Straight University

“ We need to conserve and utilize for the general good the partial education which the graduates of our colleges have secured. At the present time this is not done as it should be, and as it might be, if special student aid were available. Many graduates go forth from the college who are lost to view. After so much patient labor has been bestowed upon them—and in some instances special pecuniary aid given—they should be encouraged in every way to devote themselves to the greatest good of their people. Take the last class in Straight University as an illustration. ”

“ I think a fire has been kindled which will not be quenched when our brethren reach their homes, and we shall find, when the new school year opens, that new connecting lines have been established between Straight University and the interior towns. ”

“ I demand to be let alone. I shall keep on the right side of the law in the future, as I have done in the past, and I challenge—I dare the college to touch me. Let me remind you, Mr. Rimington, that this University has been thrown open—yes, open, sir. The old iniquitous Test Acts have been done away. One man has as much right here as another. If I am interfered with further, I will raise such a storm throughout the country, that not only Trinity College but Cambridge University shall tremble in its shoes. ”

“ Professor Child talked freely in regard to the meetings of the college faculty, for he believed that graduates had a right to know about them. He quoted some amusing anecdotes of a certain professor who led the opposition against President Eliot and praised the dignified manner with which Eliot regarded him. In 1879 he said one day:
"We are in the half-way stage between a college and a university, and there is consequently great confusion. If we once became a university, pure and simple, all that would be over; but the difficulty is that the material which comes to us is so poor. ”

“ In any further reorganisation of university and higher education it is earnestly to be hoped that the Day Technical College will find its rightful place as an integral part of the University, and that the latter may realise that her function is to further and extend the bounds of knowledge in order that practice in every sphere of life may be rendered more efficient. ”

“ For Syracuse University is tremendously real to the four thousand men and women who study within its halls. It is a poor man's college and Chancellor Day is proud of that. They come, these four thousand men and women, from the small cities and villages, from the farms of that which the metropolitan is rather apt indifferently to term "Up State." To these, four years in a university mean four years of cultivation and opportunity, and so has come the growth, the vast hidden power of the institution upon the hill at Syracuse. She makes no claim to college spirit of surpassing dimensions. ”

“ 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." ”

“ The attempt to hold the college and the no means together in bonds of ostensible Solidarity is by university an advisedly concerted adjustment to the needs of scholarship as they run today. By historical accident the older American universities have grown into bearing on the ground of an underlying college, and the external connection so inherited has not usually been severed ”

“ The fact that at almost any given time there may be seen, in this American land of ours, half a score of colleges standing and waiting, wondering if they will ever find a president again, is the climax of what the universities have failed to do. The university will be justified only when a man with a university in him, a whole campus in his soul, comes out of it, to preside over it, and the soul that has room for more than one chair in it comes out of it to teach in it. ”

“ The people of North Dakota are trying to take over the education of their own children and liberalize the school system of their state; and here comes George D. Strayer, professor of Educational Administration at Columbia University, addressing the legislative committee of the state educational committee, Minot, North Dakota, April 18, 1919, attacking the proposed new laws, and laying out a complete program of pedagogical toryism. No violation of academic propriety for a Columbia professor to take part in politics—provided it is on the side of special privilege! ”

“ These class distinctions have, happily, forever disappeared from our statute book. They were no doubt conceived in a benevolent spirit, and were characteristic of the social ethics of the times, but they were pernicious as a principle to embody in a school law.
In his "Appeal" in behalf of a university in Upper Canada, published early in 1827, Dr. Strachan gave a fuller expression to this idea of providing education only for the wealthier classes. He said:—
It is indeed quite evident that the consequences of a university ... ”

“ Learning, however, was only Strachan-Davidson's recreation. Though essentially a scholar he gave his best energies to the service of his university—whose interests in connexion with the Indian civil service he defended strenuously and successfully on more than one occasion, but especially in the years 1903–1904 and in 1913—and of his college, which he loved with a monastic patriotism most appropriate in one of the last representatives of the race of celibate life-fellows. ”

“ Man is bounded by the limits of space, but the race once established on this planet of ours, we see no limit of time, no prospect of a twilight of gods in which the darkness shall fall on the world because universities are no longer needed. The center of gravity of Stanford University, of its student body, and of its influence on civilization, is hundreds of years, thousands of years ahead.
To the students of to-day, the professors of to-day, and the trustees of to-day, the university to-day belongs, but not as a personal possession ”

“ The erection of Stanford has given an impetus to the State University, and both are doing noble work, not only for the Pacific coast, but for the whole country. One of the most noteworthy things in the history of American university education thus far is the fact that the university buildings erected by boards of trustees in all parts of the country have, almost without exception, proved to be mere jumbles of mean materials in incongruous styles ”

“ Johnson's retention of his Stratford cure when he finally accepted the Presidency of King's College, we may see in this an obstacle in his way to coming to Philadelphia almost insuperable. Stratford was within easy stages of New York, where he would reside during College term. Franklin held out to him the hope of building up a new cure in Philadelphia, thus anticipating by ten years the formation of St. Peter's Church which grew out of Christ Church. ”

“ Yet even the most elementary college work cannot be given properly unless the instructor is in touch with the latest developments and discoveries in his own field, and this familiarity only comes through research, on his own part or by his colleagues.
But more than this the University, if it be worthy of the name, owes it to the State to be a leader and a guide in the development of the highest cultural standards; it should be a reservoir upon which the people of the State can draw for truth and guidance in the difficult problems of modern life. ”

“ RESCUING MONTANA MARIE
Pre-Christmas excitements and Christmas gaieties were alike things of the past. Harding was bleak and snow-bound in the clutches of a real old-fashioned New England January. And the college cynics declared gloomily that the cold and forbidding weather was a symbol of cold and unforgiving faculty hearts.
“There are too many of us,” sighed Straight, who was more worried than she cared to admit over her record in junior argument. “Prexy thinks this college is getting too big. Maybe it is, but can’t they wait till next year to have it get smaller? ”

“ The universitas, the corporation of scholars, must and did precede any college foundation: at the same time we cannot distinguish the development of either of our universities from the rise of these foundations, whose history has, ever since, been the history of the academic society. Each college is independent and autonomous, and though the aggregate of colleges does not constitute the university, each collegiate foundation forms part and parcel of it in virtue of its union with the incorporated society of Chancellor Masters and Scholars which formed at first and still forms “the university.” ”

“ It is only natural that, with this increasing participation of the alumni in university affairs, there should be an effort to provide some means for the effectual expression of their collective opinion. Perhaps the earliest and most striking example of this movement was the provision in 1865 for the election of Harvard's Board of Overseers "by such persons as have received the degree of B.A. or M.A., or any honorary degree," from Harvard College. This effort, which came only after a long struggle, was duplicated in Princeton, Dartmouth, later Cornell, and many other institutions. ”

“ When it was first noised abroad that Senator Stanford was to found a new university in California, sundry Eastern men took a sneering tone and said, "What will it find to do? The young men on the Pacific coast who are as yet fit to receive the advantages of a university are very few; the State University of California at Berkeley is already languishing for want of students." ”

“ In the curriculum, liberty perhaps even greater than at Harvard is allowed as to “electives.” Work on some one major subject occupies about one-third of the undergraduate course; the remaining two-thirds (or more) is purely elective. The influence of sectarianism and politics is barred from the university by its charter, and by its private origin and private support. At the same time in its policy it is practically a state university of the most liberal type. ”

“ The local alumni bodies and the class organizations form important links between the graduate and his alma mater, and the sentimental ties, as well as the altruistic spirit engendered by these associations have a vital significance for the individual graduate and for the University. Practically every class that leaves the University is organized for the purpose of perpetuating its college associations and many of the classes, particularly the earlier ones, have published extensive class-books and directories. ”

“ By force of the exigencies of competitive prestige there is, of course, a limit of tolerance that sets decent bounds both to the number of such supererogatory scholars harboured by the university, and the latitude allowed them in their intemperate pursuit of knowledge; but their presence in the academic body is, after all, neither an irrelevant accident nor a transient embarrassment. It is, in one sense of the expression, for the use of such men, and for the use which such men find for it, that the university exists at all ”

“ That was the original purpose of the Universities; and the more they continue to fulfil that purpose, the more will they secure to us that real freedom from tradition, from custom, from mere opinion and superstition, which can be gained by independent study only; the more will they foster that “human [pg 052] development in its richest diversity” which Mill, like Humboldt, considered as the highest object of all society.
Such academic teaching need not be confined to the old Universities. There is many a great University that sprang from smaller beginnings than your Midland Institute. ”

“ At the present time, and for years past, the noble University Endowment is virtually expended by parties directly or indirectly connected with but one college; and the scholarships and prizes, the honors and degrees conferred, are virtually the rewards and praises bestowed by professors upon their own students, and not the doings and decisions of a body wholly unconnected with the college. ”

“ A great number of the most distinguished men of the time in British public and professional life were listed among the officers and committee-members of the organization, with Lord Strathcona as President for the United Kingdom. As set forth in the prospectus of the society, "the additional objects of the movement are to increase the value and efficiency of, as well as to extend, present University training by the provision of certain Travelling Scholarships for practical observation in other countries under suitable guidance. ”

“ To attain excellence we must have endowments, and select carefully the beneficiaries of the endowments. Sir John Strachey, in his valuable book on India, bears testimony to the "remarkable aptitude for surgery" of the Natives of India, "to the great aptitude shown by them in the practice of surgery and medicine." This University must make use of these gifts, and its energetic initiative will lay the foundation of what I cannot help thinking is destined to be one of the foremost scientific bodies. Amsterdam has certainly not the many advantages which are at our disposal. ”