Carnegie Mellon University

“ In every case, this researcher is most carefully selected for the problem in hand. The institute supplies free laboratory space and the use of all ordinary chemicals and equipment. The chemist or engineer who is studying the problem works under the immediate supervision of men who are thoroughly trained and experienced in conducting industrial research.
At the present time, the Mellon Institute, which, while an integral part of the University of Pittsburgh, has its own endowment, is expending over $150,000 annually for salaries and maintenance. ”

“ The two following years, 1890-1891, were passed mainly at Cornell, though with excursions to various other institutions where I had been asked to give addresses or lectures; but in February of 1892, having been invited to lecture at Stanford University in California, I accepted an invitation from Mr. Andrew Carnegie to become one of the guests going in his car to the Pacific coast by way of Mexico. ”

“ The chief difficulty in securing the right men for university chairs is the small field from which they must be drawn. When we have a hundred thousand men of university training teaching in the schools, there will be those deserving promotion. When we have more students doing research work at the universities, there will be more men of genius for the higher offices. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and especially the Carnegie Institution, by encouraging men to carry on research at the universities, will perform in more ways than one a service of immense value. ”

“ First—Standing apart by itself there is the founding of a university by men enormously rich, such men as must necessarily be few in any country. Perhaps the greatest sum ever given by an individual for any purpose is the gift of Senator Stanford, who undertakes to establish upon the Pacific coast, where he amassed his enormous fortune, a complete university, which is said to involve the expenditure of ten millions of dollars, and upon which he may be expected to bestow twenty millions of his surplus. ”

“ The salaries paid are not made public, but they are probably as small as will obtain and retain the men that are needed. The bureaucratic or department store system, which is the chief danger of the university, is in the case of the Carnegie Institution carried to an extreme, for the collective sentiment of a group of scholars, which is the balance wheel of the university, is there absent. It may be impossible for such an institution to accomplish more for science than it is doing ”

“ The Carnegie Institution might also reach a class that could not be benefited by a national university intended for graduate students only, for it could assist and encourage the exceptional man even if, through force of circumstances, he had been unable to obtain a degree. ”

“ With good men at the start, this works well, but one may have misgivings as to the ultimate outcome of widely scattered research work and scientific men directed by a president from an administration building in Washington. The Carnegie Institution would probably have done better either to have established a research university at Washington or else to have used its revenue to endow independent research institutions for special lines of work in different places. ”

“ It may be that they are not being born in sufficient numbers, but it is more likely that they are not found. The comparatively small salaries and the somewhat unsatisfactory methods of university control may be partly responsible. Whatever the difficulty may be, the pressing need of the present time is to find men: providing positions and equipment is scarcely of use except in so far as this may attract men.
The Carnegie Institution has taken men from universities and from other institutions; it has not made new men of science or attracted men to scientific work. ”

“ Its scientific Professor, Thompson, now Lord Kelvin, was recently elevated to the Lord Chancellorship, the highest honor in its power to bestow.
Every important university develops special qualities of its own, for which it is noted. That of Glasgow is renowned for devotion to the scientific field. What a record is hers! Protector of Watt, going to extreme measures necessary, not alone to shelter him, but to enable him to labor within its walls and support himself; first university to establish an engineering school and professorship of engineering ”

“ Professor Robert Simpson Woodward, who holds the chair of mechanics and mathematical physics at Columbia University and is dean of the faculty of pure science, was elected president of the Carnegie Institution at the meeting of the trustees held at Washington on December 13. No selection could have been made more certain to meet the general approval of scientific men. ”

“ The collection represents the work of twenty-five years, and embraces about two thousand titles.
Mr. Andrew Carnegie has offered to complete, with a contribution of £50,000, a fund which Mr. Joseph Chamberlain is trying to raise in order to make the scientific school the principal department of the University of Birmingham, England. ”

“ The entire Carnegie bequest would be exhausted before Harvard or Columbia could be reached, and the University of Pennsylvania would be barely passed. It is thus apparent that even when supplemented by the opportunities for study which Washington affords, the advantages in a material way would not exceed existing institutions by an amount sufficient to overcome sentimental or other reasons that attract students elsewhere. ”

“ Of Watt, the genius, possessed of abilities far beyond those of other men, a scientist and philosopher, a mechanician and a craftsman, one who gravitated without effort to the top of every society, and who, even when a young workman, made his workshop the meeting-place of the leaders of Glasgow University for the interchange of views upon the highest and most abstruse subjects—with all this we have already dealt, but it is only part, and not the nobler part. ”

“ It is not the smiling freshmen of the year, it is your own beardless and unwrinkled faces, that are looking from the windows of University Hall and of Hope College. Under the trees upon the hill it is yourselves whom you see walking, full of hopes and dreams, glowing with conscious power, and "nourishing a youth sublime;" and in this familiar temple, which surely has never echoed with eloquence so fervid and inspiring as that of your commencement orations, it is not yonder youths in the galleries who, as they fondly believe, are whispering to yonder maids ”

“ For example, a very able and candid English editor, in speaking of Mr. Andrew Carnegie's address as Rector of St. Andrews University, last October, which he pronounces one of the most remarkable addresses ever delivered in Great Britain, practically admits that America has outstripped the mother country in this respect at least. He says, "Mr. Carnegie is a personage. A man who has risen from nothing to the summit of American finance is a man to be reckoned with. ”

“ Dick, Professor of natural philosophy, knowing of Watt's skill from his first start in Glasgow, had already employed him to repair some mathematical instruments bequeathed to the university by a Scotch gentleman in the West Indies, and the work had been well done, at a cost of five pounds—the first contract money ever earned by Watt in Glasgow. Good work always tells. Ability cannot be kept down forever ”

“ Carnegie has shown what a large-minded liberality can do for the Scottish Universities. A great benefactor who would free the University of Cambridge from a sordid struggle, in{216} which every pound spent on development has to be laboriously begged, would earn an enduring fame in the annals of British education. It has been the earnest desire of the authors of this paper to show that the University is not unworthy of such generosity; that she has displayed great courage and great self-denial in facing modern conditions ”

“ The Sage of Chelsea was right: "The true university of these days is a collection of books."
To master a worth-while book is to master much else besides; few of us, however, make perfect conquest of a volume without first owning it physically. ”

“ Getting better all the time. You've got some first-rate supercomputer work at the Courant Institute, particularly with your IBM connection, but you should keep an eye on Columbia. Now that AT&T has joined with them to go after some of the Pentagon's AI contracts, they may finally start putting together a major computer science department up there too. In a few years Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon will have to step lively to stay out front."
Hello, she thought. How come Ken suddenly knows so much scuttlebutt about U.S. computer research? ”

“ Where there have been sympathy and hearty cooperation between the Mellon Institute and the company concerned, the institute has been able to push through to a successful conclusion large scale experiments in the factory of the company, which in the beginning of the fellowship seemed almost impossible: it may be said that the results of the fellowships at the Mellon Institute indicate that a form of service to industry has been established, the possibilities of which no man can say. ”

“ The Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tennessee, may be mentioned as a true product of the gospel of wealth. It was established by members of the Vanderbilt family during their lives—mark this vital feature—during their lives; for nothing counts for much that is left by a man at his death. Such funds are torn from him, not given by him. If any millionaire is at a loss to know how to accomplish great and indisputable good with his surplus, here is a field which can never be fully occupied, for the wants of our universities increase with the development of the country. ”

“ Carnegie has endowed for the Promotion of Research and for the Advancement of Teaching will help progress. Conservative experiments and liberal experiments will lead to better knowledge.
But whatever changes are made, whatever improvements arrive in the higher education in America, [Pg 236] one thing I hope will never be given up,—the free, democratic, united student life of our colleges and universities. For without this factor we cannot develop the kind of intellectual person who will be at home in the republic. The world in which he has to live will not ask him what degrees he has taken. ”

“ It is disappointing that the Carnegie Institution has been able to do nothing beyond making grants to certain scientific men and founding certain research institutions along well-established lines, but it may none the less be difficult to say what else it could do to better advantage. Money spent on scientific research is almost surely well spent. If the undertakings of the Carnegie Institution are what in commercial life would be called three-per-cent. investments, in science they bring a material return manyfold as large, and the ideal results are not to be measured. ”

“ Endowed institutions for research are of vast importance for the progress of science. Under existing social conditions investigation can not be undertaken as an independent profession. The sales of the publications of the Carnegie Institution are less than one per cent, of the cost of the work which they represent. ”

“ The Carnegie Institute of Washington, with an endowment of $22,000,000, was founded to encourage in the broadest and most liberal manner investigation, research and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind, while the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, with its $15,000,000 endowment, provides retiring pensions for the teachers of universities, colleges and technical schools. ”

“ American universities have, fortunately, followed the Glasgow model, and are giving more attention to the hitherto much neglected needs of science, and the practical departments of education, making themselves real universities, "where any man can study everything worth studying." ”

“ The man who builds a university, library, or laboratory performs no more useful work than he who elects to devote himself and his surplus means to the adornment of a park, the gathering together of a collection of pictures for the public, or the building of a memorial arch. These are all true laborers in the vineyard. The only point required by the "Gospel of Wealth" is that the surplus which accrues from time to time in the hands of a man should be administered by him in his own lifetime for that purpose which is seen by him, as trustee, to be best for the good of the people. ”

“ There are each year at Woods Hole between fifty and one hundred investigators carrying on original research, and about an equal number of students, many of whom become investigators. The Carnegie Institution has wisely decided not to acquire the laboratory, but is supporting it by contributing $10,000 for twenty tables, and the laboratory is thus on a secure financial basis without loss of the independence and spirit of cooperation which have accomplished so much in the past. ”

“ If there be a millionaire in the land who is at a loss what to do with the surplus that has been committed to him as trustee, let him investigate the good that is flowing from these chemical laboratories. No medical college is complete without its laboratory. As with universities, so with medical colleges; it is not new institutions that are required, but additional means for the more thorough equipment of those that exist. ”

“ The following day I made the acquaintance of the Reception Committee at a luncheon given by Mrs. Carnegie in her beautiful home still filled with memories of her husband, Andrew Carnegie, whose philanthropic achievements are well known in France. The following day we went for a visit of a few days to Smith College, and Vassar College, a few hours from New York. Later I also visited the colleges of Bryn Mawr and Wellesley, and I saw some others on my way.
These colleges, or universities for women, are very characteristic of American life and culture. ”