American university

“ The ideal American University is one which expresses and promotes this ideal of freedom.
A university is a group of vocational schools. A truly democratic university is an organic system of vocational schools, one which in the relations that subsist between its schools affords a shining, stimulating example of the kind of relations that ought to subsist between the vocational groups in the state.
The aim of an American university should be to furnish leaders for all the various groups who will undertake the great business of truly organizing democracy. ”

“ Whatever the American university may and should share with the historic institutions of other lands, enough of its destiny and function is even now indicated to bring out in clear relief the lines along which its own peculiar possessions and possibilities must and will develop. It stands to reason that the American university cannot be a slavish replica of however perfect a European model. ”

“ It will be conceded, I think, that all these activities in abstract science are to a very substantial extent due to the rapid rise of the American university and to its splendid influence upon the mentality of our industries. But in this democratic country, covering a vast area, each State has the privilege of regulating in its own way its own educational programme and policy, and each privately endowed university can pursue its own ideals in its own way without worrying very much about any other university. ”

“ The connection between the high school and the university still gives rise to troublesome problems, not alone in this country. The ideals of the older American university are often at variance with the systematic development of education below the university and the demands of the people. The state university has come nearer than any other to the solution. While Harvard and Yale met the growing demands of science by establishing separate schools, Michigan introduced the scientific course into the college, making it rank with the classical. ”

“ If we define a university as a degree-granting institution, then there are over 700 universities in the United States of America. It is the aspiration of every American city to possess its own university. The university is, in a sense, the cathedral—a somewhat truncated one doubtless—of the American city, and every citizen is unhappy until his city gets what he conceives to be its full complement of culture, in the possession of a university. ”

“ Through you the American people have begun to see that a university is not a cloister for the recluse, but an expression of all that is best in the nation's thought and character. From Harvard University men go into every part of our national life. To Harvard University come from the common schools, through paths that have been broadened by your work, the youth who have the capacity and the will to profit by her teaching. ”

“ If it were a mere recording instrument of conventional opinion and average information, it is hard to see why the University should exist at all. To clasp hands with the common life in order that it may lift that life, to be a radiant center enkindling the society in which it has its being, these are primary duties of the University. ”

“ Higher reasons, however, than these give point to the ambition to create in America the American university, which, while profiting by the larger wealth and longer experience of Europe's historic centers of learning will blaze paths peculiarly its own. The passion for American educational independence has even now won for the American professor equality with his European colleague, if not of opportunity and facilities, at least of expectation. ”

“ These small colleges possess many 309 of the virtues of the English universities; they train the mind and cultivate it, and at the same time develop the social man. If now the American university were to divide its undergraduate department into organized residential halls, it would combine the advantages of the two types of American institution, which are the two types of instruction the world over. Already our college life at its best is as happy as the college life in England ”

“ Our university was to be a model to all other institutions. Although controlled by our denomination, it was to have no sectarian bias; its policy should be conservatively liberal; morally, intellectually, and æsthetically, it might be regarded as the culmination of our American school-system. Men of national reputation and the greatest ability were to fill professors' chairs; thorough instruction could be expected in every department; languages, literatures, sciences, philosophy, and art, would occupy the time of the students who were sure to flock in from all parts of the country. ”

“ But 'the knowing of men by name,' the care for their personal lives and characters, must be the essential element in the new college course, as it was in the old. And the college function of the university must not be despised or belittled. Because Germany has no colleges, because her students go directly from the high school at home to the professional school or the university, some have urged the abandonment by the American university of this primal function of general culture. ”

“ The American college and university stands to-day at the parting of the ways: this generation will largely determine its future. If the American college and university ever becomes a social club for the sons and daughters of the rich, an institution making it easy for them to secure business and professional opportunity and advancement, to the exclusion of their poorer fellows, it may be as necessary to disestablish the foundations of our great universities, as statesmen in Europe thought it necessary to disestablish the monastic foundations at the close of the middle age. ”

“ In the universities the picture is different and the development impressive, though not devoid of problems. To understand what is going on, let us consider the role which the university plays in our culture. In our universities the most independent forces of American culture seem to gather—influences free from political or commercial pressures; the universities, more than any other institutions, sustain their role as strongholds of independent and liberal thought, and, with a few regrettable exceptions, they are jealously committed to the conservation of that independence. ”

“ The history of the early American colleges has been varied, but the more successful ones have certainly become catholic and progressive. As the country grew and men pushed westward, leaving tradition behind and developing more freely the spirit of our advancing civilization, the conception of a university, in touch with all the people, and scientific and free, arose. Thus we have the state university. At the same time the leading religious denominations have vied with each other in founding in the new states colleges or universities that are more or less denominational in spirit and aim. ”

“ On these accounts that university holds a most important place in the history of American higher education; for it stands practically at the beginning of the transition from the old sectarian college to the modern university, and from the simple, single, cast-iron course to the form which we now know, in which various courses are presented, with free choice between them. The number of students was about five hundred, and the faculty corresponded to these in numbers. Now that the university includes over four thousand students, with a faculty in proportion, those seem the days of small things ”

“ Some of the American Universities, in our judgment, come nearer to the ideal of a true University than any of the other types. Beginning on the old English collegiate system, they have broadened out into vast and splendidly endowed institutions of universal learning, have assimilated some German features, and have combined successfully college routine and discipline with mature and advanced work. ”

“ I wish that all Americans might visit such a university. But more than that, I wish that some system might be devised for the exchange of students between great colleges in different parts of the country. Doubtless it would be a good thing for certain students at western colleges to learn something of the more elaborate life and the greater sophistication of the great colleges of the East, but more particularly I think that vast benefits might accrue to certain young men from Harvard, Yale, and similar institutions, by contact with such universities as that of Kansas. ”

“ The Continental university begins and carries on the stage of intelligent and self-chosen and independent work. But in the American universities there must be discipline, college yells, drill in routine and elementary work, classes handled on the basis of averages, and teachers of the Gymnasium and lycée type, existing side by side with recognition and encouragement of the individual freedom of bent, disregard of credit hours and assigned tasks, and scholarly professors and investigators of real university type. ”

“ Thus, though the University throughout its whole history necessarily has had to recognize the first claims of the students for instruction, often of a somewhat elementary character, there have always been influences which have kept the ideals of higher scholarship constantly in view. In the older days the idea of research in its modern sense was hardly understood; but as the atmosphere of European learning began to pervade American academic life the double function of a true university came to be more clearly recognized. ”

“ Though the graduates of the earlier American colleges had a certain influence on the policies and growth of their institutions, it is only within the last twenty-five years that these associations have become a factor of recognized importance in every university. ”

“ The signs of such a development are already plain in the expert commissions of some States; in the increasing proportion of university men in legislatures; in the university men's influence in federal departments and commissions. It is hardly too much to say that the best hope of intelligent and principled progress in economic and social legislation and administration lies in the increasing influence of American universities. ”

“ The attempt to hold the college and the no means together in bonds of ostensible Solidarity is by university an advisedly concerted adjustment to the needs of scholarship as they run today. By historical accident the older American universities have grown into bearing on the ground of an underlying college, and the external connection so inherited has not usually been severed ”

“ The cure will come only by a fundamental educational reform below the level of the university. The great tragedy of American education is that our universities were founded just at the time when genuinely liberal colleges were ceasing to exist. In fact it was the developing university which, imposing the elective system, helped to kill the liberal arts curriculum of the colleges. ”

“ The American universities are closely connected in their development with the appearance and growing class-consciousness of this aristocracy of wealth. The fathers of the country certainly did postulate a need of universities, and in every state Congress set aside public lands to furnish a university with material resources. Every State possesses a university, though in many instances these institutions are in the last degree of feebleness. In the days of sincere democracy the starvation of government and the dislike of all manifest inequalities involved the starvation of higher education. ”

“ While it is the work of science and scholarship, roughly what is known in American usage as graduate work, that gives the university its rank as a seat of learning and keeps it in countenance as such with laymen and scholars, it is the undergraduate school, or college, that still continues to be the larger fact, and that still engages the greater and more immediate attention in university management. ”

“ The university, in its organization, enjoyed every advantage that American ability and aspiration, the fullest educational experience and knowledge and the command of enormous financial resources could give. It was therefore planned on the broadest lines and with a special view to growth and change in the future, so that it shall, as far as men can foresee, adapt itself in every way to the demands of modern life as they arise. ”

“ With these plans rapidly evolving there is every reason to hope that, at no distant period, the University may find an imposing physical setting more in keeping with her standing among American universities. ”

“ implicitly believe will result from the union of the English-speaking peoples throughout the world and to encourage in the students from the United States of North America who will benefit from the American Scholarships to be established for the reason above given at the University of Oxford under this my Will an attachment to the country from which they have sprung but without ”

“ These three elements, represented by the bachelor's degree, the doctorate of philosophy and the professional degrees, are variously combined and developed in our different institutions; and this certainly gives great flexibility and possibilities to university development. The foundation of new universities—Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Chicago—and the enlargement of the resources of private and state institutions have greatly favored progress and differentiation. We have no one kind of university, but many types, each seeking to work out its own salvation. ”

“ Many minds, so employed, have produced many works and much fame in that department; but if all liberal arts and sciences, useful to human life, had been taught there, if some had dedicated themselves to chemistry, some to mathematics, some to experimental philosophy, and if every attainment had been honoured in the mixt ratio of its difficulty and utility, the system of such a University would have been much more valuable, but the splendour of its name something less. ”