University of Chicago

“ The University of Chicago is popularly thought of as one of America's youngest institutions. In truth it is one of the oldest, if we discriminate between an undergraduate college and a university, a place for graduate study and research. Harper's Chicago is preceded only by Gilman's Johns Hopkins (1876) and by G. Stanley Hall's Clark (1888) . Before these institutions there was only sporadic and casual graduate work at Harvard and Columbia, Yale and Cornell. There was neither a formal program for graduate study nor a faculty to give full-time instruction to graduate students. ”

“ This, too, was Chicago, the Chicago which had fought its way through criticism, indifference and jeers to a place in the world of scholarship. People who knew what they were talking about did not laugh at the University of Chicago any more. It had too much to its credit to be passed over lightly. Men were doing things here; she felt all about her the ideas here in embryo. How would they develop? Where would they strike? What things now slumbering here would step, robust and mighty, into the next generation?
And greatest of all these was Karl! ”

“ On the philanthropic committee, and as teachers in the settlement classes, men and women, instructors and students, work side by side. The interest in sociological studies, which is [Pg 379] commoner at Chicago than elsewhere, stimulates this modern activity in college life."
The University of Chicago has been successful from the first. In 1895 it numbered 1,265 students, of whom 493 were in the graduate schools, most of them having already received their bachelor's degree at other colleges. In 1896 there are over 1,900 students. The possibilities of the university are almost unlimited. ”

“ A university's greatness consists in its being the intellectual forum of the community, the place where the basic issues of its culture are fruitfully debated. Chicago's greatness lies in the partial performance of this service. For ten years it has debated the issues which the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion met to consider—made necessary only by the fact that such debate has not occurred at other universities, as at Chicago. ”

“ The fate of Western civilization, as a cultural community, cannot be separated from the state of its educational institutions. Only one college in this country, St. John's at Annapolis, is working for the revival of a liberal curriculum. Only the University of Chicago has throughout its history manifested devotion to the true functions of a university—formation of fundamental doctrines, debate of the most serious issues. ”

“ Chicago is a city whose small beginnings are remembered by men still living. It has already attained great dimensions, but shrewd judges predict that in fifty years or less it will be three times its present size, and in respect at once of population and commercial importance easily the first city of the American continent. The University of Chicago is but a child four years old, for its age it is a child of phenomenal proportions, but it is doubtless destined to indefinite expansion. ”

“ They expressed, in more ways than William James realized, a school of thought. It was neither the eminent qualities of its individual professors nor the great quantities of research done in various fields which made Chicago the leading, the most typical, American university within a decade. Money bought professors for Chicago; it could buy them back for eastern institutions, as the competition for triple-starred names during the last half century reveals. Harvard, for example, has always had a larger endowment than Chicago and could usually procure the services of academic leaders. ”

“ The Chicago Institute, founded and endowed by Mrs Anita McCormick Blaine as an independent normal school, became a part of the university in 1901. The school of education, as a whole, brings under university influence hundreds of children from kindergarten age upwards to young manhood and womanhood, apart from the university classes proper. Chicago was the second university of the country to give its pedagogical department such scope in the union of theory and practice. ”

“ So long as we are simply learning what is set before us, taking the routine mass of academic subjects, we may be faithful 125 students, but we are not scholars. No, it is when with a free heart we give ourselves to a subject, bidding it take of us all it demands and feeling that we had rather attend to it than to anything else, because it expresses our personal desires—then it is that its quickening influence takes hold. But this is specialization. We might think of the University of Chicago then as a great specializing machine. ”

“ In few States has private initiative been more active in establishing higher schools of learning. Thirty-one institutions have assumed the name of ‘college’ or ‘university.’ Besides these there are a large number of professional and technical institutions, more modest in name, but equally well known. Cook County Normal School is one of the best known in the whole country, and the University of Chicago (q.v.) ”

“ One of the most noted educational women in America to-day, being president of State Editors' Association of Illinois, the school board of Chicago, having won this latter distinction over several men who had long served as public school teachers, took her degree of A.B., and later, her Ph.D., at the University of Chicago. ”

“ The true university is the center of thought on every problem connected with human life and work, and the first obligation resting upon the individual members who compose it is that of research and investigation. Steadfast devotion to and brilliant performance of this mission brought Chicago fair renown in the first ten years of its existence. ”

“ I do not mean to imply that various departments always collaborated in research—although more of that has occurred at Chicago than anywhere else—but I do say that the large round tables of the faculty club could usually assemble a diversity of specialists who really understood what the other fellow's research was driving at because it was a common objective they all shared. If a university should be a community of scholars, if it should sustain a universe of discourse, then the pre-Hutchins Chicago almost (I say "almost") rang the bell. ”

“ The city takes high rank as a centre for advanced education. In addition to technical schools like the Armour Institute, it has two famous Universities; the Chicago, and the Northwestern. The Chicago University began its career ten years ago. The old denominational University of the same name having been sold at auction under foreclosure, John D. Rockefeller decided to reorganize it and found a great institution of learning, and to that end pledged a portion of his fortune and secured as President, Dr. William R. Harper, of Yale. The University opened in 1892 with 702 students. ”

“ Before I had taken my master’s degree at Nashville, I was offered a fellowship in the Wharton School of Finance of the University of Pennsylvania, that paid $160.00 a year, the necessary university expenses. But I had my heart set on going to the University of Chicago. President Harper told that they would do as well by me as the University of Pennsylvania, so I entered there as a graduate student in 1893, the year of the World’s Fair at Chicago. ”

“ In the department of university extension the attempt is made to bring the university to those who cannot come to it. Lecture and study courses are given outside of Chicago, and work done in them is recognized and credited by the university. More important are the correspondence courses, which are definitely arranged in majors and minors, according to the regular university schedule, and on which credits are allowed toward the university degrees. ”

“ During this period science and higher education in this country have entered upon a new era, and during the latter part of it Chicago has assumed its proper place of leadership. Northwestern University opened its doors in 1855, and with its well-organized schools and four thousand students has become one of the leading universities of the country. ”

“ Non-resident work is accepted for only one-third of the work required for a degree.
The University has eighty regular fellowships and scholarships, besides several special fellowships.
The institution, according to Robert Herrick, in Scribner's Magazine for October, 1895, seems to have the spirit of its founder. "Two college settlements in the hard districts of Chicago," he writes, "are supported and manned by the students.... The classes and clubs of the settlements show that the college students feel the impossibility of an academic life that lives solely to itself. ”

“ A healthy unity requires the harmony of differences. But when, in the university or in our culture, other elements began to claim a place along with science, the weak unity, which had been maintained by negations ande exclusions, gave way to discord rather than to the harmony of ordered differences. Nevertheless, the shift from the Chicago School to the Chicago Fight is a small step toward the ideal of civilization, the ideal of a university, which Whitehead, writing of Harvard's future, defined as "the possible harmony of diverse things." ”

“ Education and philosophy at Chicago suffer a serious loss by the removal of Professor Dewey to Columbia University. But the work that he has accomplished at Chicago remains; it has sufficient vitality to create its own leaders. ”