Columbia University

“ Columbia University early announced that a university situated in such a city, full of problems at a time when "industrial and social progress is bringing the modern community face to face with social questions of the greatest magnitude, the solution of which will demand the best scientific study and the most honest practical endeavor," must provide facilities for bringing university study into connection with practical work. In 1901 definite practical courses shared honors of first place with the elementary or general course in college announcements. ”

“ We shall devote generous space to the study, for the reason already explained—that Columbia University is the largest and richest educational institution in the United States, and the model for all others that wish to grow large and rich. The author of its success is President Butler; and by observing him at work we learn how a university succeeds in the plutocratic empire, and what its success means to the faculty, the students, and the general public. ”

“ The university also maintains a summer session of six weeks in which are offered courses that are accepted as partial fulfillment of the requirements of certain academic degrees and diplomas. There is also a system of extension teaching for men and women who are engaged in teaching and can give only a portion of their time to study. The property of the university is valued at about $72,000,000, of which about $35,000,000 has been added by gift or bequest in the past twenty years. ”

“ In the recent annual report of Columbia University, the president, Dr Nicholas Murray Butler, speaking with all the authority of his distinguished position, faces critical issues with a frankness that is possible, perhaps, only in America. He is concerned about the dearth of great minds in spite of the spread of educational facilities, and he asks whether the universities have not destroyed the ideal of a liberal education, and with it the liberally educated man himself, [97] through allowing the choice of less valuable subjects and laying too much stress on early specialisation. ”

“ Our college presidents and professors are called upon for the most important and difficult public functions. When New York City needs its leading citizen it finds him in the presidential chair of Columbia University. When Mr. Cleveland retires from public life, he allies himself with a university. There is no other office so fit for a past president of the United States as the presidency of a university. ”

“ Teachers College of Columbia University is on a graduate basis. Though many of the 250 training and normal schools throughout the country do not require a high school diploma for admission, the tendency is wholly in that direction. In no field of professional education has the application of scientific principles to actual practice made such progress as in that of the teacher. ”

“ When other classes of the community have been measured, comparisons can be made and we shall know whether scientific men are more variable than others, have larger heads, better memory and the like. Work of this character has been carried on at Columbia University for some years. The freshmen, both the men of Columbia College and the women of Barnard College, are measured and tested with care, equal attention being paid to mental and physical traits. Then the measurements are repeated at the end of the senior year. ”

“ The good students who profit themselves and contribute to a better spirit in the institution should receive a larger part of the subsidy contributed for college education, while the students who learn but little and may be a public nuisance should not be supported at college at public expense.
But the best reward for scholarly work is adequate recognition of the work as preparation for a career in life. At Columbia University a man takes his doctor's degree at the average age of 27 years. ”

“ When an institution has a pension system, the professor who accepts a position in it does so under a business contract, and there is no question of any patronage or charity. Thus the statutes of Columbia University read: "Any professor who has been fifteen successive years or upwards in the service of the University, and who is also sixty-five years of age, or over, may at his own request signified to the president in writing, or upon motion of the trustees, be made an emeritus professor on half-pay from the beginning of the next succeeding fiscal year." ”

“ The grounds, buildings and equipment of Columbia University have cost in the neighborhood of $10,000,000, and to let these lie idle and rusting for nearly one-third of the year is evidently wasteful. But it is not only a question of the most economical administration of these trust funds that is at issue. The teachers of the country, perhaps 500,000 in number, have had just enough education to profit particularly by attendance at a university. ”

“ The total attendance grows steadily year by year and establishes the leading position of the school among institutions of its kind in this or any other country. The number attending is greater in proportion to the number of journalists in the country than is the number attending the law and medical courses in Columbia University in proportion to the number of those practicing law and medicine. In September, 1913, the school entered its new building, for which $500,000 was provided by Mr. Pulitzer's bequest. ”

“ The lectures of the professors, and the articles constantly published in the School of Mines Quarterly, have indeed given us a literature of the subject in English. The local influence in the city has been great, upon scientific education in secondary schools, and upon general public sentiment; while in Columbia University the experiment has become one of its finest departments and an element of its greatest strength. Rarely is it given to a man to see in his life-time so great a result from the plans and the labors of his earlier years. ”

“ The Library of Columbia University. are now our two main scientific centers, there being in each city about five hundred men engaged in research work. The first of the convocation week meetings was held in Washington four years ago, with an attendance estimated at 1,500 members, and there is good reason to suppose that the present meeting will be even larger and more wide reaching in its effects on the
The School of Mines, Columbia University. ”

“ This, of course, comes from Columbia University, whose standard-bearers occupy the prominent places on the program, put there by George D. Strayer, professor of Educational Administration at Columbia University. Get this title clear; it means that he teaches, not education, but the business of conducting education factories. In other words, education has become a Big Business in itself—a chain system of mills for the grinding out of standardized minds. ”

“ There for some time he was in charge of the map and chart department of the United States Coast Survey. In 1864 he became the tenth president of Columbia College (now Columbia University) in New York City, which position he held until the year before his death, his service thus being longer than that of any of his predecessors. During this period the growth of the college was rapid; new departments were established; the elective system was greatly extended ”

“ Barnard College and Teachers College occupy buildings of their own outside of the campus. Earl Hall represents the religious interests of the university.
Columbia University is intimately connected with many of the educational institutions of New York. Lectures are delivered by Columbia professors at the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at Cooper Union. Students of botany are permitted to pursue lines of research at the New York Botanical Garden, where courses in special investigation are conducted by Columbia University professors. ”

“ Some of the professors who seceded from Columbia University, including James Harvey Robinson, Charles A. Beard and Thorstein Veblen, organized a free institution known as the New School for Social Research; it was to cater to students who really wished to study, and to dispense with all the flummeries, including examinations and degrees. The enterprise has not proved a financial success, for a peculiar reason. The capitalist system does not permit people to study for the luxury of possessing knowledge ”

“ In Germany, France and Great Britain the permanence of tenure has given dignity and honor to the university chair, attracting to it the ablest men and setting them free to do their best work. In this country the better the institution, the more permanent has been the tenure of office. Up to the time of the writing of President Butler's report only one professor had ever been dismissed from Columbia University, and then it was for entering the confederate army. ”

“ We could not if we would emulate the continuous splendors of the time, for we lack not only the tradition but the environment in which to honor the tradition. If it were possible so to abolish space that Harvard and Yale and Princeton, say, and Columbia could locally unite, and be severally the colleges of one university, and assemble their best in architecture for its embodiment, something might be imaginable of their collectivity like what involuntarily, inevitably happens at Oxford on Commemoration Day. ”

“ The preliminary programs of the different sections show long lists of valuable papers and promise the attendance of leading men of science from all parts of the country. A movement of interest is the increasing tendency of special scientific societies to meet in conjunction with the Association. No less than fifteen societies will this year hold their sessions at Columbia University, some of them joining with the sections of the Association, and others holding independent meetings. ”

“ The women undergraduates of Columbia have class-rooms and residence in Barnard, an independent corporation but an affiliated college, its dean having the same relation to Columbia as the heads of all the other colleges. The faculty is composed partly of the regular Columbia staff and partly of special professors, among whom are a number of women. The seniors attend certain courses in philosophy and science in the regular university classes, and all of these are open to post graduates. ”

“ There is not a college or university in the United States today which could resists the demands of its faculty a hundred percent organized and meaning business. Even Nicholas Murray Butler would bow his haughty head if the faculty of Columbia should rise up and demand for that plutocratic empire a system of constitutional government. ”

“ This was a [Pg 202] botanical garden founded by David Hosack, M. D., in 1801, when he was Professor of Botany in Columbia College. In 1814 the land was purchased by the State from Dr. Hosack and given to Columbia College, in consideration of lands which had been owned by the College but ceded to New Hampshire after the settlement of the boundary dispute. The ground is still owned by Columbia University.
The block east of Madison Avenue, between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets, was occupied in 1857 by Columbia College, when the latter moved from its down-town site at Church and Murray Streets. ”

“ That so familiar circumstance, in America, of the completion of the good thing ironically and, as would often seem for the time, insuperably baffled, meets here one of its liveliest illustrations. It at all events helps to give meanwhile the mingled pitch of the whole concert that Columbia College (to sound the old and easier name) should have “moved up”—moved up twice, if I am not mistaken—to adorn with an ampler presence this very neighbourhood. It has taken New York to invent, for the thickening of classic shades, the “moving” University ”

“ Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, it will generally be admitted, still stand foremost, but New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore have built up universities whose subordination needs to be qualified in some particulars—for the scientific department of Johns Hopkins and the medical branch of the University of Pennsylvania rank at least as high as those of the older colleges, while Columbia’s rapidly increasing wealth has enabled it to advance with greater rapidity than any of its sisters. ”

“ The growth of individual freedom for the student has been as noticeable as the increase of breadth in the scope of the university. The same remark applies to Columbia College, as shown by the last annual report of President Barnard. Indeed, in all of our best institutions of learning the day of espionage is past, recitation-marks are to a large extent abandoned, and students are regarded as agents that are not only free, but also self-respecting, responsible, and possessed of enough common-sense to appreciate the objects to be attained by entering upon a course of college study. ”

“ Whenever a college has a chair to fill, it is necessary to hunt far and wide for a suitable person to fill it. The demand is not from the old places alone. Almost every year a new college is founded. Every year the old ones grow. In twenty-five years Harvard has quadrupled its staff. Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Yale, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania,—indeed almost every strong college 118 in the country,—shows an immense advance. ”

“ Harvard and Columbia Universities have for several years maintained an exchange of professors with the Prussian government, and both universities have recently made similar arrangements for Paris. Columbia has had at least one visiting professor from Copenhagen, and Wisconsin has recently obtained a Karl Schurz endowment for German professors. Each of our leading universities has lectureships which are frequently filled by foreign men of science and scholars; and there are certain extra university courses, such as the Lowell lectures in Boston and those of the Brooklyn Institute. ”