A Modern University

I

THE term ‘university’ has a definite meaning on the Continent and a fairly definite meaning in Great Britain; but in America no copyright — legal or traditional — protects its use. A college, though the college is itself far from being a standardized institution; a chaotic mixture of primary, intermediate, industrial, and theological classes; an educational department-store containing a kindergarten at one end and Nobel Prize winners (or as good) at the other, with all possible forms and varieties of schooling and training, practical and professional, between, and a mail-order annex besides; finally, a college with a graduate school overlapping and a group of organically connected graduate professional schools—all are called universities in America. These brief characterizations are descriptions, not judgments. They are meant to bring home vividly the complexity of the existing situation; they raise in the first instance no question as to value or importance. Thus the analogy of the department-store is not meant to belittle; for the department-store is one of the triumphs of commercial genius. It purveys excellence as well as mediocrity and inferiority. Its tendency and effect have been not only to bring the products of science, skill, and art to the doors of all, but also to elevate the level of public taste. This is precisely what the large American universities are doing — diffusing knowledge at the current level and by that very act raising the level; and not only diffusing knowledge, but, in laboratories and libraries tucked away in corners of the great institution, refining it and adding to its sum.

It would be futile to attempt to narrow or to change the use of the term. I propose to discuss a modern university that differs more or less from anything now called a university in America; and it is not a research institute, either. But it is idle to invent a new title; for a new name would have to fight for life and, if it survived, would soon be so freely appropriated as to lose precise significance. As it is impossible to expropriate existing institutions, it is best to adhere to the muchabused title.

To make clear what is in my mind I shall try to define my conception of a university adapted to modem intellectual needs, now inadequately met, by contrasting the proposed institution with the more comprehensive of existing institutions of learning. Thus we omit for the time being the mere colleges, sometimes hardly more than secondary schools, now called universities; we omit also the grammar-school, industrial, and theological classes, loosely strung together in a single institution, which have sprung up to answer current and rapidly changing needs in certain sections. We make the proposed contrast with the great educational department-stores made up of colleges, graduate schools, professional schools, correspondence courses, and extramural classes, which, characteristic product of democratic conditions as they are, are borne along by forces perhaps beyond their control in the endeavor to be of service to all classes of the community.

II

The story of higher education in America has been often told and may for my present purpose be briefly summarized. The American college was in origin an adaptation of the English college — in scope practically a secondary school for the economically advantaged or for prospective lawyers, clergymen, and physicians. A fringe of poor students burning with the desire to learn was, however, always in evidence, in the old home as in the new. Increase of knowledge, increase of wealth, the spread of democracy, naïve faith that knowledge and power, education and intelligence, go together, resulted in the rapid expansion of the American college. New colleges were established in unprecedented numbers — by local communities, by states, by religious organizations, by individuals anxious to be remembered or inspired by the desire to pay the future for the advantages which a rich, new, wideopen country had bestowed upon them. No such rapid and extensive development could in a brief period have possibly been sound or homogeneous; that must necessarily be a matter of time. Meantime complications arose. The local high school developed. That displaced the college in the scale of values. It forced the college to be more than a secondary school. But the high schools themselves were uneven and unexacting; hence the displaced and elevated colleges had, to a large and varying extent, to be high schools still. They could not discard the type of teaching and discipline proper to a secondary school, though in age their students were fairly beyond the secondary stage. Moreover, the combination of unexampled prosperity, faith in education, and love of fun enormously increased college attendance, so that administrative problems quickly arose such as could be managed only by mechanism often harmful and inappropriate to students approaching one-and-twenty. These considerations explain certain characteristic features of American colleges — their number, their rapid increase in size, the unevenness of the student body, their lack of intellectual seriousness, their overlapping with the high schools, the excessive regimentation which holds students to a strict accounting, only to find that every formal requirement can be regularly fulfilled by essentially uneducated boys and girls.

So much for the troubles due to confusion of high school and college. Meanwhile, at the far end, another set of problems arose. Within the last century a new passion has been fanned into flame. There have always been searchers for truth, sometimes in religious brotherhoods, sometimes in academic communities, sometimes alone: Roger Bacon was, for example, a Franciscan monk, not entirely approved by his associates and superiors; Galileo was a heterodox university professor; Francis Bacon a lawyer, politician, and grafter; Franklin a printer; Mendel a priest; Charles Darwin an English gentleman. Students and investigators, each in his own way, these exceptions were in their day left to their own devices. Thus, as long as it was a rare hobby, investigation did not upset existing educational institutions.

But difficulties arose when research became general, as it has become increasingly so within the last hundred years. After centuries of effort by isolated and unappreciated thinkers, men became aware of its importance and fascinations; research has almost become a fashion. An experimental and investigative technique capable of use on a large scale has been worked out in linguistic, mathematical, and scientific fields. The persons affected by this intellectual epidemic required certain conditions — places in which to work, books, apparatus, contacts, assistants, pupils, means of publication. The European universities, — in which from time to time original workers had always appeared, — plastic and loosely organized as they were in most respects, lent themselves rather easily to this new purpose; in America the college was forced to broaden its scope so as to accommodate advanced training and research at the far end. The American college was thus a high school at its beginning and a university toward its end. This looks complicated enough; the situation is, however, more complicated than it looks. For the three types of school — high school, college, and graduate school — are so intertwined that it is impossible to say what is high school, what is college, and what is university. Students, courses, and teachers are all involved in all three.

Specific dates are apt to be misleading. There have been investigators and scholars of high rank in old-fashioned American colleges — Agassiz at Harvard, Willard Gibbs at Yale, before either institution consistently thought of itself as a university in its present sense. But research was not recognized in America as one of the dominant concerns of higher education until the flag was nailed to the mast on the opening of Johns Hopkins University in 1876. Then for the first time an entire group of men were called to professorships because they were distinguished or promising contributors to knowledge — Gildersleeve in Greek, Sylvester in mathematics, Rowland in physics, Remsen in chemistry, Newell Martin in biology, Haupt in Hebrew, Bloomfield in Sanskrit, Herbert Adams in history and institutions; and, later, Welch in pathology, Mall in anatomy, and so forth.

These scholars and scientists were grouped together as a graduate or university faculty; the seminar, the thesis, and the Ph.D. degree were imported from Germany; it was the avowed object of the university to increase the sum of knowledge, to train young men to do likewise, and to send them forth to spread the gospel. Few gospels have in so brief a period done so well. Johns Hopkins has itself produced a good-sized army of advanced teachers; its graduate school has been freely imitated; its professional schools have set up new standards toward which the rest of the country has rapidly moved.

But there was a fly in the ointment. I have spoken of the graduate school of Johns Hopkins University. Johns Hopkins University was not simply a graduate school; it too had from the outset an undergraduate department. President Gilman and his counselors were really interested in graduate work, in the university idea; but, alas, the colleges of that date were in the main conventional secondary schools, far below the standard of the secondary schools which in Europe fed the universities. There was hardly a college in the United States which in 1876 was adequately equipped to teach physics, chemistry, biology, history, and economics, and it was in these branches that the Johns Hopkins of that day proposed to cultivate research and to train investigators. Where were the graduate students to come from? There were, especially in science and politics, almost no sources of supply! Johns Hopkins had, therefore, to offer undergraduate instruction in order to ensure a stream of graduate students.

Fifty years have now passed. Colleges galore and even high schools are capable of giving good undergraduate instruction, if only students embrace the opportunity. Graduate schools have multiplied; some are well staffed and well equipped, others extremely flimsy; no matter — they cultivate research and confer advanced degrees. Meanwhile other needs than the cultivation of research have made themselves felt. Eager to ‘serve,’ the colleges and universities have tried to meet them also. The result has been almost incredibly complex. Strong American universities — to mention no others — with resources ranging from $30,000,000 to $100,000,000 are nowadays at one and the same time (1) colleges for high-school graduates, some ill trained, some well trained, some serious, many trifling; (2) advanced schools for college graduates, some ready for advanced opportunities, others unready and incapable; (3) research institutions in which, usually in odds and ends of time snatched from a heavy routine, occasionally in well-protected and adequate leisure, professors, sometimes very competent, at other times less competent, and students, occasionally ‘well trained and able, too often poorly trained and varying largely in ability, swell the volume of publications and sometimes the volume of accurate knowledge; (4) professional schools, sometimes well equipped, oftener not, in which faculties constituted partly of trained teachers, partly (usually largely) of local practitioners, turn out first-rate scientists as well as patternmade doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, dentists, journalists, business men, and teachers; (5) extension institutes, sending out educational missionaries to light candles here and there in the enveloping darkness; (6) correspondence and radio schools, seeking to offer at long range, by the penny post and wireless, guidance and stimulus to those with whom physical contact cannot be established; (7) athletic and social organizations, complex, expensive, in some respects good, in others very bad.

Most of these purposes are worthy, particularly in a democracy, where every individual is entitled to his chance, and where the merest chance may result in uncovering genuine talent. None the less, it must be clear that the seven categories which I have succinctly formulated — and they do not quite cover the scope of any of the really great American universities — represent from a qualitative point of view an amazingly widespread field: some are hardly more than trades; some are mere handicrafts, almost devoid of intellectual content; some represent intellectuality diluted; some go to the very limit of sheer intellectual capacity.

In every one of these schools, departments, divisions, or activities, there are weak students and strong students, immature students and mature students. The problem would be simpler if the university could take a single attitude toward the entire student body. But it cannot. The majority need sometimes more, sometimes less, parental care. A minority are ready for freedom. But the authorities are more afraid of harming the majority through lack of care than they are of harming the minority through excessive oversight. How, one asks, can a single institution discharge all the varied functions I have named in a situation as complicated as the situation which I have described?

America has its answer to this question in the form of one word: by means of ‘organization.’ Magical word! Complex, interlocking, ramifying, varied, expensive enterprises have to be ‘organized’; thus railroads, trusts, department-stores are made to work and to pay. Precisely the same is true of a modern university with its complex, interlocking, ramifying, varied, and expensive activities; they have to be ‘organized,’ else chaos and bankruptcy will inevitably result. A president with large executive powers, a squad of deans who serve as his lieutenants in charge of separate departments, schools, and activities, — there are approximately twenty deans in one university,

— not to speak of a host of other officials with similar major and minor functions; central offices with records and accounting systems adapted from finance to education; requirements

— entrance, curricular, graduation — worked out with mathematical precision or the semblance thereof; courses, units, credits, that are for the purposes of accounting treated as if they were as definite in value as ergs or foot-pounds; advisers, vocational guiders, psychological testers, personnel managers, coaches — all engaged in policing the variegated undergraduate body, in keeping them off the grass, out of the water, in the middle of the road, to the end that in due course, with character unsullied, diploma in hand, they may be severally returned to their mothers or landed in a congenial job! Meanwhile somewhere, more or less sheltered from the traffic, real thinkers — not a few — are also at work with groups of worthy disciples. I dare say nothing so widespread as this kind of university could have come about except as a matter of necessity. Boys and girls wanted to go to colleges, professional schools, and graduate schools; they had the money and the credentials. There was nothing to stop them; perhaps on the whole at this stage of our development it was best not to stop them. Ways had to be devised to handle the business: so it was ‘organized.’

In so far as the college is concerned, there are, happily, indications that steps are being taken here and there to select students, to create conditions more favorable to scholarship, to bring about order, concentration, and individual responsibility. Thus perhaps a few colleges characterized by intellectual earnestness may be created or developed. But unless American youth undergoes a revolution of which there are at the moment few symptoms, most American boys and girls will seek colleges not predominantly intellectual in outlook. Their problem, on account of the numbers involved, may have in the main to be locally solved — as the high-school problem has been solved — through funds provided by taxation. Thus, ultimately, different colleges may choose to do different things in their severally appropriate ways. As for the rest, it is idle to prophesy what will happen to American education if ever ‘the water is squeezed out of it’; surely no nation will permanently go on devoting sixteen years to the kind of education American boys and girls nowadays receive as a result of their leisurely progress through elementary school, high school, and college.

III

From the conditions above described the graduate school seriously suffers. I said that the graduate school was designed to promote research and the higher training of competently educated students. Now, research is in the first place a highly individualized affair. Men work in all kinds of ways; the university must be so loosely put together that teacher and investigator are free to follow what are for them, not necessarily for anybody else, lines of least resistance and maximum effectiveness. So much for the faculty. But something similar is true of advanced students. They are persons of mature years, presumably trained, in so far as the thinking and effort and devising of other people can ever train anyone. The graduate student is therefore most favorably conditioned if he is free. He knows the field of his interest; books, laboratories, fellow students, and faculty are all there to be used. It is up to him to work out his own salvation by making use of the opportunities and facilities which the university has brought together, partly for him, partly for other persons and purposes. Thus the university is essentially a free society of students, professors, and pupils mingling naturally in the pursuit of intellectual aims.

A fairly sharp line can, I think, be drawn between the lower and the upper activities which we have been discussing. The lower activities — activities belonging to schools and colleges — are to a considerable extent, let us say, adaptive or disciplinary in character. Schools and colleges deliberately try to create a wholesome environment; they try to make something out of their students, try to train them to orderly habits, try to make sure they know things supposedly needful, try to get them in some sort of acceptable shape, morally, mentally, socially. Schools and colleges are thus parts of the machinery by means of which society keeps from going to pieces, as it would go to pieces if anarchy ruled from the cradle up. Particularly on the moral and social side, the college — dealing, as it does, with the immature — has a good deal of responsibility for the maintenance of wholesome conditions, though, as ‘boys must be risked, if there are to be men,’ not even the college has to play either nurse or policeman — far from it. On the other hand, the enormous and miscellaneous enrollment of the largest institutions justifies — nay, requires — a definite endeavor to provide, without forcing, a finer type of social influence than is apt, in present-day America, to provide itself. This is, however, a separate problem, which I cannot now undertake to discuss. On the intellectual side, with which I am especially concerned, the colleges have adopted an attitude and installed a mechanism which are, in my judgment, irrelevant and damaging. They are too conventional — too narrow in social and intellectual outlook, too credulous of the efficacy of machinery. Individuality should not be suppressed while it is being trained; human institutions are so defective and society so far from being really civilized that criticism ought to form an active element in education at every stage — criticism of ethics, politics, institutions, and so forth. Youthful radicalism is better than youthful smugness.

Moreover, colleges are prone to overestimate what they can accomplish by regimentation. High standards cannot be attained by conforming to requirements — so many hours, units, courses, testimonials, of this, that, or another sort. Again, nobody is wise enough and well informed enough, no matter how many secretaries, questionnaires, or colored cards he has at his disposal, to fathom the individual student and direct him to the course, the teacher, or the social niche supposedly preordained for him; nor would the student be educated if the trick could be done. Education and ad hoc training have simply nothing to do with one another; they are, rather, at daggers’ points. Genuine education involves effort, risks, and some lost motion. The requirements of school and college will never educate a student unless he consistently, persistently, and more or less in his own way tries to educate himself. Nevertheless, however these things may be decided, wherever the lines are drawn, schools and colleges do have some sort of parental responsibility for school pupils and college students.

A graduate school has, in my opinion, no parental responsibility whatsoever; it has no disciplinary responsibility. On the contrary, it ought to be the most skeptical and inquiring of intellectual agencies. It takes nothing on faith — neither Newtonian laws of gravitation, Darwinian theories of evolution, germ theory, Kantian ethics, democratic institutions, wisdom of the fathers, virtues of the jury system, nor anything else. Under the heaviest sense of responsibility for the truth, and therefore with the exercise of the utmost care of which the human mind is capable, the university is concerned to pursue the search for truth, wherever the search lead, and to train young men to find it, respect it, teach it, and, if need be, die for it. Only so can the vast forces which are latent in the human mind and which are being released from nature be brought to work for the general good.

No matter how broadly one conceives school and college, there would seem to be some real incongruity between the purposes for which boys and girls are sent to college and the purposes for which men and women resort to universities; between the objects which lurk in the back of the teacher’s head in high school and college and the objects which are in the forefront of the student’s own head in the graduate school of a university. Of course the two stages cannot be distinguished by a sharp line; but there is a genuine difference — the college to the very end, though decreasingly, being responsible for the boy, the university having no responsibility save to truth. Organization, as loose, to be sure, as possible, but still organization for ends important to the student — that is the keynote of school and college; freedom, detachment, or shifting forms of organization calculated to run down and hand on the truth — that is a different thing, and that is the keynote of a modern university.

IV

As matters now stand, however, college and university, undergraduate department and graduate department, are so intertwined as to be more or less indistinguishable. Let us for the moment ignore pharmacy, dentistry, schools of business, correspondence departments, the radio, and athletics — activities that do not now conspicuously involve the search for truth or the training of men to carry on the search for truth. Strong-minded workers can perhaps be oblivious of these academic addenda — just as they must learn not to notice many other annoyances and irrelevancies. But look at the things they may not ignore; look at the things they are expected to do. In the first place, in so far as subject-matter is concerned, courses are commonly divided into three groups — courses primarily designed for undergraduates, courses open equally to undergraduates and to graduates, courses primarily designed for graduates. Graduates are sometimes found in the first, group; both graduates and undergraduates are found in the second group; occasionally undergraduates may be found in the third group. If, as I have urged, the dominant aim of the graduate school is essentially different from the dominant aim of the undergraduate school, such overlapping is bound to confuse both teacher and student. In the competition of methods, the undergraduate usually wins; forms of organization and accounting, methods of discipline and presentation, appropriate to the undergraduate student-body, have thus to a large extent permeated the graduate school; majors, minors, units, attendance records, course examinations, — all the paraphernalia which the American college overemphasizes in its endeavor to handle an unwieldy and heterogeneous undergraduate body, — creep into the graduate school, because where graduate and undergraduate, superior and inferior, are mixed the lower type tends to determine the ‘set-up.’

Again, the teaching personnel discharges a double or a triple rôle. In one course the instructor, dealing as he does with undergraduates only, is the shepherd, charged with some responsibility for guiding the members of his flock; in a second the same instructor may have to teach boys and to unsettle men; in the third the same individual is a high priest, concerned with criticizing, transmitting, and increasing knowledge, with no personal responsibility whatsoever for the men and women who freely choose to hear him and heed him or not, as they please. Few individuals find the three rôles equally possible or congenial. Between the two attitudes involved there is an inherent incompatibility, with the result that, compelled to choose, the teacher as a rule — not always — selects or drops into the lower rôle; that is, he is apt to fall into a stride befitting an instructor rather than to strike the pace befitting a fearless pioneer. Meanwhile the material used or presented, despite the mechanical type of school organization, smacks of the graduate interest. The teachers are university heads conducting seminars, or recent Ph.D.’s looking forward to university promotion. Scholarship in technical form and aspect has thus invaded the college years — witness the highly specialized character of the ‘courses’ offered. Thus, while school organization and school responsibility have crept into the graduate departments, specialization has seeped down from above into the secondary period.

Not infrequently in the strongest universities able scientists and scholars find themselves crushed by the uninteresting routine connected either with undergraduate teaching or, what may be more irksome, with graduate teaching organized in the undergraduate spirit. Some men do both well, spending themselves conscientiously much of the time on undergraduate routine, and then, in carefully hoarded minutes, forgetting themselves in the quest for truth and in irresponsible intercourse with a small number of workers really worth their while. Finally, a few workers, as I have already stated, succeed in making special terms which protect them against the irrelevancies by which their colleagues are distracted in the effort to lead successfully a double intellectual life. The resulting situation was neatly summed up recently in an after-dinner talk by the dean of one of the most populous of graduate schools: ‘The college is a high school and the graduate school has become a college.’ Thus, at a time when scholarly and scientific work has become of greater importance than ever before, the career of scholar and scientist is, by the pressure of numbers and organization, being made in some ways more difficult and less attractive.

V

I suspect I can anticipate the first objection that will be made to the foregoing argument: I shall be told that I am pleading for the transformation of the graduate school into a research institute, which, if accomplished, will leave a large hiatus immediately after the college.

That is not, however, the form in which I visualize the situation. Research is, to be sure, a main function of the graduate school; but teaching as well as research is the business of the university professor. He is, however, the same kind of person, both as teacher and investigator. He does not stand in one attitude as teacher and in another as investigator — as he must, if he is to be at one moment a college teacher, shepherding boys, and subsequently a university professor, stimulating men. Alike as teacher and investigator, the university professor is relentlessly and irresponsibly critical — of himself as he is of others. His students are presumably mature men and women released from the control of family, school, and college. All that precept, regulation, and example can do to form character and purpose has been done. Henceforth they are responsible for themselves. Teaching students at this stage imposes no parental or pedagogical responsibility upon the university professor; he is there to offer the student opportunity to learn, opportunity to develop himself and his chosen subject. Such teaching is no easy undertaking; it is no mere incident to a life of research. The university teacher must master his field and keep abreast of it; in lectures, seminars, or otherwise, he must present this material so as to orient and stimulate his hearers; he must to a reasonable extent be accessible for conference to students who are competent and serious. But while in this sense it is his responsibility to teach, it is the student’s sole responsibility to learn. When a professor has been at pains to present material coherently and to stimulate inquiry, his responsibilities end; the student takes it or leaves it as he can and will.

Let us try to be concrete. Hebrew, history, chemistry, and mathematics —it is not difficult to conceive how a real university professor would handle these. He is himself primarily interested in Semitic lore, in historical or chemical investigation, in mathematical speculation and research; if he have not such interest and capacity, he is no proper university professor at all. His students, however broadly grounded in high school and college in general history, general science, and modern languages, cannot at once participate at his highest level. It is, therefore, his business as teacher to give them such guidance and inspiration as will enable them by their efforts — not his — to attain the upper level. He offers lecture courses, practical exercises, and the like, in the process of which they can acquire technique, become familiar with literature, get some sense of the problems ahead. If they have capacity and industry, they will accomplish something; if they lack capacity or industry, they will fail. He would like them to succeed; he will in one or another way help those who try; but he will be neither nurse nor policeman. As they succeed, they progressively undertake more fundamental and independent tasks.

So much for subjects in the field of mere scholarship or mere science. But the point I am making — namely, that the university professor is a teacher in the highest sense as well as an investigator — comes out most clearly in connection with the professional faculties, medicine, law, or theology. Here, obviously, instruction has also a practical end — the making of doctors, lawyers, and preachers. But the university attitude and function remain essentially the same. A certain grouping and ordering of studies must, to be sure, be effected; and, as art is long and time is fleeting, a limited amount of arrangement with reference to practical ends must be introduced. But the amount’ of oversight required is in America greatly exaggerated. If the student is really mature, trained, capable, and industrious — and he never will be, unless some institution treats him as if he were! — he needs only the same sort of guidance and stimulus that his fellow student gets in Semitics or history or mathematics. The faculty advises him as to the general arrangement and progress of his legal or medical studies; offers him facilities, opportunities, and counsel in the laboratories, the clinics, and the library — and there its duty and responsibility cease. It is his business to profit or not, as he will and can. Having done so much for him, — and it is no mean contribution of time and thought which the professor thus makes to the student, — the professor goes back to his reading, his researches, and the company of those who have won the privilege of intimate association; he must not be asked or expected to lead as teacher a life that destroys or seriously impairs his life as thinker and investigator. Under the most favorable circumstances, the needs of schools, colleges, and industry for highly trained teachers and investigators will bear heavily upon the university; the burden can be lightened, first, by elimination of the college, next, by throwing upon the advanced student himself a much larger share of responsibility than he is wont to carry under our present mixed system.

Thus, both in theory and in practice, the university must offer sound, effective, and devoted teaching; on the other hand, neither in theory nor in practice ought the university to adopt a coddling or parental attitude, whether the student be aiming at a Ph.D. in order to teach, an M.D. in order to become a practitioner of medicine, or at a research career. All alike have outgrown, or at any rate should be treated as if they had outgrown, the discipline of the secondary school and college with their pedagogical technique and devices; for, as I have urged, secondary school and college are deliberately attempting within certain limits to mould personalities in connection with the teaching of subjects, while the university looks beyond persons to objective ends — skill, knowledge, and truth. I repeat that the college will do well to be as critical as it may, for there should be no abrupt break between college and university, between college and life. But at best the college works under certain limitations and employs certain calculated procedures to which the graduate school should be more than indifferent.

VI

If the argument is up to this point sound, certain inferences respecting the organization of higher education in the United States may be drawn. The graduate school and the college now overlap. Unquestionably this overlapping may to some extent stimulate college faculty and college students. But, on the other hand, it tends both to draw the college away from its proper function and to lower the plane of graduate-school activities. The two institutions should not therefore be merged, either educationally or even geographically — just as little as a Continental Gymnasium or lycée should be prefixed to a Continental university. Contiguity or merging involves, perhaps insidiously, the common use of staff and facilities. And the moment the university thus lends itself in part to the disciplinary and directive business of the secondary school, the university itself suffers. No matter how resolutely the American graduate school intertwined with a college should determine to preserve its own proper attitude, sooner or later convenience, economy, or good nature would lead to trespassing.

I hold, therefore, that on the whole the intellectual interests of all parties are likely to be promoted by the detachment of the graduate school from the undergraduate college. The present situation is of historic, not logical origin; were Johns Hopkins or the University of Chicago to be founded to-day instead of in 1876 or 1892, respectively, I hazard the guess that neither would possess an undergraduate department. But this does not mean that universities can now suddenly abolish their undergraduate colleges. Already the cry is heard that the college is being stifled by the university. A general movement must, therefore, and should wait on a successful demonstration.

Conditions are, however, surely ripe for an experiment. And an experiment is fortunately in sight. Johns Hopkins University has announced a policy looking to the elimination of the first two college years and the A.B. degree, and the creation of a university faculty devoting itself to university work. Whether an institution can go so far without going farther, whether the last two years of the present college will not also be sloughed off or at least telescoped, remains to be seen; but in any case it will be interesting to watch the outcome. It is a distinct move — the first distinct move — in the right direction. Should the experiment succeed, it will be a godsend to serious students, who will be enabled to work out their own salvation, free from all the academic red tape which a graduate school partially identified with a college cannot, perhaps, help employing; and it will be a paradise for creative scholars and scientists who — still teachers, to be sure — will be free of all parental responsibility for their students. That freedom will not occasionally be disastrous to students, I should not maintain. But parental care must some day cease, whatever the result. Indeed, it is open to doubt how much good is accomplished by parental oversight beyond adolescence. But no matter: no possible advantage to the weakling can justify a parental attitude on the part of a modern university.

Will there be any students in a graduate school which is not fed by its own undergraduate college? Johns Hopkins, in its early days, attracted a rare group; but there was no competition — it had the field to itself. In our own day, however, the strong professional schools pull students across the college line. Witness the Harvard Law School and a few outstanding schools of medicine; so also Millikan, Hale, and Noyes attract a large body of advanced workers in physics, astronomy, and chemistry to the remote California Institute of Technology. I do not believe that ‘loyalty’ will keep the best students at their old colleges against the magnetic influence of an eminent man offering genuine and undiluted university opportunities somewhere else. The American student will learn to wander when there is something substantial to be gained by wandering.

Another pertinent question is suggested by the mere mention of ‘loyalty.’ Will America finance institutions whose services are not largely local, institutions that have outgrown their collegiate alumni; finance them, too, on a salary scale that will make teaching and research — what they are rarely now— bearable careers? It will be interesting to see whether the public can be educated to appreciation of the broader, rather than the narrower, view. Assuredly, as democracy needs intellectual distinction, it would be fatal to prejudge the issue by exhibiting too timorous a spirit.

It is not only the undergraduate years and undergraduate ways that must disappear under the conditions I have discussed. If the university is to be an isle of safety for scholars and students, certain other things will be eliminated, too. In its simplest form, the university is extensive and complex enough, with professional schools like law and medicine of indisputable intellectual quality, and chairs devoted to higher teaching and research in science, history, language, and so forth. There is nothing to gain and much to lose by including in such a university scheme schools of dentistry, pharmacy, journalism, business, and perhaps, as things are now going in many institutions, education. For the university’s interests should be fundamental; the schools above named are as yet too practical, too empirical, to deserve inclusion. Needless to say, the extramural and other features will disappear from this kind of university. All these things have their value; society requires the services; they must therefore be arranged for, but somewhere else — partly, perhaps largely, I imagine, in universities of the present comprehensive type. Meanwhile the severer type of university does not cease to render service; on the contrary, it withdraws from the immediate, obvious, pressing, and readily appreciated, in order the better to do the important, difficult, and thankless.

Thus the range of certain universities, at any rate, would be greatly reduced; moreover, modern science and scholarship being what they are, these universities would be very irregular affairs. Men, money, and facilities do not come together in such ways as to make it possible to have a nicely rounded institution at the highest level. No single science would be completely represented anywhere; still less, all sciences; and institutions most concerned with science would almost inevitably be less adequately developed on the humanistic side — and vice versa. This has always been the case in Germany, where these things have, on the whole, been hitherto best managed. It is likely to be more strikingly the case in future, as the possibilities latent in every subject multiply. Nor does it greatly matter: the very incompleteness of single institutions will force all real universities in the higher sense to view themselves as parts of one great organic whole.