Universities, Graduate Schools, and Colleges

I

DANIEL COIT GILMAN did a great work, making in the highest ranges of education the largest single advance in the annals of our country. Yet he made one mistake; but, before discussing this, one must first know his purpose, for an error is a failure to adapt the means to the end sought.

From Gilman’s inaugural address in 1876 as the first President of Johns Hopkins University it is difficult to discover a definite plan of operation. Perhaps it was not so clear in his own mind at that time as it became later; but the object was perfectly distinct, for it was the largest possible freedom in advanced teaching and study, in an atmosphere of liberal culture, and under the guidance of the greatest scholars, eminent or of high promise, that could be secured. How the result was to be attained he does not state. He was thinking of an aim rather than a formula. While speaking of the essential difference between colleges and universities, and rejecting for Johns Hopkins the traditional four-year college course, he says nothing that shows a clear intention to restrict admission to those who had already obtained the bachelor’s degree. He notes that Harvard ‘has essentially given up its collegiate restrictions and introduced the benefits of university freedom’; that Michigan and Cornell ‘quite early adopted the discipline of universities’; and that ‘the University of Virginia from its foundation has upheld the university in distinction from the college idea.’

In none of these cases was he referring to a graduate school. In fact, he does not use for his own project the terms ‘graduate school’ or ‘instruction for graduates.’ His idea seems to have been a higher method of education, not a series of degrees. ‘The exact standard,’he says, ‘is not yet fixed. It must depend on the colleges and schools around us; there must be no gap in the system, and we must keep ahead, but the discussions now in progress, respecting the City College, Agricultural College, and St. John’s College, must delay our announcements. Our standards will doubtless be as high as the community requires.’ Later he remarks that many students will come to them excellent in some branches of a liberal education and deficient in others. ‘I would give to such candidates, on examination, credit for their attainments, and assign them in each study to the place for which they are fitted. A proficient in Plato may be a tyro in Euclid. Moreover, I would make attainments rather than time the condition of promotion.’ Apparently he meant the test for admission to be qualification for the instruction offered, not the possession of a college degree; and this accords with his conception of freedom in a university.

Johns Hopkins, under his lead, started like Pallas from the head of Zeus. The selection of the first faculty, and of the younger men who joined it, was extremely skillful; and in a few years the University was a Mecca for many of the most promising college graduates in the country, attracted by the spirit of freedom and investigation, and the absence of emphasis on numbers. What its destiny might have been but for the misfortunes of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, in which most of its funds were invested, no one can say. Its medical school prospered, but its graduate teaching was crippled at the time when it met the competition of richer institutions, for graduate schools were soon established in most of the large American universities. This was by no means wholly a copying of Gilman’s idea, since doctorates of philosophy and science had been regularly conferred at Harvard for three years before his inaugural address — one of them on a subsequent professor at his university — and the masters of arts for advanced studies already exceeded a score. No doubt the same had been done elsewhere; but the example at Baltimore greatly stimulated the movement, and its fame set a fashion. Whatever he originally intended, his plan led to the graduate school as we see it to-day.

II

Now for President Gilman’s one mistake, if it was a mistake; and if so it was certainly not his alone. If — for we are dealing with conjectural matters — if his main object was to develop original thinkers, men expected to contribute deeply to knowledge, who cannot be very numerous in any generation, he would have done better to confer on them no degrees and let their productions speak for themselves. Granting degrees had an unforeseen but inevitable result.¹

However it may be in continental Europe where competition is extreme, and there are often examinations conducted by the state, in America the higher degrees are sure to be used as qualifications for teaching, and there is a strong temptation to reduce standards to meet the demand. Instead of the most advanced work being limited to future productive scholars, the doctorate has become the passport to the faculties of universities and the better colleges, while a master’s degree is commonly required for teaching in the high schools of large cities. ‘Raising the standard’ this is called by the appointing authorities, and to some extent it is, but not so much as they suppose, because to require a result above what can be produced lowers either the amount of the production or the test actually applied. Attempts to fix the price of bread have often been tried, and within narrow limits they may be successful, but if the cost is too high for the price fixed either the bakers are driven out of business or the amount of wheat in the loaf falls off.

Take the case of the master’s degree. Not all teachers in high schools are capable of really advanced work. Many of them can be excellent teachers, sufficiently competent in the knowledge of their subjects, but without originality or high scholarship. A man unfamiliar with the intricacies of potential functions, non-Euclidean geometry, or the higher differential equations, may teach algebra, geometry, and trigonometry in a secondary school well, and sometimes better than an eminent mathematician. What is taught in any college of high grade will serve his needs, if he has been proficient at it, and the same is true of other subjects. The demand that he, or she, must have done really advanced work becomes largely illusory. Often it may consist of scoring a number of credits, one at a time after school hours or in the summer. As evidence of a desire to improve one’s self, and as a means of doing so, this is excellent; but it is not really advanced study in the sense of university work for scholars of distinction. This the secondary teacher does not need and does not get. The demand for such instruction as he does need is large, and the graduate schools have set themselves to supply it, with the result of bringing into their student body a large mass of earnest, industrious young people who can never rise above moderate intellectual attainments. That this work should be done is clear, but whether it should be combined with the attempt to develop great scholars is a very different question.

To a less extent the same is true of the doctorate of philosophy, since it has come to be regarded as the essential requisite for teaching in a good college. The qualification for doing so has become the measure of the degree, and in the best universities it is a high one; but it is not quite the same as an atmosphere of enthusiasm for original thinkers. Every preparation for a degree involves, especially if the numbers are large, a certain amount of routine, of fixed rules which impair the complete freedom that should be enjoyed at some stage in a true scholar’s career. At what age that point is reached is not easily determined, but, for a man with the qualities for contributing greatly to the world’s thought, it should probably be placed earlier than is commonly assumed in America. Newton had the essential elements of the calculus in his mind while still an undergraduate at Cambridge. Évariste Galois left the theory of determinants in a letter to a friend written the night before he was killed in a duel at twenty; and many such examples might be cited. We are turning out every year in this country a multitude of doctors of philosophy, and yet there is often complaint of difficulty in finding men of the quality needed for positions in our universities. The fact is that graduate schools do not attract men of aggressive ability as much as they should. To attribute this to the small remuneration of professors is beside the mark, because men with scholarly tastes and comfortable fortunes, to whom this is not an important consideration, go in much larger numbers into other occupations, like law or business, that are certainly not less exacting.

Economists have long been familiar with Gresham’s Law to the effect that money coined from a cheaper metal will drive that of more intrinsic value out of circulation; and the principle has a wider application. Other things being equal, a professional school will attract in the main men of the general quality of its members. Graduate schools are now mainly seminaries for teachers of high and not so high grade, predominantly the latter, and they draw chiefly men of that type. Many people have thought that more ambitious and talented youths would come if they were offered large fellowships; but surely this is the wrong approach. It is making life easy during the period of preparation, and was tried in the divinity schools a hundred years ago, with the result of helping to lessen rather than increase the proportion of forcible men in the ministry. In fact the pecuniary advantages hitherto offered in graduate schools in the form of scholarships, and often of lower tuition fees than in other parts of the university, have not had an altogether good effect on their students. They are less provident, marrying before acquiring a settled means of support much more frequently than the students in schools of law or medicine.

The graduate schools are doing an excellent and much needed work; but they are not what we have supposed President Gilman had in mind. They produce some extraordinary scholars, but they are not on the whole well adapted to attract, and stimulate to the utmost, young men of that kind. For this purpose a new — I will not say organization, for the word implies the very rigidity we would avoid — rather, a new method is needed which will provide a more stimulating atmosphere, broader contacts with eminent men outside the special field, and a more definite independent opportunity and productive purpose.

III

Graduate schools have had one effect that has not been sufficiently noticed. They have tended to block the advance of the college. This appears clearly when we trace the history of the American college from its inception. It began as a transplantation to the newly founded colony in Massachusetts Bay of the institution with the same name in Cambridge and Oxford. These colleges were residential and teaching bodies, without the power to confer degrees which belonged to the university alone. From its foundation, however, Harvard assumed this power without authority, but by tacit acquiescence of the colony, and thus acquired control of its own affairs. In so doing it had usurped a royal prerogative, yet its right was not contested in England, and Dunster, the first president, obtained from the two great English universities recognition of its degrees as equivalent to their own, a privilege that seems to have been dropped only when they ceased to give the same treatment to foreign degrees. This modified type of the English college, with a power to grant degrees and therefore to determine its own standards, was universally followed until the Revolution, and became the traditional form of the American college.

For two hundred years there was little advance here, and in fact the eighteenth century was a time of somnolence in the universities of Europe. They awoke to greater activity early in the nineteenth, and at the same time a literary revival came in this country, together with expansion of teaching by the creation of schools of law and medicine. But the stirring of the waters had no large effect on the colleges or the standards of their education until after the Civil War, and then the eyes of scholars were turned to Germany. Some of our best men had studied there, and, instead of trying to raise the college to a much higher level, they sought to do here for the graduates what had been done for them at Göttingen, Leipsic, or Berlin. So they superposed on the American college a graduate school modeled on the German university.

Now there was in Germany nothing beneath the university analogous to our colleges, and it was not clear how they would fit into their new environment, or what would be their educational position. If the graduate school was to be a place for independent study and research by a few selected men, their position would have resembled that of the prize fellows at Oxford and Cambridge, while the colleges would have been free to develop, and in the strongest institutions probably would have evolved, education of a high order. But if the graduate school was to be, like a German university, the place for advanced study, the college had no adequate function in higher education. It must be confined to a lower grade of work, and in most places that has happened. Such is, indeed, the view often held by American professors. They are constantly giving as a reason for preferring one offer to another that they will be expected to teach only graduate students. The expression ‘the university, that is the graduate school ’ has become common, and with such an attitude on the part of many, perhaps most, of the members of university faculties, the lack, still frequent, of serious effort to raise the standard of undergraduate education to a much higher level is not surprising.

Everywhere in Europe the university follows directly on the secondary school, and so it should. A tendency is therefore observable in America to associate the college with secondary work. In his article in the April Atlantic, Mr. Abraham Flexner sets forth the conventional point of view when, referring to the colleges before the advent of graduate schools, he writes, ‘Such scholars and scientists as we then possessed led double lives — teaching boys at one time, pursuing their studies in their scant leisure. The graduate school at Baltimore shut out mere boys.’ Why mere boys? In the early nineties, when the graduate schools had begun to grow large, the age of entering Harvard was on the average nineteen years and four months, about the same as that for the English and German universities. No doubt the training in the secondary schools was inferior to that in Europe, largely because primary teaching here begins late and proceeds slowly. But the secondary schools have improved, must improve, and it is noteworthy that the average age of entrance at Harvard has in the last four decades declined just one year, although the requirements for admission have not been lowered.

To treat young men from eighteen to twenty-two and more as boys is not only an unpardonable waste of time and money, but also demoralizing to them. No excuse will justify continuing their secondary instruction to that age, or indeed any education not of university grade, by which term I mean such as is lit for maturing youth well grounded in the discipline of school. If by that time they are not capable of this, they have reached the limit of profitable advance, and should not remain to slow down the progress of the other students. We are thus brought to the alternative of raising the college to a higher level, encroaching thereby on the sphere of the graduate schools, or abolishing it in its present form by reducing its period to that required for completing secondary education — a year for the product of the best schools, two years for that of those less good.

Of course the college might be abolished altogether, and the secondary teaching relegated wholly to subordinate institutions such as the junior colleges common in the West, and especially in California. This has been proposed, but never carried out completely, for the universities which admit graduates of the junior colleges generally treat the work done there as a substitute for the first two years of their own undergraduate course. If the system were adopted fully, the university might become, like the German, a congeries of professional schools, but without the traditional background of culture that envelops the whole. Moreover, at present at least, the junior college cannot provide the highly trained teachers of the German Gymnasium, or the selected body of students preparing under rigorous discipline for the university. To see such a system thoroughly tried would be interesting, but the results problematical.

Abolishing the college in its present form has serious drawbacks. Not only in this country, but also in England and Germany, the two nations from which we have borrowed our ideas of higher education, it has been the habit during the formative period of early manhood to bring together in a community with an atmosphere of culture men who will later follow many careers — future lawyers, physicians, statesmen, public servants, teachers, and here, and to an increasing extent in England, young men who will engage in business. The contacts made, the mutual attrition, have been thought valuable, for it is not the direct education alone, but the common life also, that has been sought and has caused much of the affection and loyalty of alumni, who esteem it highly. In England and Germany this common life for young men has been supplied in varying form by the universities, in America by the college. Not long ago a student from one of the state universities remarked to the writer that in his part of the country the undergraduates deemed the instruction less important than learning to deal with men. Without exaggerating the value of close contacts between young men of very different destinies, we may observe that if the colleges were abolished nothing for the purpose would take their place, for the students in our professional schools cannot, and had better not, be merged into a single community. Certainly the graduate schools, composed as they are almost exclusively of prospective teachers, cannot take the place. Therefore these schools are not, and cannot be made, social counterparts of their German prototypes. In short, the attempt to superpose a German university upon an Oxford or Cambridge college has resulted in most cases in producing neither. Each has tended to denature the other. Speaking of American universities in general, the college and the graduate school have been doing in succession separately some things that had better be done at the same time together.

IV

The graduate school, being practically confined to the education of teachers and of technical experts, cannot by itself be a university, nor can a law school, medical school, or any other that prepares for a particular profession; but the college, if raised to a level high enough, can. To many people this may seem chimerical, yet in some of the most progressive universities it has been largely done. Their honor graduates are in many subjects fairly equal to those of Oxford and Cambridge, and certainly can be made fully equal if there is a determined effort to do so. No doubt it will be said that we have undergraduates who take no real interest in learning and neglect their work. Such men are found everywhere. In England they take the degree with a pass, formerly a very low measure of scholarship; but happily both the standard for the pass and the proportion of men who try for honors have been greatly raised. In Germany under the Empire, when we were extolling her system, a large fraction of the students never attempted to get a degree or study seriously, but after a few years’ residence went home to manage their estates. Men of this kind are the vexation and despair of all higher education, not strictly professional; but in good colleges here many of them are dropped out early, and others are provoked to a respect and desire for scholarly attainment. Moreover, to win any degree in these colleges requires more work than to obtain the pass in England, and it is needless to make a comparison with the German student who seeks no degree.

When we speak of raising our best colleges to a level commensurate with that of European universities we are, of course, using a vague and grandiose term. We do not mean that they will cover the same ground as any one of those institutions, and, indeed, no two of these are in all respects alike. Our colleges, however developed, will not give the professional training of the German university, which is in marked contrast with the less vocational tone of Oxford and Cambridge. We are referring, not to technical details, but to the general range and quality of the education. Our institutions of higher and of professional learning should not attempt to copy those elsewhere, and must be adapted to our own conditions, but they need not be inferior, or distorted by an effort at imitation.

Raising undergraduate instruction to a higher level by no means implies discarding the graduate school, although part of its work will naturally pass to the college, as it has already done where graduate courses are open to upperclassmen. The graduate school has essential functions with which we cannot dispense: first, in supplementing the education given in colleges less well equipped; second, in preparing men to be teachers in institutions above the secondary grade — not by imparting a technique of instruction, which in higher education is of slight importance compared with learning and personality, but by giving the specific knowledge required in the subject to be taught.

To raise the level of the college does mean readjustment of the graduate schools to different conditions, for as the quality of undergraduate education rises the amount of subsequent instruction required diminishes, a fact of which the graduate schools must take more account than they do now. They must be more elastic, pay more regard to individual attainment, relax their routine, and leave the progress of the proficient student more in his own hands. They must not think of themselves as essentially the university, and hence treat everyone entering as if he had received only secondary education. They must not follow for mature students methods of measuring advance by scoring credits in courses, inappropriate in a real university, and wholly out of place for graduates of high-grade colleges. The fact is that the practice of graduate schools is no longer adapted to the improvements made by the best colleges, and should be revised in accordance therewith.

V

This takes us back to the point of beginning — President Gilman’s ambition to foster prospective great scholars. I do not say to train them, because that connotes a formal process; or to educate or instruct, for these in common usage mean imparting information, not in this case the chief object sought. The aim is to incite to ardent exploration, not in a line pointed out by a superior, but in an untrodden path perceived by the imagination of the explorer. One may ask if young men have such visions. The genius does, and must seek his road in his own way. Of course he must be equipped for his travels, and all the resources of the university must be open to him, all its vast storehouse of knowledge and experience; but he must not be trammeled by conventional rules and processes, good for the ordinary man but not for him. Nor, if he is, as a friend expressed it, cutting a fresh diagonal through human knowledge, can he always know at the outset all the equipment he will need.

Devotees of the existing system will maintain that there are now such opportunities in the graduate schools, that they now produce some men of mark, and that the number of these is at best small. That is true, but the conditions might be better than is possible in the present composition of such schools. The crowd of less capable and less ambitious students, with the routine inseparable from mass production, has not the attraction or driving force of a small selected group of men of rare abilities. These should not be candidates for a degree, because their attention should be directed, not to courses and examinations, but solely to progress toward their own objectives. They should live in contact with one another and with older men, both in their own subjects and in others.

Let us suppose such a group chosen in early manhood from the whole country, each member having some important project of his own that he hopes to work out. Let us suppose he is appointed for a definite term, renewable if his progress toward his goal is promising; that he is comfortably lodged, and supplied with all the opportunities for counsel, research, and experiment the university provides. Imagine these young men around a dinner table once a week with a body of the greatest productive scholars it contains, to talk not about their own work so much as the currents of thought in the ocean of knowledge, the less charted the better; for the object is not to acquire codified knowledge, but to rouse the imagination by the intellectual ferment that conversation with such men instills. What an atmosphere that would be!

The Fondation Thiers in Paris is based on such a plan, save that the social life of the members is only among themselves, without the presence of older scholars. More complete is the resemblance to the prize fellowships in Trinity College, Cambridge, which have produced an extraordinary number of distinguished men. Such a group can be most effective only in a university whose object is not merely to preserve and impart knowledge, but also to reveal fresh sources and produce the men capable of finding them. To do so it should attract the most creative minds and place them in a tingling atmosphere of eager thought, not with large mixed masses but in selected groups, with the give-and-take of ideas and aspirations and the stimulus of ripe scholars. A plan of this kind is well worth a trial. It has been called here a Society of Fellows.