Smith Hall of Humanities, Cornell University . 152 The Tower Group, University of Chicago ... 168 University Hall, University of Wisconsin .... 188 Library of the State Historical Society, University of Wis- consin .......... 192 Gymnasium and JBoathouse, University of Wisconsin . 198 Commencement-Day Procession, University of Wisconsin . 206 A 'Class in Agriculture 216 " The Way to Knox," Knox College, Galesburg, III. . . 246 PREFACE WHEN the following chapters were appear- ing in the " Saturday Evening Post," critics, of whom there was a liberal supply, referred to them as advising parents where to send their sons. That is an undertaking beyond my temer- ity, already sufficiently taxed by describing eight or ten widely different institutions, in widely dif- ferent regions, and appealing to widely different people. It would require an intimate knowledge of all the colleges and universities in the country which, of all the modern world, is most liberally supplied with them, at least in the matter of numbers. It would require, moreover, an inti- mate knowledge of every boy, and there are as yet even more boys in the country than colleges. The end in view was humbler, but, I believe, no less useful. Nothing is more important to a young man than the college he goes to, except it be the parents he has had and that is a matter in which tyrannous nature has given him xi PREFACE no alternative. Yet the cases are very few in which the choice is made with enough knowledge. A boy goes to his father's college, to the college from which have graduated the men he most respects, to that which is nearest home, or to which some friend is going. So deep is the ignorance of our colleges in general, and so narrow are the prevailing preju- dices, that most men, even when the facts are put before them, instinctively close their minds, as they would shut their eyelids against an un- expected ray of light. Not once, but often, East- ern graduates have questioned my candor and accuracy because I have spoken highly of the state universities of the Middle West. Men of this stamp are obviously very unsafe advisers. The college nearest home, other things being equal, may be the best. But other things so seldom are equal; and very often, especially in the case of wide-awake, reliable, ambitious boys, nothing is more valuable than the opportunity of meeting fellows of a different kind and from different parts of the country. To my main title, which was a present from the editor of the "Saturday Evening Post," I have xii PREFACE consequently added a sub-title. We are to dis- cuss leading types in American education. I have tried to show what sort of young men go to each college, what its traditions are, what the authorities aim to do, and what they are actually doing. I I may judge from my own experience, college graduates, even when they have kept in touch with their alma mater, will find much new and important information. Others will, I hope, gain a pretty clear idea of the typical aims of our college world, and which institution affords the things they most desire. In brief, the purpose has been to enable the reader to think effectively on the problem in hand, and so to suit the college to the boy, the boy to the college. Necessarily I have omitted many more insti- tutions than I have described. Of the state universities I have had space for only two, and several universities of the first rank, such as Columbia and Leland Stanford, I have been obliged to pass by. Besides these, there are many institutions of great age, sound traditions, and progressive character which would well re- ward consideration, such as to mention only xiii PREFACE a few Dartmouth, Brown, Haverford, Lafay- ette, and Johns Hopkins. Yale was omitted for other reasons. When the editor of the " Post/' Mr. George Horace Lorimer, was advising with me as to the selection, he remarked that Yale was, after all, of the same general type as Harvard, and might be omitted in favor of some institution that would give the series greater variety and a more repre- sentative character. As Mr. Lorimer is himself a Yale man, he is probably not unaware that there is a lively, indeed a historical, difference between these two institutions. I even suspect that it was this difference, rather than the simi- larity, which led him to propose the exclusion. I fancy him bracing himself to endure in his col- umns a hectic eulogy of my own alma mater as preferable, at the worst, to an equally hectic de- nunciation of his. Perhaps I have been filially partial to Harvard, though certain ebullitions at Cambridge when the article appeared, to which I shall refer in place, have given me reason to hope not. On the other hand it is possible that devotion to the Harvard motto of Veritas, together with a xiv h a PREFACE more intimate knowledge of the facts of the case, has led me to a frankness in adverse criti- cism which would have been difficult and in questionable taste in the case of any other, and especially the rival institution. What if, in de- barring me from New Haven, Mr. Lorimer had deprived his alma mater of a fervent eulogy, a panegyric? It would have served him right, and Yale too. As for the reader, if he is interested in Yale and who is not ? he may gather, I hope, in passages scattered through the following pages, a pretty clear idea of its failure to produce men of advanced ideas or of originality in the arts, and of its success in producing eager and sub- stantial men in business and in the professions; of the oligarchic, perhaps tyrannical, powers of the senior societies, and of their organized effi- ciency in such undergraduate activities as they set their hands to. Yale is, in a word, the typical American university, and its failures and suc- cesses are those of the nation at large. Throughout I have given special attention to certain forward tendencies in American educa- tion, dealing with a possible future as well as XV PREFACE with the actual present. Perhaps I shall be charged with riding a hobby. A dozen years ago I made a pretty careful study of the educa- tional institutions of the mother country, which resulted in two volumes, "Schoolboy Life in England " and "An American at Oxford. " Two things chiefly impressed me. By means of the "houses" of the public schools and the colleges within the universities, England has pretty nearly solved the residential and social problems of student life. And by means of the tutorial system and the "honour schools" in the uni- versities, England, while giving way slowly much too slowly, I fear to the modern scien- tific spirit and to the necessity of allowing a measurably free election of courses, has yet ef- fected, as we have not, a very considerable har- mony and consistency in the general body of a man's education. Certain suggestions I made for reforms here along similar though far from identical lines fell, as I thought, on barren ground. For almost a decade the cause seemed a lost cause. It was as much a surprise as a delight to find that in most of the institutions I visited the ideas have xvi PREFACE long had root, and are now approaching fruition. On this subject I wrote a separate article, for the "Atlantic Monthly," entitled "Harking Back to the Humanities," material from which I have inserted in the following chapters wherever it would best serve to elucidate them. If it appears that I have devoted too much space to these matters, I can only plead that they lie at the source of the two main influences of university life, the social influence and the educational. The time is at hand when we shall require our universities, whatever they do for the scientific specialist, to offer every man according to his capacities a stimulating social life and a well-or- dered humanistic education, consciously adapted to his individual needs. It would be wrong to close without expressing my deep sense of gratitude for the hospitable frankness with which stranger universities en- tertained me, and for the unfailing vivacity and enthusiasm with which I have been refuted, admonished, and lampooned at Harvard. JOHN CORBIN. NEW YORK, April, 1908. WHICH COLLEGE FOE THE BOY? I. PRINCETON: A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY PRINCETON wrought confusion to its ad- mirers among whom I beg to be consid- ered one of the most ardent when it changed its ancient title of college for that of university. There are in America two types of institutions of higher education which, if not mutually exclusive, have hitherto at least been highly antagonistic. These used to be called the small and the large college. Of late years they have been more accu- rately distinguished as the college and the univer- sity. One teaches the few subjects which are of general and fundamental value, the other many and diverse subjects highly specialized. One places chief emphasis on the training of mind and character, the other on science. The distinction is vital. In this present day in America much stress is laid upon utilitarian 1 PRINCETON achievement. Thoughtful folk everywhere feel the need of an infusion of larger and deeper ideals. No nation can maintain its eminence without a generous share of the faculty of doing things ; but beneath and above this is the larger life of the spirit, which is more important than any material success ; more important, even, than any intellectual success: for what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? Only the inner spirit of manhood can raise the world higher and still higher. Once Princeton stood as the foremost of our collegiate institutions Williams, Amherst, Dartmouth, and a dozen others. Now, in name, though by no means in fact, it is a university, and one of the least considerable. In any real sense of the word it is not a univer- sity, and it is not likely to become one. Whatever the term may have denoted in the Middle Ages, it was then, and has since been, characteristically applied to institutions giving thorough instruc- tion in many, if not all, of the arts and professions. Its purpose was highly practical. The Master oJ Arts was no less a professional man than the law- yer and the priest, and before taking his de| 2 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY was obliged to g v t he was indeed a master by teaching actual pupus. Our American uni- versities are inspired by a thoroughly mediaeval instinct, however paradoxical the statement may seem, in fostering the new technical as well as the old liberal professions. Princeton has depart- ments of civil and electrical engineering, and a graduate school ; but together they do not include more than two hundred students. In the nature of things, neither can compete with similar de- partments in any one of a dozen American uni- versities. Other " university " features are lacking quite. It once established a law school and then abolished it after achieving a grand total of seven grad- uates in six years. Hospital and clinical facilities being out of the question in a little inland town, it has not, and never can have, a local medical school. There is a Princeton theological seminary, but, as this is denominational, it is only affiliated, not an integral part of the institution, and is not mentioned in the university catalogue. It has no schools of music, architecture, agriculture, veter- inary medicine, or dentistry. Princeton clearly recognizes its limitations, and, PRINCETON in spite of its assumed title, is consciously resolved not to compete on their own ground with other American institutions calling themselves univer- sities. Judged merely by its assumption of a more grandiloquent title, in short, it is in the position of a small boy who endeavors to hoist himself by the bootstraps. Its character is determined by its location, as is always the case with an institute of learning, at least in many fundamentals. In order to main- tain any distinctive atmosphere and spirit, the University of Pennsylvania has a life-and-death struggle to resist the devouring force of Phila- delphia, while Columbia fled for its life out of the heart of New York to Morningside Heights. Yale claims to be ideally situated in that it lives on equal terms with the city of New Haven, so that it takes what it needs from the world with- out surrendering its individuality; whereas Har- vard is dominated by Boston. Princeton lies in a town which never would have existed except for it, and which is reached by a tiny spur of a rail- way that has its end as it had its origin in the college. Down in the valley, beyond its gently sloping 4 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY hill, one sees the trailing smoke of a great conti- nental highway, but no sound of conflict reaches its Gothic halls. It lives secluded among green meadows and beneath blue skies. Nature has pre- destined it to the purity and the aloofness of col- legiate life a life that in one sense at least is monastic. As a leader in the Faculty expressed it, Princeton takes boys out of the world, dominates them for four years, and returns them to the world grown men, formed as well as nourished by their Alma Mater. Its engines are two, an intellectual life cen- tring in cultural study, and a social life centring in all the activities natural to a community of young men living in retirement from the world. In deed if not in name, Princeton has remained true to the collegiate ideal of education which America inherited from the parent universities of England. Until 1870 the curriculum was fixed and set, as much of classics and mathematics, science, history, and philosophy as could be taught to the average undergraduate in four years. All took the same studies, and no others were given. But the nineteenth century had witnessed a vast increase in the field of knowledge, and with it 5 PRINCETON the introduction of the scientific spirit, which re- gards all learning as of equal value. Meanwhile the age of the undergraduate had advanced a good two years. Under the lead of Harvard, which brought the elective system to its earliest and broadest development, though it did not absolutely in- vent it, our larger colleges gradually threw open all subjects to all men. The scientific spirit and the so-called university spirit grew up hand in hand. The Shakespearean drama and railroading, Renaissance culture and abnormal psychology, counted equally for the degree. Princeton, like other institutions of really col- legiate character, has consistently regarded the old subjects as of primary and preeminent value, in that they discipline mind and character, and enlarge the imagination. The first two years are still prescribed. It is only in the junior and senior years years of graduate study, according to the old standards that a student may choose his own courses. Even here election is subject to a wise supervision. Every man's courses must be grouped so that each is part of a harmonious and inclusive whole. Having decided to specialize 6 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY in classical literature or modern history, one can- not wander into bacteriology or the principles of English versification. For the underclassman the ideal is a general and fundamental discipline ; for the upperclassman it is wisely specialized individ- ualism. First and last the college cultivates not science, but the man. As the elder curriculum in all our colleges was inspired by that of the English universities, so this development of specialization by groups is analo- gous to the modern English " honor schools." At Oxford one must choose among a few organ- ized groups of studies, Literce Jlumaniores, Modern History, Mathematics, Science, and Eng- lish, and, having chosen, the course of study is in effect prescribed, for the end of it is an exami- nation set by the university. The field is narrow, though it is tending slowly to become larger. One might exhaust the entire instruction in a dozen years. In the leading American universities, as for example Harvard, the body of instruction is so large that it would require almost two hundred years to exhaust it. As England is tending to broaden the general field, so America is tending toward a more effective grouping. And this is 7 PRINCETON a matter in which Princeton is in the vanguard of progress. Only a few years ago, Princeton introduced another English idea, the tutor, or, as he is called in respect to the local disrepute of that word, the preceptor. 'The departure is unique in American education, and bids fair to prove epoch- making. Our universities, inspired by the German system of seminars, reserve individual instruction for highly specialized graduate courses, the pro- cedure in which is rigidly scientific, and the pur- pose of which is special research in some minute field of knowledge ; Princeton teaches each pupil as an individual from the outset. The main body of instruction, as at other American universities, is given by professors in large lecture courses, and the final degree is awarded on the basis of examinations in a fixed number of these courses. The preceptor's work does not count directly for the degree. His duty is not to coach his pupils for examinations in the subject-matter of professorial lectures, but to direct their collateral reading, and, by discuss- ing it with them, to help them digest and assimi- late it. His sole care is to make their education 8 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY enter into their moral and mental systems, and so become a vital agent in developing their character. Each preceptor teaches only four, or at most five, pupils at a time. As far as possible these are chosen from men of equal ability. Able and eager students, instead of being held back by the care- less and the plodding, advance steadily and rap- idly. Students of less ability, instead of being hurried over ground imperfectly scanned, master each subject as far as they go in it, and in the end make definite and substantial progress. One and all profit by close and continuous compan- ionship, not only with their preceptors, but with fellow students. The preceptor loves to explore interesting by- ways of knowledge. At the time of the eruption of Mont Pelee, one had his pupils read Pliny's description of the eruption of Vesuvius ; and at the time of the burning of San Francisco he turned with them to Tacitus's description of the burning of Kome under Nero. The preceptorial system has been much ridi- culed, and* especially by Princeton alumni, who too readily confuse it with such tutoring as they 9 PRINCETON themselves may have found necessary to weather the terrors of examination time. A very little reflection should clear their minds and restore their loyalty. Far from suggesting the intellectual nursery, the preceptorial system is in line with the most advanced educational practice. It does for the liberal arts, and in precisely the same way, what the much-vaunted laboratory method does for science. The system has, perhaps, a questionable fea- ture. In England one body of men, the tutors, give instruction, and another, the university examiners, award the degrees ; throughout, the undergraduate is characteristically under a single tutor, who supervises his progress with intimate personal care. At Princeton, as at all American colleges and universities, the instructor in each course examines his own students ; and it has been found expedient to give the student, not a single tutor, but a preceptor for every subject. In the two lower years he has thus many preceptors. In the two higher years, however, in which the studies are grouped, he has a single preceptor, who comes into a close and helpful relation to him, socially and intellectually. 10 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY The system would work much better, the authorities admit, if each pupil were in charge of a single preceptor through his first two, as well as his two later years. But, wonderful to relate, " university " education in America has been so specialized and scattered in recent decades that it is impossible to secure men of sufficiently gen- eral training to teach a sophomore, or even a freshman, in all his subjects. The present examination system, also, is capable of improvement. It is not unlikely that, eventu- ally, as the advantage of preceptorial instruction becomes manifest, the functions of teaching and granting degrees will be separated, as in England, so that the final result will depend, not on a multi- plication of tests in detached courses throughout the four years, but on one all-inclusive examina- tion. A possible loss in disinterestedness of pre- ceptorial teaching, it is felt, would be more than counterbalanced by the gain in intellectual scope and grasp. The superiority of English scholars in writing books and review articles is in no small measure attributable to the honor examinations of Oxford and Cambridge, which require a man to have not only knowledge, but also the power 11 PRINCETON to assemble it in coherent and convincing form. Expression goes hand in hand with knowledge. Even in its present development, the Princeton system of grouped courses of study and precep- tors is far and away ahead of any instruction in America inspired by a similar ideal. It is said to have worked a revolution in the temperament of the undergraduate that is all but incredible. Once to read, and most of all to talk of books, was to class one's self with that disreputable outcast, the "poler." To-day the library reports a fair increase in the number of books taken out ; the campus by night shows many windows glowing with the lamp of study, and even at the under- graduate eating-tables book talk mingles with gossip of clubs and athletics. In the graduate school for the first time one encounters the scientific or so-called university methods which have figured so largely for good and for evil in American education. Philology here takes equal footing with literature, and minute research with instruction. Teachers and taught gather in seminars, and theses are required for the degrees of M. A. and Ph. D. The more sub- stantial part of Princeton's claim to be a uni- 12 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY versity is based on the graduate school. But the department is small, both in students and in the scope of its instruction a mere incident in the life of the institution as a whole. Efforts have been made to enlarge it. For some years a con- siderable body of courses was offered. But many of them found no pupils, and were very wisely and honestly dropped from the catalogue. In its present normal development the gradu- ate school is a graceful crown to the instruction of a college, but a very inadequate foundation for the larger title. The most interesting fact with regard to it is that even here science has not quite exorcised the humanities. The members live together in a community not dissimilar to an Eng- lish college, in which every man, from the mo- ment of his arrival, boards and lodges, works and plays, as a member of a large family or club. To guard against the narrowing influence of gradu- ate study, the school holds a weekly beer night, at which each man in turn opens the discussion by reading a paper on his special subject. The student of mathematics is thus brought in con- tact with the latest ideas in history, the student in economics with the latest ideas in literature. 13 PRINCETON Many graduate schools offer a larger field of study and a more brilliant corps of professors; but at none is the life as pleasant and the atmos- phere of cultivation as pervasive. The ideal of undergraduate life at Princeton is organized democracy. Unorganized democracy is a spontaneous product, characteristic of commun- ities too new for local spirit and concentrated traditions. It is to be found in many Western universities, in which the non-fraternity men rule by force of numbers rather than by being representative of the best elements in the life. Organized democracy, I take it, is the rarest, as it is the most precious, flower of civilization. It means that each has an equal chance for all desir- able distinctions, and that prominence and power come to those who have deserved it. Social life at Princeton is one vast democratic organization. Simplicity of dress and manner amounts to an affectation. Corduroy trousers have their votaries. Sweaters are in vogue sometimes, it is said, even at dinner. Lately a student whose sweater showed traces of too constant wear and whose trousers were innocent of the art of the tailor fell ill, and his preceptor, fearing that he might languish in 14 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY neglect or be obliged by the lack of money to forego his education, appealed to sympathetic un- dergraduates of known solvency. They showed surprise, until told of the reason for the good preceptor's fears. " I guess there 's no danger," one of them said. " If his father's trust goes bust, he can probably sell that big French motor car of his for enough to get well on and carry him the rest of the way through college." That son of predatory wealth had become a Princetonian not wisely, but too well. Conversely, a boy of humble parentage may go to Prince- ton, and by mere virtue of character and ability do everything and be everything. Princeton abounds in traditional customs which, whatever their origin, are cherished as a means of imbuing every undergraduate with a sense of his own insignificance and of the paramount duty of college loyalty. Rushes and cane sprees, though on the decline, are regarded as a means of foster- ing class spirit not in the vulgar, worldly sense of social distinction, mind you, but in the esoteric, collegiate sense of the absorption of each indi- vidual in the class with which he enters and, it 15 PRINCETON is hoped, will graduate. For class spirit is the nursery of college spirit. Freshmen are " horsed " not because the sophomores take any unholy delight in horsing them, but in order to instill in their youthful minds a due sense of their inferiority. They may not turn up their trousers, wear colored socks or tan shoes. They may not smoke a pipe in public. They may not walk on the campus grass, or in front of the baseball grandstand. No matter how many of them are gathered together, if a sopho- more approaches they must give way and let him pass, though all step into the mud to do homage to one. Such customs go throughout the college course. If the sophomore, in turn, encounters a junior, he steps in the mud in turn. The customs with regard to hats and caps baffle reportorial curi- osity. A mystic time comes in the life of every undergraduate when he may wear a Mackinaw blanket coat or a yellow slicker on the campus, and he is apt to wear it whether it is hot or cold, wet or dry. When the precise day and hour arrive for assuming a new dignity ^jt is often marked by a peculiar and appropriate ceremony. Thus, when 16 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY a freshman has finished his last examination in the spring, he emerges to smoke his first sopho- morical pipe on the campus, and the sophomores now juniors assemble to dust the steps iron- ically with their caps as he descends. Are such customs vexatious ? Not a bit of it ! If a freshman knows what is good for him, he takes his horsing with just the right combination of dignity and good humor, and, having found out what was good for him, he visits it on his successor. As for the less violent customs, he regards them with delight verging upon dotage ; for are they not the essence of Princeton spirit, ever-present reminders that he is a Princetonian? There may be superior people to whom all this seems a childish waste of time and energy. It must be admitted that it ill accords with the dignified intellectual life supposed .with what justification I shall not say to belong to a university. In times past, at least, Princetonian tradition prescribed a mental as well as a sartorial negligee. A fellow would as soon cultivate dude clothes as individual opinions. Once a Harvard man was asked the harmless necessary question of what he 17 PRINCETON intended to do when he graduated. He said that he would like to be a dramatic critic. A Prince- tonian present was amazed beyond belief. Down in New Jersey, he explained, any one who con- fessed to such an unusual and highbrow aspira- tion would never hear the end of it. This is a matter in which Yale and Princeton are at one. There was once an undergraduate at New Haven whose soul was wrapped up in music. All went well with him until it was discovered that as an athlete he had a natural ability amounting to genius. He was haled from his piano to the run- ning track and the football field. He was willing, as I gathered, to go in for sports with moderation ; but the college sought to impose on him its own standard of devotion. He left Yale to continue his musical education in Germany. It is the effect of organized democracy that it sets sharp, and often quite arbitrary, limits upon individual taste and action. At Princeton the limits are even narrower than at Yale, for the college is smaller and more united. May it be suggested that the ruling spirit of both is apt to be boyish to the point of unintelligence ? A Yale man once called Harvard a breeder of 18 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY freaks. The retort courteous is that Yale, and even more Princeton, is a breeder of philistines. It is possible that at Princeton the preceptorial system has put independence and intelligence more in vogue, but it is difficult to believe that the tiger has quite changed his stripes. Certainly it would be a mistake to assume that stripes are altogether bad for a tiger. Any uni- versity that values a vigorous and effective spirit may well envy Princeton. To take the most obvi- ous test, in two of the three sports it has cul- tivated football and baseball it has main- tained the highest level of success. Considering that the entire student body numbers only some fourteen hundred, as against three to five thou- sand in the rival institutions, this is an achieve- ment of might. One autumn lately its eleven was light and fast ; its only chance of success lay in having a hard, even field to run and dodge on. The weather was cold and wet, and before the game with Yale the turf was covered with straw. Then came a storm of snow and sleet, inches upon inches of it. The entire university turned out and labored till long past midnight, carrying off the snow, taking 19 PRINCETON up the wet straw, sopping the ground dry, and putting on a firm new thatch against the weather. The freshman who told me of this added with bated breath that, in devotion to the university, sophomores allowed themselves to be crowded aside by freshmen who could work harder and faster. There is another side to this Princeton loyalty. The track team has not been successful, and receives little encouragement for that very in- adequate reason. Several years ago some zealous alumnus brought Mr. Carnegie to the town, and it was only natural to hope that he would see how worthy the institution was of assistance. Unfortu- nately, to make conversation, the alumnus pointed out that there was a hollow at the foot of the hill which might easily be converted into a lake. Carnegie Lake is now a fact, but the college that dominates it is as poor as ever. And it is very much sadder, for it is afraid that circumstances over which it had no control will end by forcing it to take up with another losing sport. The world is very human, even in its virtues. One of the finest flowers of the Princeton spirit is the so-called "honor system," which it invented 20 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY to do away with the double disgrace of cheating in examinations and of being watched to pre- vent it. The student body put itself on parole. For over a decade now the professors have gone to the examination-room with their papers, and, having given their few words of counsel, have left, to return only at the end of the allotted time. The students sit as they choose, smoke, walk about, talk. And the evil of cheating has departed. The expulsions are supposed to number about one a year, but no precise statement can be made, for the criminal is mercifully spared the public announcement of his crime. When an undergraduate sees another attempt- ing to copy an answer he calls the attention of his neighbors, and, if the case is a clear one, they jointly report it. The culprit is heard by a mem- ber of the Faculty, and, if found guilty, is given the fatal word. Only those who have taken part in his conviction know why he leaves college. At many universities, as for example Harvard, cheating is rare. It has been justly observed that it is found at its worst under the system of prescribed studies, and in the boyish atmosphere of a college. But this only renders it the greater 21 PRINCETON glory that Princeton undergraduates have abol- ished it by the sheer force of traditions of honor and loyalty to the good name of their alma ma- ter. Other institutions have attempted to adopt the system, but not all of them with the same success. Princeton has been helped, it is said, by the large number of Southerners, who still hold chivalrously to the honor of a gentleman's word. The crowning glory of this organized demo- cracy is the system of upperclass eating-clubs Ivy, Cottage, Tiger Inn, and the rest. Frater- nities are not permitted. In Western universities they will tell you that the distinction is without difference, that the Princeton clubs are frater- nities in everything except having Greek-letter names, secret charters, grips, and conclaves. It is true that the element of mystery is unimportant. Yet there are differences that are vital. The Princeton clubs have avoided the worst, and to my mind the only, evil feature of the frater- nity system. The fact that a man enters a fra- ternity shortly after his arrival and continues in it throughout his course leaves him little to gain by sacrificing his personal convenience for the 22 A COLLEGIATE UNIVE] good of the college. Non-fraternity : other hand, have as little to gain. This is fatal to the highest development of college spirit. In- stead of solidifying and concentrating the student body, the fraternities disintegrate and scatter it. The parts become more important than the whole. At Princeton, the clubs, instead of joining in a mad rush after supposedly desirable sub-freshmen and freshmen, do not elect members until the end of sophomore and the beginning of junior year. They are thus far more nearly, if not absolutely, representative, the reward of prominence in recognized undergraduate activities, and the sure means of concentrating and rendering efficient the best elements in the college. The fact that they are only eating-clubs, moreover, and have no rooms for undergraduates, prevents them from lifting their members quite out of the general life. More than this, they have imposed upon them- selves a restriction no less wonderful and admir- able than the honor system in examinations. By virtue of " the upperclass club treaty," they abstain from all effort to rush, or in any way 23 PRINCETON only freshmen, but sophomores. It is club once proved traitor to the best interests oi the college by renouncing the treaty and pledging its recruits. It is also true that men living in the close intimacy of a concentrated col- lege life cannot escape what is called a " hunch/' as to who is destined for this organization or that. But the backsliding club speedily renounced the error of its way, and there is an unwritten, but generally effective, rule that for weeks before the club elections all intimacy between the upper- classmen and underclassmen be suspended. The system of elections, which is quite elaborate, is designed to turn over the voting power at once to the incoming members, so that for the most part a man is elected by his classmates. No Amer- ican college or university, so far as I know, has a better club system, or, in fact, one that is any- where near as good. The only comparable system is that at Yale. There the senior secret societies, Skull and Bones, Scroll and Keys, Wolf's Head and Elihu, espe- cially the two former, have a position and exert an influence unparalleled in American college life. To them, more than to all other factors combined, 24 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY Yale owes her athletic success. On the one hand they are strictly and admirably representative, election being based on success in the leading undergraduate activities ; on the other, by virtue of this representative character, they exert a mar- velously beneficial, though oligarchic, influence on the student body as a whole. Election to them is the result of a three years' system of training and elimination mainly carried on in a set of sophomore and junior fraternities. From the start of his freshman year it is a man's ambition to put himself in the line of promotion toward Bones and Keys. If he fails of a sophomore club, he is, as a rule, socially lost. If he " makes " one, he is still lost unless, by conforming successfully to the prevailing code, he stands the process of elimination. The life of the outsider is as unfor- tunate as the life of those who have been " tapped " is fortunate. As at all American uni- versities, the great mass of undergraduates live scattered, sometimes neglected, lives. The sense of social failure is so deep at Yale that many grad- uates yearly leave New Haven never to return. Princeton is resolutely and intelligently bent on avoiding such extremes of social climbing. 25 PRINCETON The purpose in forbidding underclass clubs is to make the life of freshmen and sophomores an unorganized, democratic fellowship. This is no easy matter, especially as the size of the classes is increasing. Of late a system has grown up that reproduces many of the evil features of the sophomore and junior societies at Yale. Two attempts to establish general student com- mons having failed, the undergraduates, until lately, took their meals in boarding-house clubs. The leading sophomore clubs are distinguished by the colors of peculiar hats they wear. Certain of these, notably Red Hat and Dark-Blue Hat, by carefully selecting prominent men, earned the reputation of putting their members in line for election to Ivy, Tiger Inn, and Cottage. It thus became the chief end of the freshman clubs to secure what is called the "following" of Red Hat and Dark Blue that is, the privilege of wearing the hats in their sophomore year. To do so was to be socially blest: not to do so was to become an outsider. In other words, under- class life resolved itself, from the opening of the freshman year, into persistent and elaborate social clamber. 26 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY An astute boarding-house keeper took advan- tage of the fact. He managed to corral Red Hat and Dark Blue, thus making his group of board- ing-houses the focus of underclass life. It was o as much as a freshman's chance of an upperclass eating-club was worth not to board in one of his houses, and he is said to have used his advan- tage to charge extortionate prices for very bad food. Princeton grappled with the situation in a manner characteristically intelligent. Certain lead- ing undergraduates tore a leaf from the book of the extortionate townsman. They went to Dean Fine and proposed that the college remodel the old commons building, so as to give each club a separate apartment and then capture Red Hat and Dark Blue from the enterprising townsman who had first caught them. It was a ludicrous comedy, or a feat of statesmanlike foresight, as one chooses. So was the result, which proved all that was expected and more. The new commons are a triumphant success, both financially and with regard to the cheapness and quality of the fare. Excellent food is to be had for five dollars and a half a week. In the first fortnight after arriving at Princeton, small 27 PRINCETON groups of fifteen freshmen organize the nuclei of clubs and are given separate rooms in the com- mons. Then they proceed to elect other freshmen, until each club numbers between thirty and forty. Such freshmen as are not elected form clubs of their own, so that no one is without affiliation. So far, so good. An incidental and unforeseen result of concen- trating the life of the underclassmen in the college commons was to intensify the system of social climbing beyond all endurance. The question of hat followings has become paramount. Day and night the freshman is obsessed by the fear that he will not " make " the desired sophomore eating-club. Sometimes a group of men, regard- ing themselves as in a different class from the rest of their club, secede and join with another similar group of malcontents to form a new club. Social politics are rife. Nothing could be more perni- cious to the spirit of democracy. One fellow relates a plot by which he and two other men, all prominent as athletes, were pre- vailed upon to secede to a certain club with the express intention of being elected to the leading offices and turning the incumbents out thus in 28 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY all probability ruining their chances of an upper- class club. At the time he saw nothing wrong in the scheme, though he now looks back at it as the most unmanly act of his life. There is no occasion, however, to take a cen- sorious attitude toward these Princeton under- classmen. It is a hard alternative that faces them. Between the club man and the non-club man in the upper classes there is the sharpest of all dis- tinctions, painfully signalized by the brilliant hatband the club men wear. It is a manifest case of sheep and goats. When a freshman fails of one of the leading hat followings, his entire col- lege life is a failure in what he feels to be its most important phase. The college faced the situation with all its characteristic resolution, though in some respects with less, as it seems, than its characteristic wis- dom. President Wilson proposed two reforms : To introduce the system of residential halls, called " quads " and modeled on the English college, and to abolish the upperclass clubs, or at least to modify them so as to destroy their present elect- ive and representative character. Dormitories on the campus were to be organized in units of two 29 PRINCETON hundred, each with separate commons, and the clubhouses were to be made each the nucleus of a similar non-elective community. From the point of view of an outsider, as I remarked at the time, the measures seem to be so drastic as to defeat their own ends. The clubs are about the most valuable social asset of the college. Lacking much of the oligarchic power of the Yale senior societies, they are no less representative of the best spirit of the under- graduate world. They have their origin deep in the instincts of Princeton life, and have a long and most honorable association with the Princeton spirit at its best. Their alumni are among the most distinguished and powerful graduates of the college, and the clubhouses afford a tie of ines- timable value as keeping them in warm and close sympathy with its needs. To put the axe to the root of the system is to blight much that is most precious in the moral life of the institution. Moreover, and this is the point of chief moment, in declaring that the clubs require to be disestablished President Wilson underrated grossly the value of his proposed residential halls. When each undergraduate is a member of a sepa- 30 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY rate hall, with its facilities for pleasant and help- ful comradeship, its local spirit and traditions, its local societies and athletic teams, the club ques- tion is on a radically different footing. Red Hat and Dark Blue, even Green Hat, Light Blue, and the rest, might still persist as sophomore clubs ; but they would no longer be eating-clubs. Their members would not only eat, but sleep, work, and play, as members of different halls. Thus, their social influence and importance could not fail to diminish. It might easily become a stronger boost toward Ivy to dine in the same hall and play on the same team with upperclassmen already Ivy members than to belong to Red Hat. And when, at the beginning of the junior year, a part of one's classmates were elected to Ivy, Tiger Inn, and the rest, it would no longer be a case of sheep and goats. Men who failed to be chosen would still have a normal and pleasant life within the hall. Those who were chosen, moreover, would not be altogether removed from the old quad. They would still have their rooms there for sleep and for study. They would still have the general life and traditions of the hall at heart, ind its athletic success. In the end it would 31 PRINCETON probably be possible to forbid men to dine in their clubs before senior year. The halls would minimize the evil influences of the clubs, in short, both upperclass and underclass, without destroy- ing any helpful influence. If the halls are established, Princeton will have a further resemblance to the English universities ; but this will be incomplete and ineffective with- out the upperclass clubs. At Oxford and Cam- bridge the social life has a dual aspect. Every man is a member of a college, and takes part in its activities ; but, in proportion as his character and abilities warrant, he is led upward and out- ward into the broader life of the university, which is crystallized in organizations roughly analogous to these Princeton clubs. The hall develops men for the university, socially and in athletics ; and these men in turn bring back into the hall the larger spirit of the whole institution. To abolish the upperclass clubs, in short, would sacrifice the most vital source of organized de- mocracy and solidarity at Princeton. All this is no mere conjecture. It is the result of a careful study of the English colleges in rela- tion to the university clubs, carried on during 32 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY over a year's residence in a prominent Oxford col- lege, of which an extended account may be found in a former volume, " An American at Oxford." The result of the president's misconception of the value of university clubs was, as any Prince- tonian should have foreseen, to defeat a project which, in the main, was most admirable. If I may trust the verdict of men who have observed Dr. Wilson at close range, he is a man of tran- scendent ability and power in his general ideas, who never fails to appear at his best in public speaking and on paper, but who lacks a prac- tical feeling for human nature in the concrete. If so, he bears a close resemblance to President Eliot of Harvard, as may presently be seen. Be that as it may, he has been obliged to abandon his projects, at least for the time. In the end, beyond question, he will effect a reform of some sort. According to one plan, backed by a large and powerful body of alumni, eating-clubs are to be abolished in the freshman year, the entire class assembling at a general commons, while in the sophomore year the pre- sent dining clubs will be continued. This will have the advantage of keeping close to the lines 33 PRINCETON of Princeton life, which for some inscrutable reason has always centred in eating. But it has the disadvantage of being less and less workable as the classes become larger. A system of resi- dential quads, on the other hand, while it intro- duced a new and vastly valuable element into Princeton life, would be capable of indefinite extension to keep pace with the growth of the university. If relieved of the incubus of a mis- directed attack on the upperclass clubs, there is no reason why it should not in the end be effected. One thing is certain. Other American colleges are, as we shall see, pushing forward toward it with rapid strides. Taken for all in all, no college or university, so far as I know, has excelled Princeton in in- spiring its undergraduates with manly simplicity and earnestness. No doubt the very seclusion and democracy of the life tend toward excessive boy- ishness and a lack of individuality. During four years of preparation for life, life itself is below the horizon. In those generously beautiful spring evenings when the seniors gather on the campus and sing "Out in the Wide, Wide World," hearts sink at the dread thought of the final separation 34 A COLLEGIATE UNIVERSITY and the forlorn plunge into a strange life. That song, as it happens, is written more in the spirit of laughter than of tears ; but very few seniors realize the fact when they sing it. They are more apt to have streaming eyes. One Princeton gradu- ate I know gravely wrote a magazine essay to tell the wide, wide world the glad news that he had not found it so very much worse than Old Nassau. Yet it is a right manly sentiment that inspires the singing senior. After commencement the new graduates troop down to the station and gravely boost their departing friends, one by one, through the car windows. As the train pulls them out into that wide, wide world, those who are left lift their hats and sing their eternal loyalty to one another and to Old Nassau. It is funny in the way that brings a lump into your throat. To have lived in such a college with such fel- lows is a precious thing, and life can never bring anything else that, in its own way, is half as dear. An ideal university would combine this organized democracy of good fellowship with a broader intellectual horizon ; but as yet the ideal is far off. Few graduates of real universities, perhaps, 35 PRINCETON would sincerely wish that they were Prince- tonians. In their way they are loyal, too. But none of them, listening to the campus singing, or see- ing the departing seniors lifted though the car windows, could fail to appreciate that there is one particular boost in life which he has missed. II HARVARD : A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY TN a recent novel, Mr. David Graham Phillips -- describes Harvard --and in effect stigma- tizes it as given over to dilettantism in gen- eral, and in particular to imitating the English. The idea is widespread and popular. Proceeding, however, from a graduate of Princeton, which has assimilated the Oxford idea of tutorial in- struction, and is endeavoring to assimilate the Oxford idea of residence in coordinate colleges or halls, the charge certainly has its humors. The predicament of Harvard is exactly the reverse. As the academic world well knows, the dominant spirit, far from being dilettante, is an austere, even sacrificial, devotion to pure science ; and it is a result of the imitation, not of English, but of German, ideals and methods. Several uni- versities for example, Virginia, Michigan, and Brown dispute with Harvard priority in intro- 37 HARVARD ducing the scientific spirit ; while others, such as Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Johns Hopkins, rival her in present devotion to it ; but there can be little question that Harvard has exploited it most prominently and on the largest scale. In its origin it was founded only sixteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims Har- vard was, like Yale, Princeton, and a score of other institutions that followed in its wake, an exponent of the English ideal of collegiate resi- dence and of general, systematic human culture. Among other things, it was the first to respond to the athletic spirit, and to turn out winning teams. But, almost from the outset, it developed radical individualistic tendencies, which have ceaselessly gathered strength. Traditionally Uni- tarian, or, as many consider, agnostic, it has, through centuries, stood for reason and liberty as opposed to orthodox belief. Scientific in its methods of instruction, it has, for more than a generation, turned its back upon our native standards, which regard character and manners as of equal importance in education with the in- tellect. As Barrett Wendell once remarked, with as much truth as humor, Yale was founded fifty 38 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY years after Harvard to counteract its radical ten- dencies, and has kept half a century behind ever since, until, at last, it has taken to beating Harvard in athletics. The influence of the German university spirit has been traced as far back as the second decade of the last century. Thomas Wentworth Higgin- son has published letters written to his father, then an officer of the university, by a group of young Harvard men in residence at Gottingen, in 1817-18, among them George Ticknor and Edward Everett. With passionate earnestness they recommend German ideals to their alma mater ; and it is largely due to a long succession of foreign-trained graduates that the university has been Germanized. 1 Books, not men ; science, not citizenship, was what Germany stood for. The difference between 1 Professor Albert Bushnell Hart wrote, in the Boston Tran- script, a four-column protest against these present views of Har- vard, which deserves attention if only on the score of its sheer acreage. This epithet, Germanized, as applied to an institution which has dormitories, faculty supervision of students, and ath- letic sports, and is in other respects widely different from the Ger- man universities, he copiously derides. According to this quaint construction of the language, galvanized iron would be zinc, and Bessemerized steel a respectable English inventor. 39 HARVARD Harvard and Gottingen was that, while Harvard had a bare twenty thousand unused volumes, Gottingen "consists in the library."- "We have not yet learned that the library is not only the first convenience of a university, but that it is the very first necessity that it is the life and spirit and that all other considerations must yield to the prevalent one of increasing and open- ing it." To-day the Harvard library is the largest in the country, except only the Congressional and the Boston Public libraries, and is the primary instrument of instruction. Similarly: "A man to be a scholar must have learnt to give up his in- terest in the common occurrences of life, in the political and religious controversies of the coun- try, and in everything not directly connected with his single aim." An ideal so narrow, so intense, and so opposed to all our national instincts and traditions, was slow in taking root ; but since 1869, when Charles William Eliot became president, it has dominated Harvard. A splendid, if portentous, figure this young chemist of thirty-five, who took our oldest and largest university in his palm and has held it 40 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY there with mastery unimpaired for almost forty years ! In 1870 Oliver Wendell Holmes, then a professor in the Medical School, writes of the " bland, grave young man " to his friend, John Lothrop Motley. " King Log has made room for King Stork," he says. The school, situated in Boston, had previously managed its own affairs, and had made itself "the most flourishing de- partment connected with the college." But the new president came to every Faculty meeting, and kept the learned doctors up till midnight discussing new plans. . Holmes viewed the spectacle with the eye of a humorist, but not so his fellow Faculty members. " How is it," one of them asked, " that we have been going on so well in the same orderly path for eighty years, until now, within three or four months, it is proposed to change all our meth- ods of carrying on the school? It seems to me extraordinary, and I should like to know how it happens." "I can answer Doctor 's question very easily," said the bland, grave young man. " There is a new president." Holmes comments : " The tranquil assurance 41 HARVARD of the answer had an effect such as I hardly ever knew produced by the most eloquent sentence I ever heard uttered. Eliot has a deep, almost melancholy-sounding voice, but a placid smile on his face that looks as if it might mean a deal of determination, perhaps of obstinacy." These few words give the outline of the man. Time has filled it in with light and shade, but not altered it. The first step in Germanizing Harvard was to shatter the old hidebound curriculum, inherited from the English universities. This regarded a few traditional studies, that had come down from the Middle Ages, as of supreme value and equally important to all men. Its ideal was first mental training and then culture in the humanities. Logic and mathematics, philosophy and the clas- sics, were the chief of its diet. But, like the old woman in the nursery rhyme, Harvard could never keep quiet. The scientific awakening of the nineteenth century had added a maze of new branches to the tree of knowledge, some of which might perhaps be described as its trunk. Undergraduate life, indeed, the entire span of human existence, was 42 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY too brief to compass them all. The practical diffi- culty of the situation might have given the ordi- nary mind what is sometimes called pause. Not so the scientific mind. It is the first article in the modern creed that all knowledge is of equal im- portance, all training of equal value, provided only that the knowledge and the training are in the line of accurate classified knowledge. This is no abstract theory. It is rule of thumb the glorious guiding principle, if you will by which the elective system has been erected. President Eliot, in an address entitled " Aims of the Higher Education," reprinted in his volume on educational reform, states it explicitly. " There is to-day no difference between the philologist's method of study and the naturalist's, or between a psychologist's method and a physiologist's. Stu- dents of history and natural history, of physics and metaphysics, of literature and the fine arts, find that, though their fields of study are differ- ent, their methods and spirit are the same. This oneness of method characterizes the true univer- sity." From year to year during the early nineteenth century new subjects were added to the list of 43 HARVARD courses of instruction. At the same time, of course, the students were allowed some choice among them. At first this was limited to the senior year, and then to the two upper years ; but under President Eliot it has been extended, with one or two trifling exceptions, to the entire course. And all leading American universities have, with greater or less reservations, developed along precisely similar lines. Thanks to the vigor and success of the presi- dent's reformation, Harvard now ranks on its teaching side at the. head of American univer- sities. As for the college proper, whereas once the entire instruction could be taken in four years, the courses now offered are so minute and of so wide a range that they could scarcely be exhausted in two hundred years. The university teaches all of the recognized arts, sciences, and professions, mining, civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering; agriculture and forestry; medicine and dentistry ; law, theology, and archi- tecture. All of the departments are strong, and many of them of the very first rank. The huge mass of courses of instruction in the college makes the graduate school the foremost 44 f ' VJ * tm M t '- A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY in the land. If Princeton can boast the intimate personal instruction of its undergraduates, Har- vard is at an equal advantage with its graduates. Throughout the Faculty of Arts and Sciences there is one teacher for every seven of the taught, and in the graduate school the ratio would be far higher. The Medical School, which dates from 1782, when the first professorship of medicine was founded, is in the very first rank, disputing pri- macy with Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, the Col- lege of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, and McGill in Montreal. The Law School, established in 1817, is the oldest in the country, and, more than this, stands head and shoulders above its nearest rival. Its great triumph is the case system. Formerly, the law was regarded as an accomplished fact, a thing to be taught cut-and-dried from textbooks. The new idea is to regard it as an evolution, which is to be understood only by following it scientifi- cally, case by case, through the legal experience of centuries. The old method is quicker and easier, and it produces lawyers who have at the outset considerably greater readiness and effi- 45 HARVARD ciency in ordinary court practice. The Harvard innovation, in fact, was so radical, and based upon so advanced a conception of the law, that on its adoption a rival school was established in Bos- ton to conserve the older methods ; but this has now come over to the case system. Columbia resisted mightily, but in the end succumbed. The textbook system is now relegated to law schools whose humble aim is to establish their students as quickly as possible in a paying practice. Even in England the case system is working a revolu- tion. Not the least of its triumphs is the fact that an increasingly large number of Yale gradu- ates resort to the Harvard Law School, forsaking the Law School at New Haven, which still abhors the new methods. It is said that President Eliot deserves the credit for the establishment of the case system scarcely less than Professors Lang- dell and Ames, who originated it. The university has been equally radical, and equally successful, in insisting on uniformly high standards in its entrance requirements. In the struggle to gain students, most American institu- tions have been willing to let down the bars. The entrance requirements of Harvard college 46 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY have long been the highest in the country. The Law School, Medical School and Divinity School all require a recognized degree of B. A., or its equivalent in an entrance examination. The asso- ciation of American universities has lately fol- lowed Harvard and other leaders in this matter to the extent of refusing standard rank to insti- tutions that do not require at least one year of college work as a prerequisite to professional study. In spite of its high standards for admis- sion, Harvard has kept in the lead among our universities in numbers as well as in instruction or, as it is more accurate to say, in numbers because in instruction. In a word, under President Eliot Harvard has transformed itself from a typical English college, with at best embryonic potentialities of a univer- sity, into an institution which, in the spirit and scope of its instruction, compares not unfavorably^ with the foremost universities of Germany. This gigantic revolution has not been accom- plished without grave sacrifices. In his inaugural address the young president exhorted Harvard to throw off its native New England reticence and cultivate expansiveness of heart and expressive- 47 HARVARD ness of character. But the fact has only to be mentioned at Cambridge to evoke a broadly ironic smile. Throughout his presidency Dr. Eliot has held aloof alike from undergraduates and professors, and his aims are all as cold as they are clear. In his public addresses he has praised the traditions of Harvard, historic and literary, and has pro- claimed high ideals of citizenship ; but in pursuit of his one absorbing purpose he has dissipated the atmosphere of humanistic culture and sacri- ficed the spirit of manly democracy and efficiency. He has made Harvard the national leader in a generation of vast progress in education. But the whole tendency of his regime has been to transform the college that once inspired, and was inspired by, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Long- fellow, Agassiz, and many other large souls dif- fusing light, into a university of Germanized professors and students, each revolving in the narrow circle of a " single aim." Of all the men graduated from Harvard in al- most three hundred years, President Eliot has signed the sheepskins of more than half ; yet only one of his graduates has gained world-wide dis- 48 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY tinction, and he is best known as a Harvard man by his frank criticism of the president. A single trifling anecdote, grimly humorous, will tell what the past thirty-eight years have meant to college life at Harvard. The centre of tradition for centuries had been the Yard. Here the undergraduates lived in dor- mitories scattered among lecture-halls and labora- tories. They easily came to know one another and their common instructors. The social and intellectual life interpenetrated and were one. If any existing institution tended to keep Harvard united, it was the Yard. But with the scientific spirit the nineteenth century evolved another \ portentous institution, the bathtub ; and the build- ings in the Yard, many of them dating from the early eighteenth century, had no proper sanitary conveniences. The undergraduates cried aloud. The president answered that the rentals in the Yard buildings, having been fixed in a day of dearer money, brought no adequate return for the funds invested. The university, though it has a larger income than any other in the country, is kept poor by its lavish outlay in books, labora- tories, and advanced professorships. Its annual 49 HARVARD deficit is from thirty to sixty thousand dollars. The sum required for bathrooms was only a few hundred dollars, but the president could not afford it. Certain real-estate speculators had a keener social sense. They built private dormitories, equipped with all modern requisites, in the club quarter, away from the Yard. Undergraduates flocked to them, and the centre of Harvard life shifted to Mount Auburn Street. The Yard be- came more than squalid unfashionable. A vital injury had been done to the college spirit, but for a time no official notice was taken of the fact. Then, luxurious private dormitories having multiplied, there came a time when the rooms in the Yard were largely unrented. Every year the university was losing as much as proper sanitation would originally have cost. And the university still needed funds for courses in the History of Allegory and the theory of Photography. 1 1 Professor Hart, if I rightly construe a difficult piece of syn- tax, implies that these courses are fictions of a hectic reportorial imagination. In point of fact, they are fixed realities in the list of electives in the university catalogue, and a regular part of the proffered instruction. The fact that Professor Hart had never heard of them and failed to look them up is a sufficient commen- 50 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY Then, and not till then, the president bestirred himself in the matter of shower-baths and sani- tary plumbing. The most significant incident in this epic of the bath is that from the start not only the un- dergraduates, but a minority in the Faculty, real- ized and deplored the mischief that was being done to Harvard life. To-day prominent upper- classmen leave the comfortable private dormito- ries to colonize the old Yard buildings, in the hope of reviving the native democratic spirit. But the horse has been stolen. You can't pump a dry well nor galvanize a corpse. The Yard is no more. The wisest and most human foresight, no doubt, would have failed to keep the Harvard social order precisely what it once was. The small con- centrated college of a generation ago has become a vast and multifarious university, as if with a single bound. The formation of cliques was in- evitable, and that means the death of college democracy. Harvard is not alone here. Yale, whose demo- cracy used to be symbolized and expressed by tary on his case against me, and on the triviality of a vast por- tion of Harvard instruction. 51 HARVARD t sacred gatherings at the Fence, now laments that there are three Fences, and that one of them, in front of Vanderbilt Hall, is the hang-out of gilded youths, who do not mingle with those at the other two. Many Yale men deplore the dominance of the secret societies, and more than once the col- lege has risen in open and sacrilegious revolt against it. The social revolution which is threat- ening Princeton democracy has already been described. But as Harvard is the largest and most radically Germanized of our universities, it is at Harvard that the disintegration of the traditional college spirit has proved most momentous. Under the old order, classes of less than a hundred not only found accommodations in the Yard buildings, but assembled daily in the large prescribed courses. To-day classes of four to six hundred are scattered over almost a square mile. One half does not know where the other half lives. By virtue of the elective system, moreover, the classes do not meet in lecture-halls as units, but mingle with all the other classes, and with gradu- ates. One half does not know the other half, even by sight. There are members of the Faculty who do not know a large proportion of their fellow 52 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY members. The college commons in Memorial Hall has become a mob. 1 The system of societies and clubs, never par- ticularly serviceable in developing an efficient dem- ocratic spirit, was long ago strained to bursting. , Theoretically, there are two representative socie- ties, the Institute of 1770 for underclassmen and the Hasty Pudding for upperclassmen, each con- taining about a fifth of each class. In point of fact, they are not really representative, the mem- 1 The editor of the Harvard Bulletin has called me to book, offering me, if I can prove this statement, a large, round, red apple. It is, of course, possible that he should find reason and order in a system under which a thousand or more students are served by slap-dash negroes with tasteless food cooked wholesale, while visitors to a great seat of learning throng the galleries " to see the animals feed." He may even approve of club tables, the men who sit at which often get together on the spur of the mo- ment, and have no other interest in common than the desire to have a fixed seat of their own at meals. He may possibly admire " hotel " tables where men are mussily served in hurried se- quence. To demonstrate to him that such a re'gime is both un- desirable and needless it would be necessary to initiate him into the admirable order, the social convenience, and the excellent cooking of the hall of an English college. But to do so would leave me his sorrowing creditor to the extent of one decent meal, minus one large, round, red apple. The reader who is willing to take my word may find a description of dinner in an English hall in An American at Oxford. 53 HARVARD bership in both being practically determined in the freshman year ; for it is a rare exception when a man not in the Institute is elected to the Pud- ding. And both are practically powerless in form- ing and directing college spirit, for both are little more than a shell for various small inner clubs, which are the real kernels of social Harvard. And these kernels, as it happens, are sterile. The clubs are intense rivals, and compete for the men on the first tens of the Institute, so that their membership is virtually determined early in the sophomore year. They seldom elect men who devolop later, as many do, especially in the more serious and vital activities of college life. In this respect they are but little better than warring fraternities who rush sub-freshmen and freshmen. To their members they are eminently pleasant abodes of the best of good fellowships and frater- nal feeling. They are the source and the reservoir of the gentlemanly ease and intelligent charm that have long been the best traits of the Har- vard manner. " You can always tell a Harvard man," James Barnes of Princeton once remarked. " But you can't tell him much." Some of the clubs have traditions and memorabilia dating from 54 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY the eighteenth century, full of the charm and the color of liberal college life. The Porcellian Club has erected a gate at the entrance to the Yard opposite its clubhouse, and dedicated it to its ancient founder, giving him his "addition" of S. T. D. in large capitals. It is a subtly beau- tiful gate, and it involves an even more subtly beautiful pleasantry, for the modern Porcellian man reminds one of a Doctor of Systematic The- ology only because he is so different. Pleasant as the clubs are, however, they are prejudicial to college life in that they make against democracy and efficiency. This their own members freely admit. Once in them, sopho- mores have nothing to gain from their classmates, nothing to fear from them. Worse than this, the clubs are not able to take any strong position of leadership, as they would honestly like to do. Not being representative, it would be as absurd as it would be impossible to assume general au- thority and responsibility. Mr. E. S. Martin has described the clubs as a sort of social pool pocket, on getting into which a man tends to fall out of the game of undergraduate life. 1 1 As originally written this passage read, " is definitively out 55 HARVARD There is a sorry contrast here with the sister universities. The eating-clubs at Princeton wisely limit themselves to upperclassmen, and patriot- ically forbear to vie with one another in electing new members. The Yale senior societies are the pinnacles of a social system, still in a large mea- sure democratic and representative, which leads upward from the freshman year, and so wields a power for good that is in effect oligarchic. The of the game of undergraduate life." A Harvard club man wrote Mr. Martin, himself a member of the Porcellian, objecting that " although some of the men in the clubs cut themselves off en- tirely from college activities, yet it is also evident that the back- bone of many of our athletic teams, especially the crewjs and football teams, are formed by club men." Mr. Martin wrote to the Harvard Bulletin as follows: " Mr. Corbin seems to have read a piece of mine that was published ten years ago (May, 1897) in Scribner's Magazine. I have looked the piece up and it does not seem to me to close the door of hope so conclusively as Mr. Cor- bin suggests. I find this passage : ' For superior men who are too active to be pocketed the clubs are pleasant without being unprofitable. ... It depends upon the man.'" Yet this very correction emphasizes the point I was driving at. The clubs are not primarily representative, and instead of affording the nat- ural leader a point of vantage for influencing college life, they place a barrier between him and his college mates which it takes exceptional ability and energy to surmount. When a club man takes part in undergraduate activities he does so as an individual, not as a democratically chosen representative. 56 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY social and athletic superiority of Yale and Prince- ton to Harvard is due not so much to a difference in the character of the undergraduates as to the superiority in the systems, and most of all to the fact that the Faculty and the alumni regard a democratic efficiency as of vital importance in undergraduate life, and strenuously cultivate it. President Eliot has often taken a hand in club matters, as in the case of the alleged barbarity of the Dickey initiations, but he has only threatened to abolish, never attempted to build up. As long as the clubs have created no newspaper scandal they have been left to themselves. The college which the young president exhorted to become more human and fraternal has lately been described, and not without reason, as a social orphan asylum. Under such a regime, the Harvard spirit, once celebrated, is falling into sad decay. The mental alertness is still there. A freshman, being asked to give an example of anti-climax, quoted the pious New Haven song, " For God, for country, and for Yale." When Mrs. Poteat, distressed by seeing Yale men smoke, declared that she would rather send a boy to hell than to Yale, a Harvard man suggested that his university change its 57 HARVARD motto so as to read : "To Yale with Hell." There is as much of truth as conceit in the Cambridge saying that Harvard is Athenian and Yale Boeo- tian and Spartan. But there was a time when Harvard undergraduates were the equals of their rivals in other things than satire. The university has very largely lost its power of social assimila- tion. A well-known professor, walking through the Yard, met a youth who seemed so forlorn and troubled that he was prompted to ask : " Are you looking for anybody? " Theyoung man answered : " I don't know anybody this side of the Rocky Mountains." Whether from shyness or from/* pride, many men hold Harvard degrees whose 7 L acquaintance at Cambridge is scarcely greater. 1 ! J 1 My critics have objected that the subject of this anecdote was a freshman, that he subsequently became thoroughly happy at Harvard, and that a number of his brothers who followed him were equally prosperous and contented. All this is interesting, but does not alter the case. The obvious fact is that when a fresh- man arrives at Harvard he receives no personal welcome, or at best, in recent years, only an attempt at a welcome which, as I shall show, is clumsy and ineffective. To get into any real associa- tion and sympathy with his college mates he depends on his own natural push or the chance kindness of a stranger. Where classes are smaller and more homogeneous, and especially where a 58 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY When I was teaching composition at Harvard one student wrote a daily theme on hearing steps on the stairs of the entry in which he lived. For the first time in years, he said, he prayed that it might be some one coming to see him. A graduate once published a paper in the " Harvard Monthly " on the decadence of Harvard manners, his text being the fact that a student entering the library in front of him had let the door slam in his face. The scholastic reputation of the university is at- tracting increasing numbers whose experience of Harvard is limited to the classroom. Lamb de- clared that there are books which are not books at all, as, for example, timetables and collected sermons. There is little help for that. But there system of social assimilation prevails such as I have described in my book about Oxford, the case is quite the reverse. Mr. Mar- tin remarked to me that he was glad to have sent his son to Harvard and that in general the university " gives satisfaction." Another critic confronted me with the fact that President Roose- velt's sons are Harvard men, in spite of his criticisms of Presi- dent Eliot, and apparently without regret. I may add that I prevailed upon my own brother to go to Harvard, and would do the same by any young man who showed sufficient character to make friends against odds and sufficient wisdom and ability to avoid a fair number. of the pitfalls of the elective system. But that does not prevent me from seeing that the difficulties of Harvard life are many, or from wishing them fewer. 59 HARVARD j is no reason why a college man should not be a \college man. Here again the will for righteousness is strong. Every freshman is appointed an adviser, whose duty it is to initiate him into the college life. But, as I myself discovered after persistent efforts, and as many another will sadly admit, the adviser is seldom able to do more than to help his fresh- man make out a list of electives that do not clash in lecture hours and examinations. There is no normal and natural basis for association. Certain hospitable members of the Faculty have after- noons at home with tea, and ladies connected with the university give teas at Phillips Brooks House. But teas! The most hopeful institution is a series of beer nights which upper classmen give to the incoming freshmen, in the hope of making them friendly with one another. But, with the best of intentions, such functions can only be occasional and incidental. Last, as first, Harvard is disorganized. The students in the graduate school, who are largely from other colleges, have lately had a building set apart for them with a common room for social conversation, which is liberally supplied 60 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY with periodicals. This is a long step in the right direction, but still falls short of the desirable and easily attainable life of a thoroughly organized residential community. In the professional schools there are very serious and efficient law clubs, medical clubs, and so forth ; but on the social side there is not even the pretense of hospitable assim- ilation. A graduate of the University of Chi- cago, who spent a year at the Law School, sat next a Harvard man who had been a prominent athlete, and in the entire nine months did not receive so much as a nod of recognition. On the last day of the final examination period, when there could no longer be any motive for scraping favor, he met his benchmate in the street, and, his Western instincts getting the better of him, as he said, nodded to him. There was no sign of recognition. Naturally, he put down the Harvard man as a snob. It is quite as likely that the cut was unintended. In so large a place without social ties one gets used to regarding most men as strangers. Whether not unkind or most unkind, however, that cut gave particular zest to another anecdote. In the class discussions the Harvard man was 61 HARVARD accustomed to begin with the cold, if courteous, prelude : " The man who has just spoken - 1 beg his pardon : I don't know his name." Now, as I have said, there are Yale men in the Law School, and one of these met the courteous prelude with the retort : " My name is R , and I played opposite you last year on the Yale eleven." The score of that game was still a sore remembrance. What my informant did not see was the fact that the retort was equally characteristic of the " sis- ter " university. As against the social system of other universi- ties, Harvard offers a great and unique advantage virtually limitless scope to individual effort. This extends even to the club life. If a man considers, as he very reasonably may, that one of the chief opportunities of a university is to extend his acquaintance among young fellows of family and position, he will find the way open to him. The social and sectional snobbishness, of which one hears so much, is mainly an accident a result of the fact that a large proportion of the undergraduates come from New England families or schools, and have already a large circle of acquaintances when they arrive. It can 62 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY be, and yearly is, overcome by boys from the farm and the workshop, from the West and the South. In a letter to a Boston paper, five years ago, Dean Briggs mentioned by name two country boys, recently dead, Marshall Newell and Adelbert Shaw, who, by virtue of high character and unusual ability in athletics, were imme- diately taken into the leading clubs, and, what is more, strongly impressed themselves upon the student body at large. There are many still alive whose story is similar. Even without athletic ability, or without special talents of any sort, a man may make his way! anywhere. It is well for him to prepare at one of the great Eastern schools, so that he may have prominent acquaintances in the critical freshman year. It is indispensable that he be well-mannered and capable of giving as well as receiving the pleasure of good comradeship. But he will encounter no real barrier beyond the inevitable one of the size and diversity of the classes. A recent graduate, having gone to Chi- cago to start in business, remarked to a grad- uate of the university on the Midway, that in a few weeks he had made friends of four 63 HARVARD of the most prominent merchants of the West, through their sons, whom he had known at Cambridge. In almost any city he would have been at an equal advantage. It is true that no distinction at Harvard is as valuable in this, or in any way, as membership in one of the Yale senior societies. But it is also true that to fail of the coveted distinctions is far less damaging. There are many clubs out- side of the traditional system which, though ob- scure to the public eye, are highly pleasant and profitable. Several fraternities have active chap- ters at Harvard, with commodious and hand- some houses. Though many men without family or money become socially prominent, many who have both fail to do so, and join the outside clubs and fraternities, or remain unattached. Wealth, even family, is no open sesame, as poverty and a humble origin are no barrier provided a man is capable of working his own way. No Harvard man feels, or has cause to feel, the bitterness of the Yale man who is not "tapped." A member of the Committee of Ad- missions of the University Club of New York lately remarked that a Yale man who had failed 64 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY of the senior societies was regarded by his class- mates as standing in need of apology, and was far less likely to be elected than a Harvard man in similar position, whose classmates judged him merely for what he was. What Harvard has lost as a social unit Harvard men have gained as individuals. Professor Palmer tells a story highly illustra- tive of the diverse individuality of Harvard un- dergraduate interests. David A. Wells was to deliver a lecture on banking, as a guest of the Economics Club. On his way to the lecture, Pro- fessor Palmer passed a hall which was crowded with a mass meeting of undergraduates, discuss- ing some knotty question of Athletic relations with Yale. It seemed a foregone conclusion that there would be no audience for the distin- guished visitor. But, as it turned out, the lecture hall, which seats four hundred, was crowded with undergraduates to the walls and doors. After the lecture Professor Palmer went to a meeting of the Classical Club in the rooms of one of his students, and found there almost thirty undergraduates, oblivious alike of bank- ing and of Yale. 65 HARVARD No university, to my knowledge, offers a richer and more varied field of activity to young men of serious interests. Every department of instruction has its organization, similar to those in the professional schools, such as the Deutscher Verein, the Cercle Frangais, the English Club, the Economics Club, and the Classical Club to which Professor Palmer refers. The outside world hears of them mainly through the dis- tinguished lecturers they attract, and through their scholarly and illuminating productions of the masterpieces of Greek and Elizabethan drama, of the classics of France and Germany. But their greatest work is in bringing professors and students together under the inspiration of a common intellectual enthusiasm. And in spite of the non-sectarianism of Harvard theology, and the reputation of the university for free thought, it has and cherishes a vigorous religious life. There are student organizations in most of the leading denominations, and in Phillips Brooks House they have a collective home, spacious and beautiful, and consecrated to the memory of a great and abiding spirit. There is much truth in a saying of Dean Briggs 66 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY that if a man is interested in anything outside of himself he will get human fellowship at Cam- bridge. Like Harvard snobbishness, Harvard indiffer- ence is a myth of the careless observer. The Harvard " Lampoon " which, by the way, is the oldest of American journals of its kind, and father of " Life " once had a pithy liner on this topic: "Harvard indifference I don't care if I do." Such snobbishness and indifference as exist are very largely the result of intense ab- sorption in the interest nearer at hand. This is only to say, however, that the German ideal of education has inspired Harvard also in its social life. Each man has his "single aim." and is given every facility for pursuing it. But in the process it fares ill with all the forces that make for general and fundamental character- building. In one way Dean Briggs's phrase is not quite accurate. A Harvard man's interests are not "outside of himself" or, if they are, he finds every force of the place in array against him. As a collection of little men, each keen on I his own beloved activity, Harvard is magnificent. ' As a human institution, as an ancient and fruit- 67 HARVARD ful tradition, as a definite and united force, social and moral, it is a byword and a jest. There is no better barometer of the tone of college lif e than athletics. For better or for worse, the thing an American undergraduate cares most about is that his college shall be known for manly vigor and success on the field of sport. That is the reason why, to the popular view, Yale now stands in the lead of all our universities; and no true Harvard man, I think, critical though he may be of certain excesses of the enthusiasm for athletic victory at Yale, can fail to regard the sister and rival university with warm admira- tion and deep humility. Harvard men are individually, as I think, the best sportsmen in the world, though I say this without any hope of being believed, even at Har- vard. The fact remains, however, that they do not, as a rule, lay that exaggerated emphasis upon the mere fact of winning which has dis- torted the spirit of true sportsmanship at so many American universities, and led to the use on the athletic field of the cutthroat methods of the lower business world. Harvard has often seemed priggish and mistaken in its athletic policy, and 68 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY not infrequently has been so ; but the fact remains that it has been a leader, I may say the leader, in the regulations which are stamping out professionalism from American college athletics. To young men whose interests in life are so largely serious and intelligent, it comes natural to regard sport as sport. It once seemed to me that the Harvard spirit was more nearly that of the English universities until I came to know this at first hand, and found that its much-lauded temperance was little better than indifference. The Harvard sporting spirit is at once sane and keen. I have seen Theo- dore Roosevelt not President, but police com- missioner rouse the university in a brief hour's talk to the acme of patriotic enthusiasm. And the result? There was the social system to reckon with. Enthusiasm had no means of focusing and expressing itself. In the face of every desire to the contrary, patriotic Harvard resolved itself into a welter of individuals, each revolving in the eddy of his single aim. And then there is "the bland, grave young man." Once, after fifteen years of uninterrupted defeat on the gridiron, the university found itself 69 HARVARD united by the genius and the enthusiasm of its foot- ball captain. The undergraduates had regarded that long period of defeat as a deep disgrace to the college they loved. And after the captain had labored two years, with the labor that is prayer, they won. Almost any college man can imagine what that meant. The university turned out in a mass, and dragged the victorious eleven on a coach to the president's front door. He made them a speech a speech of congratulation. He said that the finest feature of the game had been the rally which had enabled Yale to score a single touchdown in the face of certain defeat. 1 1 A correspondent who also heard this speech assures me that President Eliot added a qualifying clause, saying that the Yale rally was the finest feature of the game next to winning it. Whichever version is right, the fact remains that, as far as I knew, the men who heard the speech went away with the sensa- tion of having had a bucket of water cast upon their spines in their solitary hour of elation. President Eliot's tactlessness is as celebrated as his formal correctness. The painful memory still lingers of the speech in which he proclaimed to the Mormons (Harvard being a favorite university with the sect) the blessings of religious freedom which doubtless was not, as it appeared to the country to be, a defense of polygamy. Quite lately he recom- mended to the Jews, also numerous at Harvard, the cultivation of an athletic and martial spirit as a valuable corrective to commercialism, oblivious of the fact that many famous athletes, 70 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY Life in the world has not convinced the vast majority of Harvard men that for the largest of American universities to be the most signally unsuccessful in athletics is anything else than a disgrace. Men of our race and time instinctively regard prowess on the field of manly sport as of no less value in the training of character than scientific acquirements. The opinion may be wrong. Yet it remains true that for a man to get accustomed to defeat in a cherished ambition is the worst possible training for success in the affairs of the world. The attempt has been made to abolish Harvard clubs and Harvard intercol- legiate athletics. But it is beyond the power of any man, however bland and grave, to abolish human nature. Like other American universities, overgrown and chaotic, Harvard will in the end be obliged to resort to constructive reform. It is characteristic of Harvard that it was the first to propose the plan of dividing the student mob into coordinate colleges, or halls, in imita- tion of the residential features of the English even prize fighters, have been Jews, and that during the Spanish War a regiment was patriotically mustered in the New York Ghetto. 71 HARVARD colleges. In 1894, at the death of Frank Bolles, secretary of the university, a posthumous paper was published, very clearly pointing out the evil and the remedy. Since then a book or two and several papers, in the " Harvard Graduates' Maga- zine," have been published urging that the time had come for correcting excessive Germanization by reverting to the original type of our universi- ties, with regard to both residence and teaching. 1 The undergraduates are spontaneously develop- 1 The university is, in short, divided into faction on the sub- ject. When this paper was first published, the Boston Transcript reprinted it in full, with an editorial welcoming it as bringing into public notice "for the first time . . . with the frankness with which many of the younger and the older alumni have long spoken privately to each other . . . the doubts and the question- ings, the complaints and the fears, that have long been sim- mering among them," and strongly seconded the plea for an organized cultivation of the humanities. This happened, amus- ingly perhaps, but also somewhat pathetically, at the season of the opening of the college, when Cambridge was thronged with eager and timid new freshmen. Professor Hart's extensive arti- cle (September 28,1907) was, as it appeared, written to comfort and reassure them. His refutations are, however, with amazingly few exceptions, founded on misrepresentations, even obvious misquotations, of my remarks. Some few of these I pointed out in the Transcript of September 30. Judging by his accuracy in this case I am obliged to concede that Professor Hart is not him- self a Germanized professor. Under his attack I was sustained 72 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY ing their manner of living along the desired lines. Several of the private dormitories encourage the men in residence to choose who shall fill the va- cant rooms, so as to build up a compact social life and traditions, and several of them have local crews and teams that compete with one another. Randolph Hall, planned by an intelligent recent graduate, is built* about a square in the manner of an English college, with a beautiful garden quadrangle ; and, with the addition of dining- commons, for which room has been left, it will be a complete residential hall. Certain public- spirited Boston alumni have bought up the land between the university and the river, and are holding it at an annual expense of $20,000 until the time when, it may be hoped, the authorities will be more hospitable to suggestion toward the and soothed by many Harvard men, notably Charles Francis Adams, who brought to my notice his little volume Three Phi Beta Kappa Addresses. Though neither of us had read the other's book, each had made the same diagnosis of the case of Harvard and advocated the same remedy. Graduates of other American universities, meantime, wrote me of similar conditions, which, as will develop later, are characteristic of our institutions in general. From an alumnus of the University of Virginia came a letter describing at length conditions infinitely worse than those at Harvard. 73 HARVARD improvement of the conditions of undergraduate residence. Everything will depend upon President Eliot's successor. Lately, when there was some irre- sponsible talk about electing Theodore Roose- velt, the senior member of the Corporation said that that would be impossible, because the Presi- dent of the United States was " not an academical man." The remark, however, was highly academi- cal, and suggests that the first requisite of the new president is to be humanly sympathetic and progressive. One of the chief causes of all these social evils is, as I have indicated, the elective system. And in itself it is an evil. The essence of the scien- tific spirit, as President Eliot has so clearly shown, is to regard all knowledge as of equal value. You may study the French Revolution, or (that object of Ibsen's casual satire) the domestic industries of Brabant in the Middle Ages, and so long as you study them scientifically they count equally for the degree in arts. You may study literature and science, let us say Petrarch and the Theory of Photography, but in " the true university " the spirit and the methods will be identical. 74 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY One or two examples will illustrate the prac- tical absurdity that has come from the attempt to construct a system of education on this theory, and especially in view of the fact that the rubric of it all was entire freedom in the choice of stud- ies. I remember if I may speak of what I know best I remember electing a course that centred in the French Revolution as an aid to the study of modern literature and drama. The lecturer spent hour after hour droning over the series of constitutions that were framed and adopted one day to be superseded the next. What was picturesque and dramatic in the period, even what was of the deepest and most permanent significance, he neglected, or at best passed it over with a small sarcasm at the vanity of so much passion and bloodshed. Constitutions were matters of scientific record, and the soul history of a great nation in its greatest crisis was not. Again, I elected to study the Elizabethan drama. The pre- liminary course was a minute verbal scrutiny of five of the plays of Shakespeare, in which the consideration of literature as literature was casual and incidental. It was strongly recommended that the student repeat this course, philologizing 75 HARVARD five more plays. The study of the Elizabethan drama as such was limited to two half courses, which were in no wise to be repeated or extended. In order to get at the drama one was required to plow through an equal dose of philology, and it was recommended that the dose be doubled. Decidedly, the play was not the thing. The thing was words, words, words. That was what the glorious proffer of free election came to. A well-ordered general culture is as impossible under the new regime as individual study was under the old. Some years ago a student who had taken his degree in the classical department with the highest distinction went to Oxford and entered the similar department of Literce Hu- maniores, the great centre of English humanistic culture. But this Harvard honor man was a mere philologer, and after three more years took only a third-class English degree. The elective system, in short, is, in any true sense of the word, very far from elective. And it is not a system. Virtually from the outset an undergraduate is permitted to choose from scraps and fragments of knowledge whatever pleases his momentary inclination ; and not only regula- 76 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY tion, but guidance, is lacking; for, in the absence of close personal relations with the instructors, inevitable in the all-important freshman and sophomore years, it is practically impossible to gain sound advice in planning a scheme of study ; and, even if a man knew how to lay out a sys- tematic course, he is prevented from doing so by conflicts in examination hours and lecture hours, unavoidable when the mass of courses is so great. The very ideal of a liberal education has been metamorphosed. As a people we place no more value upon the intellectual than on the moral and social side of undergraduate life upon clean manhood and democracy as expressed in col- lege spirit; upon personal courage, self-control, and chivalrous generosity as expressed in true sportsmanship. To these things the partisans of the " true university " pay little or no heed. In his weighty volume on educational reform Presi- dent Eliot does not consider them. But as to the new and absorbing passion for science he is elo- quent. " Science has engendered a peculiar kind of human mind the searching, open, humble mind, which, knowing that it cannot attain unto all truth, or even to much new truth, is yet pa- 77 HARVARD tiently and enthusiastically devoted to the pursuit of such little new truth as is within its grasp, having no other end than to learn, prizing above all things accuracy, thoroughness, and candor in research, proud and happy, not in its own single strength, but in the might of that host of students whose past conquests make up the won- drous sum of present knowledge, whose sure future triumphs are shared in imagination by ' each humble worker. Within the past four hun- dred years this typical scientific mind has gradu- ally come to be the kind of philosophic mind most admired by the educated class ; indeed, it has come to be the only kind of mind, except the poetic, which commands the respect of schol- ars, whatever their department of learning." Unquestionably there is fire in these words. But is it not the kind of fire which inflames the palm that has held a block of ice ? What, after all, is the business of a university ? Has it not a duty to young men as well as a duty to knowledge? In order to give science its due, is it necessary to ignore altogether the human heart and the human will character ? How many boys go to college, how many par- 78 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY ents send them there, to achieve that peculiar kind of human mind which rejoices not in its own strength, and has no other end than to learn? It may seem a philistine thing to say, yet it is in- dubitably true, that boys go to college and their parents pay the considerable price of their educa- tions, not to become searching and humble, but to realize the proud strength of the human mind and heart ; to feed their minds not on the little new truth within their grasp spare diet ! but on the many great truths of nature, history, and art ; not to narrow their spirits to minute special research, but to expand them in contact with the Promethean fire of the great personalities and the great movements of civilization. In all this we have assumed that the German and the American universities are, roughly, par- allel institutions ; for that has been the tacit as- sumption of the advocates of the elective system. The fact is far otherwise. The discipline in char- acter which the young American gets on the athletic field, in the close community and under the rigid standards of college life, the young Ger- man gets, in a form suited to German traditions and standards, in the army or the bureaucracy. 79 HARVARD The business of the German university is not at all to discipline character. Quite the contrary, it is to enfranchise it from Kaiserism and red tape. The universities are the great strongholds of Ger- man liberty. Their watchwords are the freedom to learn and the freedom to teach. In England and America liberty and truth have been an un- disputed heritage for two centuries and more. Moreover, the German university is built on the foundation of the Gymnasium and the Real- schule, which carry the student at least as far as the end of the second year of the American college. Now the instruction in these German schools is thoroughly organized in groups, insur- ing that the body of a student's knowledge shall be coherent and symmetrical. In the Gymna- sium, which leads upward to the university, an extended study of the ancient classics is pre- scribed. The German secondary schools thus give a mental discipline which one looks for in vain in American schools and colleges. Many Harvard men report that they first learned in the Law School what it is to think consecutively and hard, assembling significant details into a vital whole. Our elective system, disorganized to the 80 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY point of anarchy, is not so much an imitation of German methods as a caricature of them. All along the sense of the great body of edu- cated people, and of a large proportion even of college faculties, has been against the doctrin- ary extremes to which we have carried our devo- tion to foreign ideals. Almost a generation ago Harvard went through a reaction that still gives occasion for thought, and perhaps also for a smile of far from subtle irony. The question was of student freedom. To the progressive element in the Faculty it seemed a monstrous thing that men in a great university should be subject to petty police regulations in the matter of residence and attendance at lec- tures. Here, with one stroke of the pen, it was possible to make the university quite like Berlin, Leipsic, and Bonn. For once the undergraduates were in full accord with the Faculty. Midnight potations in Boston were no longer troubled with thoughts of the nine o'clock lecture in Cambridge. To the moose hunter it ceased to be evidence of the eternal unfitness of things that his season in the woods was cut short by the coming term time. Skater, 81 HARVARD snowshoer, and tobogganer partook deeply of the joys of the ice carnival in Montreal. At the season when winter had become darkest and most oppressive, one party of undergraduates woke up in the Grand Central Station in New York, still clad in their evening clothes. After due consideration, they decided that their pur- pose the night before must have been to spend the month of February under the clement skies of Bermuda ; and, stopping only to buy the necessary flannels on Broadway, they embarked forthwith. Lernfreiheit bade fair to eventuate in a sort of Lehrfreiheit which the Faculty had little taste for, namely an entire freedom from any one to lecture to. The Board of Overseers and parents every- where were even more deeply moved. The life of this experiment in the ways of the "true university " was short. The nine o'clock lecture has ever since called the undergraduate forth from sybaritic repose, for the office keeps a jealous eye on absences from lectures. Hour examinations at irregular intervals prod the r-slothful to intermittent effort. Harvard College, in short, is still in spirit a college. 82 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY From the outset it should have been evident that the spirit and needs of our young men are, in many respects, infinitely removed from those of the German undergraduate. They are, in fact, though differing in many details, essentially simi- lar to those of the Oxford and Cambridge man. In the English universities no one is allowed to leave his college after nine o'clock; and to remain without the walls after midnight, on whatever pretext, is a crime punishable and punished with expulsion. Far from considering this regime an infringement of his liberties, the young Briton regards it as part and parcel of a system which he respects and loves. Much as he might relish the autumn hunting in the shires or the spring gayeties of the London season, he loves his life as an undergraduate more, and acquiesces in the college gate rules, vexatious though they often are, as the very foundation of the social and ath- letic as well as of the studious life of his college - of the humanities, in short, in the broad and true meaning of the term. For the American youth, of course, the full rigor of the English regulations is impossible; but he might be led far in the same direction if it were made evident 83 HARVARD to him that that way lies a better ordered and more wholesome college life. That our universities have responded to the modern scientific impulse is wholly admirable. But in doing so was it necessary to renounce the function of mental training, of character-building, and of humanistic culture, which is not only native to them, but vital in the scheme they are ostensibly emulating? By their most recent deeds they are confessing that it was not. To-day there is a reaction against the elective system, which is strongest at Princeton and is felt even at Harvard. Yale has given a curious example of conservatism, first by yielding to the elective system only after a long, slow struggle, and then by capitulating to it, in its extreme form, only four years ago, when the reaction elsewhere was in full swing; so that it is still in the rear -guard of the intellectual advance. With this general reaction has come the tendency to revert toward the English university methods or rather to compass them a second time in the full swing of the cycle of progress. Tutorial instruction and the grouping of electives have, under various guises, taken foothold in many uni- 84 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY versities beside Princeton. When Cornell lately insisted on grouping electives, Harvard lost its last loyal ally unless indeed one may apply that endearing epithet to Yale. The dean of the uni- versity was the only one seriously to oppose the change, which he regarded as a surrender to con- servatism. He and President Eliot now stand virtually alone. "The older I grow/' he said, " the more I see that the real radicals are the old men. The conservatives are young men." The amusing truth is that the ancient champions of the elective system are frozen in the radicalism of their youth, which has thus become the most rigid conservatism. Even at Harvard a radical element in the Faculty has lately secured regula- tions encouraging serious students to group gen- eral subjects. This is something ; but in order to be thoroughly effective or in any way adequate the entire system would have to be revolutionized as it never can be under the present president. At Oxford the scope of election is narrow. One may choose among Literce Humaniores, Modern History, Mathematics, Science, and Eng- lish ; and once having chosen, the studies are in effect prescribed by virtue of the uniform univer- 85 HARVARD sity examination. Such narrowness of scope is generally conceded, even in England, to be mis- taken. In America far greater latitude will have to be granted, with perhaps considerable inter- play among the cognate honor schools. The prob- lem is far from simple. But if an American educa- tion is to be a real education, not a loosely stitched garment of shreds and patches, some order will have to be evoked from the chaos of the elective system. Not the least advantage of such a grouping of subjects is that it will tend to remove the emphasis from mere science and place it on the broader and more general culture. There has seldom been a country or a time when there was greater need of this than in the America of to- day. A professor of Romance Literature in one of our foremost universities has a very sad story to tell to illustrate the declining vogue of those studies which used to be called the humanities. In his introductory course in the literature of the Italian Renaissance he had had two young women, intelligent, charming to teach whom was a delight. He had confidently looked to them the following year to take the advanced 86 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY course, but at the time of registration they did not appear. Besought for an explanation, they said that his lecture hours conflicted with those of another course they had elected in abnor- mal psychology. Charming young women; ab- normal psychology ; no wonder the professor of renaissance culture shook his head at the future of the nation. At Harvard, out of a total of 2334 students in the college, less than 300, or about one in eight, are pursuing either Greek or Latin, and many of these elect only a single course or two. The number of those who achieve any considerable degree of classical culture is much smaller. The scientific spirit, in its most altruistic de- velopment, as embodied in the special researcher, has of necessity withdrawn itself very far from the actual and present needs of the nation, political, commercial, and social. At its most practical, in the technical schools, its aim has been frankly utilitarian. The great need of mod- ern America is an impulse away from material- ism and toward higher standards of living, moral, intellectual, and spiritual. Many leading institu- tions, notably Princeton, as we have seen, are 87 HARVARD already keenly sensible of the need. And it is a hopeful sign of the times that no one has been more vigorous in sounding the advance than the president of our foremost technical university, Cornell. Already we have made mighty progress in the purification of personal life, of business, and of statecraft. For the purpose of further- ing the movement and conserving it, no better engine could be devised than a system of uni- versities in which the chosen youth of the nation shall be brought in contact with the best stand- ards of the human spirit, in their comrade- ships and their games no less than in things of the mind. Whether the ancient classics will ever regain their predominance in liberal education may be doubted ; but when they are taught in well- organized groups as literature and not merely as scattered exercises in philology they cannot fail mightily to increase their appeal. The important fact is that the human spirit is asserting itself as of at least equal importance with the passion for pure science. The man of broad culture will take his place beside the narrow researcher. Character and style, in living and thinking and 88 A GERMANIZED UNIVERSITY writing, will be no less regarded than the con- quest of new truth. For the universities as institutions the depar- ture should prove epoch-making. Hitherto there have been two broadly differentiated types in America, the small college and the large, or, more accurately speaking, the college and the university. Princeton has been the most perfect example of the one, Harvard of the other. Both are now seen to be tending toward the same goal, the union of the spirit of pure science with that of the ripest humanities. There is still a long way to go. Princeton is as imperfect in scientific teaching as Harvard is in the organiza- tion of study. Nor are the two elements any- where successfully mingled. But it is not too much to hope that eventually we shall reproduce, in a form assimilated to our national needs, all that is valuable in the two great types of modern university, the English and the German. Whatever may be the misgivings of the new radicals with regard to President Eliot, it is nowhere disputed that he has made Harvard, and to a great extent our education as a whole, what it is to-day. The late nineteenth century 89 HARVARD in America witnessed perhaps the greatest and most rapid educational expansion the world has ever known ; and he was its master spirit. If the future proves what it promises, the American university will be the most perfect institution of the kind in the history of the world. And it is already evident that no one can ever have a more powerful hand in shaping its destiny than the bland, grave young man who remarked to Holmes and his venerable associates that Harvard had a new president. Ill MICHIGAN: A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY University of Michigan was the first, and -*- is perhaps still the foremost, of the state universities characteristic of the West ; but the impression it gives, and especially when ap- proached from the interior, is that of an eastern institution. From the point of view of the Back Bay and Fifth Avenue, western New York is on the frontier ; but from the point of view of the Golden Gate, Chicago lies next the eastern sea- board. Our nomenclature needs revising. The great university of the Old Northwest really lies in the new Middle-East. When President Hadley of Yale lately ad- dressed his western alumni at Cincinnati, exhort- ing them to be more diligent in recruiting fresh- men, he characterized the state universities as local and provincial, in contrast with the endowed universities of the East, which, he said, were more nationally representative. 91 MICHIGAN Professor James R. Angell of the University of Chicago brought him to book. Few of the state universities, he said, are merely local, and he showed that his own alma mater, Michigan, was very largely national. It draws its students from the same number of states and territories as Yale, namely forty-eight, and from one more outlying dependency and one more foreign country. Though Michigan draws more students from the home state, the disparity is scarcely greater than the disparity in size between Michi- gan and Connecticut. Area for area, the figures are about the same. Though Yale draws more students from New York, Michigan has a compensating advantage in her own neighboring commonwealths of Ohio and Illinois. The comparison was invalidated, if at all, only by a single fact : Michigan has 4571 students, or about a thousand more than Yale being one of the three or four universities that are closely pressing Harvard for first place ; so that in proportion to the whole number of stu- dents it is, perhaps, a trifle less representative. So much for the charge of provinciality. A decade before Michigan had been attacked 92 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY in the state legislature as a class institution, the resort of the sons of the rich. A matter of funds was at stake, and Professor Angell's father, president of the university during more than half of its existence, showed that forty-five per cent of the students were sons of men who lived by manual labor, farmers, mechanics, and the like, many of the rest coming from the families of clerks and shop-keepers. Almost as broadly representative as the East- ern universities on the score of territory, Michi- gan is more broadly representative on the score of democracy. And this distinction is not less- ened by the fact that the children of the well-to- do are resorting to it in increasing numbers. The University of Michigan has at once the popular character of a Western state university and the national character of the endowed institutions of the East. A similar blending of apparently opposite qualities runs through the whole life of the insti- tution, social and educational, though not always to its advantage. Emulating the German univer- sities, it early renounced direct responsibility for the manners and morals of the students. Yet, 93 MICHIGAN like Harvard, which went to even greater ex- tremes, it has been held accountable in this respect by the community from which it draws its funds ; while the undergraduates are project- ing, and may bring about, a social life closely resembling that of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. On the educational side, as will appear later, it has striven from the very outset toward the Ger- man ideal of pure science as opposed to the state university instinct for technical training on the one hand and the elder American ideal of liberal culture on the other ; but in practice it has been obliged to give most of its instruction in technology and in the liberal arts and profes- sions. In two ways it is marvelous : that, being a state institution, it has become so broadly repre- sentative and so liberal; and that, having devel- oped so far, it has not developed further. It is among the most chaotic of our universities, as it is among those that give greatest promise for the future. The disorder is largely due to the fact that the university has no dominant progressive policy. President Angell has guided its destinies with 94 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY consummate wisdom and tact through the period of gigantic development and expansion that has placed it where it is, and his faculties are said to be as keen as ever ; but the propulsive power of leadership is waning. The machine, such as it is, is well oiled and humming, but it is inadequate to the gigantic work in hand. In almost every department of university life there are two fac- tions, a group of older men in control, and a body of younger men, filled with creative energy, who feel themselves hampered. The academic shades of Ann Arbor are still reverberating with the noise of factional strife. A group of the older and more influential mem- bers of the Faculty conceived the idea of a memorial hall to commemorate those who died in the Civil War, together with those who have honored the alma mater in the arts of peace. It was a noble idea, but as it was of no great utility, it did not pull strongly upon alumni purse- strings. A rumor came vaguely to their ears of a movement on the part of the undergraduates to establish a Union which should develop in a common centre the scattered social life of the institution. In the circulars they sent out to the 95 MICHIGAN graduates, appealing for funds, the impression was conveyed that the Michigan Memorial Hall was to include the Michigan Union. The response was immediate and generous. Then the plans for the building were divulged. The chief room was an assembly hall, seating eight hundred a solemn, rectangular apartment for solemn, rectangular occasions. There were to be four galleries for pictures of the dead, and one for mortuary sculptures. On the walls of the halls were to be placed tablets to the departed. And the Michigan Union ? There was to be one rectangular room for alumni, and one reading- room. There was no kitchen, no dining-room, no easy rooms for foregathering undergraduates, no bedrooms for returning graduates. The pro- mised social centre was a series of whispering galleries for the dead. The protests of the living were loud. A party of old men, the younger fac- tion said, had hoodwinked them into subscribing a monument to their fame. They burlesqued the Memorial Union, caricatured it, lampooned it. When the subscriptions were called for, many neglected to send the promised money. To-day the sounds of strife are subsiding. Even the 96 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY undergraduates admit that, like Reynard the fox, of old, the Memorial Committee " had no wykked intent." Peace has been declared, in the name of seemliness. The Memorial Hall will be built in time, and so will the Union. At the outset the university had dormitories and commons the system of collegiate resi- dence which we have inherited from our English ancestors and which has proved everywhere har- monious with our racial instincts. In the sixth decade of the past century President Tappan abolished them. He was an able educator, of lofty and devoted ideals, well deserving of a statue in the Memorial Gallery. But his ideals were derived from the German universities, and he had not the practical sense to see that they could not be adopted en bloc, but must be adapted to the genius of our people. In the words of the historian of the university, " he believed that, whatever the convenience and charm of dormi- tory life might be, they were more than balanced by even so much of home life as a student could find in a lodging or boarding house, while the abolition of the system would at once set free space in the college buildings that was much 97 MICHIGAN needed for other purposes, and relieve the trea- sury of a large expenditure of money, and the Faculty of a great deal of care and annoyance in the way of supervision." The italics are mine. In other words, to gain a few laboratories and lecture rooms he shirked upon townspeople the responsibility for the manners and morals of the undergraduates. The result is modern Ann Arbor a place without the amenity of well- ordered college life, without pervasive college spirit and traditions. The suggestion of family life is a joke. At Michigan and many another state university lodging-house keepers live in nooks and crannies in a kitchen extension, crowding undergraduates into every available room in front. Obeying the sordid and selfish instincts of their kind, they prefer men students, who are less trouble to serve ; and, when they are able, they fill their rooms with them. Thus the young women are delayed in securing lodgings and prevented from getting the more desirable rooms. At Michigan and at other state universities, as for example Wisconsin, there is a strong movement toward reform in this particular; but at the time of my investigations 98 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY it was by no means rare for one or two young women to live in a house with many men, shar- ing with them a single bathroom. At Michigan, as at many another university and college without dormitories, the first protest against this order, if order it can be called, was the fraternity and the sorority. Here we come upon the great moot question of American un- dergraduate life. At Princeton fraternities were long ago abol- ished as harmful to undergraduate democracy. At Harvard they are an insignificant survival. At Yale, where fraternities are still strong, they are limited to the sophomore and junior years, and are subordinate and tributary to the senior fifteens, Bones, Keys, and the rest, which, though secret, are purely local, having no fraternal ties with chapters elsewhere. The ideal of the social system of the older universities is a gradual pro- cess of democratic selection on the basis of the character a man develops in the general life, and his services to the student body as a whole. Where the fraternity system has reached its strongest development, on the other hand, mem- bers are chosen at the outset of the freshman 99 MICHIGAN year, or earlier. They are pledged a year, some- times two years, before they arrive ; and it is the exception when a man is admitted after his. first semester. I have mentioned it to the discredit of the Harvard clubs and societies that, though emi- nently pleasant to the men who belong to them, they are not made up on any true basis of leader- ship, and tend to withdraw a man from the gen- eral life rather than strengthen his power in it for good. The evil influence of the fraternity system is of a more pernicious kind, and much more pronounced. One of the incidents of " rushing " freshmen and sub-freshmen is that it lays stress on a man's family and social position which is cer- tainly an eye-opener, in view of the fact that the fraternity system is strongest in the most recent, and ostensibly the most democratic, of our uni- versities. Harvard's reputation for snobbishness, as I have pointed out, is greatly exaggerated. Before the Bones elections at Yale, as a member of the society assured me, the electors are instructed by leading graduates to ignore all question of a man's family and its previous 100 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY connection with the society. The means which Princeton takes to guard against nepotism has already been indicated. Many fraternities, on the other hand, pride themselves on the fact that they are able to choose most of their members from brothers and sons of older members. One chapter frankly cited this as evidence of its dis- tinction. At Michigan the so-called Palladium, consist- ing of eight leading fraternities, long dominated the social life of the university ; and though the Palladium has disappeared, the spirit that ani- mated it remains. The fraternities number about one third of the student body ; but in scholarship they are below the average, for the pleasantness of fraternity life is a constant temptation to idleness. If they excel in other student interests, it is largely by accident. Leading orators and debaters are frequently not fraternity men. Last year at Michigan all three of the leading 'varsity captains were non-fraternity men, and the fact, as far as I could find out, was so far from para- doxical that my surprise at it was most surprising to my informers. The fraternity is a family, I was told, its 101 MICHIGAN members brothers wbo live in the most intimate affection and loyalty. In order that its influ- ence shall be exerted to the best effect, it is regarded as essential that one shall be a member throughout all four years. Even though a man is an orator or an athlete, why should he be elected if his table manners are bad or his character in any way unpleasant? I pointed out that many non-fraternity upperclassmen who have achieved prominence are men of the best char- acter, and their manners often good, or easily capable of betterment. A few such men, I was told, were elected ; and in other cases they had refused election because their pride had been wounded at not being elected earlier, or because they were opposed on principle to the fraternity system. The simple fact is that the fraternities have never regarded themselves as leaders in college spirit or in college activities. More than once, and especially in smaller institutions, I have been told in so many words that the fraternity is more important than the college. There is nothing else in undergraduate life half as pleasant or half as inspiring; and in the world it is of far more 102 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY value to be, say, an Alpha Delt than a graduate of this .college or that. All this is in striking contrast with the spirit of Princeton or of Yale. There the ideal is to select the men who have done most for the alma mater ; to subject them to its best influences and traditions in order to make them in all ways worthy of it ; and, finally, to send them out into the world so equipped as to be of the utmost service to the world and credit to their alma mater. In a fraternity college such an ideal is undreamed of. In the nature of things, a stranger tends to exaggerate the fraternity evil. Fraternity life has certainly rare and signal virtues. A maximum of comfort is attained at a minimum expense. Of the extravagant luxury so often charged against it I found really nothing, and I have lived and dined in leading houses, not only at Michigan, but at Wisconsin, Chicago, and Cornell, not to mention less prominent institutions. The fare is wholesome and probably simpler than a major- ity of the members are accustomed to at home. Dinner usually consists of meat with vegetables and a very simple dessert; breakfast of cereal and milk, coffee and toast. Soup at dinner is 103 MICHIGAN infrequent; at breakfast I only once found eggs, fish, or meat. The house is a rare exception in which drinking of all kinds and degrees is not forbidden by common consent of the members, not by decree of the Faculty. Even outside the houses the fraternities exert a strong, good influence. If a fellow is given to excessive conviviality, the senior in residence takes him in charge. At Michigan one Saturday evening I was sitting with a group of my fra- ternity hosts in one of the most popular beer saloons. An underclassman drew aside one of our number, the senior resident of the chapter, and, after a whispered conference, departed with a smiling countenance. The boy had lost control of himself, the senior told me, and he had put him on his honor. That evening there was to be a special occasion, and he had dropped the lad off the water wagon for the time on a promise of moderation. Though leadership is scarcely a basis of elec- tion to the fraternities, many chapters give their members all encouragement to distinguish them- selves except that of making election in the first place a quid pro quo. Even in the matter of 104 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY scholarship the senior members exert a wisely restraining influence. Few of the men fail ut- terly. If the spirit of manly jollity and help- ful comradeship has ever been more successfully cultivated than in fraternity life at its best, I do not know where. Throughout life the bond of the fraternal spirit is almost incredibly strong. The dramatic critic of a New York paper, a Michigan man, told me of hearing from a reporter that a woman in the notorious Haymarket was wearing the pin of his fraternity. Deeply scandalized, he sallied forth at once, and found that it had been stolen by a hotel chambermaid from a graduate of a New York college. He bought it and restored it to its bereaved owner. In his youth Clyde Fitch, having been involved against his will in a small riot at the door of a theatre, was arrested and lodged in jail by an officious policeman. A re- porter caught sight of the pin of his fraternity at Amherst, and organized a relief expedition. When Mr. Fitch was released, he was asked if he had not suffered in his dirty and noisome cell. " Not at all," he said. " I spent the time reciting Browning." It must be granted, however, that 105 MICHIGAN his fraternity proved the more efficient Samar- itan. A man who was appointed to a professor- ship at Michigan from a post in the army made it known that he would like to join Sigma Phi. He was initiated with all due torture, and submitted to the ordeal unflinchingly, never ceasing to show all respect to older members, whether sopho- mores or freshmen. But, as one of these assured me, that did not prevent him from flunking his new brothers whenever they deserved it. In all large American cities leading fraternities have club houses, which rival the Yale clubs and the Harvard clubs in loyalty, if not in size. No event, from the cradle to the grave, fails to enlist the sympathy of the mystic brotherhood. At Michigan there are now thirty-two fraterni- ties and eleven sororities. Almost every year sees the addition of a new chapter. The need of a better residential life is shown in the fact that men are beginning to get together fraternally on the basis of the sections from which they come : already there is a Rocky Mountain Club, a Key- stone Club, and a New York Club, each with its separate house and dining-room besides half a dozen other similar organizations. In no state 106 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY university, so far as I am aware, are there as many fraternities as at Michigan ; and their handsome and commodious houses are surpassed, if anywhere, only at Cornell. For the non-fraternity students there is no social centre no place where they feel them- selves a part of the student life. Their logical friends are the chance collection who live under the same roof or board at the same table. Some few they may meet in lecture rooms or on the athletic field. As in Germany, beer drinking is a means of general intercourse. One fraternity man explained his frequent presence in the saloons by saying that nowhere else was he able to enlarge his acquaintance beyond the narrow fraternity world. It is probably due to the lack of general undergraduate life, quite as much as to German example, that beer drinking has become popular at Ann Arbor. While I was there a student soci- ologer found that there were thirty-nine saloons, and explained their popularity on the ground that they afforded " all the comforts of home." One graduate of the Medical School, now a well- established practitioner, had his favorite saloon- keeper put his mark beneath the signature of 107 MICHIGAN President Angell, explaining that his hours of conviviality were among the most important of his educational life. But both fraternity men and non-fraternity men characteristically live the narrow life of cliques, gaining little from the spirit of the place and contributing as little to it. Yet, in spite of boarding-houses and frater- nities, there is at Ann Arbor a vigorous and most vital tendency toward a general social life. Inter- class rivalry, so strong in the days when Amer- ican universities were colleges, survives, here as elsewhere, in freshman and sophomore dinners. Until lately these were the occasion of exuberant rough-house. The diners were captured, their hair clipped, their faces streaked with war-paint -and the result handed down to posterity in group photographs. Once the freshmen escaped the sophomores by crawling to the dinner room in the gymnasium through hot-air ducts leading from the central heating plant. Not infrequently the disorder exceeded all bounds. Inoffensive cit- izens of Ann Arbor were caught and, by means of the ready shears, deprived of their hirsute adornments. The annual rough-house now takes the form of a pushball contest between the com- 108 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY bined forces of the two classes, and a " big-side " tug-of-war. This ended last year by dragging the contestants into the Huron River, which is said to be very wet. The origin of such demonstrations to the superficial and the unsympathetic view mere ex- cesses of barbarity is in reality an admirably exuberant social sense, a wholesome esprit de corps. Under the present system this is sporadic and ineffective; but it needs only a fitter means of expression to develop into valuable college spirit and traditions. Of late years progress has been rapid. There has been a large and altogether wholesome increase in the number of student associations drawing their members from the undergraduate body at large. Only a few of these need be men- tioned. Churches of every denomination in Ann Arbor gather students together on a social basis. The Phi Beta Kappa is about to establish a chap- ter. There is a Cercle Frangais and a Deutscher Verein, which give, respectively, a French and a German play annually. A Comedy Club gives a play in English at the time of the Junior Hop. There are junior and senior social clubs The 109 MICHIGAN Pipe and Bowl and The Friars. A recently organ- ized club, the Michigamua, aims to draw its mem- bers, quite in the manner of the Yale senior societies, from among the leaders in all prominent undergraduate activities, studious, social, and ath- letic. In a word, the University of Michigan is de- r veloping club life on precisely the lines laid down by the great endowed universities of the East. Much the same can be said, no doubt, of all state universities, but I know of none where the de- velopment is anywhere near as rich and varied. Both the leading senior societies, The Friars and Michigamua, are highly picturesque. The Friars convene on Saturday nights, at about ten o'clock. At the head of a huge table, carved full of initials and names of former members, sits the Pope, who commands order by rapping on the table with a spigot, and calls on the members in turn for a song or a story. The Friars have their own song, written by a member "In College Days." It is an uncommonly fine song, and is sung uncommonly well. Several of the more popular of the young instructors are members, and occasionally attend meetings. But it is very important that they should be able to tell the 110 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY precise psychological moment for saying good- night. Otherwise they are likely to become in- voluntary recruits in a shirt-tail parade. This function must be clearly distinguished from the night-shirt parade known at the University of Wisconsin. A number of young instructors were lately led into the midnight streets of Ann Arbor, in their ordinary clothes, to be sure, but flying a flag fore and aft. The members of Michigamua are all braves wampum and feathers are their regalia. Indian names they have also. Let Broken-heart Smith marry ever so happily, his wife,, when she sees his Michigamua photograph, will, like Dante, know the traces of an ancient flame. The Michi- gamuans have gone the tapping of Yale senior societies one better. When they have elected new members, they don their war-paint, and with swinging lariat issue forth, lasso the elect, and drag them to the lodge. Unlike the Yale senior societies, Michigamua is, and will perhaps always remain, subordinate to the fraternities ; yet it is said to be a strong factor for good. Though The Friars and Michigamua have clubrooms, they are not, in the full sense of the 111 MICHIGAN word, clubs. Except at the times of the periodical meetings, the rooms are pretty sure to be deserted. To get in, one has to use a private key or a lock combination. Neither has club servants or a kitchen. Michigamua sedately bars the keg, more- over. The normal club has a well-frequented house, and is moderately convivial. If the appeal of the saloon at Ann Arbor is to be successfully combated, some place is needed which also of- fers, in the phrase sociological, " all the com- forts of home." Such a place it is the purpose of the Michigan Union to supply. The question of beer is likely to prove knotty. At a club in another state uni- versity I was shown an ice box with bottles in it, but was asked not to mention the fact for fear of steeling the hearts of the legislature. It has been conservatively estimated that seventy per cent of the undergraduates resort to the saloons, though for the most part at infrequent intervals. The closing hour of ten o'clock is observed by the turning off of lights but not always of beer. A Union frequented by the Faculty and man- aged by representative young graduates and 112 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY undergraduates could certainly do better ; judg- ing by the rule of the fraternities with regard to drinking in the house, they should do super- latively well. Kitchen and grill the Union will certainly have, with bedrooms to entice the gradu- ate who has not the privilege of the alumni room in a fraternity house, and who shrinks before the well-known terrors of the local hotel. There will be billiards and bowling, easy-chairs for comfort- able talk, and a periodical room and library for comfortable reading. The residence of the late Judge Cooley, which lies across the street from the campus, has already been acquired, and the house, a substantial and rather handsome build- ing -of stone, is to be the first home of united Michigan. Eventually a vastly larger and more adequate building is to be erected. It would be easy to exaggerate the good in- fluence of the Union, even if it succeeded in diverting and tempering the conviviality of the saloons. The poorer students, on the one hand, have neither the time nor the money necessary to take full advantage of it; and, on the other, fraternity men would be always inclined to prefer the comfort and close friendship of their own 113 MICHIGAN houses. For precisely such reasons as these the value of the celebrated Oxford Union is far less than we Americans have assumed, and the Har- vard Union, though well frequented, has not suc- ceeded in materially remedying the lack of a united college sentiment. But Michigan has far greater need of social facilities than either, and beyond question the Union will prove of vast advantage as a centre of college traditions and spirit. Already the university has developed enough /university spirit to give it, on the whole, the broadest and most successful athletic develop- V ment in the West. At Michigan, as in most other American uni- versities, however, the crying need is of a better- ordered residential life. The influences that make most strongly for character and culture are not those which adorn moments of social leisure, but those which operate without intermission in the normal and inevitable occupations eating and sleeping, work and play. Thanks to her system of clubs and her Union, Michigan has a less pre- sent and crying need of the residential hall than other state universities for example Wisconsin, 114 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY as we shall see ; but at best the difference is not great. Sooner or later the " home influence " of the boarding and lodging houses will have to be moderated. It is said that the townspeople would exert a powerful political influence against the system of quadrangular halls. But under strong leadership the university should have nothing to fear from influence so obviously inspired by narrow self-interest. I heard nothing of that sort of thing at Wis- consin. There a clear-headed leader is armed and resolute to strike to the heart of the one great evil of American university life. Michigan is at an equal advantage with Wisconsin in that it has no system of dormitories to demolish as a prepa- ration for the quadrangular hall, and a recent liberal grant of money from the legislature has put the university in funds. But it is much to be feared that the Ann Arbor undergraduate will still be enduring President Tappan's ideal of home influence when the undergraduate at Madison is well housed and well fed in communities alive with ripe university tradition. The Michigan co-ed enjoys the liberties which are still enjoyed, and on the whole fortunately, 115 MICHIGAN by the generality of young women in the Middle West. The chaperon is an idol that has a niche, but few worshipers. Parties of several couples rejoice in the Arcadian buggy ride and the dis- tant dinner. The single wayfaring couple is not unknown. In a happy newspaper phrase, the light fantastic toe is weekly tripped at Granger's. But not all liberties are cherished. Michigan scorns her co-ed. The eight leading fraternities, once known as the Palladium crowd, have frowned upon her. It is said that at Madison if a fra- ternity, no matter how powerful, fails in its du- ties of gallantry, the feminine influence against it is strong enough to divert the best freshmen to its more gallant rivals. At Ann Arbor a fra- ternity is on the down grade if it begins to take notice. In the old days, when the maiden from Detroit and Jackson first appeared in numbers, the mag- nanimous woman student granted that it was only natural for the fellows to invite their boyhood friends from home. But the men proved un- worthy of such magnanimity. They began to have their sisters invite whole boarding-schools of young girls they had never seen. Then the co-ed as- 116 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY serted her dignity and stayed away, even though invited. At the last junior hop there were less than a half-dozen women students. It is said that the president seriously considered refusing to sanction it by his presence, on the ground that it was not a representative gathering. Enforced or voluntary, the young women have profited by this social segregation. It is generally admitted that they have progressed even further than the men in the matter of general organiza- tion. Sororities are numerous, and one of them, a non-secret society called Sorosis, has a house of distinguished comfort and beauty. There is a spacious women's gymnasium, with a large bath- ing-tank in the locker-room. Connected with it is a series of rooms which already serve most of the purposes of a Union. In them the Women's League holds receptions, dinners, and dances. At present there is no kitchen, so that things to eat and drink have to be supplied from without, and only on set occasions, but it is hoped that that defect will be remedied in time. Eecently the Women's League has begun to form committees to welcome incoming freshmen and aid them in taking up undergraduate life in 117 MICHIGAN the manner best suited to their needs and cap- abilities. No young woman need now arrive at Ann Arbor quite friendless and forlorn. And the Dean of Women is exerting a strong, though quiet, pressure toward reforming the boarding and lodging houses. Before many years she hopes to have done away with the mingling of the sexes beneath the same roof, and to induce each wo- men's house to have its own parlor and adequate bathing facilities. There are many who will regard such developments as no slight compen- sation for the lost joys of mixed society. Educationally, as socially, Michigan has been at war with its own instincts. From the begin- ning, early in the nineteenth century, its proudest ideal has been to reproduce the German type of state university. One of the curiosities of American history is the scheme for a so-called Katholoepistemiad, describing a typical Prussian institution in the quaintly pseudo-classic no- menclature which Jefferson narrowly failed to saddle upon the Old Northwest entire, and which still remains in such names as Kome, Ithaca, Athens, and Sparta. The Katholoepistemiad was the preliminary sketch of the University of Michi- 118 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY gan. The actual result, however, was no more than a high school. To President Tappan the German university was an inspiration, an ideal for which he strug- gled heroically, and largely because of which, in 1863, in the prime of life, he was removed from office by pragmatical regents. There is reason to believe that,' before any other American, he naturalized the German system of seminars for instruction in original investigation. In develop- ing scientific courses Michigan was antedated only by Harvard, which, under the influence of Agassiz and others, established the Lawrence Scientific School in 1847, and by Brown Uni- versity. Michigan was the first to grant the de- gree of Bachelor of Science, and it adopted an elective system as early as 1855-56, though lim- iting it to the senior year. Andrew D. White, who served in his youth at Michigan as professor of history, says, in his autobiography, that the real beginning of a uni- versity in the United States, in the modern sense, was made at Ann Arbor, under Doctor Tappan. Yet, after all is said, the institution he left was essentially of the type of the English college. 119 MICHIGAN It fared even worse with the American tech- nological ideal of state instruction than with the German ideal of purely scientific culture. The Michigan College of Agriculture, established fifty years ago, was located, not at Ann Arbor, but at the state capital, Lansing. The School of Mines was established in mineral regions of the northern part of the state. Both institutions are quite independent of the university. The result has probably been unfortunate for all parties. At Wisconsin the Agricultural College, by appealing to the practical sense of the legisla- ture, has carried the whole university financially, and in turn has received strength from it on the side of pure science. Michigan has had to fight its financial battles unaided, and, in spite of really splendid success in its own field, it has received only the most niggardly support. Originally of the same general type as Har- vard, Yale, and Princeton, its development has closely paralleled theirs. Upon the trunk of lib- eral collegiate instruction it has grafted the branches of the liberal and technological profes- sions and, as I have indicated, of pure scientific culture. Instruction in the liberal arts and letters 120 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY is by no means strong, and the graduate school is admittedly weak. The professional schools are outgrowths of those early semester lecture courses, and in them lies the great strength and the glory of the uni- versity. The Law School is now one of the ablest, as well as the largest, in the land. It has almost entirely discarded the old textbook system of instruction for the case system, and will probably make the change complete when the younger men get into control. The Medical School is notably large and able. Situated in a small city, it has few emergency cases calling for quick and skillful surgery, but the state hospital gives it unrivaled advantages for the study of the more perplexing field of chronic disease. There is a strong Dental School. A School of Unsectarian Theology is presently to be established. The School of Engineering is of the very highest rank, and in the past decade has had a marvelous increase in numbers. One of its dis- tinctive features is a recently built naval tank for perfecting the models of ships. Here the stu- dents receive drawings of projected vessels, con- struct models in parafime, and, by means of a 121 MICHIGAN trolley running above the water, calculate the precise resistance encountered and the amount of coal per mile required to attain a given speed. There is a similar tank at Washington, and one at Cornell, which, however, is unroofed. Throughout the long administration of Presi- dent Angell the progress of the institution has been preeminently sane and wise, if not radical. His public services as Minister to China and Turkey have reflected great and wholly merited credit on the university. Considering the parsi- monious support doled out by the legislature, and the fact that, like all state universities, Michigan charges no more than a nominal tuition fee, his achievement has been little short of marvelous. One of his favorite innovations is the diploma system, by which pupils from certain accredited schools throughout the state are admitted to the university without examination. The teaching body complains that much of the material with which it has to work is raw, and the instruction in the Law and Medical Schools is kept to a low level because they are not able to insist on a high standard of qualification for entrance. A decided advance in this respect is promised, but, at best, 122 A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY the schools will compare unfavorably with the increasing number of those excluding all who have not attained a degree equal to the B. A. But on financial grounds President Angell has been justified. The university stands as the pinnacle and crown of the educational system of the commonwealth, and as such commands the support of the people. Within the last year its income has been almost doubled, so that, if the liberal order lasts, the institution will be raised from penury to a competence. There are respects in which, both socially and intellectually, Michi- gan seems to be sleeping ; but it needs only the touch of young vigor to raise it in all respects to the proud position it has already achieved in numbers and in national representation. IV CORNELL : A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY /CORNELL has not the reputation of being ^x modest with regard to its achievements, and in point of fact, it is not a bit modester than any healthy-minded person ought to be ; yet the dean of the College of Engineering, when questioned as to its rank as a technical institution, outvied the violet. He equaled the arbutus, indeed, which is much more truly modest than the violet ; for, instead of rearing aloft its shyly averted head for all the world to see, the arbutus hides beneath a mould of fallen leaves, and blushes pink when it is discovered. By no means, asserted the dean, was Cornell to be regarded as the foremost technical institu- tion of the country. There were many schools of engineering of the first rank at the Massachu- setts Institute of Technology, at the Universities of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan, at Stevens, and at the Troy Polytechnic. 124 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY Then put the question another way, said the patient inquirer : Was it not through its techni- cal schools that Cornell first made its reputation before the country? By no means. It was the high ideals, the creative genius, of Ezra Cornell and Andrew D. White that made its scholarly greatness, and with it its reputation. Third down and no game : now for a desperate drop-kick for goal. Was not its present reputa- tion that of a technical institution ? It seems an innocent question, but at the sound of it Cornell was itself again. That was true, said Dean Smith unfortu- nately true, for the reputation was an error. Cornell was more than an aggregation of tech- nical schools. It was, in the fullest sense of the word, a university. The mere technical school turns out a narrow specialist, but it was the ideal of Cornell to turn out specialists who were also men of liberal culture able thinkers, writers, and speakers, efficient men among men. The modern engineer has to be more than a technician ; he has to deal with the exponents of big and advanced ideas, to make himself the in- 125 CORNELL spiration and the instrument of broad sweeps of industrial progress. He should be able to touch life on all sides social, intellectual, aesthetic. Then the only reason, the reporter suggested, why Cornell could not claim to lead the tech- nical schools was that it was in a different and a higher class. The shy arbutus blushed. It had been discov- ered. Cornell was a technical university, perhaps, but the accent was strong on " university." The voice of Dean Smith was that of the Ithaca Zeitgeist. President Schurman put the case thus : When Cornell was founded, there happened to be one great field unoccupied in American universities that of technical train- ing. Cornell tilled it to the utmost, and reaped the reward. From the outset, however, it was strong in many departments; but it got little credit for the fact, for other universities were as strong or stronger, and, having long occupied the field, unduly overshadowed Cornell. The pre- sent aim of the university is to make known what it has accomplished in arts, pure science, and the liberal professions, and to build itself up still higher. 126 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY Doctor White, who lives on the campus and keeps a watchful and kindly eye on the creation of his youth, points out that from the start the university enjoyed the lectures of a corps of non-resident professors, which included the most distinguished men of the time Louis Agassiz, James Kussell Lowell, Goldwin Smith, Matthew Arnold, James Anthony Froude, E. A. Freeman. Always the aim had been to make breadth of character and depth of culture go hand in hand with utilitarian training. For the site of the university they chose a splendidly picturesque hill. To climb it from the residential quarter below caused a local malady known as leg fever; but what of that? It lay between two romantic gorges, the wooded decliv- ities of which murmured to the rush of waters. In one of them gleamed a waterfall higher than Niagara. From the summit were to be seen the most magnificent views of hilltops, valleys, and Alpine waters commanded by any university in the world. The exercises that opened Cornell began with the pealing of chimes a luxury unknown in other American universities. The bells hung 127 CORNELL in a rudely-improvised wooden steeple, and were manifestly out of tune. No matter: they now hang in a lofty Romanesque tower surmounting the library; and in this present year of grace they are going back to the bell founder to be recast and to have new bells added, so that the chimes may peal harmoniously in various keys. There you have the symbol of the university as a whole. It was rude in its beginnings, and the intended note is not always sounded; but its ambition is to run through the full gamut of edu- cation and culture. Though independent in endowment, Cornell is historically and in spirit closely allied to our state universities. Its origin is in the Morrill land grant of 1862, from which so many noble insti- tutions have sprung. Ezra Cornell, inventor and company manager, was serving in the state Sen- ate. A self-made man, he took shame, it is said, that he was not able to understand the Latin quotations with which his colleagues interlarded their speeches, and determined that, if he could help matters, no eager young man in the future should suffer his humiliation. However this may be, he united with a youthful fellow senator, 128 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY Andrew D. White, to prevent New York from dividing, scattering, and wasting the Federal grants of land, as so many other states had done. Local self-interest, mainly emanating from feeble and jealous denominational colleges, arrayed it- self strongly against them and in favor of parti- tioning the lands. If any one thinks it an easy and a delightful vocation to do good to his fellow men, let him read the records of those years. To check the onslaughts of bigotry and ignorance, Ezra Cor- nell had to reach deep into his own pocket; and then, to secure the full returns from the lands put in his charge, he was obliged to devote the best years of his maturity to locating them in distant parts of the country and to administering them. His reward was lifelong obloquy. In fact, after forty years the voice of calumny is still heard. His enemies charged, with a lack of con- sistency which did not in the least detract from their vehemence, that he was seeking to glorify his name at the expense of the state, that he was building up a "godless" university, and that he was using the national land grant to swell his private fortune. His was a nature stoic to the 129 CORNELL point of austerity and taciturn to the point of secretiveness. It was enough for him that he secured for New York many times the sums any other state received from its Federal grants and left the university free from the dominance alike of bigotry and of politics. It is highly characteristic that Andrew D. White first won the admiration of Ezra Cornell by opposing him. It was he, in fact, who pointed out the paramount necessity of keeping the grant intact, so as to found a university worthy of the name. He had no illusions as to the kind of educa- tion that had made their fellow Solons so glib in Latinity. Yale man though he was, and, what is more, a Bones man, he was radically, even bit- terly, opposed to the old-fashioned curriculum of his alma mater a series of dry, soulless reci- tations from textbooks in science, mathematics, and the classics, which every man was forced to undergo, whatever his capacities, and beyond which the college offered nothing. He had con- tinued his education in Germany, and then taken a professorship of history at Ann Arbor, where he found the German tradition in full swing. 130 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY When Ezra Cornell called him to be president of the new foundation, he regarded the foremost of the state universities as a force destined to prove the salvation of higher education in Amer- ica. As he has himself said, Cornell is the daugh- ter of the University of Michigan. As happened at the parent institution, German ideals gave way for the time to American practi- cality. The older colleges of the East had pre- empted the field of liberal education as they understood it, and were attracting the sons of the rich. Like the state universities, Cornell had to begin with boys from the plow, the saw, and the anvil a necessity by no means disconcert- ing to Ezra Cornell. His ideal is inscribed on the seal of the university. " I would found an insti- tution where any person can receive instruction in any subject." To live up to the terms of its charter, the uni- versity had to open its doors before the buildings, few as they were, were completed before there were doors to open, or windows to shut, for that matter. This was in 1868. Ezra Cornell an- nounced through the press that students without means would be able, by working one-half of 131 CORNELL each day on the unfinished plant, to pay the ex- penses of their education, which would occupy the other half. Doctor White is at pains to explain in his autobiography that he was absent from Ithaca when the offer was made. Destitute enthusiasts arrived in droves, unfit either to labor or to learn. One was the father of a family, and was grieved to find that no provi- sion could be made for his offspring in case of his demise. 'Another was a teamster from a Western state, who could neither read nor write. When remonstrated with, he quoted the words of the founder : " I would found an institution where any person can receive instruction in any sub- ject." Most of the students, however, were sturdy, self-respecting youths, who hoped by hard work and self-denial to rise above their origin. The technical colleges lead in numbers, as in reputation. Out of a total registration of 3641, almost one third are under Dean Smith in the Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering. This includes a department of electrical engineering and one of naval architecture, the latter having a naval tank in a canal above a neighboring waterfall, which is only less admirable than that 132 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY at the University of Michigan. In spite of the qualified modesty of its dean, Sibley College is believed at Cornell, and in many other places, to be the most successful department of its kind in the country perhaps in any country. It gave evidence of its quality as early as the Centennial Exposition of 1876. In the fair de- voted to a century of American progress, Sibley exhibited a steam engine of advanced and salable design, surface plates, power lathes, and tools of precision, all constructed for the occasion by its pupils. The country received the exhibit with the neglectful silence which for so many decades made modesty of doubtful value at Ithaca. In a neighboring booth a school of technology in Moscow put forth certain engines and tools of antiquated design and no merchantable value, but exquisitely finished and showily arranged. The head of an American technical school wrote an enthusiastic magazine article declaring that the Russian exhibit pointed out the path of pro- gress to American schools. In his fascinating autobiography, Andrew D. White, the mildest-mannered man that ever com- mitted murder with flat irony, relates that, when 133 CORNELL he was Minister to Russia, one Wischniegradsky, formerly head of the Moscow School of Tech- nology and then Minister of Finance, praised American railroading. The climax was reached when Moscow methods proved inadequate to Rus- sian needs, and " men from American schools, trained in the methods of Cornell, sent out locomotives and machinery of all sorts for the new Trans-Siberian Railway, the starting point of which was this very Moscow, whose technical school was praised by American critics." Another of the triumphs of Sibley was to build a dynamo and with it light the college cam- pus, when electric lighting was all but unknown in the United States. Doctor White also relates that he foresaw the future of electricity, and, overcoming opposition from the university by pledging his own private resources, founded the department of electrical engineering - " the first ever known in the United States and, so far as I can learn, the first ever known in any country." Adding to Sibley the College of Civil Engi- neering (about five hundred), the College of Architecture, the State College of Agriculture, 134 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY and the State College of Veterinary Medicine, the number of technical students is about two thousand, or nearly two thirds of the total regis- tration. The two latter, rejoicing in recent liberal grants from the state, have erected new build- ings and are looking to a rapid increase in qual- ity of instruction and number of students. There is no school of mines. All of these colleges, except possibly that of architecture, are of the highest rank, having a long record of able teaching and famous gradu- ates. Nowhere has the ideal of scientific training in a profession given way to a specious " practi- cality." The engineering students learn to cal- culate actual stresses, and to study the economic application of power ; but they spend little of their time in manual labor, and none of the funds of the institution in operating blast-furnaces and Bessemer converters. The students in agriculture study the chemistry of soils and the preparation of lotions for exterminating destructive insects and parasitic bacteria ; they make reports on the efficiency of fertilizers and on the productivity of various seeds ; they assist in the manufacture of butter and cheese by means of the most recent 135 CORNELL methods ; they study the breeding and the care of cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, and poultry. But the routine work of the farm is delegated to hired men. The colleges of liberal professions are smaller and less distinguished. There is no school of theology. The Law School has a little over two hundred students, all of them taking a three years' course, though a four years' course is offered. Its instruction is mainly by the case system, though some of the teaching is from textbooks. The College of Medicine numbers over three hundred regular students. To gain hospital facilities, the -iwe upper classes are in New York City, where the institution is doing excellent work. The instruction of the tw4ower year$ is given both in New York and in Ithaca. The College of Arts and Sciences numbers only a little more than a fifth of the total regis- tration, and is one third smaller than the single technical department of mechanical and electrical engineering. Its departments of economics, his- tory, and philosophy are strong, owing probably to Doctor White's influence, as are also the de- partments of pure science, owing to the influence of the technical colleges. 136 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY From the outset the instruction has been in- spired by German ideals, and the elective system is espoused with an ardor only equaled by its quixotic champion. Harvard. Museums have been an object of especial care. The library is one of the three or four largest in the country, numbering 350,000 volumes, among which there is a very small proportion of superseded books and other dead matter. Doctor White has given it his vast private collection in history and economics; and it contains also the best collection in the country in Dante, Petrarch, and Romance literature in general. The gradu- ate school, numbering over two hundred, is large in proportion to the undergraduate department. Yet, after all has been said, both are of a second- ary order. In its technical departments, in short, Cornell is seriously rivaled only by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; but in all other depart- ments many institutions overtop it. It is not quite clear that Cornell has succeeded in imbuing its technical students with the true spirit of university education. Some of them are college graduates, but for the most part they 137 CORNELL come straight from the preparatory school. The lectures of the brilliant group of non-resident professors used to assemble and inspire the entire university; but they are a thing of the past, and the regular work is so absorbing that the students have little time for non-technical culture. In law and medicine an increasing number of American institutions keep alive the true univer- sity spirit by requiring the A. B. degree for en- trance. The Cornell Medical School encourages students to take the A. B. by permitting them to count the last year in the course as the first year of medical study, so that both degrees may be taken in seven years. Both Medical and Law Schools now require two years of college work, and the Medical School will next year require four years. But as yet the vast majority of stu- dents are without culture in the humanities. The enlargement of intelligence and the train- ing of the mind are only a part, however, of the function of higher education. Popular common- sense regards our universities as seminars for the propagation of manners as well as of the scientific spirit laboratories for the testing of character as well as of gases. It is often said that one can 138 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY tell a Yale man from a Harvard man or a Prince- ton man at sight. In this matter of university tradition and atmosphere Cornell has, in the scant four decades of its life, made notable progress. It was once the supercilious habit of older insti- tutions to look down on it as a university of farmers. That, in some measure, it still is, but, the fact is very far from being prejudicial. The ambition to rise means energy, but not always ability. Doctor White early devised an original and highly effective device for insuring that those who receive financial aid from the uni- versity shall be fit to profit by it. There are four scholarships for each of the one hundred and fifty assembly districts of the state of New York, and they are awarded by competitive examina- tion. When students already in residence are overtaken by poverty, their fees are remitted and money is advanced, but only in case they are of proved mental calibre. Mediocrity is thus pre- vented from leaving its proper field on the farm or in the mechanic arts to make a failure in the technical and learned professions. The Cornell system has the further advantage of creating a vital bond between the state school system and 139 CORNELL the university a bond which has already re- sulted in raising the standards of both. In so far as Cornell is a farmers' university, the fact is to its soundest advantage. And it is far more than this. Year by year it is attracting larger numbers of the sons of the well-to-do who respect simple and solid efficiency. Over half of the students come from New York ; but every state, territory, and dependency is represented in approximate proportion to its population, from Pennsylvania, which sends over three hundred students, to Indian Territory, Porto Rico, and Hawaii. Twenty -nine foreign countries send one hundred and thirty students, among them all the leading countries of Europe, Asia, and South America. There is a Cosmopoli- tan Club at Cornell, which (the child, in this respect at least, being father of the man) parent of the similar organization at Michigan. Wholesomely sectional in its origin, Cornell is wholesomely national and international. It might almost be taken as a corollary oi this that its spirit is vigorously athletic. Dr. White was himself a boating man, and penn< the first challenge to row that ever passed b< 140 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY tween Yale and Harvard. He has always encour- aged sane inter-university sports, and he recalls with special pride that he gave the shells for the first contests between rival factions at home. It used to be said, and not altogether in jest, that Cornell owed its success on the water to the fact that the men had to climb the hill so many times a day. Now there is a trolley ; but the university is more clearly than ever supreme in boating an eminence held by no other university in any sport, not even by Yale in football. In times past Ithaca seemed prone to assert its own glory. Much is to be forgiven to youth, especially when it is denied the opportunity to prove its mettle. Now Cornell has met its chief opponents and vanquished them, and the once vociferous rowing dog barks no more. Even Yale is forgiven to the extent of occasional baseball games. For variety in athletic prowess Cornell is less remarkable than for excellence in its favorite sport; but in recent years it has made rapid advances in football, baseball, on the track, and in several minor sports. In Ithaca, for the first time, I saw undergraduates making " dope sheets" on the intercollegiate championships, 141 CORNELL and checking them off as the results were an- nounced by telegraph. No influence is more powerful in creating a vigorous and united uni- versity spirit than athletics. The social organization, like that at Michigan, blends the characteristic features of the West and the East. Nowhere, to my knowledge, has the fraternity system been more fully developed. The chapter houses line the lofty, wooded crest of Cascadilla Gorge, in which the song of birds mingles with the song of tumbling waters, or hang on the declivity of the campus hill, com- manding the noble prospect of Cayuga Lake and the restful lap of Ithaca Valley, with its vigorous hills beyond. If the homes of American under- graduates are anywhere more sumptuous and beautiful, I do not know them. Some of the houses are of picturesque Tudor half-timber, others of solid masonry. The interiors are richly and soberly furnished in mahogany, leather, and heavy silk. One dining-room I saw had a vaulted ceiling, with heads of elk and moose on the walls. Almost every house has its tennis court. One chapter has an independent structure for its secret conclaves, starlike in ground plan, and 142 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY with a dome so monumental that, misled by my memories of Grant's tomb, I at first took it for the mausoleum of Ezra Cornell, which proved to be far less impressive. The boyish love of unmeaning mummery and trumped-up mystery, in which our secret socie- ties had their origin, still persists. Some of the houses have the charters of their rivals, stolen in midnight raids into ill-guarded penetralia. It is admitted that a perusal of these reveals the child- ish vacuity that underlies all this miming and mystic hand-gripping ; but the stolen scrolls are not restored. Quite lately one house lost its senior rocking-chairs, carved with the names of departed members, which had incautiously been left at night on the veranda. Priceless booty ! If anything could destroy the impressiveness of the chapter houses, or of the life that centres in them, it would be this small-boyish is it not rather small-girlish ? make-believe. Curiously undemocratic, all this, and out of tune with the foundation of Ezra Cornell ! It is not, as has so often been charged, that the frater- nities breed a spirit of inordinate luxury. The rooms cost no more than habitable apartments 143 CORNELL elsewhere. In some of the houses the table is liberal. For the first time in my eastward wan- derings in fraternity-land, there were eggs and meat for breakfast, soup and fresh vegetables for dinner. But the cost, including service, was only five dollars a week. The expense of building the houses has been borne by alumni. It is true, no doubt, that many fraternity men enjoy a comfort and elegance which they have not had in their own homes, and which they may never achieve for themselves. But it is a poor spirit that would be corrupted by the fact. What higher function has a university than to inspire one to solid and well-ordered living? The material comforts of fraternity life are only the outward expression of an inner spirit of comradeship, which is very real and potent. Each chapter is a family, and re- ceives the bounty of its alumni in the same spirit in which one receives the hospitality of the pa- ternal roof. At Cornell, as elsewhere, the real harm of the fraternity system is that, in intensifying the social life, it narrows it. In order to preserve the spirit of common brotherhood the chapters are limited to from twenty to twenty-five members ; and in 144 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY order to keep up the standard of membership incoming freshmen are pledged before they arrive, or are " rushed " within an inch of their lives from the moment they step off the train. One freshman arrived with his parents. Three fraternities vied for the honor of bearing this Homeric youth into Cornell life. The most active of them went up the line a station and grabbed the boy. The second boarded the train at Ithaca and grabbed his father. The third had to content itself with his mother. But this fraternity had the fortune of the cricket in Hans Andersen's fairy tale, which won a high-jumping contest against the grasshopper and the flea by tactfully jumping into the princess's lap. The husband flew to the rescue of his wife, and the freshman bleated and ran to his parents, so that the fraternity that had begun with the mother landed the son. As the fraternity spirit is stronger than at Michigan, so the tendency toward a general social life is weaker, though still distinct and highly picturesque. One of its earliest manifes- tations was a chapter of T. N. E., a lawless, mock-fraternity organization. In those days the 145 CORNELL authorities had an idea of building up a system of self-government in the student body. T. N. E., by virtue of its pull with the non-fraternity ele- ment, succeeded in swinging one of the elections, and put in power a body of men notorious as leaders in lawlessness. The meetings of these student lawgivers were held in the favorite beer saloon, and the announcements of them in the student daily ended with the very polite request : "Members will please bring their own steins." In his autobiography Doctor White speaks in general terms of his own attempt to make the student body wisely self-governing, and adds, in still more general terms, that it did not prove successful. T. N. E. made it a business in life to ridicule the fraternities, as a result of which the leading chapters forbade their members to join. The society fell before the opposition of its two chosen enemies, the fraternities and the Faculty. There is a junior society and a senior society, the Mummy and the Nelanda, elected on the basis of social popularity. They have no club- rooms, but meet at the favorite beer saloon. It is presumable that the members bring their 146 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY own steins without exhortation. Certainly they wear the club caps. Together with the names and the traditions of the clubs, these are handed down from senior to sophomore, classes with even numbers always belonging to one society, those with odd numbers to the other. The caps are emblazoned with certain Hebrew letters, which to the vulgar view resemble Yiddish kosher-meat signs. The most popular organization is the Savage Club, formed by members of the Glee Club who were entertained by the Savage Club of London, at the time of Cornell's attempt at Henley. To be elected one has to be master of some manner of entertaining, and the meetings generally have the object of extending hospitality to the actors in a company playing in Ithaca. There are also two clubs, the Quill and Dag- ger and the Sphinx Head, to which men are elected on the basis of what they have accom- plished for the university in the various student organizations. Like Michigamua at the Univer- sity of Michigan, they aim to take the place of the senior societies at Yale. In some minor mat- ters they have proved efficient. They have dis- 147 CORNELL suaded certain student reporters from sensation- ally misrepresenting the university, and have even induced a mayor of Ithaca, a Cornell gradu- ate, not to exploit in the college daily his plan for silencing bibulous undergraduates on their way home in the small hours. In parenthesis I may say that Cornell is by no means intemper- ate the fellows have to work too hard. When Henry, the Candy Man, was banished from the campus by the Faculty, the senior societies re- stored him to his ancient privilege. Also, they instituted the custom of the freshmen burning their own caps in the class bonfire. It was once proposed to increase the resemblance to the Yale senior societies by making the clubs secret, but the fraternities proved so jealous of their hold on their members that the plan was abandoned; which suggests that these senior societies, like Michigamua, are not destined to achieve the pre- dominance of their prototypes. The most original and picturesque student cus- tom at Cornell is Spring Day, the end of which is to promote hilarity and support the athletic teams. As soon as the May weather permits, the whole university turns out on the campus in car- 148 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY nival array. For days before the student body has been agog with anticipation. Every morning the Cornell "Sun" prints some such squib as this : " President Roosevelt slipped up yesterday on his Cabinet tennis court, and, landing on his hip-pocket, broke a twenty-dollar bill. He announces that he will come to Ithaca and spend the change on Spring Day." In a huge tent on the campus fellows from the Law School convene in gowns and wigs to illus- trate " how justice is dispensed with at Cornell." Outside the college wit officiates as barker. It is safer to heed his admonitions and buy a ticket, for impromptu constables make a business of haling in for public trial those who do not. A professor of the legal Faculty was once tried solemnly and in form for " busting " the presid- ing judge in one of his courses. The leading student organizations vie in pre- senting spectacles. The Cosmopolitan Club stands at a distinct advantage. A Latin- American stu- dent, devotee of the bull-fight, rigged up a papier- mache bull on wheels, and slew it valiantly in the orthodox manner. This was the origin of the report, made much of in South American papers, 149 CORNELL that the United States, in spite of its professed abhorrence of bloody sport, practiced bull-fight- ing in its universities. Another Cosmopolitan stunt was to represent a negro prize-fight with the aid of burnt cork. The great hit in connec- tion with this was a Chinaman in gorgeous silk costume, and with his pigtail (which his Emperor had permitted him to cut off when he left home) securely tied in place, who announced through a megaphone : " Dass nigga plize-fight ! " In the evening a musical show is given indoors, with the aid of the Savages. Last spring the festival netted over two thousand dollars. At Cornell, as at other American universities, the one great social problem centres in the non- fraternity men. In spite of the broad develop- ment of fraternities, two thirds of the student body lodge and board in the town, and lead the life of small cliques. The undergraduates are aware of their necessities, and are already collect- ing funds for a grill-room, located in the Y. M. C. A. building on the campus, which is to serve the purposes of a Union ; but the project is far less promising, even, than that at Michigan. Like Princeton and Harvard, and, as we shall 150 A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY find, like the universities of Chicago and Wis- consin also, Cornell is seeking the remedy for student disorganization in the "quad/' or resi- dential hall. Doctor White, as he records in his autobiography, has dreamed from his youth of an American university that shall house its undergraduates in separate communities and in beautiful, well-ordered buildings like those of the English colleges. Mentioning the subject to Pre- sident Schurman, I found that his mind had traveled the same path. For years he has agitated the subject in his annual reports. I quote from a report of nine years ago : " No provision is made by Cornell University for the social life of the men students. In the absence of halls of residence for students, Greek-letter fraternities have sprung up ; but, cordially as those are to be welcomed, they cannot take the place of univer- sity halls, for they rest on an entirely different, and indeed antagonistic, principle. A residen- tial hall is open to every student; a fraternity house is closed to all except the few who are invited to become members. The one is demo- cratic, the other selective. Hence, if one looks deep enough, it will be apparent that the more 151 CORNELL fully developed the system of Greek-letter frater- nities at a university, the greater is the need of residential halls. And if, in addition to such halls, there were a dining-hall in which the men from the fraternity houses and men from the public halls took their meals together, the ar- rangement would make for democracy and fra- ternity and tend to eliminate cliquishness and social sectarianism. The dream of residential halls, dining-hall, and club or common room will undoubtedly one day be fulfilled at Cornell Uni- versity." The. scheme which is here outlined lacks one feature of that contemplated at Chicago and Wisconsin. It does not provide that each hall have its own individual commons. President Schurman admitted that no agency was more powerful in developing community life and spirit than a separate gathering place for breakfasting, lunching, and dining. There is an eternal and apparently inalienable connection between food and fellowship. He at once made inquiries of the steward of the women's commons as to the rela- tive cost of feeding students by the hundred and by the thousand. If the buying was done for the 152 ', ' ' .' ' ' ' *' '' A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY gross number to be fed, we found, it would add only a fraction of a dollar a week per student to feed them in communities of two hundred. In one respect Cornell has a unique advantage. There is an abundance of land near the campus, of no great value, much of which is already owned by the university. Instead of a quadran- gle, each hall could have an inclosed garden, with plenty of tennis courts, and even squash courts and handball courts for winter. Sloping down from the campus toward the lake and the valley is a tract which would afford a lordly view and throw the architecture of the buildings into splendid relief. The women students already have a residential hall and commons. Otherwise, their lot is not the most fortunate. The men regard them as having "butted in" and impaired the standing of what is otherwise a typical Eastern university of first rank. The women hold the balance of power politi- cally, and in elections manifest the solidarity of hall life by voting in a body. It is said that the man who does not "fuss" is a political corpse. Before elections Sage Hall is a mighty stamping 153 CORNELL ground. One candidate is said to have given every girl in his class a box of candy, and an- other a box of flowers. The flower man is said to have fared better; but let it be recorded to the credit of the sex that both were defeated. It may be inferred that the determination to make the university spirit dominate the technical is mostly as yet in the air. This is not quite the case. The recently-built Hall of the Humanities named after Goldwin Smith is one of the very few educational edifices of real beauty in Amer- ica, and is substantial earnest of Cornell deter- mination to develop as an institution of liberal culture. It has often been said, and no doubt is in some measure true, that the great danger in American life is the dominance of the spirit of mere utility. No sign of the times could be more promising than the fact that our foremost tech- nical university should be bending its chief energies toward the humanities. CHICAGO : A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT rpHROUGHOUT its young and strenuous life -- the University of Chicago has had to strug- gle against two damaging accusations that it is a Standard Oil institution, and that it is a hot- bed of revolutionary doctrine. Across its official letterheads is inscribed : " Founded by John D. Rockefeller;" and from day to day the news- paper press has flaunted in staring headlines irresponsible utterances of its Faculty, in litera- ture and in sociology. Either fact would con- demn an ordinary institution of learning. Shall this one survive them both ? For fifteen years it has not only survived them, but prospered exceedingly. That is won- derful until you stop to think of it. Extremes have met, and in a measure neutralized each other. The generation that has invented the per- fume concert is not at a loss to inject into the 155 CHICAGO taint of money a countertaint to make it nose- able. Do these instructors of youth live on monopolistic spoils? At least they can show that they have retained their liberty by proclaiming abhorrent sensational doctrine. The institution is popularly known as the Midway University the implication being that it is the intellectual and spiritual descendant of the multifarious side- show which flourished on its site at the time of its founding, during the Chicago Fair. It is all very characteristic of the most paradoxical and turbulent of modern communities the so- called Garden City, the flowers in which are the fire-belching chimneys of industry and anar- chistic bombs. Socialistic Chicago jeers at the university because of its founder, and conserva- tive Chicago denounces its radical teachings. Cha- otic? Yes, if you will. But in half a generation the university has taken its place, in size and in the character of its teaching, as in wealth, among the foremost in the land. Thus spake Zara- thustra: There needs must be chaos to give birth to a star. The chief source of misrepresentation has been the Chicago press, and through it the press of 156 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT the entire country. One of the most profitable means of self-support for students is to write up the university news. Flagrant exaggerations in- crease the earnings, and are welcomed as evidence of journalistic skill. A characteristic example occurred in recent memory at the University of Michigan. A pro- fessor enlivened his lecture with a little talk on various conventions in courtship. The student- journalist representing a paper that boasts itself, and not without color of justification, the best all-around newspaper in the country re- ported that he illustrated his lecture by getting a woman pupil up on the platform and acting out with her in realistic detail the form of pro- posal and acceptance which he himself pre- ferred. The item was widely copied and hilari- ously commented upon. The undergraduate was expelled, and was immediately taken on the staff of the great newspaper. When applied to Chicago University, the effect of such methods may easily be imagined. The case of Professor Triggs is well known. That he lacked common-sense and balance is obvious. None the less, he was the victim of persecution. 157 CHICAGO His first leap into the spot-light was the result of a speech at a fraternity dinner on the topic of " The Most Important Question in the World." He said that for himself it was what to name his new baby. Postprandially foolish the remark may have been ; but what shall be said of a press that made a sensation of it ? From that time whatever he said and he had the gift of tongue was wildly exaggerated and shamelessly perverted. Rockefeller, he once remarked, was as original a genius in industrial combination as Shakespeare in the poetic drama a proposition that is at least debatable. He was reported as having said that Rockefeller was as great a genius as Shakespeare, and the incident was so twisted as to give the impression that the chief end of the university was to glorify its founder. I was told, and on the best authority, that Triggs would have lost his position in the uni- versity much sooner if it had not been for such persecutions. Above everything President Har- per valued liberty of speech, and long refused to abandon one of his Faculty under fire. A simi- larly creditable scruple prevents the expulsion of offending reporters. The Faculty is indulgent 158 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT of self-supporting students, and, when ques- tioned, they usually maintain very plausibly that the work of falsification is done by copy editors in the newspaper office. In point of fact the teaching of the university tends toward socialism rather than toward the order which produced its founder. The offspring of Yale, its primary ideal in instruction is thai? of scientific culture, as it is pursued in our East^ ern universities. The department of economics happens, rather fortunately, to be under a man of well-balanced opinions ; but that of sociology is very advanced. Professor Charles Zueblin advocates experi- mental marriages and pensioning mothers in proportion to the size of their families, propo- sitions precisely in line with the system that in- volves free love and the upbringing of children by the state. Professor W. I. Thomas recently described " the so-called sporting woman " as leading "what from the psychological stand- point may be called the normal life," and said that her kind " make good wives uncommonly good wives, some of them, because they have had their fling." None of these opinions, as far as I 159 CHICAGO know, have been uttered before the students ; but none the less they have caused alarm as the opinions of those in authority in a coeducational institution. Professor Thomas is an able and sci- entific sociologist, though at times an irrespons- ible writer ; and when he republished the article in question in his " Sex and Society " he modified it in accordance with the unsensational truth. These incidents mark the extreme of their kind, and are very far indeed from indicating the ideas of the university as a whole. A searching inquiry convinced me that the great bulk of the teaching and the general life of the undergraduates is intelligently conserva- tive and in all ways sound. It cannot be said to have any real connection either with capitalism or with socialism. It is the function of a great uni- versity to teach, not what to think, but how to think. Its spirit is that of scientific culture un- hampered by authority, the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn without any inspiration but the love of truth. President Harper's plan was big, to the verge of grandiosity. His university was to be complete and perfect, combining all the ideals 160 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT recognized in American education. Himself a graduate of Yale and a professor there, when called to Chicago he held firmly in mind the two principles of the Eastern university that of the liberal training of character, both mental and moral, which we have inherited from the English universities ; and that of pure scientific culture, which in recent decades we have adapted from the German. To these was to be added the prin- ciple of technical education which, already re- cognized even at Yale and Harvard, is dominant in the newer universities of the West. If his physical strength had been commensu- rate, there is no telling to what heights he might have raised the institution during his lifetime. But at the outset his physique gave warning of a breakdown. The only wonder is that he sur- vived his gigantic labors so long. To the end, however, his mind and will were master. On his death-bed he dictated incessantly to a stenographer, bringing to such completion as was possible his labors as a scholar and an educator. There is something grimly terrible in the composure with which he met his end. He prescribed in minute detail the arrangements 161 CHICAGO for his funeral, even directing that the watchers who guarded his coffin should be served with luncheon at midnight. In a recent address before the Yale alumni of Ohio, President Hadley described the Western in- stitutions as local rather than national, and lack- ing in " an atmosphere charged with tradition." The great Eastern institutions have expanded with the nation from its earliest beginnings, year by year, generation by generation. The few Colonists and Indians of the seventeenth century have slowly grown to three and four thousand young men from all corners of the land, from many nations widely scattered over the globe. The earliest curriculum of divinity, spell- ing, and arithmetic has expanded until it includes all modern arts, sciences, and professions, each a spontaneous growth from the soil of our national life. The sod is enriched with the tares of old harvests, nourishing even in decay. The Univer- sity of Chicago, on the other hand, has sprung forth out of nothing, as if by a stroke of magic. And if it has the glamour of enchantment, it has also something that seems as yet fantastic and of questionable stability. It is a mingling of old and 162 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT new, of native and foreign "the fabric of a dream " that time is only gradually proving not to be " baseless." Its location, a mere quarter of an hour from the heart of the metropolis, is likely to prove un- favorable to the atmosphere of liberal culture. The fate which has overtaken Columbia and Pennsylvania, in spite of their age and traditions, seems inevitable. A large proportion of the stu- dents live at their homes in Chicago ; so large a proportion that certain even of the best fraterni- ties have had trouble in getting members to live in the houses. And a larger proportion have neither time nor ambition for anything more than a bare degree. But they do get an experi- ence in the vital realities of life, and with it a mental and moral training more valuable than liberal culture, highly as that is to be prized. On the publication of President Hadley's re- marks the Chicago press, which in the manufac- ture of " news " has never hesitated to traduce neighboring institutions, spoke a few words of simple truth and sense. Admitting their lack of social prestige, and of all the graces of ease and leisure, it laid convincing emphasis on the intel- 163 CHICAGO lectual seriousness and practical earnestness of Western universities. Certain of President Harper's innovations once seemed to strike at the root of the spirit of American education, and notably his "quarter system." Elsewhere the unit of residence and instruction is a year of eight or nine months, which must be satisfactorily completed in order to count for a degree. During the summer the entire plant lies virtually idle. Classes come and go in phalanx ; and in class unity, it is thought, lies the local spirit and tradition, the genius of the place. At Chicago the unit is a quarter of three months, at the end of which every course of instruction is brought to a definite close ; and the teaching con- tinues throughout the year. For both teachers and taught this means a vast increase of freedom. As elsewhere, a normal year's work consists of three quarters. But a professor who so chooses may teach six consecutive quarters, and at the end of them have an uninterrupted vacation for study or travel of half a year. Or, if he is will- ing to take less pay, he may teach at the rate of only two quarters yearly, thus gaining an annual 164 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT vacation of six months, or a biennial vacation of twelve. For the students the liberty is even greater. The majority of them take their degrees in the usual manner, for four years' work of three quar- ters each, omitting the summer quarter, and so maintain considerable class spirit. But a student may, if he chooses to work continuously, gain his degree in three instead of four years, or he may make any interval between quarters. Many stu- dents have left college to teach, completing the work for their degrees in successive summer quarters. One spread his undergraduate career over fourteen years, not qualifying as bachelor of arts until he was father of a family. In a section as busy as the Middle West there is abundant use for such an institution. The sacrifices often made to get a degree are little short of heroic. Many students light street lamps, tend furnaces, wait on tables, wash dishes. One student, an athlete of national reputation, tutors in his spare hours all day and manages a tele- phone exchange until early morning. The situation has its dangers. On the one hand, boys are tempted to strive for a university educa- 165 CHICAGO tion whose abilities would be better employed in the manual arts and trades; while, on the other, able fellows break down under the combined strains of money-making and study. But it will be a sad day for our democracy when it ceases to be the ambition of our youth to rise through learning. According to an estimate lately made by Dr. James H. Canfield, one per cent of American men are liberally educated, and these hold forty per cent of all positions of trust and distinction. As yet both time and money have been lacking to build up the technical departments at Chicago. Industrial chemistry, it is true, is very ably taught, and the departments of pure science are among the most advanced in the country; but there are no schools of engineering, civil, mechanical, electrical, or mining; there is no school of archi- tecture or of agriculture. The utilitarian needs of the Middle West are in a large measure already supplied, and very well supplied, by the state uni- versities. Not only the University of Wisconsin, but the University of Illinois at Champaign, has an agricultural and engineering department of the highest efficiency. Purdue, in Indiana, has an 166 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT admirable school of engineering with a strongly "practical" bent. President Harper's idea seems to have been to give the West the kind of education it lacked rather than the kind it wanted. Yet there are manifest difficulties in starting a new institution against the grain, and especially in face of the tide of Western youths of greater leisure which has so long been flowing east. Mr. Rockefeller's latest gift has been spent for the technical schools. Original as was President Harper's scheme in certain details, it is prevailingly imitative, even assimilative. At the outset a complete prospectus of the university as a whole, worked out in the minutest detail, was sent for criticism to over fifty American institutions, with a view to coming in touch with all the latest and most progressive developments in education. In every case in which an older university had made itself preeminent in the teaching of a particular subject, its system and organization were reproduced. Thus the Harvard department of English was exactly copied, and placed in the hands of a group of its most bril- liant young graduates. The schools of the learned professions have 167 CHICAGO advanced slowly, but with the same minutenes and breadth of purpose. The Law School is a replica of that at Harvard : it teaches by the case system, and is in charge of a distinguished pro- fessor of law from Cambridge. In his plans for the Medical School, President Harper's eclecticism reached a climax. Over on the West Side of Chicago is the Rush Medical College, one of the largest and ablest in the coun- try obviously ripe for benevolent assimilation. There are human difficulties in the way of such a plan, as Harvard has found in the course of its efforts to incorporate the Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology. As yet Rush is no more than benevolently affiliated. The first two years of the university course in medicine are pursued in the admirable scientific laboratories on the Midway, after which the classes migrate to the elder institution. The Divinity School, like the university as a whole, is nominally Baptist, and its head is a Baptist, as are the president and a majority of the board of trustees. But in practice this university is scarcely more. Baptist than Harvard is Unita- rian or Yale Congregational. The Faculty of the 168 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT Divinity School is so criti'cal and scientific as to be a source of local amusement or scandal. It is in the graduate school that the university has made its strongest mark. At the outset lead- ing professors in all subjects were induced by the magnificence of the new foundation and by liberal salaries to migrate to the new institution. Few, even of our oldest universities, excelled Chi- cago, either in the number and variety of sub- jects taught or in the ability and reputation of the men teaching them. The university library, containing 367,442 volumes and 1287 current periodicals, is one of the three or four largest in the country. Laboratories and museums are equally strong. The students in the graduate school reached, in 1906-07, the extraordinary number of 1121. The university issues twelve periodicals recording original advances in science and philology, several of which are of world-wide reputation. The new president of the university, Harry Pratt Judson, is an older man than his predeces- sor older in temperament as in years. Doctor Harper's chief failing, and especially from the point of view of the founder, was the sanguine 169 CHICAGO largeness of his undertaking and the lavishness of his expenditures. Under Doctor Judson the institution has for the first time become approxi- mately self-supporting on the basis of its endow- ment. For the present the work of expansion proceeds slowly. The main effort is to perfect the departments already in being by an increase in equipment and in funds available for teaching. Yet the original aim of completeness is held firmly in view. President Harper's " immense forethoughtful- ness" is nowhere more clearly evident than in his plans for the residential and social life of the students. The apparent failure of the Eastern type of university to make the local atmosphere and traditions permeate the student body as a whole must have been obvious to him; and he had, besides, to counteract a new set of forces tending to render undergraduate life uncompan- ionable and unhomelike the distractions of the city and the absorbing earnestness of the students, the disintegrating influences of the quarter sys- tem, and the large proportion of graduate stu- dents. The scheme he hit on to give character and tone to the student body was identical with 170 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT that projected at Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, and, as we shall see, at the University of Wiscon- sin : the residential hall. Chicago is the first of these universities to make any actual progress in the matter. Three of the community organizations, one for men and two for women, are mere clubs of students resid- ing off the campus or even in the city, and have no home except a clubroom appointed by the Faculty in one of the university buildings. Nine of them, five for men and four for women, have separate residential buildings on the campus, built like the traditional dormitories at Yale and Har- vard. Each of these has as its head a member of the Faculty appointed by the president, and is subject to certain general university statutes ; but each elects its own house committee and other officers, and is virtually self-governing. None of them has a separate dining-hall. The students take their meals in two large halls, one for each sex. The women's halls are open to any student, appointments being made by the registrar. For three months the newcomer lives on probation as a guest, and cannot become a member except by 171 CHICAGO election of the community. All the halls have a common room or parlor for general use, recep- tions and dances, in which freshmen, upperclass- men, and graduates meet, to the manifest advan- tage of all. The farthest advanced of the men's halls is Hitchcock, a very beautiful and richly-furnished building, divided into five sections or entries connected outside by a beautiful Gothic cor- ridor. The entry nearest the athletic field is given over to the athletic teams in the training sea- son, an arrangement which should prove fruitful in developing precisely that esprit de corps which a city university is pitifully prone to lack. The entry at the other end has a hall library and a lounging-room in which breakfast is served. It is the conscious purpose of the authorities, as soon as may be, to make the hall of limited size, with individual common rooms and dining- rooms, the normal centre of undergraduate life. Such a plan, as I have repeatedly indicated, is inevitable if the American university is to make its spirit and traditions permeate the entire body of students. But this university has, as it seems 172 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT to me, failed to conceive the residential hall in its logically perfect form. The organizations in- dividually are small; the English universities have found that the number most favorable to social and athletic life is somewhere between one hundred and seventy-five and two hundred and twenty-five. And it is probable that a hall the life of which centres in a closed quadrangle is more likely than a dormitory hall to develop individuality of character and compactness. But for the quadrangular hall the university has not enough land. Fraternity and club life also bear the stamp of President Harper's mind. It was his purpose to build each chapter a house on the campus and rent it at a minimum price; but the undergradu- ates proved untractable. It is said that they objected to being herded together on a basis of seeming equality and here again we come upon the curious lack of democracy in fraternity life. They are, however, administered as halls and subject to the general rules for halls an arrangement that is said to have lessened the disorder often incident to the fraternity system. There are fourteen undergraduate, five medical, 173 CHICAGO and three law chapters, with an average member- ship of something over twenty. To represent the student body as a whole, Pre- sident Harper devised a junior council for the two lower classes and a senior council for the two upper. The elections to the councils are free from machine politics, and the membership in consequence very representative. They manage such matters of general interest as the junior promenade. A characteristic example of their activity occurred lately, when they protested against the prices at the university bookstore. Each class has its society, made up mainly of fraternity men, though there are usually two or three independents. The senior society, the Owl and Snake, like similar societies at other frater- nity universities, such as Michigan and Cornell, corresponds closely in its functions to the senior societies at Yale. Its membership is chosen strictly on the basis of prominence in the leading undergraduate activities. Its gatherings are so secret that it is not generally known where it meets, or whether it has a house of its own. Its influence is said to be strong and well directed. There are other undergraduate societies, as, for 174 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT example, the Black Friars, who give a college play every year. To supplement the exclusive organizations halls and fraternities and societies there is the Reynolds Club, which is open to all students of the university. Its function is that of the Har- vard Union, which in turn was modeled on the celebrated Oxford Union, with the exception that it does not hold debates a feature which has fallen into subordinate position in its prototypes. It has bowling-alleys and billiard-tables, a library and periodical room, and very beautiful rooms in which it holds monthly dances. Thus even those students without special affiliations are afforded a point of contact with the undergraduate life. Socially as educationally, in short, the Univer- sity of Chicago has projected, and in a consider- able measure realized, an ideal type of the Amer- ican university, and the only type, as far as I can see, which will ever be able to restore it to its original and normal character as a school for manners and morals as well as for the mind. It has done this in spite of its unfortunate situation near the city, and in the face of no little opposi- tion from the very element they are seeking to 175 CHICAGO benefit. The undergraduates used to sing a deri- sive song, " The Profs Make Student Customs at the U!" But, in the end, it will be able to say that every student finds the way open to an asso- ciation with the body of undergraduate life which is calculated to bring him normally and easily under the influence of its traditions. What these traditions now are an outsider can only imperfectly surmise. One thing seems rea- sonably certain : they are strenuous to the point of exuberance. It is not only the "Profs" who have been busy in making student customs. A graduate, whose undergraduate life saw the birth of the institution, told me that the fellows were singing a sentimental college song about Old Haskell, of the type of Old Nassau, before the varnish on the door was dry. The composer of the first undergraduate burlesque, now a pro- fessor in the English department, related that the show set a high example of "spontaneity." His best topical song, which had the refrain, " Girl Wanted ! " was producing less than its due effect, so at the end of a stanza a member of the com- pany whooped things up by smashing the glass in one of the doors, which almost stampeded the 176 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT audience. Those were the good old days. There is no such spontaneity nowadays, the librettist lamented. To the superficial Eastern view the West is wild and woolly, just as to the Western mind the East is lackadaisical and snobbish. But there is no virtue without its compensating defect, no defect without its virtue. The qualities of the Chicago undergraduate are democratic good hu- mor and efficiency. A fraternity house at which a graduate had invited me to dine proved to be without a cook. For several days things had been up to the stu- dent steward, whose name, it appeared, was Bill. At the outset Bill spilled the entire pepper-box into the soup, with the result that certain finicky graduates turned up their noses and sneezed at his stewardship. But the dinner as a whole was edible. At the freshman table it even inspired the exuberant singing of the fraternity song. Taken for all in all, this makeshift meal was far better than many I have eaten in Memorial Hall, and cost the students less. And it went off with a gusto of comradeship beyond the power of any high-salaried chef to inspire. 177 CHICAGO The life of the women, I was told, is of a higher social quality than that of the men, and higher than that of the women in most other coeduca- tional institutions. Most young Chicago men of leisure and means still go East to college, while the women of state universities are mostly from local rural communities. The high standard of instruction at Chicago in polite learning at- tracts young women of the best traditions in the city, and to some extent from the entire West and South. Chicago was fortunate, moreover, in hav- ing for its first Dean of Women Alice Freeman Palmer, whose large and dignified ideal, "the union of learning with the fine art of living," gave permanent character to the women's halls. It is the settled policy of the authorities to lessen the mingling of the sexes both socially and in the classroom in President Harper's phrase, to segregate them. As in most universities, coedu- cation had its origin in an economic necessity ; it increased the number of students and avoided duplicating the instruction. As the funds of the university permit, the sexes are to be separated, and especially in the earlier years. Theoretically there is much to be said for 178 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT comradeship between youths and maidens ; but, practically, it is said at Chicago to have worked ill in both directions. On one hand it forces the Faculty to exert its influence against undergrad- uate engagements, and on the other it encourages bachelorhood. One unmarried graduate relates that he had deep tribulations while in college in the effort to make his fraternity pay its coal bills before giving dances. Another, also unmarried, alleges that he lost the illusion necessary to mat- rimony by crawling into a sweater for an early lecture and seeing the girls with whom he had romantically danced into the small hours of the night before, heavy-eyed and hastily dressed. President Harper had all a Yale man's love of athletic victory, and a shrewd sense of its value in attracting students. At the great games a prominent box was always reserved for him, and usually another beside it in which he managed to land the most distinguished personalities of the hour. Long after he was too ill to sit in the open, he witnessed contests from a window in the gym- nasium overlooking the athletic field. In A. Alonzo Stagg, double hero of the base- ball and football fields as a Yale undergraduate, 179 CHICAGO and later a paid coach, President Harper found a general of consummate craft. With an eleven of slender Y. M. C. A. men he once scored against his alma mater; and he has been no less successful with the sparse material of this new city uni- versity. A few years ago he had the problem of meeting an eleven from Michigan which even he regarded as unconquerable. He trained his team to play a defensive game only, in the hope of pulling off a tie at nothing to nothing. His men checked their mighty opponents in every one of their repertory of plays, and by the most fortu- nate of accidents succeeded in forcing the full- back to a safety, so that they won by the score of two to nothing. Yale luck has become Chicago luck, being spelled in both places with a p before it. In the East there was much discussion over the fact that Stagg, though by virtue of his office a professional, once played on the Chicago eleven which made not only his own team, but those who played against it, technically professionals. The answer of the West is characteristic. With- out him the team of the new university would have been too weak to deserve to meet its rivals, which was why no objection was made. The in- 180 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT cident happened in the fall of 1892, and has long been forgotten. The question of importing paid athletes is, however, a live wire, to be handled with care. The East has had its periods of iniquity, and is even now none too virtuous. The West, with its lack of athletic standards and traditions, and its exuberant delight in success, was ripe for all evil influences. At the great universities, it is said, promising material was, until lately, eagerly com- peted for and liberally paid. In many univer- sities members of the faculties connived at the traffic, and even assisted in it; but I have every reason to think that, contrary to the general be- lief, the Faculty of the University of Chicago in general, and Stagg in particular, kept their skirts uncommonly clean. When athletes were imported it was by irresponsible graduates. To-day the checks against professionalism are not less rigid in the West than in the East. No man is allowed to compete until he has been in good standing an entire year, and he cannot compete more than three years all told. For the present, athletics in the West are pure. Stagg' s position is far different from that of 181 CHICAGO the paid coach, or even of the one-man instructor in athletics. Physical culture is a part of the curriculum. The student may choose whatever exercise he likes and is fitted for, but he must take ten " majors " of some sort, or he does not qualify for his degree. The ideal of the university, which Stagg has repeatedly voiced, is that no man shall graduate who has not learned to do at least some one thing for the health of his body. Here again forethought has done what it can to correct the tendencies natural to a city university. The most wholesome form of athletic compe- tition, it is generally conceded, is that between rival factions within the university, in that it en- gages the largest number of men in the form of sport most highly colored by generous rivalry and least likely to lead to notoriety and animosity. It is here that the English universities, with their twenty distinct colleges, have their most enviable advantage. If ever the Chicago halls develop in sufficient size and number, all the essential features of the English system will obtain. Already an in- telligent effort has been made in this direction. The university is divided for athletic purposes on the basis of the Schools of Science, Arts, Phi- 182 A UNIVERSITY BY ENCHANTMENT losophy, etc. It is to the development of active home contests, and not to arbitrary abolishments, which they have often attempted in vain, that the Faculty may look in the hope to minimize the evil effects of the great games. Architecturally, the recent and wholesale ori- gin of the university has been fortunate. What is bad in institutions sooner or later perishes, but bad buildings are a permanent offense. It is no exaggeration to say that through all the period of their greatest expansion the architecture of the Eastern universities has been monstrous. Harvard and Yale suffer from what Charles Eliot Norton used to call the plague of Romanesque. And there is that worse plague of pseudo-Gothic. It was not until the era of the University of Chicago that we discovered the true style of academic archi- tecture genuine residential Gothic. And Chi- cago had the further advantage of being able to plan a university as a uniform and consistent architectural whole. The site is flat and the buildings are of necessity somewhat crowded; but the latest acquisitions of land have been shrewdly made on the farther side of the Mid- way, thus virtually incorporating into the site 183 CHICAGO of the university a pleasance six hundred feet wide. The most recently erected buildings are posi- tively and memorably beautiful. They are copies or close imitations of masterpieces of the English universities made by Mr. Coolidge of the Boston firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge. The Law School has of necessity wandered rather far from the chapel of Trinity, Cambridge. Mitchell tower, to a layman's eye, at least, though simple and forcible, lacks the refinement and the spirituality of the tower of Magdalen, Oxford. But the din- ing-hall is a faithful copy of that of Christ Church, Oxford, while the interior of Reynolds Club is an original creation of astonishing rich- ness and beauty. VI WISCONSIN: A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY ASTERN educators were surprised, four years ago, when a member of the British Parliament, who had come to this country on the Moseley educational commission, the Honorable William Henry Jones, placed the University of Wisconsin in a list of our five leading institu- tions of learning, and excluded from the list Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Johns Hopkins. Surprise changed to skepticism when he proceeded to state his opinion that Wisconsin stood above even the four other institutions which he named as of the first order, Harvard, Cornell, Michigan, and California being, in fact, the foremost university of the land. Many of the reasons he gave for this opinion were vague and unconvincing. Wisconsin is not strong in graduate study ; it has no schools of architecture, medicine, or theology. But he was 185 WISCONSIN on firm ground when he said : u The University of Wisconsin is a wholesome product of a com- monwealth of three millions of people ; sane, in- dustrial, and progressive. It knits together the professions and labors ; it makes the fine arts and the anvil one." This judgment touches the bed- rock of fact highly characteristic fact. The older institutions of the East are the pro- duct of two distinct currents of university tradi- tion. Upon the ideal of liberal education, train- ing in mind and in morals, they superimposed that of original research. Their watchword is twofold character and truth. The state universities of the West lay chief stress upon immediate practical results the technique of industry. Foremost in devotion to this ideal is Wisconsin. Its watchword is utility. As President Van Hise has frequently expressed it, its aim is to make the university the instru- ment of the state. It is in this respect that Wis- consin ranks first among American institutions. That it does so is the result of historical circum- stances, which until recent years worked blindly, and, as even the university itself thought, most unfortunately. It was a case of graft in lands. 186 A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY By a wise provision of the Federal Government, tracts were apportioned throughout the West at the organization of the various states for the endowment of state universities ; and these grants were supplemented by the Morrill Act of 1862, which set aside lands, proportionate to the representation of each state in the Union, for the endowment of colleges teaching agriculture and the industrial arts. The trust was a noble one, and Wisconsin proved faithless to it. It was an agricultural community. In the minds of the rustic fathers, education was a wasteful luxury. The great need of the commonwealth, they thought, was population. The legislature sold the lands of both grants at less than one half their market value at that time, for the al- leged purpose of attracting settlers. The case was similar in most of the states of the Old Northwest. Michigan proved an honorable excep- tion, husbanding her grants with wise foresight, and thereby winning primacy among the state universities, both in wealth and in numbers. In the New Northwest several states, notably Wash- ington and Idaho, have profited by her example. A single instance will illustrate how costly Wis- 187 WISCONSIN .consin's course proved. From the Morrill granl Cornell, thanks to the energy and foresight the founder, now receives an annual income oi three hundred and fifty thousand dollars ; consin receives twelve thousand dollars. The folly of the Wisconsin fathers did nol stop here. It had been the wise intention of th< Federal Government that the 'lands should be an endowment in perpetuity for the maintenance and development of the university, the states themselves supplying such funds as were neces- sary for buildings; but Wisconsin obliged its university to spend its endowment for buildings, reducing its income to a bagatelle. Eetarded and enfeebled, the institution barely escaped confis- cation. A movement to disband it and apply its funds to local sectarian colleges failed by the nar- rowest margin. Of all the great state univer- sities, Wisconsin is still the poorest in independ- ent income. What so narrowly missed being its destruction has proved the source of its present distinction. Living on the bounty of the state legislature, it early learned the policy of producing results of such immediate utility as were most likely to 188 A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY impress the rural mind. In the phrase of a local satirist, its ideal became, not culture, but agri- culture. 1 Its first great achievement was a milk test, in- vented by Professor Stephen M. Babcock, of the Agricultural School. Together with the method of instantly separating the cream from each day's yield by means of centrifugal force, invented by Dr. De Laval, of Sweden, the Babcock test forms the basis of the immense cooperative industry of modern dairying. It was estimated in 1900 that it saved the cheese factories, dairymen, and farm- ers of Wisconsin alone eight hundred thousand dollars a year, or twice the current expenses of the university for all departments ; and it is of proportionate value to every state of the Union, to every agricultural country of the world, from Switzerland to Australia. Other departments of the university, though they have been less successful in adding to the wealth of the state, are inspired by the same aim. The Engineering School has invented a method of thawing frozen pipes without digging 1 The work of the schools of agriculture, at Wisconsin and elsewhere, is described at length in the following chapter. 189 WISCONSIN them up, and a method of producing absolutely pure iron by electrolysis. When the new hydraulic laboratory was installed, it turned its attention to the problem of pumping the water which is de- stroying the value of the lead and zinc mines of the southwestern portion of the state. In imitation of the agricultural " short courses " held by many col- leges of agriculture during the Christmas vaca- tion, for farmers and their wives, the Wisconsin School of Engineering has instituted a midsummer course for artisans and apprentices, designed to teach them the rudiments of the science of engi- neering. The instruction has been eagerly sought and pursued. Though the university has no medical school, it is busy with the problem of eradicating un- wholesome conditions, and hopes within a decade virtually to eliminate such infectious diseases as whooping-cough, measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and typhoid fever, and to make great headway even against tuberculosis. Unable to provide clinics for the education of doctors, owing to its situation in a small city, it is putting the pro- fession out of business by diminishing the crop of disease. 190 A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY In a not dissimilar manner, the Faculty, owing to the situation of the university in the state capital, is able to render valuable practical assist- ance to the legislators. Thus the committee at present framing a public utilities bill has en- listed Professor John R. Commons to advise it as to the economic wisdom of proposed measures, and Professor E. A. Gilman to pass on their con- stitutionality. No less than ten members of the Faculty serve on state commissions, ranging from livestock sanitation to the taxation of the railways, real estate, and mortgages. Professor McCarthy has organized a library bureau for the legislators, the purpose of which is to put them in touch with the books that throw light on any subject they may happen to have to deal with. In several cases the requisite information has been collected by students of economics and so- ciology, so that even the undergraduates have taken a hand ,in the practical work of law- making. The methods pursued in order to impress the agricultural legislator are sometimes strange enough, from the point of view of educators of the liberal and purely scientific type. In his latest 191 WISCONSIN biennial report, President Van Hise devotes a page and more to proving that professors engaged in writing books about their original investiga- tion are not mere idlers wasting the funds of the state, but a valuable type of teacher. The report of the Dean of the College of Agriculture is enthusiastic over the discovery within the state of what he calls "the world's record cow/' a bovine that produces yearly almost her own weight in butter ; and on the next page promises the solution of " the all-absorbing question of the American farmer" by the invention of a machine for milking cows. A prominent Eastern educator, famed for suc- cess in soliciting bequests, lately asked President Van Hise if he did not find it personally deroga- tory to be dependent for funds upon Sdlons from the farm. His answer in effect, though not in precisely these words was that tastes might differ, but he would rather hang by the whiskers of honest farmers than by the coat-tails of the predatory plutocrat. This, at least, can be said: that he and his immediate predecessor have met a practical situ- ation with statesman-like wisdom and resource, 192 A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY and by so doing have evolved a great institution of a type as serviceable as it is new. Whether Wisconsin is the leading American^ university may be questioned; but it seems fairly certain that it is the one most immediately in touch with the spirit and needs of our time. It used to be our patronizing custom to call the Japanese the Yankees of the East. The success which Wisconsin has met in adapting education to ends of immediate utility fairly entitles it to be called the Japan of the West ; and it has gone a step beyond the island kingdom, for many of its advances have been the result of its own origi- nal experiments. The College of Letters and Science, granting the degree of Bachelor of Arts, is, as at Michi- gan and other state institutions, the oldest depart- ment of the university ; that is why the institu- tions met so much opposition from local colleges. And it is strong in numbers, its courses being well attended, especially by young women. It also, however, has a strongly utilitarian basis. Leading Eastern universities, notably Harvard, require four years of general study, or its equivalent, before beginning the study of the 193 WISCONSIN learned professions, though they encourage the student to elect such courses as bear on his chosen profession, especially in the senior year. In order to reach a recently-fixed standard, moreover, American universities have to require at least two years of general study before taking up a learned profession. Wisconsin still receives students into the Law School direct from the academy or high school, and from pupils of ac- credited schools it requires no examination. And students in tha college are supposed to choose their studies with a view to their professions after the sophomore year. A man who intends to enter the ministry elects as his " major " subject Hebrew and Hellenistic Greek, and is encouraged to supplement this with social science or some of the other courses that anticipate the work of the theological seminary. The intending lawyer concentrates on political science and jurisprudence. The intending physi- cian enters a " pre-medical " course a highly coordinated scientific curriculum with biology as its centre. A large plurality of students, espe- cially women, are preparing to teach, and shape their studies to this end. 194 A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY There is a course in " home economics/' which centres in the chemistry of cooking, sanitation, and house decoration, and is founded on a gen- eral study of chemistry, biology, and bacteriology. Curiously significant of the trend of the teaching are courses in pharmacy for intending druggists, and the course in commerce for business men. Based upon the College of Letters and Science is a graduate school, but even here the spirit of pure scholarship is less advanced than is desir- able. Resolutely as the university insists, however, on the directly utilitarian aspect of education, it has resisted any trivial ideal of "practicality." Purdue has a railway engine, and makes its stu- dents run it up and down the track deeply impressing prospective employers. Harvard is crying for a blast furnace. Wisconsin regards the undergraduate course as all too brief for a thorough grounding in science, and wisely leaves its students to gain practice in real workshops. Time and again it has insisted upon the value of merely scientific culture. The remedy for oat smut, much prized in the capital, was an indirect and casual result of investigations into the theory 195 WISCONSIN of the constituents of alcohol ; and the celebrated milk test was a by-product of one of Professor Babcock's many non-utilitarian investigations. In his inaugural address of 1904, which marked at once the beginning of his presidency and the fiftieth anniversary of the granting of the first university degrees, Doctor Van Hise laid splendid emphasis on this point. When Franklin went out into the fields to fly his kite, he said in effect, the figure he presented would scarcely have inspired a rural legislator to endow him with the funds of the state. Yet that experi- ment, with others as little promising of utility, has ended in opening up vast new sources of mechanical energy, in increasing mechanical efficiency and facilitating human labor, and in binding the whole world together in electrical sympathy without which our present hopes of in- dustrial progress and peace among nations would be impossible. " If, half a century since, a legis- lator in France had wished to be humorous at the expense of the scientist, what better object of derision could he have found than his country- man, Pasteur, who was looking through a micro- scope at the minute forms of life, studying the 196 A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY nature and transformations of yeast and mi- crobes? And yet from the studies of Pasteur and Koch and their successors have sprung the most beneficent discoveries which it has been the lot of man to bestow upon his fellow-men. The plagues of cholera and yellow fever are con- trolled ; the word diphtheria no longer whitens the cheek of the parent ; even tuberculosis is less dreaded and may soon be conquered ; aseptic surgery performs marvelous operations which a few years ago would have been pronounced impossible. The human suffering thus alleviated is immeasurable." One fact is fortunate for the hope that Wis- consin may develop the pursuit of truth for its own sake. The College of Letters and Science is still the largest department of the university, even aside from its graduate school, which in recent years has rapidly expanded. As fast as the legislature permits, both departments are to be strengthened on the side of pure culture. The progress is slow, but it bids fair to be sure. The Law School has been almost completely made over according to the most advanced methods those of the case system, developed 197 WISCONSIN at Harvard. The old textbook method is quicker and easier, and it produces lawyers who have at the outset considerably greater readiness and efficiency in ordinary court practice. It is still preferred at institutions which aim to establish their graduates as quickly as possible in a paying practice. Wisconsin does not extend utilitarian- ism as far as this. It has adopted the new method because it produces a far broader and deeper type of legal mind, and because in the long run its graduates are winning their way into positions of eminence legal and judicial. There are times when considerations of immedi- ate utility seem to crush out the higher ideals of a university. The mention of the milk test or oat smut to a professor in the College of Letters and Science is a lamentable error in tact. He feels shackled hand and foot by the cry for immediate results. Yet it is a good thing to make friends with one's bread and butter, and this the uni- versity has very ably done. Meantime the older order of legislator is giving way to the generation which has been educated at the university. The time should arrive before long when the question of bread and butter falls into its proper relation. 198 A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY Residentially and socially, as well as intellec- tually, Wisconsin is in a way to find the uses of adversity sweet. In the past indeed, in the present few of our great institutions have been more unfortunate; but in the not distant future it bids fair to equal, perhaps excel, the best. Somewhat more than three hundred of the men students find agreeable and profitable life in the fraternity houses; but the remaining two thou- sand and more have not a single dormitory, and moreover no Union or social centre of any sort. They are scattered about the little city in board- ing-houses, with few ties other than those of small cliques formed by chance acquaintance, or the accident of living under the same roof. Two social clubs there are, the Yellow Helmet and the Monastics ; but they are only a few years old, have no kitchen and no servants, and are deserted except for a few hours on occasional evenings. One senior society, the Iron Cross, is formed of representative men of ability, and membership in it is highly prized ; but it is only a faint shadow of the senior societies at Yale or the upperclass clubs at Princeton. The character of Wisconsin undergraduates is 199 WISCONSIN that of the better element in the community from which they come simple, frank, manly. The moral life, I gathered, is rather exceptionally sound. There are not many vicious resorts in Madison, and such as exist are closed to students. Most of the fraternities have house rules of their own framing against malt and spirituous liquors. Once it was the custom to evade these by putting a case of beer on a shelf outside the house and drinking it with head sticking out of the window. Such evasions are no longer countenanced. Many fraternities forbid taking a freshman to a saloon. In the near future, I was told, the legislature will prohibit saloons within three quarters of a mile of the university. There are souls, perhaps, to whom the manners of the students would savor overmuch of the howdy-rowdy. Personally, I am rather fond of the exuberant freshness of youth. In his inau- gural address President Van Hise, whose sense of humor perhaps lacks subtlety, announced that the occasion would be celebrated, as was most fitting, by abolishing for that year all final examinations. Great was the joy of the undergraduates until the president wrote a letter to the college paper, 200 A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY explaining that the remark was a joke Then there was destruction of fences, burning of gates, and a fine example of that cherished institution, a nightshirt parade. A few years ago, when the Faculty for a time abolished inter-' varsity football, the town awoke one morning to find written across the gymnasium in huge white characters the legend PING-PONG HALL. The leading Faculty abolitionists were hanged and burned in effigy, and in the light of the fire members of the eleven one of them fullback on the all-Western team of the year played marbles, while the crowd of students gathered about and gave the college yell with brazen lungs for every successful shot. I have seen far more violent disorder at Harvard and at Oxford, with far less of the inspiration of sa- tirical wit. One of the things that delighted the Moseley Commission with Wisconsin was its democratic tone. In one way the university is democratic. Where there is little or no social organization social distinctions are few. But such democracy the much-lauded virtue of the new West is natural, if not inevitable. It is a very different 201 WISCONSIN thing from the democracy that is sometimes found in old and well-organized communities. That has to be achieved, and is one of the rarest flowers of civilization. Already at Wisconsin, local observ- ers assured me, lines of caste are drawn between rival fraternities, as indeed they seem to be at all fraternity institutions; and here as elsewhere the fact is more regrettable because the basis of judgment is birth and manners rather than ability. The line between the fraternity and the non- fraternity elements is sharp, and the strife keen. It is a virtue for a fraternity man to know many of the so-called "barbs;" but it is a virtue of necessity, for the " barbs " have the power of outvoting them in class elections, and have not infrequently exercised it. The fraternities claim, of course, that they have carefully selected all the representative men; but where there is so little community life it is obvious that such a claim is false. Among two thousand there must be many good fellows and many potential leaders who are never discovered. This evil, as we have seen, is characteristic of all American universities, even Princeton and 202 A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY Yale, which have developed the most efficient social system. But it has reached its climax, as it seems to me, in the state universities, most of which are quite without dormitories of any kind for men students. At Michigan they have a Union in embryo; but of all the universities I have visited, it is the only one that had never considered the residential hall or "quad." The University of Wisconsin is deficient in general societies, and has no Union; but it is fortunate in having a president whose ideas of undergraduate life are as advanced as his policy is vigorous. Utilitarian as the aims of Doctor Van Hise have of necessity been hitherto, his plans for the future are in the truest sense of the word human- itarian. The things a fellow learns from books, lectures, and laboratories form only a part, and the smaller part, of a college education. Know- ledge is power only when one knows how to use it; and, in order to make it efficient to any high end, it has to be backed by well-poised, well- mannered, and forcible character. What a fellow learns is less important than what he becomes. It is President Van Hise's purpose to build up 203 WISCONSIN the general life, social, residential, even athletic, by means of residential halls. He is, moreover, in a position to do so in the near future. The very fact that there is no sys- tem of dormitories places him at an advantage over Eastern institutions in that he has a clean slate for a clean sweep of organization. A few years ago he secured from the legislature a grant of one hundred thousand dollars a year for stu- dent buildings, and has already architectural plans for a series of quadrangular halls, each with its common-room, kitchen, and dining-room. Backward as Wisconsin has hitherto been, it bids fair to lead all its rivals in this widely impending and momentous reform. It is not possible, even if it were desirable, to reproduce slavishly a foreign institution. In many details a hall at Wisconsin must differ from an English college. Yet this much can be said : that, in so far as it can be made a compact community, it will work for the good of the university as a whole by broadening and ad- vancing the social and athletic life. I had the pleasure of going over the subject in detail with President Van Hise, and of ex- 204 A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY plaining to him the difficulties President Wilson has encountered in proposing the quadrangular hall as a substitute for the existing social sys- tem. No attempt will be made to combat the fraternities. The halls may lessen their prestige, but only in so far as that prestige is unfortunate. And it will always be in their power to maintain their prestige, and even to advance it, by includ- ing all representative men, many of whom would naturally be chosen from the second and third year men in the halls. Wisconsin is the paradise of the co-ed, a fact indicated, among other things, in the defer- ential habit of calling her, not co-ed, but woman student. Days and days I spent trying to track down the coeducational problem, until I seemed, even to myself, to be the victim of an evil mind. There is no coeducational problem at Wisconsin. Members of the Faculty, and among them recent arrivals from Eastern universities, declared this in so many words. To the undergraduates and I lived and took most of my meals at different fraternity houses the only problem with regard to the woman student seemed to be how to get nearer, or next. For there is only one woman to 205 WISCONSIN half a dozen men, and the most approved use of an idle hour appears to be what is called " fussing." l The unrestrained social intercourse natural to the West has full swing, and the result is, as always in a self-respecting community, a state of innocence which to any one from a highly chap- eroned community seems little short of Arca- 1 In support of this statement the college page of a Chicago paper quotes the following spirited paragraph from the Wiscon- sin Cardinal. " The football management deserves every credit for giving the rooter of earnest mind and able lungs a place to go, and express the faith that is in him. We hope its existence will incite the Fusser's Union to dissolve all partnerships for once. No Wisconsin girl ought to be so shy and timorous as to stay away from the game for lack of a Percy-boy to escort and protect her. On the contrary she ought to be ashamed to make a full-grown rooter sit by her and lower his useful voice to a society snicker. Amorous dalliances are incompatible with good yelling. Mark Antony was the champion fusser of antiquity, but he stood up against the shiftiest fighters of every weight of his time, so long as he eschewed all cozy-corner work when there was trouble. But once, at Alexandria, he took Cleopatra along to watch hostilities, and a week later Mark was measured for his sar- cophagus." The journal adds : " Such plain heart-to-heart talks are not bestowed upon persons of no importance. The ' co-ed ' at Madi- son must be a real personage." Also Wisconsin editorial writers are the real thing. 206 X" 2 - I w 8 2 ^ * il A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY dian. About a hundred of the young women room and dine in Chadbourne Hall. Another hundred live in sorority houses. The rest live in their own homes or board in student lodging- houses some of them in houses partly occupied by men students. Until last year there had been no dean of women. The new dean is trying, and with suc- cess, to prevent men and women students from living in the same houses. The matter of chaperons is more difficult. Each of the sororities has a matron, but she is largely a figure-head. She has not even a posi- tion on the House Committee, so that, though she has responsibilities to the university, she has little or no authority over the students. Buggy-riding flourishes. One of the under- graduates admitted to me that it was not unusual for parties of two and three couples to drive out to the several hotels on Lake Mendota for dinner. "I suppose," he added, "that that will seem to you horribly crude." On the contrary, it seemed like the Golden Age or like my own boyhood in this same Middle West. I asked if a single couple ever went on such an expedition. He 207 WISCONSIN shook his head. The girl's own dignity, if not the traditions of the university, would forbid this. When I put the same question to another undergraduate, he smiled and said that occasion- ally a couple would go forth to dine in single blessedness. Yet I am convinced that no serious harm is done. Were engagements common? By no means. Sometimes gossiping souls would allege that a couple were engaged or if not, that they ought to be. But no engagements were announced, except, in most cases, as the immedi- ate prelude to student marriages, which are rare. And this was wise, one informant told me; for then if the young woman went home and married a man in her native town no one could prove that she was unduly experienced, or that the undergraduate had been jilted. And this leads to the only thing approaching a coeducational problem. Though men and women are of much the same age, there is a rad- ical difference in their situation in life. The women are in a position to be married, but the men are not in a position to marry them, as regards either age or worldly goods. The women, 208 A UTILITARIAN UNIVERSITY arriving from farm, village, or city, regard their life in the university as a social coming-out their first and perhaps only chance for a real good time. To the men the university is a place of preparation for the serious work of life, and for manly comradeships and sports. One of the Faculty told me that of late years the women had taken to appearing on the campus in fine array, as if coming to market. That, he said, was not playing the game in view of the fact that the men were in no situation to buy. It is a part of the plan of the president to build residential halls for the young women, also. Such halls should assist the dean of women in dignifying the office of chaperon. If experience shows that dining out by single couples is inad- visable, it should not prove impossible to foster a community sentiment against it. No university is more fortunate than Wiscon- sin in its site. The ideal location, it has often been said, is a town of character and importance that is yet not large enough to dominate or ab- sorb the undergraduate life. Madison is the capital of the state, and the undergraduates come easily, and on the whole wholesomely, in 209 WISCONSIN touch with the political life of the country. The social and intellectual life of the town is of a very high quality. Its age, which is consider- able, and the presence of the legislature, have given it an intellectual and social tone far above the average of Western university towns. It has been known to call itself the Athens of the West. Good plays and good music come often. The undergraduates deny that they call the univer- sity the Princeton of the West ; but they are ready to admit that others have so dubbed it. The four lakes of Madison, magically set among wooded, rolling country, give the place a beauty unrivaled among Eastern universities. Longfellow once wrote a poem about those lakes, though he had never seen them. Imagine, then, the rapture of those who live on their shores ! Though Wisconsin still falls somewhat short of leadership among American universities, it would be hard to find an institution that is more keenly alive to its environment or more vigor- ously functioning. VII THE FARMER'S AWAKENING f MHE strength of our nation, it has been said, -- lies in the fact that every boy aspires to rise above the station of his father, and, by vir- tue of democratic opportunity, is able to do so. But what is the outlook of the farm boy ? In the two decades from 1880 to 1900 the aver- age value of American farms with their equip- ment almost doubled, mounting from $3516 to $6531. This was due in part to the increasing use of farm machinery. Very largely it was due to a revolution in farm methods. Extensive farm- ing is giving way to intensive farming. When rich land could be had for a few dollars an acre, it was enough to skim the cream of a quarter- section. With land worth from seventy-five to a hundred and fifty dollars an acre, every furrow must be worked for its maximum yield, every head of stock must be bred and fed to produce the maximum return. Year by year it is becom- 211 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING ing more necessary for a farmer to be, on the one hand, a man of capital, and, on the other, a man of thrifty intelligence. Some things are in the farm boy's favor. Farm labor commands a high wage, enabling him to save ; while the difficulty of procuring labor of any sort disposes land-owners to rent out such tracts as they cannot farm in person, rather than intrust them to an overseer. Yet, if the requisite of capital keeps on increasing, it will not be many decades before the ambition to own a farm will be all but impossible. Intead of rising, the farm boy will become a laborer, and a laborer without hope. Already there is a familiar touch in Rogers' s description of the English farm hand : " He can- not cherish any ambition, and is, in consequence, dull and brutish, reckless and supine." The hope of the farm boy, no less than of the boy who intends to live in the city, lies in educa- tion. As hired help at the outset, he should be a man of intelligence, and, when he comes into his own, he must be a practiced master of his craft. Our educators have long been alive to the situa- tion, especially in the West. Every state has its col- lege of agriculture, liberally endowed and manned 212 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING by an able faculty. But the number of students they attract is pitifully small. The farmer is a slave to the spirit of conserva- tism. A graduate of one of our foremost colleges of agriculture lately went to a Southern state, full of the hope of introducing modern scientific methods. His new neighbors had always broker} the ground with a single horse dragging a single plow. As a farm boy in the North the missionary had been used to a team of four horses dragging four plows, which enabled one driver to do the work of four men. In college he had become familiar with traction engines, each dragging six- teen ten-inch plows, four six-foot harrows, and a, press drill for planting seed wheat, the whole capable of plowing, harrowing, and planting from fifty to seventy-five acres a day, rough land or smooth, hillside or prairie. But he knew his neigh,- bors, or thought he knew them, and began by hitching two horses to two plows. His neighbors were as deeply scandalized as if he had attacked morality and religion. They predicted dire failure to his crops. His only answer was : " Wait till you see my potatoes ! " In due time they assem- bled, eager to confound the heretic. When they 213 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING saw the yield of his land, they stroked their beards, shifted their quids, and departed in silence, with the air of one whose God has forsaken him. For untold thousands of years the farmer has balked at new ways. As surely as the man who first struck fire from flint marked forever the superiority of his race over the other animals, so surely did the man (or, what is more likely, the woman) who first broke ground and planted, mark the beginning of civilization. Yet our Puri- tan forefathers, who gave up home and country in the cause of freedom of the conscience and freedom of the press and after them, their descendants, who wrested independence from England with rifle and sword had no better farm implements than the wooden bull-plow and the wooden flail, which had served mankind, unchanged in any essential feature, since long be- fore the dawn of history. In 1755 General Brad- dock could find only twenty-five farm wagons fit for transports in the entire colonies of Virginia and Maryland. As late as 1850, according to the Twelfth Census, the implements of agricul- ture were hand implements, excepting only the cotton gin. 214 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING Then came a sudden and mighty awakening to the value of farm machinery, the forerunner and prophet of an awakening to science which as yet is scarcely begun. What it has meant is very clearly recorded in a monograph by H. W. Quaintance, Ph. D. 1. The statistics of cereals show that, during the entire period of the introduction of farm ma- chinery (1840-1900), the proportion of crops to population steadily increased : the population in 1900 was only 4.42, while the production of cereals was 7.18 times as great as in 1840. 2. In the crops in which machinery has been a leading factor, each day's work now produces almost five times what it formerly produced. 3. The cost of production of the principal crops, though affected by the increase in wages, has been reduced one half. The human result of all this has been to make farm work easier and farm hours shorter, both for men and for women. The lumpish, stooping shoulders of the man with the hoe have given way to erect carriage and lithe stride. Increased leisure, abetted by rural delivery of mails, are making the modern farmer a reader and a thinker. 215 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING In short, he is, in the words of J. R. Dodge, " a more efficient worker, a broader man, and a better citizen." Yet much as machinery has meant to the farmer, science may and should mean more. But how awaken him to the grandeur of the oppor- tunity? In the case of machinery the way was easy. We are an inventive people, and the farmer is able in the end to grasp what is apparent to his eye. Almost twice as much money is invested in farming as in all our other industries com- bined; but while our schools of engineering civil, mechanical, mining, and electrical are many and their graduates legion, the farmer is still content to educate his boy in the district school. The agricultural college had an inspiration. It adapted an old motto : " If you would the farm boy win, with the farmer first begin ! " And so we have agricultural extension, which brings the results of science to the farmer's eye. Here is an incident that should jog the most self-satisfied. Iowa is above all other states agri- cultural, and corn is its great crop, the basis of its prosperity. In 1903 it was discovered that 216 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING the crop was falling regularly below the normal yield of land of such fertility, the average be- ing thirty-three bushels an acre, where intelli- gent farmers produced sixty and seventy. Now the professor of agronomy at the state college, P. G. Holden, has had a lifelong belief in the value of science to the farm, and has given his life to the task of winning the farmer for the sake of his boy. He discovered the reason for the decline in the corn crop. Twelve hundred samples of seed corn, gathered from anxious farmers in different sections, showed that an average of eighteen per cent of the ker- nels were dead, and that an additional nineteen per cent were so low in vitality as to be unfit to plant. Much of the rest was so weak that in a cold spring, such as actually followed, it would either fail to grow or give weak plants. Think what this means. The farmers were losing the use of over thirty per cent of their land, of over thirty per cent of their labor in planting and cul- tivating. And for what reason? Because they failed to make sure that the seeds they planted would grow. One would naturally conclude that to test an 217 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING ear of seed corn is a difficult matter. This is how it is done. Put two inches of moist sand, soil, or sawdust in the bottom of any old box, and mark it out in squares. Take six kernels from each ear of seed corn, two near the butt, two near the tip, and two from the middle, and place them in a square with a number corresponding to the number of the ear. Cover the whole with cheese- cloth, and above it place two inches more of damp sand, soil, or sawdust. Keep the box warm. In due time the live kernels will sprout, about as they would when planted. In cases where the kernels do not sprout, or show feeble growth, feed the corresponding ears to live stock. Plant the rest. The smallness of the total amount of work required may be judged by the fact that it takes only twelve to fourteen ears of corn to plant an acre. At the expense of a few hours' labor on each farm the corn lands could be made to yield not sixty but ninety per cent of the maximum crop, a gain to the farmers of some eighteen mil- lions of dollars. But how turn the discovery to practical ac- count? The college did its heroic best by means of the mails; but no one knows better than the 218 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING professor of agriculture how deeply rooted is the farmer's distrust of men of education. It re- mained for a railway man, W. H. Given, superin- tendent of the Rock Island, to suggest a plan and it may be remarked in passing that, if there is one thing the farmer distrusts more deeply than the college, it is the railroad. Mr. Given's motive was not educational, by no means philan- thropic. Each bushel that yielded the farmer forty cents would yield his road, for transporting corn or live stock, a fraction of a cent, and he was out for the fraction. He placed at the disposal of Professor Holden and his staff a special train, on which they made a tour, stopping at every station to give an object-lesson in testing seed corn, with a short but very straight talk on what was to be gained by it. He also gave the farmers free transporta- tion to and from the lectures. Other railways fol- lowed suit, until the Iowa town is a rarity that has not had its corn-seed demonstration. I asked one of the corn-train professors whether the farmers were not eager for enlightenment. "Not altogether," he admitted with a smile. "It won't do to assume that you know more about 219 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING farming than they do. I begin by saying that they already know everything I am going to tell them. Then, when I have told them, I say: 'You men know all this. But why don't you do it? You are too shiftless to stir yourself to a few hours' work three days before plant- ing!' Then they nudge one another and say, ' Well, I guess the boy has about got the rights onus!'" I asked if they really did grasp what he had told them. "Oh, yes," he said; "when I have shown them the boxes." A traveling man told me of a farmer who said : " A boy with book learning, by hek, showed whiskered men how to mind their own business -whiskered men! And, by hek, he was right!" The "boy" was upward of thirty, and had been born on a farm: in the leisure left by his duties as a professor he cultivates a farm of eighty acres. Yet, after years of corn trains and similar enter- prises, the young professor told me, not more than one farmer in a hundred tests his seed corn thoroughly. As for seed oats, most farmers fan them so as to eliminate the light and chaffy grains; but only fifteen per cent fan them so as 220 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING to eliminate also the small plump grains, leaving only those that are both plump and large. The chief significance of all this lies in the fact that in no state is the level of agricultural intelligence higher than in Iowa. A man who had traveled extensively in the region west of the Missouri told me that, time and again, on remark- ing a thrifty-looking farm, he was met with the word that the man who owned it came from Iowa. One farmer said: " I call myself from loway ; but I lived seven months there and seven years in Kansas." This is only the most spectacular of many tri- umphs of agricultural extension. As early as 1886 the University of Wisconsin originated the system of Farmers' Institutes, or meetings held in various districts for practical instruction and conference on all matters pertaining to the farm and farm life. The system has since spread over the larger part of the country. Any com- munity can secure an institute by early applica- tion to the superintendent. Wisconsin holds ap- proximately one hundred two days' institutes a year, in all portions of the state, each especially adapted to the crops and conditions of the local- 221 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING ity. There are also half a dozen special-feature institutes, treating tobacco, potatoes, corn, and dairying. At the close of the institute season a round-up institute is held and many papers of timely interest presented. The Wisconsin legis- lature, in its last session, voiced the popular ap- preciation of the institutes by increasing the annual appropriation for them from twelve to twenty thousand dollars. Equally popular and beneficial are the "Farm- ers' Short Courses." Originated in 1899 by Dean Curtiss, of Iowa State College, they were at once widely imitated. While the regular work in the college is suspended for the Christmas holi- days, the doors are thrown open to farmers, dairy- men, and stock breeders. About two hundred and fifty attended the first short course, and the num- ber gradually rose to a thousand. The ages of the short-course pupils range from twenty-five to seventy-five. Object lessons, minute and thor- ough, are given in all points vital to the farmer, the dairyman, the stock breeder, and the horti- culturist; arid then follow contests in judging live stock, cereals, and fruit. The pupils who journey to the farmers' short 222 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING courses are naturally much more eager and ener- getic than the average of farmers who attended the corn-train lectures and institutes, many of them having been successful farmers and stock hreeders for a lifetime. At the more prominent colleges, such as Iowa, they come from all parts of the continent, from Toronto to Texas and from Virginia to California. In 1905 the business men of Red Oak, Iowa, raised a guarantee fund of three thousand dol- lars, and a dozen or so of professors came from the college to hold a short course. The course has been repeated yearly, the attendance mount- ing from two hundred and forty to four hundred and twenty. Other cities have followed Red Oak's example. Perhaps the most thorough engine of exten- sion is the experiment station run in connection with the county poor farms. First instituted in Iowa in 1903, they are already spreading rapidly. The experiments at each station relate to the peculiar problems of the soils and crops of the vicinity, and give opportunity for object-lessons far more convincing than those of the seed trains. Time was when the farmer of the rich Western 223 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING soils heaped his manure all winter long on the ice of his brook, and left it to be carried away in the spring, polluting the stream. To-day the value of manure is understood ; and in many states, in which the soil is naturally poor or is becoming exhausted, owing to the unintelligent repetition of crops, the experiment stations give demonstrations in the adaptation of special artifi- cial fertilizers to special soils. The most popular form of experiment is the seed competition. Samples are obtained from each farm in the country round, and are planted and cultivated in separate plots under identi- cal conditions. At harvest time there is a picnic on the farm, the attendance often rising as high as three thousand. The extension professors judge the rival exhibits, giving the reasons for their verdicts. As a rule, the men whose seeds turn out best are found to be the ones who have the thriftiest barns, the best machinery, and the largest balance in the bank ; and the professors are not slow to point out the relation between in- telligence and success. In Wisconsin indeed, in many a live agricul- tural state extension has been equally aggress- 224 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING ive and successful. No factor has done more to increase its effect than the work of Professor R. A. Moore in breeding cereal and forage plants. Wisconsin is primarily a dairy region. If you ask the way to the nearest grocer, you will be told to go three cheese factories to the right and then two creameries to the left. Now corn is the first essential of the dairy industry. But the state lies north of the great corn belt, and large areas of it are swept by cold northeasters from Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. In some dis- tricts the growing season is so short that it used to be impossible even to grow corn for silage. By years of selection and breeding of corn Professor Moore has produced two types, one adapted to the southern and western counties and another to the colder counties that border the lakes. These improved breeds, together with improved methods of cultivation, have raised the average yield per acre to forty-one and a half bushels, placing the state in the second position in this respect, in spite of the handicaps of soil and climate. Professor Moore has been equally successful in developing a special breed of corn for silage ; and the same methods are now 225 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING being applied with similar success to barley and oats. Oat smut, a fungous growth that blasts the grain and spreads with amazing rapidity, is prevalent in the North Central States, and once cost Wisconsin millions of dollars yearly. Loew, now of Tokio, discovered the value of formal- dehyde as a germ killer about 1890. Bolley, then of the Indiana experiment station and now of North Dakota, was the first to use it against oat smut. Professor Moore took up the dis- covery and, by an exceedingly active extension campaign, has virtually eradicated the pest in Wisconsin. The diseases of cattle have received similarly successful attention. Post mortem demonstra- tions held at state and county fairs, and even before the legislature, have awakened interest in the tuberculin test, by which it is possible to eliminate all affected cattle from a herd. Farmers attending the short courses have been taught to apply the test; tuberculin has been furnished free of charge, and individual cases have been handled by correspondence. During the past two years twenty-five thousand voluntary tests have 226 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING been secured, and the affected animals disposed of according to law. No detail escapes scrutiny. Every year hun- dreds of square miles of good farm lands are yellow with the pest of wild mustard. It was dis- covered in Germany that a solution of iron sul- phate kills this and other weeds without harming the crops. Now iron sulphate is a by-product of the steel industry, and in 1906 the American Steel and Wire Company brought the German discovery to notice in America. The University of Wisconsin took the lead, and, by a series of demonstrations, has succeeded in largely exter- minating mustard and other weeds, not only in Wisconsin, but in neighboring states. The dread of the inland cranberry grower has been frost, even in the summer months. In Wis- consin the cranberry industry has been fostered by state appropriations, and has been under the special care of the university. By sanding and weeding the bogs and draining them of excess- ive water, the experiment stations have suc- ceeded in keeping them six to eight degrees warmer, thus protecting them against frost dur- ing July and August, and in many cases making 227 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING all the difference between the success of the crop and its utter failure. Like all education worthy of the name, this extension work means more than a matter of dol- lars and cents. It means that the farmer wakes up to the manifold variety of the laws of nature, their beauty and their magnificent certainty. Intelligent thrift is a double blessing. The story of Uncle Asa Turner, of Iowa, cannot be too often told. While instructing a class of fifty farm- ers in seed-corn judging, Professor Holden no- ticed a man of sixty hovering about the outskirts. Asked if he would not join the class, Uncle Asa answered : " No, thanks. I 'm too old. Just reconnoiterin' round." His real purpose, as he afterwards confessed, was to see if any man " could talk about corn ten minutes without run- ning out." Professor Holden insisted. Uncle Asa became deeply interested, and took home some seed corn. The next year the Governor of Iowa offered a trophy for the best ear of corn in the state, and the man who had declared himself too old to learn, but who had been really too proud, won it. He is now the president of the Iowa Corn Growers' Association. Before his conversion he 228 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING was tired of farm life and was planning to move into town for the rest of his days. Instead he has built a new farmhouse and spends his declining years happily in the study of the things that for over half a century he had looked upon with unseeing and, therefore, weary eyes. Extension teaching in the West does not go in for nature poetry. Much hilarity was caused by the news that an Eastern professor had described to his bearded pupils how beautifully a clover folds up its leaves every night and puts them to sleep like children. And it is, in fact, an evil ideal that divorces beauty from utility. In nothing is the admirable spirit of the ex- tension work more evident than in the fact that it includes instruction for the wives and daugh- ters of the farmers. On a trolley platform at Ames, Iowa, I fell in with a party of woman visit- ors, who were making merry over a demonstra- tion in cutting and sewing corset covers. One of the instructors had just admitted to me that extension had failed to eradicate the farmer's addiction to pie, but expressed the modest hope that the pie belt might still be led to produce a superior and digestible article. These two are 229 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING sensational extremes. Between them lies a mean of sober utility. I transcribe the topics of a short course for women, lasting a single week. Monday Food : its use in the body. Diges- tion : the daily bill-of-fare, illustrated by charts and experiments. Demonstration: eggs and milk. Tuesday Personal hygiene. Demonstration : cooking vegetables. Home decorations, illus- trated. Wednesday Meat : best and cheapest cuts, illustrated. Serving a. meal, illustrated. De- monstration of the making of a kitchen apron. Care and feeding of little children. Exhibition and demonstration of a baby's outfit. Demon- stration : invalid cooking. Thursday Home nursing. Demonstration : making patient's bed ; bathing patient in bed ; giving alcoholic rub, etc. Demonstration : simple desserts. Dress : the art of simple clothing ; quiet colors in dress ; good material. Demonstration of cutting and fit- ting shirtwaists. Friday Demonstration: bread and rolls ; charts showing yeast plants, cross sec- tion of a grain of wheat, gluten test, test of bak- ing powders. Travel. Correct things to do when traveling alone. Conduct in hotels and sleeping 230 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING cars. Saturday Laundry work. Removing stains from linen. Washing table linens. Washing woolens and silk. Serving left-overs. At the extension short courses prizes are given for over a score of household feats, such as making bread, muffins, doughnuts, cake, pies with two covers, jellies, pickles and preserves, aprons, hemming, stitching, patching, and darn- ing. It is rigorously provided that the prizes " shall not include anything that is fanciful or not useful, such as false teeth, wedding invita- tions, or Teddy bears," and shall, on the con- trary, include washing machines, books, rocking- chairs, etc. The latest thing at Ames is a movement to bring household economics before women's clubs; and, Mrs. Cobden-Sariderson having failed to convert our club women into suffragettes, there seems to be at least a fighting chance, especially with Teddy bears and false teeth excluded from the prizes. It is to farmers' wives, however, that the extension movement appeals most powerfully. They have been awakened to certain very real and wholesome rights, and their husbands, too. 231 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING One farmer lately deposed that, in view of the fact that he had to renew his reaper every six or seven years, it did seem only fair that his wife should have a new range once in a generation or so. Her temper was better, he found, and also the cooking. Extension work is, of course, quite apart from college teaching. So is professional research ; but, in order to get a clear idea of agriculture as a creative science, it may be well to take a glance at the results research has achieved before pass- ing to the work of the student. Historically, indeed, the experiment station preceded both college teaching and extension. Perhaps the most famous discovery, as it was one of the very first, is the Babcock milk test. Invented in 1890 by the professor of agricultural chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, it shares with De Laval's centrifugal cream separator the credit of establishing the dairy on an economic, cooperative basis, literally creating untold millions in every state in the Union, in every country on the globe. By a very simple appliance and in a very few minutes it determines the precise amount of butter fat in any sample of milk. It thus in- 232 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING stantly exposes adulteration by water or skimming, putting the purchase and handling of milk on a basis of accurate knowledge. By means of it also the richness of the yield of each animal can be gauged; so that it has placed the feeding and breeding of milch cows on a scientific basis, and led to the development of a distinct type of butter- producing cow. The Wisconsin curd test places in the hands of the factory a means of detecting milk which has been tainted or rendered defective by careless handling. The alkaline tablet test, invented at Wisconsin, affords an easy and quick means of determining the development of acidity in milk and cream, and so of measuring accurately their ripening. A description of a new process of determining the proportion of casein, the cheese- producing element in milk, is now on the press. Hitherto the Babcock butter-fat test has been used for casein also; but experience has shown that casein does not vary in proportion to butter fat, and, moreover, is not in itself uniform. A refined chemical analysis is prohibitively slow and expensive. Professor E. B. Hart devised last sum- mer a method that is as effective as it is simple. 233 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING It is probable that this new test will enable breed- ers to develop a typical cheese cow, as they have already developed a butter cow. Professor Babcock and Dean Russell have in- vented a revolutionary method of curing Ameri- can cheddar cheese. Previous experiments had seemed to show that the work had to be done at ordinary temperatures. In an experimental study of the different action of chemical ferments and living organisms they ripened cheeses below the freezing point in order to arrest the development of bacteria. To their surprise they found that, covering the cheeses with a thin layer of paraffin shortly after they were made, they produced an actually better quality than at ordinary tempera- tures ; and at the same time they made a saving in shrinkage, which alone covered the increased cost of the process. No innovation has been more valuable to the industry. In view of such results, and I have by no means exhausted the list, it is not strange that Wisconsin has come to place confidence in its university. The hand of progress has been laid even on the local milkman. At irregular intervals an officer stops the wagon on its rounds, buys a quart of 234 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING milk, analyzes it, and publishes the result in the local paper, so that every householder knows just what he is buying. Purchasers of pure-bred cows have learned by experience to prefer official uni- versity tests to the individual tests of the breeders, so that the university has gained a vast influence with the stockmen. It has laid especial emphasis on community breeding, and associations have been formed in various districts, each concen- trating its energies on a single breed. There are several Guernsey centres ; and Lake Mills, a Hoi- stein centre, annually ships pure-bred stock to the value of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Largely as a result of university control, Wiscon- sin has become one of the most important breed- ing centres of the country. The college at Ames, Iowa, has made very interesting and valuable experiments in the feed- ing of stock to be slaughtered. Of the total number of hogs received at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, the greatest hog market in the world, Iowa furnishes more than one half. A miller who was found running corn hulls into his wheat bran answered a protest with the remark : " What does a farmer know about pro- 235 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING tein!" Thanks to a bulletin, 25,000 of which were distributed by the state college, the intelli- gent farmer now knows a good deal about pro- tein. He knows just what is in the commercial feedstuffs, and how to make his own mixtures, whether for the purpose of producing work from a horse, milk or meat from cattle, or wool from sheep. The Iowa bulletin on condimental stock foods and tonics, issued last January, is hilarious read- ing, even for the layman. Nearly every drug store and feed store, in addition to numerous and indefatigable agents, was selling these wares. They advertised to cure the thousand natural ills which stock is heir to, including Texas fever, which is caused by a tick, and tuberculosis, which is caused by a germ. Their claims read like an intended parody of patent medicine advertising. Experiment showed, of course, that all these claims were groundless. As foods the prepara- tions were mediocre, and the drugs in them were either without effect or of the most familiar kind. One mysterious fact remained, however. Cattle were most unmistakably eager for condi- mental mixtures. But even this yielded to chem- 236 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING ical analysis. It was found that in one hundred pounds of mixture there was often as high as eighty-five pounds of salt. I found one professor at Ames experimenting on a cart wheel having such finely-adjusted ball bearings that with a single whirl it would revolve ten minutes, whereas an ordinary wheel will re- volve only two or three times. A prominent firm was selling wagons equipped with it for large prices, its agents claiming that it eliminated forty per cent of the draft. Now, as it happens, the total friction in the bearing of the wheel of an ordinary farm wagon is only about four per cent of the draft. But this professor was working out his problem with delicate and elaborate appa- ratus, and at the expense of weeks of labor. Scientific accuracy of statement is the first essen- tial. One of the problems he had in store was a two- wheel windmill, in which the flukes of the second wheel caught the wind as it glanced from the first. The claim was that the second wheel did more work than the first, and that the two to- gether produced double power. As to the second wheel the claim was probably true, the professor 237 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING said; for, according to his guess, the wind backed up from it so as to exert little or no power on the first. It was by no means certain that the two wheels produced more power than one. One of the most interesting of his experiments was with the comparative value of gasoline and denatured alcohol for heat, light, and fuel: contrary to expectation, it appeared that, at their prevailing prices, gasoline produces far better results in all respects. Very interesting experiments in breeding are under way. The leading types of draft horses are now imported from France and England. Pro- fessor W. J. Kennedy spent last summer abroad purchasing horses from which he hopes to pro- duce a breed acclimated to the country, and adapted to our special American conditions. Long-horn cattle are excellent meat-producers; but their horns make them hard to handle in the barn and dangerous to one another. Professor Kennedy is endeavoring, by an admixture of polled cattle, to remove their horns without im- pairing their value as meat-producers. One of the problems of sheep-raising on our Western ranges lies in the fact that sometimes the leading de- 238 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING mand is for wool and sometimes for mutton. By combining the British Southdown with the Me- rino and other breeds from France, Professor Kennedy hopes to produce a breed that can be used at need either for meat or wool. Some years ago the colleges began showing their stock at the international shows held in Chicago. The men who made a business of breeding laughed at the idea that college pro- fessors had anything to teach them. In the last seven contests, judged by Englishmen and Scotchmen, the colleges have won four grand championships for steers Iowa in 1902, Ne- braska in 1903, Minnesota in 1904, and Iowa in 1905. In 1906 Iowa owned the grand champion, though it was exhibited by its former owner. In swine the results are equally good, Iowa having taken the grand championship three times and Ohio once, while Iowa has taken fifty per cent of all prize money. In sheep Wisconsin has won two grand championships in the seven years, and always a heavy share of the prizes. The profes- sional breeders no longer laugh at the professors. Quite the contrary, they have protested against competition from them as unfair to the mere 239 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING business man. But more liberal counsels are pre- vailing, the verdict being that the purpose of the shows is to exhibit the best types of stock from whatever source. The colleges are just beginning to show horses. As a result of all this extension and experi- mental work there has of late years been a rapid increase in the number of students in the colleges. At Wisconsin, for example, the four-year course, leading to the degree of Bachelor of Agricul- tural Science, which for many years was sparsely attended, last year enrolled one hundred and forty-two students. For two years the studies are prescribed, and include chemistry, physics, bio- logy, and botany; mathematics, English, and Ger- man. In the junior year agricultural chemistry, soils, and bacteriology are prescribed; but the larger portion of the work is elective. In the senior year all studies are elective, so that the student can prepare himself for whatever field he may choose. The graduates of the four-year course easily find positions in the government bureaus at Washington, in the agricultural colleges, and in the practical management of large farms. At 240 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING Iowa I was told that the average salary of grad- uates in twenty-six state colleges and experiment stations was sixteen hundred dollars, the lowest being eight hundred dollars. The highest was no less than ten thousand dollars, and, after ten years of service, there was a guaranteed pension of five thousand dollars a year. This was for a position under the British Government in Cal- cutta. The man who secured it was only twenty- four years old when he graduated last year; but before going to Ames he had received the degree of B. A. at the University of Edinburgh and of Ph. D. at Leipsic. About eighty per cent of the agricultural students of the Iowa State College, I was told, go back to the farm, often refusing salaried positions of twelve hundred dollars to fifteen hundred dollars to start with. These figures compare exceedingly well with the earnings of engineers, of which the public holds an exaggerated notion. Some years ago one of the classes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gathered, at its fifteenth anniver- sary, statistics of the earnings of its members. In spite of the fact that several had made them- selves multimillionaires, the average was less than 241 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING three thousand dollars. As most engineers are subject to the expenses of city life, it is probable that the net returns to agricultural graduates are very considerably greater. Realizing the necessity of making a special appeal to farm boys who, for the lack of time or of money, could not take the four-year course, the University of Wisconsin offered, in 1885, a two-year course, the first of the kind in the coun- try. For nine years this consisted of terms of twelve weeks in the dead of winter. In 1894 it was increased to two terms of fourteen weeks each. This course, as Dean Russell has said in a recent letter to the University Regents, was long ridiculed, on the one hand by the farmers, who scoffed at studying agriculture from books, and on the other by the universities, including land- grant colleges of agriculture, as an unworthy departure from the university ideal. But for twenty years it has justified itself splendidly, growing steadily and rapidly from 18 students in 1886 to 327 in 1906. Of the 1098 out of 1174 graduates of this short course from whom reports could be secured, more than half, or 558, are now engaged in general 242 THE FARMER'S AWAKENING farming; 363 are specialized farmers, including breeders, dairymen, and seedmen ; twenty-six are farm superintendents and managers, twenty veter- inarians, and twenty specialists in college experi- ment stations and the national Department of Agriculture. Only 111, or ten per cent, have taken to other vocations than agriculture. It is still true that the farm boy may aspire to rise above the station of his father. It is, in fact, magnificently true ; for to-day the way of advance- ment lies, of necessity, through an education that makes him not only a more effective producer, but a broader, a deeper, and a happier man. VIII THE SMALL COLLEGE VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY WHY neglect the small college ? Is it not doing a work that never has been and cannot be done by the university ? Are not the influences of a compact, well-organized commun- ity more powerful on the individual than those of a vast, multifarious institution, however ad- vanced ? Is not character-building more vital to the nation than science ? The cry has long been familiar. While the foregoing chapters were ap- pearing serially, I received many letters inviting attention to the virtues of particular small colleges. The issue had not been wholly overlooked. Wisconsin, Michigan, Cornell, and Harvard were all criticised for their failure in the humanities. Chicago escaped censure only because, a large proportion of its students being residents of the city, it cannot take a firm hold upon the life of the individual. Princeton, which, of all the insti- 244 THE SMALL COLLEGE tutions reviewed, bends its energies most ably and insistently toward the development of character, and the ideal and scope of which are essentially collegiate, was cited as having, in appearance at least, abandoned its proper field by assuming the grandiose title of university. I now propose a frank and, I hope, a sympathetic examination of the claim of the small college. If it proves well founded, nothing could be more fortunate for American education. In an article on " Harvard and the Individual," Dean Briggs once suggested that the small col- leges proclaim the advantages of smallness only in order to become bigger. Perhaps his satire was edged by the fact that Harvard's neighbor, Dartmouth, now numbers well over a thousand students within two hundred of as many as Princeton and is yearly diverting a larger number of freshmen from Cambridge. Yet the fact remains that only one small college, Wil- liams, has ever seriously discussed limiting its size. Ten years ago the project caused much favorable comment. But to-day if you ask the trustees how the experiment is prospering, they answer, some- what curtly, that it never was tried. 245 THE SMALL COLLEGE It is in the West, however, that the problem is most vital. There the ideal of the small col- lege is beset with a double danger. Many institu- tions with less than half the students and only a small fraction of the equipment of Princeton, or even of Dartmouth, have abandoned the collegi- ate ideal to assume the name and the work of a university. The head of Western Eeserve has been called the foremost university president in Ohio ; and the malice of the phrase is not with- out warrant, for this single state has more insti- tutions aiming at the highest rank than the whole of Germany, where the university has reached its broadest development. The true universities of the West, on the other hand, the state univer- sities, have as yet been prevented by their youth, their lack of * traditions and endowment, from developing the personal and social the distinct- ively collegiate side of undergraduate life. Nowhere is the need of the presumed virtues of the small college as pressing as in the West, or its opportunities as great. The General Education Board, which pays particular attention to the small college, has lately stamped Knox College, at Galesburg, Illi- 246 " THE WAY TO KNOX," KNOX COLLEGE, GALESBURG, ILL, VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY nois, and Beloit College, at Beloit, Wisconsin, as standard in their respective districts. The aim of the small college has seldom been as forci- bly and explicitly expressed as in the catalogue of Knox College. " While in scholarship and methods its aim is to maintain its place with the best institutions of the day . . . [Knox] still holds to the old-established and significant ideals ; it still tries to lay the foundation of its educational plans on the rock-bottom principles of integrity, of hard work, of manly and womanly character. . . . The earnest moral and Christian spirit of the founders is cherished as the most sacred heritage of the institution and its most vital educational force." The ideal of Beloit is precisely similar : " To teach the heart as well as the mind, and to give personal care that shall reach the individual needs of every student." Mere smallness, it is obvious, cannot achieve such an ideal. Two factors are necessary, a fac- ulty capable of exerting a strong personal influ- ence on the minds and morals of the undergrad- uates, and a student body inspired and permeated by high standards of character and conduct. As regards the influence of the faculty (neg- 247 THE SMALL COLLEGE lecting for the moment the question of its methods and its ability), we may expect to find it strong in institutions in which the proportion of students to teachers is small. With the best of intentions there are limits beyond which no man can exert his personality. Knox College, according to its latest catalogue, had 224 stu- dents and a faculty of 19, or 11.8 students to one teacher. Beloit had 322 students and a fac- ulty of 35, or 9.2 to one. Each college, however, has an affiliated academy receiving instruction from the faculty, and the advantage of Beloit is diminished by the fact that its academy students number 178 to 82 at Knox. Including the acad- emies, the proportion for Knox is 16.1 to one; for Beloit 14.28 to one. The students in the academy, however, receive less personal attention than those in the college ; so that it is only fair to reduce the proportion let us say to 14 to one for Knox and 13 to one for Beloit. As against this, the University of Michigan has only 12.9 students to one teacher, and the University of Wisconsin 10.48 to one. In the East, it may be remarked in passing, the small colleges are at a similar disadvantage. 248 VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY Amherst has 11.3 students, and Williams 9.6, to each teacher; while Yale has 8.47, Princeton 8.2, and Harvard only 7.2. In comparison with the Western university, it is true, the Eastern small college has a slight advantage; but, turning the tables, we find that the Western small college has almost twice as many students to each teacher as the Eastern university. If the faculties of small colleges excel, it must obviously be by virtue of methods and abilities vastly better fitted " to teach the heart as well as the mind and to give personal care that shall reach the needs of every student." In our universities there is certainly room for a vast increase of personal instruction. Where the German ideal prevails, as at Yale, and espe- cially at Harvard, the professors' time and ener- gies are largely given to original research, quite apart from teaching; and when they teach they do not come into personal relations with their pupils except in advanced and highly specialized courses, for upperclassmen and graduates. Even there the relations are of scholar to scholar rather than of man to man. In the general courses, which make up a very great part of the work of 249 THE SMALL COLLEGE a vast majority of the undergraduates, the attend- ance is large, frequently mounting into the hun- dreds, and the means of instruction is nothing more personal than a formal lecture. Now the university lecture is a survival of the Middle Ages, when, books being few and pro- hibitively dear, the only feasible way of impart- ing knowledge was by word of mouth. The lec- ture was> in fact as in etymology, a mere reading, the students copying it word for word. The modern lecture, even at its best, offers little more scope for personal influence on character ; and our university professors, being chosen as scien- tists rather than as teachers, are seldom accom- plished lecturers. Many of them frankly scorn the art of the platform. At Harvard, for exam- ple, in fully half the general courses, a student who knows how to use a library would gain tune by spending the lecture hour in reading; and nothing prevents many from doing so except the rigorously enforced rule against absences. How far have the small colleges escaped from this melancholy predicament? At Knox one lec- ture I heard, on early New England literature, was a mere mediaeval reading, every phrase being 250 VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY uttered twice or thrice and laboriously copied. The explanation was that there was no textbook on the subject; but surely the printing press, or at the worst the mimeograph, offers a cheap enough escape from this soulless drudgery. And for students of literature are not real books pre- ferable to textbooks? It was comforting to hear that this reading was the only one of the kind at Knox. At both Knox and Beloit a large part of the instruction is by recitation from stated lessons in textbooks, a method obsolescent or obsolete in our leading universities. An even larger part of the instruction is by lecture. One great advantage both colleges possess, and they are intelligently making the most of it. The classes are small enough to permit personal relations between teachers and taught. " Quiz sections," in which the work of the course is reviewed by viva voce examination and discus- sion, are an important part of the method. In the more advanced and smaller courses a dozen or so students gather with the instructor about a table and proceed by intimate and personal discussion. These methods are ideal. The object of educa- tion is to make men think, of culture to make 251 THE SMALL COLLEGE them feel. In a philosophy class I attended at Knox and a literature class at Beloit the results, it seemed to me, left little to be desired. On the whole, however, it can scarcely be said that these two typical small colleges have made any notable advance in the matter of personal instruction. The universities everywhere, as we have seen, are tending to revert to the earlier collegiate ideal with which historically they be- gan, and to blend it with that of the university. Wisconsin is dividing its larger courses into more wieldy units, and both Wisconsin and Michigan have long had quiz sections. At institutions of the type of Harvard the large proportion of teachers to taught gives scope, in the distinctively university courses, to a vast amount of personal instruction in laboratory and seminar. Even the large lecture courses are supplemented by per- sonal conferences. Princeton, true to the collegi- ate ideal, has thrown the weight of its numbers into the tutorial, or so-called preceptorial, sys- tem, powerfully supplementing and vitalizing the large lecture course. Many of these features, and especially the tutor, who is the acme and ideal of humanistic teaching, are obviously beyond the 252 VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY powers of the hard-worked faculties of our small colleges. Even on the question of the elective system our two small colleges have taken no decided stand. Allowing for the difference in entrance requirements, Beloit offers almost as great free- dom though, of course, not the same scope as Harvard and Yale ; while Knox, in spite of its championship of the "rock-bottom principle of hard work," is less severe in its prescription of courses than Princeton. As it happens, Beloit, in addition to a slight superiority in its teaching force, is decidedly superior in laboratories, library, and general equipment. It is by no means im- probable that if Knox were as well equipped it would be as unrestricted in the matter of elect- ives. If the collegiate ideal flourishes in these insti- tutions, it must, pretty clearly, be in their general life. Beloit enjoys all natural advantages. The city has only twelve thousand inhabitants, and the college is separated from it by the broad and beautiful waters of Rock River. The campus lies on the edge of a bluff overlooking the valley; 253 THE SMALL COLLEGE the country round is gently rolling and studded with groves of prairie oak. Without being wholly removed from the world, the college is seques- tered and its life concentrated. Founded in 1845, it has grown steadily in wealth and traditions. In size it is ideal 237 men and 85 women. No purely collegiate institution in the West is more aptly situated for the development of a sound college life and spirit. Its success has not been complete in all re- spects. The size of professorial salaries and the ever-present servant problem make against the attempt to bring the undergraduates into social relations with the Faculty. The wife of one of the Faculty leaders told me that for three years she had given a series of small dinners, including the entire freshman class. One year she had been obliged to cook the dinners as well as preside at them. The first year only three per cent of her guests ever came to her house again, and, though remonstrance improved the showing, she was not encouraged to continue. There remains, however, an association of Faculty ladies, which has been successful in getting the students to call for tea. 254 VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY In the chosen student activities, however, Beloit has had marked success. In athletics that sure index of the health of college spirit it has always been prominent. In the bad old days, when the imported athlete was rampant throughout the West, it put forth what is known as a scrappy team, often fighting on equal terms with the state universities. To-day it is pure - and more moderately successful. Debating and oratory are scarcely less prized than athletics. Courses are given on declamation, the forms of public address, oratorical master- pieces, debating, and extempore speaking. Two literary societies, the Cliosophic and the Delian, debate weekly. Every year the colleges of the Mississippi Valley hold contests in public speak- ing. In debating Beloit has won more victories than any of its rivals, and in oratory it has won three times as many victories and four times as much prize money. A democratic student association, the Archaean Union, fosters not only oratory and debating, but the general literary interests of the college, in- cluding the publication of a weekly paper and the maintenance of a reading-room. Out of the 255 THE SMALL COLLEGE 322 students last year, 276 paid the annual fee of one dollar. The more purely literary interests of the college are fostered by an English club, which holds thirteen meetings yearly, the average attendance of which is thirty-five, and by a Shake- speare society, limited to the young women. Beloit holds strongly for self-government under control of the Faculty. At the time of my visit the eleven had not been giving a good account of itself; and it became known that a certain player had flagrantly broken training. One morning in chapel the Dean spoke briefly but pointedly to the student body, making it clear that, if the team and the college wished to retain the services of the offender, his offenses must cease. Even the college papers profit by the Dean's watchful eye. There had been a Beloit banquet in Milwaukee, and the alumni had be- haved badly, abandoning the undergraduates and flocking by themselves to the theatre. The col- lege editor was for scoring them roundly; but the Dean prevailed upon him to deal gently with the erring grad. Clearly those words in the cata- logue about individual needs and personal care are not altogether vain. 256 VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY Associated with the Dean is a cabinet of seven undergraduates, three seniors, two juniors, one sophomore, and one freshman. Its function is to suggest and promote methods for making col- lege work more effective and college life more attractive ; and it has met with marked success. Examinations are held under the honor system, administered by a judicial committee of nine un- dergraduates of all classes. There has been some cheating, for it is hard to create a high standard where none has existed. On the other hand, the Faculty has been slow to meet the logic of the situation by trusting the students absolutely. But, on the whole, the system is said to work well. The sense of social responsibility extends into almost every phase of undergraduate life. When the freshman arrives at Beloit he is met at the train by friendly upperclassmen, who escort him to his quarters and teach him to box the local compass. On the first Friday of term time the Y. M. C. A. and the Y. W. C. A. each holds a reception to- newcomers. On the second Friday the two associations hold a joint reception, with refreshments. Every one present, including mem- bers of the Faculty, wears his name on a tag in 257 THE SMALL COLLEGE his buttonhole, and it is assumed that all are ac- quainted. There is a grand march by classes, and, to insure a thorough mixing, senior men pair with freshmen women (if the expression be per- mitted), and freshmen men with senior women. Last year the Dean and his cabinet instituted a new general function, Big Hill Day, which promises to become as popular as it is picturesque. In the soft season of Indian summer, when the oak leaves are fading from dull, rich crimson to a dusty purple bloom, the whole college assem- bles at the hill for one large family picnic. Eat- ables are provided by means of an assessment of twenty-five cents a head. There is a baseball game between the young women and the Faculty, and each class provides a stunt for the general entertainment. Last autumn, to the bewilderment of the spec- tators, three ranks of men, eight broad, marched out of the woods, and, wheeling, faced the audi- ence. Behind them stood the inventor of the stunt, and at one end a helper worked the arm of one of the performers like a pump. The whole, it developed, presented a vocal octave, with three voices to each note. While the pumper pumped, 258 VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY the inventor, an undergraduate organist, pressed on the heads of now one row and now another. The result was a series of college songs that smote the welkin. Advanced vaudeville please copy. On the whole, the life at Beloit presents a bright contrast to that at our universities, Eastern or Western. A recent graduate who went to Har- vard to continue his studies was asked if the university had extended the glad hand. " They extended it," he replied, " to receive what they call a bond, securing them against failure to pay my term bills. I had n't known it was necessary, and the glad hand turned to the frosty mitt." At Knox the general student life is a trifle less fortunate. Galesburg is several thousands larger than Beloit, and the college lies at the heart of it. Both Faculty and students are hope- lessly scattered. And Knox is relentlessly hard-working. At Beloit it is said that forty per cent of the stu- dents earn their way through college in whole or in part. At a Faculty meeting I attended it was reported that a certain student had been absent for over a week. It appeared that he was a piano tuner and had been obliged to go forth to earn 259 THE SMALL COLLEGE money to pay his bills. At Knox, thanks to the greater opportunities of the city, sixty-five per cent of the students are wholly or in part self- supporting. They are reporters and newspaper correspondents, clerks in clothing stores, waiters in restaurants; in many cases they do chores in return for board and lodging. Athletics flourish, and societies for the cultivation of oratory, debat- ing, and literature ; there are receptions, teas, and picnics as at Beloit. But success in these student activities is less marked. As against this, the moral life at Knox is extraordinarily strong and austere. Founded in 1837 by a colony of fervent Christians from west- ern New York, the spirit of the fathers has been only slightly affected by modern luxury and free thought. The small Faculty copes with its task of personal instruction in a spirit truly heroic. Graduates of Eastern institutions though many of them are, and alien in traditions to the stren- uous life of the West, their loyalty to the college and interest in the vital work it is doing has, in several cases, led them to refuse higher salaries elsewhere. As for the moral life of the undergraduates, 260 VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY the only difficulty is to make a true account of it credible. At both Beloit and Knox chapel is compulsory. Instead of preceding the day's work, as is the custom in the East, it comes just before noon, and is thus robbed of many of its terrors. But even this will not account for the fact that at Knox chapel seems to be heartily enjoyed. At Beloit drinking is rare and smoking prohibited on the campus. At Knox both are all but un- known. One student of cosmopolitan travel told me that in Europe he took wine with his meals, but at Knox would never dream of going into a barroom. I was told that a certain one of the fraternities was inclined to be fast. This reputation, as its members regretfully admitted, was due to the fact that the year before two of the men, since graduated, had resorted to the bar of the Union Hotel. In some mysterious manner the lady who holds the office of registrar is minutely informed of all the shortcomings of the students, and es- pecially of their long goings. The guilty fra- ternity assured me that it was doing its best to live down its reputation. At the two other fraternity houses no one had smoked. Here I 261 THE SMALL COLLEGE ventured the postprandial weed. With hospitable tact the senior resident sent a freshman down- town by bicycle to get tobacco; but when he re- turned it appeared that nobody had a pipe. During my stay at Galesburg, Billy Sunday, once a Chicago ball player under Pop Anson, and now a revivalist famous throughout the Middle West, concluded a campaign against the devil, in which eternal fire flamed hotly. He is a remarkably dramatic exhorter and a man of manifest sincerity; and he converted large quantities of students, including several of this wickedest fraternity. Among the young women his harvest was vast. Now Knox is just finishing a gymnasium, not the least anticipated feature of which is a hardwood floor flanked by alcoves, an ideal spot for the college dances which hitherto have been held in a dingy hall in town. But among the unregenerate, anticipation had turned to despair. Billy Sunday had forbidden dancing, so where were the partners to come from? At both Knox and Beloit the young women live in a single community in a separate building equipped with kitchen, dining-room, reception and drawing-rooms, gymnasium, and under a 262 VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY closely-similar regime. Emerson Hall, Beloit, is fine architecturally and beautifully equipped, and the life in it, as it seemed to me, exemplary. The food is so good and the dining-room so attractive that several of the young instructors come there for their meals at least that is the only motive they would admit to. Among the students a con- stant permutation of seats at table promotes general sociability. Every evening after dinner there is dancing (non-coeducational) in a large and beautifully-furnished drawing-room. Life in Emerson Hall is governed by an asso- ciation similar in aim and in compensation to the Dean's cabinet of men. To maintain quiet in study hours there is a system of proctors, and on each floor one or more officers known as squelch- ers. The ideal of the hall is democratic unity and loyalty. There is, however, a tendency to form exclusive societies. It is generally believed that the Shakespeare society is a veiled sorority. Owing to the wealth of general apartments in Emerson Hall, there are rooms for only forty-five students. Others room in adjacent cottages, one of which is devoted to the junior class as a body. The total number of young women is strictly 263 THE SMALL COLLEGE limited to eighty-five all that can be adequately housed by the college. Every year many are turned away. Knox is only a little less strict. There is a strong contrast here with the neigh- boring state universities. At both Knox and Beloit the social life of the women leaves little to be desired. I could not find that the limita- tion of number's was the result of any general predilection for smallness. Beloit resisted coedu- cation until 1895, and gave in then, I was told, only because it felt the need of more students. There never was a better example, however, of the advantage of limiting the number of under- graduates according to the capacity of the col- lege to assimilate them socially. At Knox there is no men's dormitory, no gen- eral gathering-place, and no general commons. Except for the fraternities the men live broadcast in the houses of the townspeople, and the chap- ter houses are widely removed from one another. At Beloit there is a dormitory, Chapin Hall, with kitchen and dining-room; but life in it is far from attractive. Until lately the academy stu- dents mingled there with college men. The food is said to be poor, and the general life until this 264 VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY year has been turbulent enough. Now the stu- dents are responsible to themselves for their own well-being, and there is said to be comparative peace and quiet. The real reason for the unpop- ularity of Chapin Hall, however, is that it is the abode of "barbs," the fraternity men flocking by themselves through all four years. The fraternity is, in fact, the crucial problem of the small college in general. That the evil features which I have noted elsewhere are pecul- iarly developed at Beloit and Knox I shall not venture to say ; but, in a considerable experience, I have never heard them as frankly admitted and as calmly accepted as inevitable indeed, as a virtue. The basis of election, it was admitted, was not what a man had done or could do for the college, but his desirability as a housemate. As the rushing begins shortly after the opening of college, the test is largely a freshman's family and social position at home. One chapter, at Knox, rather boasted of the fact that it was able to maintain its standing by electing sons of former members of the fraternity. The non-fraternity men very naturally resent all this. At Beloit I was told that, during the 265 THE SMALL COLLEGE general reception to freshmen and at Big Hill Day, the fraternity men showed a disposition to flock by themselves, and (this seemed to be the crime!) to monopolize the young women, who shared the weakness of their sex for badges of distinction. The "barbs " threatened that, if this sort of thing continued, they would stay away ; and so matters were altered for the better. But the spirit that caused the difference remains. Westerners often stigmatize the Eastern uni- versities as snobbish; but in such a comparison they do not appear at marked disadvantage. Gentlemanly character and good fellowship, it is true, count for much at Yale and Princeton, and it is well that they do. But the primary basis of election is what a man has done for his alma mater. When I pointed out that many men of good character who have made their mark in debating or athletics, even captains of university teams, were not fraternity men, the objection was met with bland surprise. The fraternity, I was told, was more important than the college. A man was first a member of Beta Theta Pi, and then an undergraduate of Beloit. When I pointed out 266 VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY that such a spirit was not only snobbish but anti- patriotic, I was met with a helpless shrug. At Beloit I was able to discuss a particular case that of the football man who had broken training. Though he had come with a reputation as a player, and had turned out one of the most brilliant men on the team, he had not been taken into any of the three fraternities. Resentment for this had probably had much to do with his insub- ordination. It was admitted that, if he had been subjected to the influence of fraternity life, he would probably have acted differently. Certainly he would have done so if he had had hope for the future, as he would have had under the Eastern club system. But under the system of four-year fraternities the only influence that could be brought to bear was a threat in chapel from the Dean a fact which inclines the East- ern college man to lift his shoulders. In the small college, as in the university, in short, the fraternities, pleasant and profitable as they are to their members, fail of the two great functions of the social system as it is cultivated in non-fraternity universities. On the one hand, they neither stimulate nor control the leading 267 THE SMALL COLLEGE undergraduate activities, and on the other they allow many of the strongest men to leave college without the impress of its best traditions. The Faculty at Beloit is mindful of these evils. It has already required the fraternities to defer rushing until the third week after freshmen arrive, and it hopes to defer it for the entire freshman year. It would be far better to emu- late Princeton, which limits its eating-clubs to the two upper classes, and by an intelligently- planned and rigorously-enforced system of elec- tion virtually does away with rushing. But the fraternities resist even the delay of a single year. The sense of the college seems to be that the practicable solution lies in multiply- ing chapters, as Amherst has done, where over ninety per cent of the students are fraternity men. Already both at Beloit and at Knox there are eating-clubs, which, though professedly demo- cratic, differ from the fraternities chiefly in lack- ing a charter. And other similar organizations are germinating. But it is hard to see how a col- lege, split up from the start into rival cliques, can hope to attain the ideal of representative and efficient democracy. 268 VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY The fact is that all American institutions, and particularly those in which the fraternity system prevails, have hold of the wrong end of the social stick. The first duty of the college is to the stu- dent body as a whole; its energy and its money should be spent in making the general life democratic and congenial. Loyal efforts in this direction are being made everywhere, even in the universities; but the only means I have ever discovered of effective reform is to gather all underclassmen into a dormitory, or a system of dormitories, and to feed them at well-regulated commons. The small college should be, funda- mentally, one large social unit. The life of the women, both at Beloit and at Knox, is so arranged, and the result is highly satisfactory. Why not the life of the men? It is true that, within this general body, however com- pact, there will always tend to be exclusive or- ganizations. But if the basis of election to them is tested merit, the upperclass club has proved itself as wholesome and as necessary as it is inevit- able. The representative and dominant club is as vitally necessary as the democratically inclusive college. 269 THE SMALL COLLEGE After all has been said, is it quite certain that even the general life of the small college, in so far as it differs, for instance, from life at Princeton or Yale, differs for the better? In both types of institution the student body is divided sharply into the socially elect, whose existence is, on the whole, well ordered and fortunate, and the socially excluded, who live in scattered neg- lect. According to C^sar, it is better to be first in a village than second in Rome ; but conversely, is it not more profitable to be last in the broad, rich life of a university than in the narrower life of a college? The universities, as we have seen, are already turning their attention to this matter of the gen- eral residential life. At five out of the six insti- tutions I have studied there is a strong faction in favor of dividing the student body into small residential communities. At Wisconsin, the near- est and most dangerous neighbor of the two colleges we are considering, President Van Hise has commissioned architects to draw up plans. Both Knox and Beloit face a future grave with uncertainty. That they, and all institutions of their kind, 270 VERSUS THE UNIVERSITY have a large and important function in the life of the nation is not for a moment to be doubted. Their opportunity lies in the fact that they are acutely local. They have the appeal on the public mind of the thing seen and known, and their traditions are more nearly in harmony with the surrounding community than those of a univer- sity can ever be, the ideals of which are important in proportion as they are above the common ken. Of the graduates of Beloit in the last ten years, almost seventy per cent have gone back to their homes in the country round about as business men or teachers. In the West, moreover, the small college is able, if it proves equal to its opportunity, to win a much more nearly exclusive field than the small college in the East. The state universities are more and more tending to lay chief stress upon advanced or characteristically university instruction a fact by no means incompatible with their awak- ening to the social needs of their students. Being unable to exact tuition fees, they are more than willing to give over general and collegiate in- struction to the colleges. President James of the University of Illinois has lately written the heads 271 THE SMALL COLLEGE of neighboring local colleges, offering to cooperate in diverting to them students who desire a general education. Granted an adequate teaching force and a wholesomely-constituted social life, the small colleges of the West should, in a very few decades, achieve the exalted ideal of usefulness which, as yet, in spite of their frequent protesta- tions, they have not achieved. The problem is almost wholly financial. Be- loit has been fortunate in the benefactions of Dr. D. K. Pearsons, to whom it owes its science building and both Chapin and Emerson Halls; but it still lacks funds. Knox has been incred- ibly and, as it seems, shamefully neglected by the citizens of Galesburg. Both institutions have received offers of funds from the General Education Board, which rejoices in the recent Rockefeller millions. But the rejoicing of the board is tempered by the Rockefeller prudence, which demands that each college shall itself raise as much as it is to receive. Both despair of being able to do this, though both have made heroic efforts. So the fate of the two colleges is as yet an unfinished sentence. IX THE QUESTION OF EXPENSE rilHE question of expense, to many the most -*- vital of all, is too complicated to receive any adequate treatment in a work of the present scope; and it need not do so. College and uni- versity catalogues, which are sent free on appli- cation, furnish details of the cost of rooms, board, and tuition, and over against these a list of scholarships offered and the conditions of win- ning them, the chances of obtaining local employ- ment, etc. Sometimes they give estimates of the total cost of a college year. These are, naturally, never in excess of the sums required. As a general proposition it may be stated that life in small colleges is less expensive than in large, in the West than in the East. In the state universities there are no tuition fees. These dif- ferences are offset in a measure by the fact that many Eastern institutions, especially the univer- sities, offer a large number of valuable scholar- 278 THE QUESTION OF EXPENSE ships, and, owing to the presence of the idle rich, for student tutoring. The presence of a large city in the neighborhood means an increased field for remunerative labor ; and those institutions which command wide public interest offer the best field for men who are able to earn money as newspaper correspondents. At Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and other uni- versities of the kind, many men live on five hun- dred dollars a year and less, and many earn the larger part, even the whole, of the money they spend. Others spend five, even ten and fifteen, thousand dollars a year. A boy who has a thou- sand dollars a year need never feel pinched or at any real disadvantage in college life. Twelve to fifteen hundred is the maximum which wise par- ents will allow unless indeed it be considered wisdom to encourage a young fellow to seek the comradeship of the sons of the leaders in wealth and society. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. lOMAY'GQfG IN STACKS APR 2 e iosn REC'D LiJ *W5 I860 tfR 1 1971 8 6 BEC'D LQ MA/1 2271-3PM36 --** LD 21A-50m-4,'60 (A9562slO)476B General Library University of California Berkeley YB 0440: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY