Northwestern University

“ Later on, as a higher evolution of the central thought, an arrangement was made between the Woman's College and the Northwestern University, by which the former became the woman's department of the latter, on condition that in its board of trustees, faculty of instruction, and all its departments of culture, women should be admitted on an equality with men, as to opportunities, positions and salaries. ”

“ Extract from a letter by Joseph Cummings, president of Northwestern University:
“The effect of co-education in this institution, upon the manners and morals of both men and women, is only good. The history of co-education shows that men and women trained 81under its influence are less open to temptations of the passions than are those trained in separate institutions.
“Women are less inclined to pursue long courses of study, but the average scholarship of those who do persevere and graduate is higher than that of the men; and women here do not retard the progress of men.” ”

“ During the interim the Armour name will remain, but at the end of the five years there will be only the one school, with its main buildings on the Evanston campus and its night classes and laboratories on the new McKinlock campus in Chicago.
President Walter Dill Scott of Northwestern admitted that negotiations were under way.
"Everybody on both sides is agreeable," he said. "We are now on a working basis, but everything beyond that is tentative. If the plan is consummated it will be a great forward stop in the development of Chicago and of the university." ”

“ What this means is that such universities as Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins rely upon their prestige to get them teachers, paying starvation wages, and tacitly establishing a celibate order in the service of the plutocracy. I note in my morning newspaper that Northwestern University, a great religious institution at Evanston, Ill., has come out into the open, and has refused to engage married men as professors, explaining that it cannot afford to pay a salary for two. ”

“ It comprises a college of liberal arts, and schools of law, medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, and music and oratory. The college of liberal arts and the school of music are at Evanston, the professional schools in Chicago. Students are admitted on certificate from accredited schools or on examination in three groups of studies. The courses in the college lead to the bachelor's and master's degrees in arts, philosophy, science, and letters, and to the degree of doctor of philosophy. ”

“ So, of course, the professor who taught his students to think had to move on.
Let us also move, to Meadville, Pennsylvania, where there is a little religious toadstool in the heart of the oil country, and with a Standard Oil board of trustees. On this Allegheny College we have a report of the American Association of University Professors, in the bulletin for December, 1917. The president (now president-emeritus) is a product of Judge Gary’s Northwestern University, a Methodist clergyman, and trustee of the Carnegie Foundation. ”

“ In 1920 I find Northwestern setting out after twenty-five millions, Pittsburgh after sixteen, Harvard fifteen, Princeton fourteen, Cornell ten, followed by Boston University, New York University, Oberlin, Bryn Mawr, Massachusetts Tech—a total of more than sixty institutions, demanding over two hundred millions of dollars. I have no objection to colleges getting money; I am merely pointing out the price of money in a class civilization—which is conformity to class ideas and ideals. ”

“ As the Southern states grow richer, they are giving more attention and more money to their public institutions, but so far few of their advanced institutions take rank alongside the great Northwestern universities. The University of North Carolina has 682 students and an excellent tradition; the University of Texas counts 1,100 men and 400 women, and is in many ways the most flourishing of the Southern institutions. The University of Virginia, though it has an annual grant from the legislature, is practically an endowed institution with 700 students ”

“ The Waterman Gymnasium, for men, and the Barbour Gymnasium, for women, are free to all students, the general supervision of athletic sports is vested in a board of control of nine members, five chosen from the University Senate and four from the Students' Athletic Association. The university is a member of the Northern Oratorical League, which includes the universities of Chicago, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, the State University of Iowa, Northwestern, and Oberlin. ”

“ Nor can it justly be said that in thus acting she sacrifices Science, and, under a pretence of fulfilling the duties of her mission, perverts a University to ends not its own, as soon as it is taken into account that there are other institutions far more suited to act as instruments of stimulating philosophical inquiry, and extending the boundaries of our knowledge, than a University. ”

“ The tendency to rely upon united public action is illustrated in the growth of Northwestern educational systems. The universities of these commonwealths are State universities. Professional education is under the State auspices and control. The normal schools and the agricultural schools belong to the State. The public high school provides intermediate instruction. ”

“ Many minds, so employed, have produced many works and much fame in that department; but if all liberal arts and sciences, useful to human life, had been taught there, if some had dedicated themselves to chemistry, some to mathematics, some to experimental philosophy, and if every attainment had been honoured in the mixt ratio of its difficulty and utility, the system of such a University would have been much more valuable, but the splendour of its name something less. ”

“ It was, however, no mere spirit of feminine rivalry, but a generous impetus to labour in intellectual fields, to satisfy one's own thirst for truth, and to help in the building up of the sciences—whether natural or human—that inspired the promoters and labourers in this new field of College activity. The most eager and influential in this movement was a member of the College eminently marked by a keen delight in research for its own sake, and by a desire that Newnham should be able to hold its own in the highest kind of University work among all the Colleges of the world—Mary Bateson. ”

“ I trust that, at least, I shall have brought home to many the conviction that Newnham College is unique, in the character and motives of its first founders, in the steady devotion to its best interests of successive governors, teachers and students, as also in its relations—complicated, but near, we may hope, to a solution—with the University under the protecting shadow of which it has grown to prosperity. ”

“ Knowledge, viewed as Knowledge, exerts a subtle influence in throwing us back on ourselves, and making us our own centre, and our minds the measure of all things. This then is the tendency of that Liberal Education, of which a University is the school, viz., to view Revealed Religion from an aspect of its own,—to fuse and recast it,—to tune it, as it were, to a different key, and to reset its harmonies,—to circumscribe it by a circle which unwarrantably amputates here, and unduly develops there ”

“ Harvard; but as it seems to me that you were born to take an active part in the great world problems, and as you have your living to make, I have thought it expedient to suggest the University of the Northwest—” He paused again and turned away his head; the polite scholar loathed the thought of the Western college. As Fessenden stared at him in earnest attention, he proceeded, in a moment.
“It is quite a remarkable institution in a way, and very cheap. As it is in a small Western town, living costs next to nothing ”

“ This, however, is not the reason why I claim for it so sovereign a position; for, to bring schools of all knowledge under one name, and call them a University, may be fairly said to be a mere generalization; and to proclaim that the prosecution of all kinds of knowledge to their utmost limits demands the fullest reach and range of our intellectual faculties is but a truism. My reason for speaking of a University in the terms on which I have ventured is, not that it occupies the whole territory of knowledge merely, but that it is the very realm ”

“ The various busy world, spread out before our eyes, is physical, but it is more than physical; and, in making its actual system identical with his scientific analysis, formed on a particular aspect, such a Professor as I have imagined was betraying a want of philosophical depth, and an ignorance of what an University Teaching ought to be. He was no longer a teacher of liberal knowledge, but a narrow-minded bigot. While his doctrines professed to be conclusions formed upon an hypothesis or partial truth, they were undeniable ”

“ If then I am arguing, and shall argue, against Professional or Scientific knowledge as the sufficient end of a University Education, let me not be supposed, Gentlemen, to be disrespectful towards particular studies, or arts, or vocations, and those who are engaged in them. In saying that Law or Medicine is not the end of a University course, I do not mean to imply that the University does not teach Law or Medicine. What indeed can it teach at all, if it does not teach something particular? ”

“ I quote the later portion: "One appeal I should like to make to those whom we still regard as our friends, though for the moment they are opposed to us. It is that they may not be led to think that a separate University for women can be the true solution of the difficulty.
"Can we imagine what the position of such an institution would really be? If it were merely a body for conferring degrees without holding examinations, its degrees must be given alike on the [103] examinations of Cambridge, Oxford, and Durham; all the other Universities having opened their degrees. ”

“ They have come from shoddy homes to mix shoddy with the honest stuff of Harvard life. It would be better for them, for us, and for all their associates, if they never set foot on scholastic ground. Still they serve as a foil to the noble-hearted men of wealth who are the glory of a college,—men who are strong in their willingness to aid others, pure in heart, active in body, loyal to the ideals of the University. ”

“ To set on foot and to maintain in life and vigour a real University, is confessedly, as soon as the word “University” is understood, one of those greatest works, great in their difficulty and their importance, on which are deservedly expended the rarest intellects and the most varied endowments. For, first of all, it professes to teach whatever has to be taught in any whatever department of human knowledge, and it embraces in its scope the loftiest subjects of human thought, and the richest fields of human inquiry. ”

“ Any one examining the many-sided and happily circumstanced 432scientific work of these twenty-eight institutes at Washington will come to feel that the equipment could be used to better advantage if actual teaching were to be undertaken, and that the organization of the institutes into a national university attracting students from all parts of the country would tend to stimulate their achievements. ”

“ I had been invited to repeat the lecture at New Haven, and on arriving there found a large audience of Yale professors and students; but, most surprising of all, in the chair for the evening, no less a personage than my revered instructor, Dr. Theodore Dwight Woolsey, president of the university. He was of a deeply religious nature; and certainly no man was ever under all circumstances, more true to his convictions of duty. ”

“ This was the time of the refounding of that institution under the beginning of President Northrop's administration, to whom Professor Judson became a right hand. His career is an illustrious example of one rising slowly and patiently through every grade of the public school system, to its crown in the highest grades in the state university. It must have been of inestimable worth to him to become familiar with the genius of a state university, so peculiarly a people's institution and so characteristic of the middle West. ”

“ It is, indeed, the one great institution of modern times that works to no ulterior end and is controlled by no consideration of expediency beyond its own work. Typically, normally, in point of popular theory, the university is moved by no consideration other than "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." ”

“ Accordingly, I anticipate that, as in the middle ages both the teaching and the government of the University remained in the Faculty of Arts, in spite of the genius which created or illustrated Theology and Law, so now too, whatever be the splendour of the modern philosophy, the marvellousness of its disclosures, the utility of its acquisitions, and the talent of its masters, still it will not avail in the event, to detrude classical literature and the studies connected with it from the place which they have held in all ages in education. ”

“ He has stifled all manly independence and individuality wherever it has exhibited itself at college. All noble idealism, and all the graces of poetry and art have been shrivelled by his brutal and triumphant power. He has made mechanical efficiency and administrative routine the goal of the university's endeavour. The nobler ends of academic life will never be served so long as this spokesman of materialism remains in power. ”

“ It matters not to what family we belong—Harvard, Yale, Columbia, or Princeton—we are all of us one in our welcome to them, for they represent the university spirit and what it teaches—honor, high- mindedness, intelligence, truthfulness, unselfishness, courage, and patriotism. ”