College or university

“ If, beside opportunity, the college can furnish also the inspiration which shall make opportunity precious and fruitful, its work is accomplished. The college that fulfils these two conditions—opportunity and inspiration—will be a success, will draw to itself the frequency of youth, the patronage of wealth, the consensus of all the good. Such a university, and no other, will be a power in the land. ”

“ Define any college according to the general scheme indicated by its founder; when you have made the situation as intelligible as a limited knowledge of French or German will allow, the inquirer will conclude that 'also it is a monastic institution,' and that you are wearing a hair shirt under your tourist tweeds. Try to disabuse him of this impression by pointing out that colleges do not compel to celibacy, and are intended mainly for the instruction of youth, and your Continental will go away with the conviction that an English University is composed of a conglomeration of public schools. ”

“ WHAT is the difference between the college and the university? There is no blinking the fact that many of the students, most of the alumni, as well as a large proportion of the members of the faculties and administrative boards, including presidents, have very nebulous views in regard to the fundamental distinction that exists between these two classes of institutions. The successful administration of a college or university depends upon the recognition of the existence of a vital principle which distinguishes the functions of one from those of the other. ”

“ While it is the work of science and scholarship, roughly what is known in American usage as graduate work, that gives the university its rank as a seat of learning and keeps it in countenance as such with laymen and scholars, it is the undergraduate school, or college, that still continues to be the larger fact, and that still engages the greater and more immediate attention in university management. ”

“ Neither does the worldly spirit that pervades the gentlemen's college further the university's interest in scholarship, nor do the university's scholarly interests further the college work in gentility. ”

“ In this new American usage, a college is a place where undergraduates are trained, and a university is a place where graduate-students are guided in research. Thus the college gives breadth, and the university adds depth. Thus the college provides general culture and the university provides the opportunity of specialization. If we accept this distinction,—and it has been accepted by all those who discuss the higher education in America,—we are forced to admit that the most of the self-styled universities of this country should be called colleges ”

“ And the present condition of things is equally a disadvantage to our colleges, whose students, to rival those of universities, aspire to what is quite beyond undergraduate work, and thus wholly overlook the plain line of distinction between a college and a university, consisting as it does so largely of the separating line between acquisition of the known and investigation of the unknown. And hence it is, too, that a number of colleges, even those of low grade, and especially those of low grade, aspire to be called universities. ”

“ This was the theory of the middle-age university and the design of collegiate foundations in their origin. Time and circumstances have brought about a total change. The colleges no longer promote the researches of science, or direct professional study. Here and there college walls may shelter an occasional student, but not in larger proportions than may be found in private life. Elementary teaching of youths under twenty is now the only function performed by the university, and almost the only object of college endowments. ”

“ Some of the American Universities, in our judgment, come nearer to the ideal of a true University than any of the other types. Beginning on the old English collegiate system, they have broadened out into vast and splendidly endowed institutions of universal learning, have assimilated some German features, and have combined successfully college routine and discipline with mature and advanced work. ”

“ But now my argument for the college would be, that while the purpose which gives it a right to continued existence alongside the university is distinctly its social rather than its professional, or, in the narrow sense, scholarship, value, it is not primarily social leadership that it should aim directly to provide for. ”

“ And we can the more readily admit this, inasmuch as in the university we have a new type of institution which does have just this aim. Accordingly, since the discovery and promoting of peculiar intellectual excellence is perhaps the most obvious statement of the end of higher education, we find a strong disposition of late among those who care for the theory of education, and like logical neatness, to look forward to the day when the college as an institution shall have been shorn of its present importance. ”

“ On these accounts that university holds a most important place in the history of American higher education; for it stands practically at the beginning of the transition from the old sectarian college to the modern university, and from the simple, single, cast-iron course to the form which we now know, in which various courses are presented, with free choice between them. The number of students was about five hundred, and the faculty corresponded to these in numbers. Now that the university includes over four thousand students, with a faculty in proportion, those seem the days of small things ”

“ A college, on the other hand, in its primitive form, is a foundation erected and endowed by private munificence solely for the lodging and maintenance of deserving students, whose lack of means rendered them unable to pursue the university course without some extraneous assistance.” [20]
It must be remembered, moreover, that when a mediæval benefactor founded a college his intentions were very different from those which would actuate a similar person at the present day. ”

“ It was only natural that the 'gentle natures and studious habits' of a select band of learners should undergo some modification as college after college was founded, and comparative frivolity would from time to time obtain admission to the sacred precincts. The University became the resort of wealth and rank, as well as of mere intellect, and the gradual influx of commoners--still more, of 'gentlemen commoners'--once for all determined the character of colleges as places of serious and uninterrupted study. ”

“ But it is not the venerable appearance of University College, hallowed by the associations of so many centuries in age, nor Queen's opposite, nor All Souls', nor any other of the colleges as mere buildings, that so connect them with our feelings. We must turn the mind from stone and wood to the humanity in connection with them. ”

“ Whether the college lives by itself as an independent establishment on a foundation of its own, or is in point of legal formality a subdivision of the university establishment, it takes its place in the educational scheme as senior member of the secondary school system, and it bears no peculiarly close relation to the university as a seat of learning. ”

“ What the University Can Do.—An increasing number of young people from the country are going to college. The college was founded on the principle of educating American youth in a higher culture than local elementary schools could provide. It is the function of the college and the university to open wider vistas for the individual mind than is otherwise possible, to do on an infinitely larger scale what the teacher is attempting in the elementary grades. These higher schools are passing through a humanizing process; they are making more of the social sciences and the art of living well ”

“ Training for citizenship and the preparation of the scholar are then the twofold function of the college. To furnish professional training for lawyers, doctors, ministers, engineers, librarians, is manifestly the work of the university or the technical school, and not the function of the college. Neither is it, in my opinion, the work of the college to prepare its students specifically to be teachers or even wives and husbands, mothers and fathers. ”

“ President Foster of Reed College, Oregon, puts it thus: "It is possible to graduate from almost any college without an idea in one's head." Professor Wenley, Head of the Department of Philosophy in Michigan University, had about the same thought when he gave me his original definition of an American college as "A so-called institution of higher learning whose chief accomplishment is the inoculation of innocent youth against education." ”

“ The Continental university begins and carries on the stage of intelligent and self-chosen and independent work. But in the American universities there must be discipline, college yells, drill in routine and elementary work, classes handled on the basis of averages, and teachers of the Gymnasium and lycée type, existing side by side with recognition and encouragement of the individual freedom of bent, disregard of credit hours and assigned tasks, and scholarly professors and investigators of real university type. ”

“ A university is an assemblage of schools, as our government is an assemblage of states. In England, different corporations, giving substantially similar instruction, are brought together by a common body which confers the degrees. In this country, a group of professional schools—law, medicine, theology, and science—are associated through one governing body with the college proper, that is, with the candidates for the B.A. degree. In this useful sense, Tufts and Bowdoin are universities ”

“ There are three things that the university would do—represented by the college, the professional schools and the graduate faculty. Through the college it would give men broader interests and wider sympathies, through the professional schools it would teach the routine methods of practise, through the graduate faculty it would improve these methods and enlarge our knowledge. ”

“ Following out that line of thought, there is a great deal that is attractive in a gathering of College men. They have such a winsome and a winning way with them.
Richest in endowments, foremost in progress, honored by the renown of a long line of distinguished sons, the university that claims you is worthy of the homage and respect which it receives from the educated men of America. ”

“ The whole body of the colleges, taken together, constitutes the University. All those who after residing seven years at some college, have taken the degree of Master of Arts, or a higher one, and keep their name on the college lists by a small payment, vote at the University elections for members of Parliament and all other officers, and manage its affairs. ... The colleges, at certain intervals; present such students as comply with their conditions to University authorities for matriculation, for certain examinations, and for the reception of degrees ”

“ The faculty is the teaching body. If you have the right sort of faculty, you have a university though you have only a tent to lecture in. If, on the other hand, you try to make a university out of a board of sagacious business men acting as trustees, and treat the professors simply as “hired men,” bound to give the college so many hours a week, you may have a good school for youths, but you will get no enlightening influence or force out of it for the community at large. ”

“ In order to particularize some of the distinctive features of the American college, we need to understand our educational system as a whole. We start with the public school and impart to the youth a primary education. In the high school or academy the pupil is introduced into a higher circle of thought and life and then passes on to the college, where the aim is to extend general culture and prepare for special work. The educational system culminates in the university, which is devoted chiefly to technical and professional education. ”

“ The University must be more than an abstraction, it must be a body of living men. Now, how can this end be attained in a natural process of evolution, and how can you help in that process? I have drawn your attention to the fact that this University, differing from that of London, requires its students to have passed through affiliated colleges; but so far it has not provided that they, in their life as graduates, shall continue, in communion with their colleges. Now it is in and through the college that I believe this congregation of learned and scientific men, may best be obtained. ”

“ It will hasten the differentiation between college and university. And, while these two institutions are still "siamesed," it will provide for the fairer division of effort and attention between them. Student-teachers will relieve some members of the faculty from elementary work; it will let others pass over completely into the graduate schools in the course of time. After ten years, a respectable number of student*teachers will be ready to fill purely collegiate professorships. ”

“ The society of persons engaged in the pursuits of literature, including the officers and students. Societies of this kind are incorporated, and endowed with revenues.
"A college, in the modern sense of that word, was an institution which arose within a university, probably within that of Paris or of Oxford first, being intended either as a kind of boarding-school, or for the support of scholars destitute of means, who were here to live under particular supervision. ”