Harvard College

“ At Harvard College there is, of course, none of that old-fashioned, time-honoured, delicious, mediæval life which lends so much grace and beauty to our colleges. There are no gates, no porter's lodges, no butteries, no halls, no battels, and no common rooms. ”

“ This was Harvard College incarnate, but even for Harvard College, the Class of 1858 was somewhat extreme. Of unity this band of nearly one hundred young men had no keen sense, but they had equally little energy of repulsion. They were pleasant to live with, and above the average of students,—German, French, English, or what not,—but chiefly because each individual appeared satisfied to stand alone. It seemed a sign of force; yet to stand alone is quite natural when one has no passions; still easier when one has no pains. ”

“ With its complement of professional schools of law, medicine, theology, science, and many special departments of the latter, more than any other institution in America, and with but a few gaps yet to be filled in its completeness of method and equipment to bring it to comparison with foreign institutions of learning, Harvard College may claim to be in the most comprehensive sense of the term a university, a title which is, indeed, assumed, and generally applied to it. ”

“ Harvard College furnishes instructors and teachers to the most distant parts of the union; and, in general, for the extent of its funds, the richness of its library, the number and character of its establishments, and the means it affords of acquiring, not only an academical, but a professional education, it is considered to be without an equal in the country. ”

“ John Harvard founded Harvard College with his library and £800; but now museums, as well as books, are essential to the work of any university. They are peculiarly necessary in an American university; for we are a now conglomerate people, in a fresh land which has no monuments that are not recent, at the opening of an epoch characterized by tremendous new powers drawn by man from nature. These powers have changed profoundly every human occupation and the whole mode of life of civilized man; but their province is the material world and man's material welfare. ”

“ The professors of literature in our colleges are usually persons who have made no additions to literature, and the professors of rhetoric seem ordinarily to have been selected to teach students how to write for the reason that they themselves have never written any thing that any one has ever read.
To these remarks the Harvard College of some fifty years ago offers some striking exceptions. It was not the large and fashionable university that it has lately grown to be, with its multiplied elective courses, its numerous faculty, and its somewhat motley collection of undergraduates ”

“ It cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or give the manners and instincts of any profession,—such as temper, patience, courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of opponents,—it would have been education better worth having than mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it helped only to make the college standard permanent through life. The Bostonian educated at Harvard College remained a collegian, if he stuck only to what the college gave him. ”

“ Far, far away it bore fruit—not only in his own generation, but the waves of scholarly influence have rippled down through successive decades to the present day, when the College he founded in America—the first established in the New World—sends forth her men in thousands to all parts of the globe, and the name of Harvard is an honoured household word through the length and breadth of the world. ”

“ And the warrant of Harvard College for writing the names of its dead graduates upon its tablets is not in the mathematics, the chemistry, the political economy which it taught them, but that, in ways not to be discovered, by traditions not to be written down, it helped men of lofty natures to make good their faculties. ”

“ The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught. Sometimes in after life, Adams debated whether in fact it had not ruined him and most of his companions, but, disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence. ”

“ If parents went on generation after generation, sending their children to Harvard College for the sake of its social advantages, they perpetuated an inferior social type, quite as ill-fitted as the Oxford type for success in the next generation.
Luckily the old social standard of the college, as President Walker or James Russell Lowell still showed it, was admirable, and if it had little practical value or personal influence on the mass of students, at least it preserved the tradition for those who liked it. The Harvard graduate was neither American nor European, nor even wholly Yankee ”

“ He is trying to make intellectual activity the basis of Harvard’s democracy at the very moment when he is the ablest of those who in reality help to sustain all that I have here ventured to criticise.
It has been in no reactionary spirit. I have not intended to say that Harvard actually produces the type I have described. The truth is that it does so little to refine what it gets. The care of the superior individual, which always results in the greatest benefit to all, has ceased to engross the college. ”

“ If the funds which are now distributed through so many small establishments were concentrated on a few universities, advantages might be enjoyed which will now be in vain sought. It is much to be regretted that measures have not been taken for the erection of a national university, which the general government of the country might endow with privileges and means sufficient for its permanent success.
At the head of the collegiate institutions in the United States, is Harvard university, originally styled Harvard college, at Cambridge, three miles west-north-west of Boston. ”

“ The great and imperishable service which Harvard College has rendered to American education in the last fifteen years consists in two things. It has extended enormously the range of subjects in which instruction is offered within it own limits, and thereby made it absolutely necessary for all other institutions which did not wish to lag hopelessly in the rear to do the same. ”

“ While subordinating book-knowledge to piety, they had learned scarcely less the dangers of ignorance. Their first college was founded because of "the dread of having an illiterate ministry to the churches when our ministers shall lie in dust." Charles Francis Adams says, in regard to the establishment of Harvard College: "The records of Harvard University show that, of all the presiding officers during the century and a half of colonial days, but two were laymen, and not ministers of the prevailing denomination." ”

“ He had thought Harvard College a torpid school, but it was instinct with life compared with all that he could see of the University of Berlin. The German students were strange animals, but their Professors were beyond pay. The mental attitude of the University was not of an American world. What sort of instruction prevailed in other branches, or in science, Adams had no occasion to ask, but in the Civil Law he found only the lecture-system in its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century. ”

“ Harvard College was a negative force, and negative forces have value. Slowly it weakened the violent political bias of childhood, not by putting interests in its place, but by mental habits which had no bias at all. ”

“ But Harvard and the institute have been leaders in setting certain educational ideals, and each will for a long time maintain its preeminence. Harvard consists of a college with free electives for culture and professional schools based on it; whereas the institute aims to give culture with and through its professional studies. The outcome appears to be more play at Harvard and I more work at the institute. It is extremely difficult to appraise the value of an educational system by its results on the students. ”

“ The public school system, in the United States, is an outgrowth, or by-product of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century in Europe. Harvard college was established at Cambridge, near Boston, in 1639, less than twenty years after the first arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers. ”

“ President Thwing of Western Reserve University, the historian of higher education in America, says that he has found no exception, in the records of any American college, to the general rule that those who achieve most before graduation are likely to achieve most after graduation.
The list of the first ten scholars of each of the classes that graduated from Harvard College in the sixth decade of the last century, as presented by William Roscoe Thayer, is a list of men eminent in every walk of life. ”

“ Every year we discover some fresh limitation which will make persistence more natural, neglect more strange. I believe study at Harvard is to-day more interested, energetic, and persistent than it has ever been before. But that is no ground for satisfaction. A powerful college must forever be dissatisfied. Each year it must address itself anew to strengthening the tenacity of its students in their zeal for knowledge. ”

“ We cannot accept these artificial bounds without damage. Instead of accumulated wealth they will bring us accumulated poverty, and increase it every day. Years ago at Harvard we began to discuss the establishment of a Graduate School; and I, a young instructor, steadily voted against it. My thought was this: Harvard College, in spite of what the public imagines, is a place of slender resources. Our means are inadequate for teaching even undergraduates. But graduate instruction is vastly more expensive; courses composed of half a dozen students take the time of the ablest professors. ”

“ Mentally they never were boys. Their education as men should have begun at ten years old. They were fully five years more mature than the English or European boy for whom schools were made. For the purposes of future advancement, as afterwards appeared, these first six years of a possible education were wasted in doing imperfectly what might have been done perfectly in one, and in any case would have had small value. The next regular step was Harvard College. ”

“ CHAPTER VII HARVARD SIXTY YEARS AGO I do not think Harvard College had changed very much when I entered it on my sixteenth birthday in the year 1842 either in manners, character of students or teachers, or the course of instruction, for nearly a century. There were some elementary lectures and recitations in astronomy and mechanics. There was a short course of lectures on chemistry, accompanied by exhibiting a few experiments. But the students had no opportunity for laboratory work. There was a delightful course of instruction from Dr. Walker in ethics and metaphysics. ”

“ Self-possession was the strongest part of Harvard College, which certainly taught men to stand alone, so that nothing seemed stranger to its graduates than the paroxysms of terror before the public which often overcame the graduates of European universities. ”

“ One of the chief difficulties in the way of local patronage has been the overshadowing influence of Harvard University. It was scarcely to be expected that an institution planted in such close proximity to that powerful and venerable seat of learning would, in the beginning, attract students from its immediate neighborhood. Many persons have thought that the location of the College is a mistaken one on that account. But colleges are not made in one day nor in one decade. It will take more than Leland Stanford's twenty millions of endowment to give his University a solid and enduring fame. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You are doubly rewarded, for not merely is Cambridge a perfect specimen of a colonial village, but in Harvard there breathes the true spirit of humane letters. Nor is the college a creation of yesterday. It is not far short of three centuries ago that John Harvard, once of Emmanuel College in England, endowed the university which bears his honoured name. The bequest was a poor £780, with 260 books, but it was sufficient to ensure an amiable immortality, and to bestow a just cause of pride upon the mother-college. ”

“ The young man—always in search of education—asked himself whether, setting rhetoric aside, this absence of enthusiasm was a defect or a merit, since, in either case, it was all that Harvard College taught, and all that the hundred young men, whom he was trying to represent, expressed. ”

“ These facts are sufficient to show that Harvard has reached her present great prosperity by becoming the pioneer in a general educational movement. What made the movement general was the dread of flimsy study. Our world is larger than the one our grandfathers inhabited; it is more minutely subdivided, more finely related, more subtly and broadly known. The rise of physical science and the enlargement of humanistic interests oblige the college of to-day to teach elaborately many topics which formerly 180 were not taught at all. ”