Chapter SIXTEEN: The Universities (1)

When American industry began, a short time ago, to disturb European circles, people very much exaggerated the danger, because the event was so entirely unexpected. The “American peril” was at the door before any one knew about it, or even supposed that America really possessed an industry which amounted to anything. It will not be long before Europe will experience a like surprise in the intellectual sphere. A great work will certainly appear, as if accomplished in a moment, before any one supposes that America so much as dreams of science and investigation. At the time, people tardily said to themselves that such industry could only have been built on firm rock, and never would have been able to spring up if American economic life had really been founded, as was then supposed, on avarice and corruption. And similarly, in the intellectual sphere, people will have to trace things back, and say in retrospect that such achievements could not be brought forth suddenly, and that serious and competent scientific work throughout the country must really have gone before. It is not here, in this world of intellectual labour, as in the economic world; there is no question of threatening rivalry, there is no scientific competition; there is nothing but co-operation. And yet even here no people can, without danger to its own achievements, afford to ignore what another nation has done. The sooner that Europe, and in particular Germany, acquaints itself with the intellectual life of America, so much more organically and profitably the future labour in common will develop. For any one who knows the real situation can already realize, without the gift of prophecy, that in science more than in other spheres the future will belong to these two countries.

On the part of Germany to-day there prevails an almost discouraging ignorance of everything which pertains to American universities; and we may say, at once, that if we speak of science we shall refer to nothing but the universities. As in Germany, so it is in the United States, in sharp and notable contrast to France and England, that the academic teacher is the real priest of science. In England and France, it is not customary for the great investigator to be at the same time the daily teacher of youth. In America and Germany he is exactly this. America has, to be sure, historians and national economists like Rhodes, Lodge, Roosevelt, Schouler, and others who are outside of academic circles; and very many lawyers, doctors and preachers, who are scientifically productive; and her most conspicuous physicists, so far as reputation goes, like Edison, Bell, Tesla, and so many others, are advancing science indirectly through their discoveries and inventions. Strictly speaking, the officials of the scientific institutions at Washington are likewise outside of the universities, and the greatest intellectual efficiency has always been found among these men. Nevertheless, it remains true that on the whole, the scientific life of the nation goes on in the universities, and that the academic instruction conveyed there is the most powerful source of strength to the entire American people.

The German still has no confidence in American science, is fond of dwelling on the amusing newspaper reports of Western “universities” which are often equivalent to a German Sekunda, or on those extraordinary conditions which prevailed “a short time ago” in the study of medicine. This “short time ago” means, however, in the intellectual life of Germany an entirely different length of time from that which it means in the New World. One is almost tempted to compare the intellectual development of Germany and America by epochs in order to get a proper means of comparing intervals of time in these respective countries. The primitive times of the Germans, from the days of Tacitus down to their conversion to Christianity under Charlemagne in about the year 800, would correspond, then, to the one hundred and fifty years from the discovery of America up to the beginning of the Puritan era in 1630. The next period would embrace in Germany seven hundred years more—up to the time when Germany freed itself from Rome. In America this would be again a century and a half, up to 1776, when the nation freed itself from England. Then follow after the Reformation during a period of three hundred years, the Thirty Years’ War, the Renaissance of the eighteenth century, the downfall of the Napoleonic influence, and, finally, the war for freedom. And once again the corresponding intervals on this side of the ocean have been of very much shorter duration; firstly years of war, then the æsthetic rise in the middle of the century, then the sufferings of the Civil War, the period of reconstruction, and, finally, peace. After 1813 a new period commences, which ends in 1870 with the German amalgamation into a nation. Historically incomparable with Germany’s great war against the French, America had in 1898 an insignificant war with Spain; but for the national consciousness of the Americans it played, perhaps, no less important a rôle. In fact, there began at that time probably a certain culmination in American intellectual development which in its six years is comparable in effect with what the Germans went through during several decades after the Franco-Prussian War. Indeed, all that happened in America a hundred years ago is felt to lie as far back as the events which took place in Germany three hundred years ago; and, in matters of higher education and scientific research, conditions have probably changed more in the last ten years than they have changed during fifty years in Germany.

The many false ideas, however, depend for credence, so far as they have any foundation, not alone on the reports of the previous condition of things, but also on misleading accounts of the conditions to-day. For even the best-intentioned narrator is very apt to be misled, because he finds it so hard to free himself from ordinary German conceptions. The position of the German schools of higher education is so easily grasped, while that in America is so complicated, that the German is always tempted to bring clearness and order into what he sees as confusion, by forcing it into the simple scheme to which he is accustomed, and thus to misunderstand it.

The German traveller is certain to start from the distinction so familiar to him between the Gymnasium and the university with four faculties, and he always contents himself with making but one inquiry: “Is this institution a university with four faculties?” And when he is told that it is not, he is convinced to his entire satisfaction that it is therefore only a Gymnasium. Indeed, very many of the educated Germans who have lived in America for some decades would still know no better; and, nevertheless, the conditions are really not complicated until one tries to make them fit into this abstract German scheme. The principle of gradations which is manifest in all American institutions is in itself fully as simple as the German principle of sharp demarcations. Most foreigners do not even go so far as to ask whether a given institution is a university. They are quite content to find out whether the word university is a part of its name. If they then ascertain from the catalogue that the studies are about the same as those which are drilled into the pupils of a Sekunda, they can attest the shameful fact: “There are no universities in America to be in any wise compared with the German universities.”

In the first place, it should be said that the word “university” is not used in America in the same sense as in Germany, but is almost completely interchangeable with the word “college,” as a rather colorless addition to the proper name of any institution whatsoever, so long only as its curriculum goes beyond that of the high school, and so long also as it is not exclusively designed to train ministers of the gospel, doctors, or lawyers. A higher school for medical instruction is called a “medical school,” and there are similarly “law schools” and “divinity schools,” whereas, in the college or university, as the term is generally used, these three subjects are not taught. College is the older word, and since the institutions in the East are in general the older ones, the name college has been and still is in that region the more common. But in the West, where in general the institutions are on a considerably lower level, the newer name of university is the more usual. No confusion necessarily arises from this, since the institutions which are styled now college and now university represent countless gradations, and the general term is without special significance. No one would think of saying that when he was young he went to a university, any more than he would say that on a journey he visited a city. In order to make the statement entirely clear, he would add the explicit name of the institution. Every specialist knows that a man who has spent four years in Taylor University in Indiana or at Blackburn University in Illinois, or at Leland University in Louisiana, or at other similar “universities,” will not be nearly so well educated as a man who has been to Yale College or Princeton College or Columbia College. The proper name is the only significant designation, and the addition of “college” or “university” tells nothing.

Out of this circumstance there has independently developed, in recent years in pedagogical circles, a second sense for the word “university.” By “university” there is coming to be understood an institution which is not only a college or a university in the old sense, but which furthermore has various professional schools. Even in this sense of the word, it is not exactly the same as the German conception, since such an institution includes the college, whereas there is nothing in Germany which would correspond to this collegiate department. Moreover, here belongs also a part of what the Germans have only in the technological institute. Finally, there is one more usage which arises in a way from a confusion of the two that we have mentioned. Some persons are inclined to mean by “university” a first-class college, and by “college” an institution of an inferior standard; and so, finally, the proper name of the institution is the only thing to go by, and the entire higher system of education in the country can be understood only in this way.

Therefore, we shall abstract from the designations of these institutions, and consider only what they really are. We have before us the fact that hundreds of higher institutions of learning exist without any sharp demarcation between them; that is, they form a closely graded scale, commencing with secondary schools and leading up to universities, of which some are in many respects comparable with the best institutions of Germany. In the second place, the groupings of the studies in these institutions are entirely different from those which prevail in Germany, especially owing to the fact that emphasis is laid on the college, which Germany does not have. It could not be different; and this condition is, in fact, the patent of American success. If we try to understand the conditions of to-day from those of yesterday, the real unity of this system comes out sharply. What was, then, we have to ask, the national need for higher instruction at the time when these states organized themselves into one nation?

In the first place, the people had to have preachers, while it was clear, nevertheless, that the state, and therefore the entire political community, was independent of any church, and must never show any favour to one sect over another. And so it became the duty of each separate sect to prepare its own preachers for their religious careers as well or as badly as it was able. The people, again, had to have lawyers and judges. Now the judges, in accordance with the democratic spirit, were elected from the people, and every man had the right to plead his own case in court:—so that if any man proposed to educate and prepare himself to plead other men’s cases for them, it was his own business to give himself the proper education and not the business of the community. He had to become an apprentice under experienced attorneys, and the community had not to concern itself in the matter, nor even to see to it that such technical preparation was grounded on real learning. School-teachers were necessary, but in order to satisfy the demands of the times it was hardly necessary for the teacher to go in his own studies very much beyond the members of his classes. A few more years of training than could be had in the public schools was desirable, but there was no thought of scholarship or science. On the lowest level of all, a hundred years ago, stood the science of medicine. It was a purely practical occupation, of which anybody might learn the technique without any special training. He might be an apprentice with some older physician, or he might pick it up in a number of other ways.

As soon as we have understood the early conditions in this way, we can see at once how they would have further to develop. It is obvious that in their own interests the sects would have to found schools for preachers. The administrators of justice would of course consult together and found schools of law, in which every man who paid his tuition might be prepared for the legal career. Doctors would have to come together and found medical schools which, once more, every one with a public school training would be free to attend. Finally, the larger communities would feel the necessity of having schools for training their teachers. In all this the principle of social selection would have to enter in at once. Since there were no formal provisions which might prescribe and fix standards of excellence, so everything would be regulated by the laws of supply and demand. The schools which could furnish successful lawyers, doctors, teachers, and clergymen would become prosperous, while the others would lead a modest existence or perhaps disappear. It would not be, however, merely a question of the good or bad schools, but of schools having entirely different standards, and these adapted to purely local conditions. The older states would, of course, demand better things than the new pioneer states; thickly settled localities would fix higher requirements than rural districts; rich districts higher than poor. In this way some schools would have a longer course of study than others, and some schools demand more previous training as a condition of entrance than others. So it would soon come to mean nothing to say simply that one had taken the legal, or medical, or theological course, as the one school might offer a four years’ course and the other a course of two years, and the one, moreover, might demand college training as preparation, and the other merely a grammar-school education. Every school has its own name, and this name is the only thing which characterizes its standard of excellence. In this way there is no harm at all if there are three or four medical schools in one city, and if their several diplomas of graduation are of entirely different value.

What is the result of this? It is a threefold one. In the first place, popular initiative is stimulated to the utmost, and every person and every institution is encouraged to do its best. There are no formal regulations to hamper enterprising impulses, to keep back certain more advanced regions, or to approve mediocrity with an artificial seal of authority. In the second place, technical education is able to adapt itself thoroughly to all the untold local factors, and to give to every region such schools of higher training as it needs, without pulling down any more advanced sections of the country to an artificially mediocre level more adapted to the whole country. In the third place, the free competition between the different institutions insures their ceaseless progress. There are no hard and fixed boundary lines, and whatsoever does not advance surely recedes; that which leads to-day is surpassed to-morrow if it does not adapt itself to the latest requirements. This is true both as regards the quality of the teachers and their means of instruction, as regards the length of the course, and more especially the conditions of entrance. These last have steadily grown throughout the country. Fifty years ago the very best institutions in the most advanced portions of the country demanded no more for entrance than the professional schools of third class situated in more rural regions demand to-day. And this tendency goes steadily onward day by day. If there were any great departures made, the institutions would be disintegrated; the schools which prepare pupils would not be able suddenly to come up to new requirements, and therefore few scholars would be able to prepare for greatly modified entrance examinations. In this way, between the conservative holding to historic traditions and the striving to progress and to exceed other institutions by the highest possible efficiency, a compromise is brought about which results in a gradual but not over-hasty improvement.

We have so far entirely left out of account the state. We can speak here only of the individual state. The country as a whole has as little to do with higher education as with lower. But the single state has, in fact, a significant task—indeed, a double one. Since it aims at no monopoly, but rather gives the freest play to individual initiative, we have recognized the fundamental principle that restrictions are placed nowhere. On the other hand, it becomes the duty of the state to lend a helping hand wherever private activities have been found insufficient. This can happen in two ways: either the state may help to support private institutions which already exist, or it may establish new ones of its own, which in that case offer free tuition to the sons and daughters of all taxpayers. These so-called state universities are, in a way, the crowning feature of the free public school system. Wherever they exist, the sons of farmers have the advantage of free instruction from the kindergarten to the degree of doctor of philosophy.

Now private initiative is weakest where the population is poor or stands on a low level of culture, so that few can be found to contribute sufficient funds to support good institutions, and at the same time the rich citizens of these less advanced states prefer to send their children to the universities of the most advanced states. The result is, and this is what is hardest for the foreigner to understand, that the higher institutions of learning which are subsidized by the state stand for a grade of culture inferior to that of the private institutions, and that not only the leading universities, like Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Chicago, Cornell, and Stanford, carry on their work without the help of the state, but also that the leading Eastern States pay out much less for higher instruction than do the Western. The State of Massachusetts, which stands at the head in matters of education, does not give a cent to its universities, while Ohio entirely supports the Ohio State University and gives aid to six other institutions.

The second task of the states in educational matters is shared alike by all of them; the state supervises all instruction, and, more than that, the state legislature confers on the individual institution the right to award grades, diplomas, and degrees to its students. No institution may change its organization without a civil permit. As culture has advanced the state has found it necessary to make the requirements in the various professional schools rather high. In practice, once more, a continual compromise has been necessary between the need to advance and the desire to stay, by traditions which have been proved and tried and found practical. Here, once again, any universal scheme of organization would have destroyed everything. If a high standard had been fixed it would have hindered private initiative, and given a set-back to Southern and Western states and robbed them of the impulses to development. A lower universal standard, on the other hand, would have impeded the advance of the more progressive portions of the country. Therefore the various state governments have taken a happy middle position in these matters, and their responsibility for the separate institutions has been made even less complete in that the degrees of these institutions carry in themselves no actual rights. Every state has its own laws for the admission of a lawyer to its bar, or to the public practice of medicine, and it is only to a small degree that the diplomas of professional schools are recognized as equivalent to a state examination.

The history of the professional schools for lawyers, ministers, teachers, and physicians in America is by no means the history of the universities. We have so far left out of account the college, which is the nucleus of American education. Let us now go back to it. We saw in the beginning of the development of these states a social community in which preparation for the professions of teaching, preaching, law or medicine implied a technical and specialized training, which every one could obtain for himself without any considerable preparation. There was no thought of a broad, liberal education. Now, to be sure, the level of scholarship required for entrance into the professional schools has steadily risen, the duration and character of the instruction has been steadily improved; but even to-day the impression has not faded from the public consciousness, and is indeed favoured by the great differences in merit between the special schools, that such a practical introduction to the treatment of disease, to court procedure, the mastery of technical problems, or to the art of teaching, does not in itself develop educated men. All this is specialized professional training, which no more broadens the mind than would the professional preparation for the calling of the merchant or manufacturer or captain. Whether a man who is prepared for his special career is also an educated man, depends on the sort of general culture that he has become familiar with. It is thought important for a man to have had a liberal education before entering the commercial house or the medical school, but it is felt to be indifferent whether he has learned his profession at the stock exchange or at the clinic.

The European will find it hard to follow this trend of thought. In Europe the highest institutions of learning are so closely allied to the learned professions, and these themselves have historically developed so completely from the learned studies, that professional erudition and general culture are well-nigh identical. And the general system of distinctions and merits favours in every way the learned professions. How much of this, however, springs out of special conditions may be seen, for instance, from the fact that in Germany an equal social position is given to the officer of the army and to the scholar. Even the American is, in his way, not quite consistent, in so far as he has at all times honoured the profession of the ministry with a degree of esteem that is independent of the previous preparation which the minister had before entering his theological school. This fact has come from the leading position which the clergymen held in the American colonial days, and the close relation which exists between the study of theology and general philosophy.

The fact that by chance one had taken the profession of law, or teaching, or medicine, did not exalt one in the eyes of one’s contemporaries above the great mass of average citizens who went about their honest business. The separation of those who were called to social leadership was seen to require, therefore, some principle which should be different from any professional training. At this point we come on yet another historical factor. The nation grew step for step with its commercial activities and undertakings. So long as it was a question of gaining and developing new territory, the highest talent, the best strength and proudest personalities entered the service of this nationally significant work. It was a matter of course that no secondary position in society should be ascribed to these captains of commerce and of industry. The highest degree of culture which they were able to attain necessarily fixed the standard of culture for the whole community; and, therefore, the traditional concept of the gentleman as the man of liberal culture and refinement came to have that great social significance which was reserved in Germany for the learned professions.

In its outer form, the education of such a gentleman was borrowed from England. It was a four years’ course coming after the high school, and laying special stress on the classical languages, philosophy, and mathematics—a course which, up to the early twenties, kept a young man in contact with the fine arts and the sciences, with no thought for the practical earning of a livelihood; which, therefore, kept him four years longer from the tumult of the world, and in an ideal community of men who were doing as he was doing; which developed him in work, in sport, in morals and social address. Such was the tradition; the institution was called a college after the English precedent. Any man who went to college belonged to the educated class, and it was indifferent what profession he took up; no studies of the professional school were able to replace a college education. Now, it necessarily happened that the endeavour to have students enter the professional schools with as thorough preparation as possible led eventually to demand of every one who undertook a professional course the complete college education. In fact, this last state of development is already reached in the best institutions of America. For instance, in Harvard and in Johns Hopkins, the diploma of a four years’ college course is demanded for entrance into the legal, medical, or theological faculty. But in popular opinion the dividing line between common and superior education is still the line between school and college, and not, as in Germany, between liberal and technical institutions of learning. One who has successfully passed through college becomes a graduate, a gentleman of distinction; he has the degree of bachelor of arts, and those who have this degree are understood to have had a higher education.

This whole complex of relations is reflected within the college itself. It is supposed to be a four years’ course which comes after the high school, and we have seen that the high school itself has no fixed standard of instruction. The small prairie college may be no better than the Tertia or Sekunda of a German Realschule, while the large and influential colleges are certainly not at all to be compared simply with German schools, but rather with the German Prima of a Gymnasium, together with the first two or three semesters in the philosophical faculty of a university. Between these extremes there is a long, sliding scale, represented by over six hundred colleges. We must now bear in mind that the college was meant to be the higher school for the general cultivation of gentlemen. Of course, from the outset this idealistic demand was not free from utilitarian considerations; the same instruction could well be utilized as the most appropriate practical training of the school-teacher, and if so, the college becomes secondarily a sort of technical school for pedagogues. But, then, in the same way as the entrance into legal and medical faculties was gradually made more difficult, until now the best of these schools demand collegiate preparation, so also did the training school for teachers necessarily become of more and more professional character, until it gradually quite outgrew the college. The culmination is a philosophical faculty which, from its side, presupposes the college, and which, therefore, takes the student about where a German student enters his fourth semester—a technical school for specialized critical science laying main stress on seminaries, laboratories, and lectures for advanced students. Such a continuation of the college study beyond the time of college—that is, for those who have been graduated from college—is called a graduate school, and its goal is the degree of doctor of philosophy. The graduate school is in this way parallel with the law, medical, or divinity school, which likewise presuppose that their students have been graduated from college.

The utilitarian element inevitably affects the college from another side. A college of the higher type will not be a school with a rigid curriculum, but will adapt itself more or less to the individuality of its students. If it is really to give the most it can, it must, at least during the last years of the college course, be somewhat like a philosophical faculty, and allow some selection among the various studies:—so that every man can best perfect his peculiar talent and can satisfy his inclinations for one or other sort of learning. So soon, now, as such academic freedom has been instituted, it is very liable to be used for utilitarian purposes. The future doctor and the future lawyer in their election of college studies will have the professional school already in mind, and will be preparing themselves for their professional studies. The lawyer will probably study more history, the doctor will study biology, the theologian languages, the future manufacturer may study physics, the banker political economy, and the politician will take up government. And so the ideal training school for gentlemen will not be merely a place for liberal education, but at the same time will provide its own sort of untechnical professional training.

Inasmuch as everything really technical is still excluded, and the majority of college students even to-day come for nothing more than a liberal education, it remains true that the college is first of all a place for the development and refinement of personal character; a place in which the young American spends the richest and happiest years of his life, where he forms his friendships and intellectual preferences which are to last throughout his life, and where the narrow confines of school life are outgrown and the confines of professional education not yet begun; where, in short, everything is broad and free and sunny. For the American the attraction of academic life is wholly centred in the college; the college student is the only one who lives the true student life. Those who study in the four professional faculties are comparable rather to the German medical students of the last clinical semesters—sedate, semi-professional men. The college is the soul of the university. The college is to-day, more than ever, the soul of the whole nation.

We have to mention one more factor, and we shall have brought together all which are of prime importance. We have seen that the professional and the collegiate schools had at the outset different points of view, and were, in fact, entirely independent. It was inevitable that as they developed they should come into closer and closer relations. The name of the college remained during this development the general designation. Special faculties have grouped themselves about the college, while a common administration keeps them together. There are certain local difficulties in this. According to the original idea, a college ought to be in a small, rural, and attractively situated spot. The young man should be removed from ordinary conditions; and as he goes to Jena, Marburg, and Göttingen, so he should go to Princeton or New Haven, or Palo Alto, in order to be away from large cities in a little academic world which is inspired only by the glory of famous teachers and by the youthful happiness of many student generations. A medical or law school, on the other hand, belongs, according to American tradition, in some large city, where there is a plenty of clinical material at hand, and where great attorneys are in contact with the courts. It so happened that the college, as it grew up into a complete university, was especially favoured if it happened to be in the vicinity of a large city, like Harvard College in Cambridge, which had all the attractions of rural quiet and nevertheless was separated from the large city of Boston only by the Charles River bridge. In later times, to be sure, since the idyllic side of college life is everywhere on the wane, and the outward equipment, especially of laboratories, libraries, etc., has everywhere to grow, it is a noticeable advantage for even collegiate prosperity to have the resources of a large city at hand. And, therefore, the institutions in these cities, like New York, Baltimore, Chicago, and San Francisco, develop more rapidly than many colleges which were once famous but which lie in more isolated places.

At the head of the administration there is always a president, a man whose functions are something between those of a Rektor and a Kultus-Minister, most nearly, perhaps, comparable with a Kurator, and yet much more independent, much more dictatorial. The direction of the university is actually concentrated in his person, and the rise or fall of the institution is in large measure dependent on his official leadership. In olden times the president was almost always a theologian, and at the same time was apt to be professor in moral philosophy. This is true to-day of none but small country colleges, and even there the Puritan tradition disappears as financial and administrative problems come to be important. The large universities have lately come almost always to place a professor of the philosophical faculty at their head. Almost invariably these are men of liberal endowments. Mostly they are men of wide outlook, and only such men are fit for these positions, which belong to the most influential and important in the country. The opinions of men like Eliot of Harvard, Hadley of Yale, Butler of Columbia, Shurman of Cornell, Remsen of Johns Hopkins, Wheeler of California, Harper of Chicago, Jordan of Leland Stanford, Wilson of Princeton, and of many others, are respected and sought on all questions of public life, even in matters extending far beyond education.

The university president is elected for a life term by the administrative council—a deliberative body of men who, without emoluments, serve the destinies of the university, and in a certain sense are the congress of the university as compared with the president. They confirm appointments, regulate expenditures, and theoretically conduct all external business for the university, although practically they follow in large part the recommendations of the faculties. The teaching body is composed everywhere of professors, assistant professors, and instructors. All these receive a fixed stipend. There are no such things as private tuition fees, and unsalaried teachers, like the German Privatdocenten, are virtually unknown. The instruction consists, in general, of courses lasting through a year and not a semester. The academic year begins, in most cases, at the end of September and closes at the end of June.

During his four years’ college course the student prefers to remain true to some one college. If this is a small institution, he is very apt, on being graduated, to attend some higher institution. Even the students in professional schools generally come back year after year to the same school till they finish their studies. It is only in the graduate school—that is, the German philosophical faculty—that migration after the German manner has come in fashion; here, in fact, the student frequently studies one year here and one year there, in order to hear the best specialists in his science. Except in the state institutions of the West, the student pays a round sum for the year; in the larger institutions from one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars. In the smaller colleges the four years’ course of study is almost wholly prescribed, and only in the final year is there a certain freedom of choice. The higher the college stands in the matter of scholarship, so much the more its lecture programme approaches that of a university; and in the foremost colleges the student is from the very beginning almost entirely free in his selection of studies.

A freedom in electing between study and laziness is less known. The student may elect his own lectures; he must, however, attend at least a certain number of these, and must generally show in a semi-annual examination that he has spent his time to some purpose. The examinations at the end of the special courses are in the college substituted for a final examination. Any man receives a degree who has passed the written examinations in a certain number of courses. The examinations concern not only what has actually been said in the lectures, but at the same time try to bring out how much the student has learned outside in the way of reading text-books and searching into literature. Originally the students roomed in college buildings, but with the growth of these institutions this factor of college life has declined. In the larger universities the student is, in matters of his daily life, as free as the German; but dwelling in college dormitories still remains the most popular mode of living, since it lends a social attraction to academic life.

To go over from this general plan to a more concrete presentation, we may perhaps sketch briefly a picture of Harvard College, the oldest and largest academy in the country. The colony of Massachusetts established in 1636 a little college in the vicinity of the newly founded city of Boston. The place was called Cambridge in commemoration of the English college in which some of the colonists had received their education. When in 1638 a young English minister, John Harvard, left this little academy half his fortune, it was decided to name the college for its first benefactor. The state had given £400, John Harvard about £800. The school building was one little structure, the number of students was very small, and there were a few clergymen for teachers. On the same spot to-day stands Harvard University, like a little city within a city, with fifty ample buildings, with 550 members of the teaching staff, over five thousand students, with a regular annual budget of a million and a half dollars, and in the enjoyment of bequests which add year by year millions to its regular endowments.

This growth has been constant, outwardly and inwardly; and it has grown in power and in freedom in a way that well befits the spirit of American institutions. Since the colonial régime of the seventeenth century gave to the new institution a deliberative body of seven men—the so-called Corporation—this body has perpetuated itself without interruption down to the present time by its own vote, and without changing any principle of its constitution has developed the home of Puritanism into the theatre of the freest investigation, and the school into a great university of the world.

Now, as then, there stands at the head this body of seven members, each of whom is elected for life. To belong to this is esteemed a high honour. Beside these, there is the board of overseers of thirty members, elected by the graduates from among their own number. Five men are elected every June to hold office for six years in this advisory council. Every Harvard man, five years after he has received his degree of bachelor, has the right to vote. Every appointment and all policies of the university must be confirmed by this board of overseers. Only the best sons of the alma mater are elected to this body. Thus the university administration has an upper and lower house, and it is clear that with such closely knit internal organization the destiny of the university is better guarded than it would be if appointments and expenditures were dependent on the caprice and political intrigues of the party politicians in the state legislature. Just on this account Harvard has declined, for almost a hundred years, all aid from the state; although this was once customary. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to suppose that, say in contrast with Germany, this self-government of the university implies any greater administrative rights for the professors. The German professors have much more administrative influence than their colleagues in America. If, indeed, the advice of the professors in matters of new appointments or promotions is important, nevertheless the administrative bodies are in no wise officially bound to follow the recommendations of the faculty.

The president of the university is Charles W. Eliot, the most distinguished and influential personality in the whole intellectual life of America. Eliot comes from an old Puritan family of New England. He was a professor of chemistry in his thirty-fifth year; and his essays on methods of instruction, together with his talents for organization, had awakened considerable attention, when the overseers, in spite of lively protestations from various sides, were prompted by keen insight in the year 1869 to call him to this high office. It would be an exaggeration to say that the tremendous growth of Harvard in the last three decades is wholly the work of Eliot; for this development is, first of all, the result of that remarkable progress which the intellectual life of the whole land has undergone. But the fact that Harvard during all this time has kept in the very front rank among all academic institutions is certainly due to the efforts of President Eliot; and once again, if the progress at Harvard has resulted in part from the scientific awakening of the whole country, this national movement was itself in no small measure the work of the same man. His influence has extended out beyond the boundaries of New England and far beyond all university circles, and has made itself felt in the whole educational life of the country. He was never a man after the taste of the masses; his quiet and distinguished reserve are too cool and deliberate. And if to-day, on great occasions, he is generally the most important speaker, this is really a triumph for clear and solid thought over the mere tricks of blatancy and rhetoric. Throughout the country he is known as the incomparable master of short and pregnant English.

His life work has contained nothing of the spasmodic; nor have his reforms been in any case sudden ones. To whatever has been necessary he has consecrated his patient energy, going fearlessly toward the goal which he recognized as right, and moving slowly and surely forward. Year by year he has exerted an influence on the immediate circles of his community, and so indirectly on the whole land, to bring up the conditions for entrance into college and professional schools until at the present time all the special faculties of Harvard demand as an entrance requirement a complete college course. He has made Harvard College over into a modern academy, in which every student is entirely free to select the course of studies which he desires, and has introduced through the entire university and for all time, the spirit of impartial investigation. Even the theological faculty has grown under his influence from a sectarian institution of the Unitarian Church into a non-sectarian Christian institution in which future preachers of every sect are able to obtain their preliminary training. And this indefatigable innovator is to-day, as he now has completed his seventieth year, pressing forward with youthful energies to new goals. Just as he has introduced into the college the opportunity of perfectly free specialization, so now he clearly sees that if a college education is necessary for every future student in the special departments of the university, that the college course must be shortened from four to three years, or in other words, must be compressed. There is much opposition to this idea. All traditions and very many apparently weighty arguments seem to speak against it. Nevertheless, any student of average intelligence and energy can now get the Harvard A. B. in three years; before long this will be the rule, and in a short time the entire country will have followed in the steps of this reform.

It is true that Eliot’s distinguished position has contributed very much to his outward success—that position which he has filled for thirty-five years, and which in itself guarantees a peculiar influence on academic life. But the decisive thing has been his personality. He is enthusiastic and yet conservative, bold and yet patient, always glad to consider the objections of the youngest teacher; he is religious, and nevertheless a confident exponent of modern science. First of all, he is through and through an aristocrat: his interest is in the single, gifted, and solid personality rather than in the masses; and his conception of the inequality of man is the prime motive of his whole endeavour. But at the same time he is the best of democrats, for he lays the greatest stress on making it possible for the earnest spirit to press on and emerge from the lowest classes of the people. Harvard has set its roots as never before through the whole country, and thereby has drawn on the intellectual and moral energies of the entire nation.

Under the president come the faculties, of which each one is presided over by a dean. The largest faculty is the faculty of arts and sciences, whose members lecture both for the college and for the Graduate School. There is really no sharp distinction, and the announcement of lectures says merely that certain elementary courses are designed for younger students in the college, and that certain others are only for advanced students. Moreover, the seminaries and laboratory courses for scientific research are open only to students of the Graduate School. The rest is common ground.

As always happens, the faculty includes very unlike material, a number of the most distinguished investigators, along with others who are first of all teachers. In general, the older generation of men belongs to that time in which the ability to teach was thought more important than pure scholarship. On the other hand, the middle generation is much devoted to productive investigations. The youngest generation of instructors is somewhat divided. A part holds the ideal of creative research, another part is in a sort of reactionary mood against the modern high estimation of specialized work; and has rather a tendency once more to emphasize the idealistic side of academic activity—the beauty of form and the cultivating value of belles-lettres as opposed to the dry details of scholarship. This last is generally accounted the peculiar work of German influence, and in opposition to this there is a demand for Gallic polish and that scientific connoisseurship of the English gentleman. Since, however, these men are thinking not of the main fact, but rather of certain insignificant excrescences of German work, and since after all nothing but the real work of investigation can lead to new achievements which justify in a real university any advancement to higher academic positions, there is no ground for fearing that this reactionary mood will exert any particularly harmful influence on more serious circles of workers. Such a movement may be even welcomed as a warning against a possible ossification of science. Particularly the college would be untrue to its ideals, if it were to forget the humanities in favour of scientific matters of fact.

The lectures naturally follow the principle of thorough-going specialization, and one who reads the Annual Report will probably be surprised to discover how many students take up Assyrian or Icelandic, Old Bulgarian, or Middle Irish. The same specialization is carried into the seminaries for the advanced students; thus, for instance, in the department of philosophy, there are special seminaries for ethics, psychology, metaphysics, logic, sociology, pedagogy, Greek, and modern philosophy. The theological faculty is the smallest. In spite of an admirable teaching staff there remains something still to do before the spirit of science is brought into perfect harmony with the strongly sectarian character of the American churches. On the other hand, the faculty of law is recognized as the most distinguished in the English-speaking world. The difference between the Anglo-American law and the Romano-German has brought it about that the entire arrangement and method of study here are thoroughly different from the German. From the very beginning law is taught by the study of actual decisions; the introduction of this “case system,” in opposition to the usual text-book system, was the most decisive advance of all and fixed the reputation of the law faculty. And this system has been gradually introduced into other leading schools of law. The legal course lasts three years, and each year has its prescribed courses of lectures. In the first year, for instance, students take up contracts, the penal code, property rights, and civil processes. Perhaps the departure from the German method of teaching law is most characteristically shown by the fact that the law students are from the very first day the most industrious students of all. These young men have passed through their rather easy college days, and when now they leave those early years of study in the elm-shaded college yard and withdraw to Austin Hall, the law building of the university, they feel that at last they are beginning their serious life-work. In the upper story of Austin Hall there is a large reading-room for the students, with a legal reference library of over sixty thousand volumes. This hall is filled with students, even late at night, who are quite as busy as if they were young barristers industriously working away on their beginning practice.

The German method is much more followed in the four-year medical course of studies, and still there are here striking differences. The medical faculty of Harvard, which is located in Boston on account of the larger hospitals to be found in the city, is at this moment in the midst of moving. Already work has been commenced on a new medical quadrangle with the most modern and sumptuous edifices. In somewhat the same way, the course of studies is rather under process of reformation. It is in the stage of experimentation, and of course it is true throughout the world that the astonishing advance of medicine has created new problems for the universities. It seems impossible now for a student to master the whole province, since his study time is of course limited. The latest attempt at reform is along the line of the greatest possible concentration. The student is expected for several months morning and night to study only anatomy, to hear anatomical lectures, to dissect and to use the microscope; and then again for several months he devotes himself entirely to physiology, and so on. Much is hoped, secondly, from the intuitive method of instruction. While in Germany the teaching of physiology is chiefly by means of lectures and demonstrations, every Harvard student has in addition during the period of physiological study to work one hundred and eighty hours on prescribed experiments, so that two hours of experimentation follow every one-hour lecture. In certain lines of practical instruction, especially in pathological anatomy, the American is at a disadvantage compared with the German, since the supply of material for autopsy is limited. Popular democratic sentiment is very strong against the idea that a man who dies in a public poor-house must fall a prey to the dissecting knife. The clinical demonstrations are not given in special university clinics, but rather in the large municipal hospitals, where all the chief physicians are pledged to give practical instruction in the form of demonstrations. In the third place, there is an increasing tendency to give to the study of medicine a certain mobility; in other words, to allow a rather early specialization. As to the substance itself which is taught, Harvard’s medical school is very much like a German university, and becomes daily more similar. In the American as in the German university, the microscope and the retort have taken precedence over the medicine chest.

Harvard has about five thousand students. Any boy who wishes to enter must pass, at the beginning of the summer, a six-day written examination; and these examinations are conducted in about forty different places of the country under the supervision of officers of the university. Any one coming from other universities is carefully graded according to the standard of scholarship of his particular institution. The amount of study required is not easily determined. Unlike the German plan, every course of lectures is concluded at the end of the year with a three-hour examination, and only the man who passes the examination has the course in question put to his credit. Whoever during the four, or perhaps three, college years has taken eighteen three-hour lecture courses extending through the year receives the bachelor’s degree. In practice, indeed, the matter becomes enormously complicated, yet extensive administrative machinery regulates every case with due justice. In the legal and medical faculties, everything is dependent on the final examinations of the year. In the philosophical two, or more often three, years of study after the bachelor’s degree lead to the doctorate of philosophy.