Boston University

“ Today it has grown into this great modern manufacturing and commercial center. It boasts of two hundred universities, colleges and schools, of which the major ones are Boston University, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Radcliffe, Wellesley, Tufts, Simmons, Boston College, New England Conservatory of Music, Northeastern, and Massachusetts School of Art. There are two hundred and twenty-four public libraries available with more than four million books. There are five museums open to the public. ”

“ With the Law School of Boston University he has stood connected from its commencement in 1872, receiving at that time the honor of being selected as its Dean. He was not at the time able to serve in that capacity, but was a regular lecturer, and in 1876, on being again elected to the position, he accepted it. This relation to the school he sustains at present, having, during the decade which has passed since his assumption of the office, contributed in no small measure to the present efficient organization and very gratifying prosperity of the school. ”

“ This was the first hospital in New England over which women have had entire control, both as physicians and surgeons. Boston University is open to both sexes, with equal studies, duties and privileges. This institution was incorporated in 1869, and includes, among other schools and colleges, schools of theology, law and medicine. The faculty consists of many distinguished men and women. Boston University School of Medicine (homeopathic) was organized in 1873. Of the thirty-two lecturers and professors who constitute the faculty, five are women. ”

“ The resident professors at that university are gentlemen of learning and varied attainments; and are, without one exception that I can call to mind, men who would shed a grace upon, and do honour to, any society in the civilised world. Many of the resident gentry in Boston and its neighbourhood, and I think I am not mistaken in adding, a large majority of those who are attached to the liberal professions there, have been educated at this same school. Whatever the defects of American universities may be, they disseminate no prejudices ”

“ This was the purpose for which the Boston University Law School was founded; this has been the constant aim of its teachings; and the selection of practitioners for instructors, coming fresh from consultations with their clients, and from sharp contests in the court-rooms, has been made from the first with the endeavor to set before the students live men, who could tell them what to do and how to do it.
If students could be more frequently brought face to face with the living heroes of the law, the zeal for careful work and laborious study would be fanned almost into enthusiasm. ”

“ At the edge of the cemetery we find an old granite milestone which bears the inscription “Boston 8 miles 1734.”
Entering our car we swing left around the Common following the traffic arrows and pass
Harvard University
This is the oldest and in many ways the most distinguished school of learning in the United States. Built in 1636. However, this priority is oftentimes disputed as William and Mary College in Virginia claims its date of charter to be 1617. In order to visit Harvard you should set aside a whole day. ”

“ This country where hundreds of parents all over the world who never had the chance to further their education could still watch their children become the first in their family to earn a degree on a hopeful Boston day in June.
This is America. A place where millions of restless adventurers from all over the world, still weary of their lot in life - still hoping for something better - have longed to travel great distances and take great risks for a chance to arrive on our shores. ”

“ The College of Liberal Arts is named in his honor.
Boston University owes much of its wide reputation to its president, the Rev. Dr. William F. Warren, a successful author as well as able executive. From the first he has favored co-education and equal opportunities for men and women. Dr. Warren said in 1890, "In my opinion the co-education of the sexes in high and grammar schools, as also in colleges and universities, is absolutely essential to the best results in the education of youth. ”

“ Seldom, in the history of science, has there been a nobler instance of that patronage than this University is now experiencing, in the mission of one of her professors on an enterprise of scientific exploration, started and maintained by a private citizen of Boston. ”

“ The Boston University, honored in being first to open professional courses to women, Michigan University, the New England Conservatory, the North Western University of Illinois, the Wesleyan Universities, both of Connecticut and Ohio, with others of the colleges of the country, have opened their doors and welcomed women to an equal share with men, in their advantages. ”

“ Nevertheless a finer intellectual life, in many respects, was lived at old Cambridge within the years covered by this chapter than nowadays at the same place, or at any date in any other American university town. The neighborhood of Boston, where the commercial life has never so entirely overlain the intellectual as in New York and Philadelphia, has been a standing advantage to Harvard College. ”

“ The conservatory has possibly done more for New England culture than any other influence save Harvard University.
The literary life of Boston needs neither chronicler nor comment. Such men as Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Francis Parkman, Prescott, the historian, Longfellow, Lowell and countless others who, living, have made the city their home, or, dead, sleep in its chambers of Peace, have cast a glamour of books and bookmen and book-life around her until her title of "The Athens of America" has passed from jest to earnest. ”

“ If an American university is not at all like either Oxford or Cambridge, still Harvard is an influence, and Harvard is at Cambridge, a near suburb of Boston. The result of it all is that we feel something of the old atmosphere of home and are stimulated. Boston grows upon us very rapidly. The father of one of my good American friends, Mr. John G. Anderson, who has gone on golfing expeditions with me in England, Scotland, France and the United States, is a Scot with a great love for his home country, and our rambles round old Boston have been of a peculiarly interesting kind. ”

“ In organization and scope of effort Harvard has grown, especially after 1869, under the direction of President Charles W. Eliot, to be in the highest sense a university; but the “college” proper, whose end is the liberal culture of undergraduates, continues to be in many ways the centre of university life, as it is the embodiment of university traditions. The medical school (in Boston) dates from 1782, the law school from 1817, the divinity school1 (though instruction in theology was of course given from the foundation of the college) from 1819, and the dental school (in Boston) from 1867. ”

“ At Boston University, made out of the millions of Isaac Rich, the merchant, and Lee Chaflin, the shoe manufacturer, they will teach you how to collect tips at summer hotels. The commercial men and women who specialize in such subjects come into the universities, and they bid against the professors of liberal arts for power and prestige and pay—and how much chance do you think a scholar or lover of belles-lettres stands against such people? ”

“ We have also in our membership representatives of literary and educational organizations such as the Papyrus club of Boston, the Twentieth Century club of that city, the American Oriental society, the New England Historic-Genealogical society, the Royal Society of Northern Antiquarians, Denmark, and the Archæological Institute of America. Relative to the great American universities, we number in our ranks alumni of Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Boston, Johns Hopkins, Bowdoin, Brown, Notre Dame, the University of Vermont, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia. ”

“ No longer can we assume that a high-school education in Boston is enough to compete for a job that could easily go to a college-educated student in Bangalore or Beijing. No more can we count on employers to provide health care and pensions and job training when their bottom-lines know no borders. Never again can we expect the oceans that surround America to keep us safe from attacks on our own soil. ”

“ Besides, I am perfectly sure that if the younger men who now hold positions as instructors at the College could cast their votes and could influence the Directors’ decisions, there would be more chance for the admission of women.
The New England Female Medical College was absorbed into the Boston University Medical Department, an inferior school and a homeopathic one, which has no other merit than that it admits men and women on equal terms to all its advantages; therefore, it does not injure the movement for women any more than it does the profession at large. ”

“ For girls the largest school is the Northfield Seminary at East Northfield. In Boston and in the towns in its environs are various famous schools, among them the boys’ classical school in Boston, founded in 1635, one of the oldest secondary schools in the country. The leading educational institution of the state, as it is the oldest and most famous of the country, is Harvard University (founded 1636) at Cambridge. In the extreme north-west of the state, at Williamstown, is Williams College (1793) , and in the Connecticut Valley is Amherst College (1821) , both of these unsectarian. ”

“ They ought to take the votes away from these people, who don't know how to use them, and give them only to us, the Educated." My heart leapt the Atlantic, and was in a Cathedral or University town of South England.
Yet Boston is alive. It sits, in comfortable middle-age, on the ruins of its glory. But it is not buried beneath them. It used to lead America in Literature, Thought, Art, everything. The years have passed. It is remarkable how nearly now Boston is to New York what Munich is to Berlin. Boston and Munich were the leaders forty years ago. ”

“ Various long causeways over the wide expanse of Charles River where it spreads out to form the Back Bay, and passing in front of the newly filled-in West End, lead from Boston to the academic city of Cambridge. This populous city, best known from Harvard University, is beautifully situated on a plain, has important manufacturing industries, handsome public buildings, and a large number of elegant private residences in spacious grounds ornamented with fine old trees, shrubbery and flower-gardens. ”

“ In Boston, at that big new college called Simmons—the first of its kind in the United States—a regular four-year college of which the aim is to send out every graduate technically trained to earn her living in a certain specific occupation, there were enrolled last year, besides some five hundred undergraduate women, some eighty other women who had already earned their bachelor's degrees at other colleges, such as Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, Radcliffe, Leland Stanford, and the University of Montana. ”

“ A People’s Palace dedicated to the work of the Salvation Army, and containing baths, gymnasium, a public hall, a library, sleeping-rooms, an employment bureau, free medical and legal bureaus, &c., was opened in 1906. Simmons College and Harvard University maintain the Boston school for social workers (1904) . Beneficent social work out of the more usual type is directed by the music and bath departments of the city government. In the provision of public gymnasiums and baths (1866) Boston was the pioneer city of the country, and remains the most advanced. ”

“ The learning and literature of America at that time centred round Boston and Harvard University in the adjacent city of Cambridge, and no invidious comparison is intended or will be felt if they, with their poets and historians and men of letters at that time, with their peculiar atmosphere, instinct then and now with a life athletic, learned, business-like and religious, are taken to show the dawning capacities of the new nation. ”

“ Sometime in January, 1842, I made a visit of two or three days to B. D. Greene in Boston; the first time I ever saw Boston. Came out one day to Cambridge, dined with his father-in-law, President Quincy; the company to meet us was Professor Channing [23] and Professor Treadwell. [24] Sometime in April, I received a letter from President Quincy, telling me that the Corporation of the university would elect me Fisher professor of natural history if I would beforehand signify my acceptance. The endowment then yielded fifteen hundred dollars a year. ”

“ Darling, I ought sooner to have answered your enquiries about the Colleges, etc. Harvard (Boston) is a University for men, and we couldn’t get in there, because they wouldn’t have any women. I was anxious to go there because the degree is considered a valuable one. Here in New York the College I am at is just opened by Dr. 207Elizabeth Blackwell for women only,—or at least only women attend it, though I believe men would be admitted. ”

“ The perception of it grows on the foreigner. Its charm is so deliciously old in this land, so deliciously young compared with the lovely frowst of Oxford and Cambridge. You see it in temperament, the charm of simplicity and good-heartedness and culture; in the Harvard undergraduate, who is a boy, while his English contemporary is either a young man or a schoolboy, less pleasant stages; and in the old Bostonian who heard, and still hears, the lectures of Dickens and Thackeray. Class Day brings so many of that older generation together. They reveal what Harvard, what Boston, was. ”