Harvard University

“ Harvard University is governed by seven men who are chosen to fill this responsible position, solely because the academic community has profound confidence both in their integrity and in their breadth of view. ”

“ THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY.
The proposed alliance between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University is a matter of more than local interest. Among the questions involved are the relations of technological to liberal and other forms of professional education; the advantages of great size to a university; and the share in the control of educational institutions which should be assumed, respectively, by the trustees, faculty and alumni. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Harvard University has a form of government different from that of other American universities. Since 1650 the corporation has consisted of the president, the treasurer and five fellows, who are in certain respects responsible to the board of overseers, which is now elected by graduates of the college.
By the courtesy of the Harvard Graduates Magazine, we are able to reproduce here portraits of the present members of the corporation. The body is so small that the members take, an active interest in the welfare of the university; they have always been men of distinction in the community. ”

“ There is no opportunity given to the Harvard pedagogical students for actual teaching; but the connection brought about between the college department and the secondary schools, by the constant attendance of students in the school-rooms of the neighbourhood, may possibly develop into a system wherein trained students may act as substitutes in these schools. Quite apart, however, from this possible future connection, there is even now an important practical relationship between Harvard University and some of the secondary schools—viz., that of supervision. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We are told that the working of the option system at Harvard affords an indication of the preferences and tendencies of the students in regard to the studies they incline to pursue; but is not entrance to Harvard a part of its policy, and what about the option there? Is there not at the door of the university a big winnowing-machine which delivers the "disciplinary" studies as acceptable wheat, and blows the "utilitarian" studies to the winds as the veriest chaff? ”

“ The student body of Harvard University at present includes three youths whose remarkable intellectual achievements and the manner of their upbringing have given rise to much discussion in American educational circles. The oldest of these students was graduated from Tufts College at the age of fourteen, gained the degree of Ph.D. at Harvard when only eighteen, and now is continuing his studies abroad as the holder of a Harvard travelling fellowship. ”

“ Students from other parts of the country frequent the eastern universities and their professors lecture elsewhere. But the first official arrangement for an exchange of professors among American institutions has just been announced by Harvard University. A professor is to be sent annually to four colleges in the middle west—Colorado, Grinnell, Knox and Beloit—spending an eighth of a year at each, and the college sends one of its junior officers to Harvard, where he takes part in the regular instruction and may at the same time pursue graduate studies. ”

“ Harvard University, the oldest and premier educational institution in the United States, is located at Cambridge, Massachusetts, 3 m. W. of Boston; it is named after the Rev. John Harvard, a graduate of Cambridge, who by the bequest of his library and small fortune helped to launch the institution in 1638; it was originally intended for the training of youths for the Puritan ministry, but it has during the present century been extended into a university of the first rank, under emancipation from all sectarian control ”

“ In that way we hope that it will supplement the work that is done at Harvard, and we look with the greater rejoicing upon the work which Harvard is doing now to supplement our own, in that spirit of co-operation of which I have spoken, with the desire not to run parallel lines of rivalry or of emulation, but each doing its part as best it can, each suiting its work to the work of the other, so that the two institutions may henceforth go forward as two parts of one whole. ”

“ The introduction of pedagogy as a definite branch of the philosophical department at Harvard University, is perhaps one of the most important movements in the progress and development of the Science of Teaching in America. In establishing its course, “adapted to the purpose of teachers and persons intending to become teachers,” Harvard has made recognition of the fact that something more than pure scholarship is needed to produce the successful teacher or professor. Accordingly, it has established two departments of training ”

“ In truth, it almost makes one laugh to see Harvard, for example, congratulating herself that she is now a "University," when the curriculum of her studies is wanting in only about half of the circle of the arts and sciences, and when also she shuts out the best minds of half the human race. No university proper has ever yet existed or can exist, until every department of human knowledge is represented in it, and until mind is free to come there for culture as mind simply, and not as mind plus a particular sex. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the United States, the term university is loosely applied to many institutions which strictly are only colleges, just as the term college includes many academies and high schools. In its strictest sense it is limited to institutions having several schools, as those of law, theology, arts etc., in addition to the regular college course, where graduate work is carried on, that is, work done in the higher branches after graduation in a college. Harvard University, the oldest college in the country, now is one of the best equipped universities. ”

“ Gentlemen,—The philosophical work in Harvard has in the last twenty years gone through an inner development which has met with a hearty response alike on the part of the University and of the students. The students have attended the courses in constantly growing numbers, the Governing Boards have provided the Division amply with new teachers, steadily increasing the number of professors, instructors, and assistants. ”

“ Contrast the brief existence of our educational institutions with such a foundation as Harvard, nearly ready to celebrate her tercentenary; and yet Harvard is young compared with the University of Paris with its nearly 800 years of continuous history. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The philosophical work of Harvard has been too long scattered in scores of places; there was no unity, philosophy had no real home. But Emerson Hall will be not only the workshop of the professional students of philosophy, will be not only the background for all that manifold activity in ethics and psychology, in logic and metaphysics, in æsthetics and sociology, it will become a new centre for the whole University, embodying in outer form the mission of philosophy to connect the scattered specialistic knowledge of the sciences. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 ”

“ There are two things which unless a university can give, it fails of its legitimate end. One is opportunity, the other inspiration. But opportunity is marred, not made, and inspiration quenched, not kindled, by coercion. Few, I suspect, in recent years, have had the love of knowledge awakened by their college life at Harvard,—more often quenched by the rivalries and penalties with which learning here is associated. ”

“ John Harvard was an Englishman and indifferent to high places. The result is that Harvard has become a university of vast proportions and no color. Yale flounders about among the New Haven shops, trying to rise above them. ”

“ The statement will stand impregnable, that, from the time John Harvard founded our little College in the wilderness, to this hour, when it is fast becoming a great University, with its schools in every department, and its lectures covering the whole field of human knowledge, the graduates have always attained a longevity surpassing that of their generation. ”

“ The most advanced thinkers of our time are working to-day in all fields of knowledge to restore such a unity of human life through philosophy. To foster this spirit of the twentieth century in the life of our University there is no more direct way possible than to give a dignified home to the philosophical work. Such a building ought to be a Harvard Union for scholarly life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the readjustment in the curricula of American colleges of the elements of professional training and liberal culture Harvard has been bold in experiment and innovation. With Johns Hopkins University she has led the movement that has transformed university education, and her influence upon secondary education in America has been incomparably greater than that of any other university. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The fellows are the forbears of the modern corporation, the tutors of the faculty; and though the institution has been separated from the state, the "teaching elders" are the earliest overseers. Furthermore, the endowment of Harvard has remained undivided; and generations elapsed before the present very un-English division was made by which the teaching force is separated into independent faculties for arts and the various professions. From the first the "college" was a "university" in that it granted degrees; and less than twenty years after its founding the two terms are used as synonymous ”