College settlement

“ No person will contend that donations of land to all the States of the Union for the erection of colleges within the limits of each can be embraced by this principle. It can not be pretended that an agricultural college in New York or Virginia would aid the settlement or facilitate the sale of public lands in Minnesota or California. ”

“ The work of college women for the settlements, and through them for better home making, is not confined to settlement residents, as large financial aid has been given all the college settlements by the undergraduates and alumnæ of the twelve or more important colleges for women in the East. ”

“ It aims rather at the quickening of sympathy and intelligence on social questions, and the moral and financial support which the College Chapter can give its representatives out in the world. Such by-products of the settlement interest as the Social Study Circle, an informal group of undergraduates and teachers which met for several years to study social questions, are worth much more to the movement than the immature efforts of undergraduates in directing settlement clubs and classes. ”

“ In an ancient though not very populous settlement, in a retired corner of one of the New England States, arise the walls of a seminary of learning, which, for the convenience of a name, shall be entitled "Harley College." ”

“ The statute of April 9, 1852, in strict conformity with the Constitution, provides that colleges may be founded by individuals, and incorporated under its provisions. A city cannot found a college. One man, however rich, may not found a college and be the autocrat and controller of education and mind forever; but five or three, all citizens resident, may found and incorporate a college, (Swan, 193, 195, 196,) but they cannot give it perpetuity. The directors may sell and dispose of the real estate with which it is endowed ”

“ Possibly this can be explained by the character and diversity of the recipient colleges and universities and the absence of any intimate continuing relationship or dependency between government and religiously affiliated institutions. The potential for divisiveness inherent in the essentially local problems of primary and secondary schools is significantly less with respect to a college or university whose student constituency is not local but diverse and widely dispersed. ”

“ Within twenty years every state in the Union had taken advantage of this splendid endowment, either to found a new state university which would comply with the requirements as regards courses of instruction or to establish an agricultural college as an independent institution, or in connection with some already existing institution. Not only do some of the finest state universities like those of California, Illinois, and Minnesota owe their origins to the Morrill Act, but others owe to it their real beginnings as institutions of collegiate grade. ”

“ That history has not been one of mere benefactions on one side, and pure indebtedness on the other. Whatever the University may owe to the State, the balance of obligation falls heavily on the other side. In the days of Provincial rule the Colony of Massachusetts Bay appears to have exhausted its zeal for collegiate education in the much-lauded promissory act by which the General Court, in 1636, "agree to give four hundred pounds towards a school or college, whereof two hundred pounds shall be paid next year." ”

“ At that juncture a bill was filed by some of the scholarship holders, and an injunction asked for and obtained, restraining the defendants from the removal of the college. The ground upon which the injunction was put was, that in the case of a scholarship issued by a college having an established location, the place where the tuition is to be given is an essential part of the contract. ”

“ A question to be answered in passing on the merits of the first of these bills is, could Jefferson College surrender its charter, with the consent of the legislature, and accept a new one, consolidating it with another institution or college of the same nature and kind, without the assent of the holders of scholarships in the college?
The general right of a private corporation to surrender its franchises, may possibly have exceptions, but undoubtedly it is the rule. ”

“ In reality, the decree forbids them to receive boarding-scholars; henceforth, the University will have the monopoly of them.
The proceedings against the small seminaries, more energetic competitors, are still more vigorous. "There shall be but one secondary ecclesiastical school in each department; the Grand-Master will designate those that are to be maintained; the others are to be closed. None of them shall be in the country. All those not situated in a town provided with a lycée or with a college shall be closed. ”

“ Probably such rivalries have their rise in the dull supposition that a fixed constituency of pupils exists somewhere, which if not turned toward one college may be drawn to another. As the old political economists tell of a “wages fund,” fixed and constant in each community, so college governors are apt to imagine a public pupil-hoard, not susceptible of much increase or diminution, which may by inadvertence fall into other hands than their own. In reality each college creates its constituency. Its students come, in the main, from the inert mass of the uncollegiate public. ”

“ The only discretion written into the statute permits a State to determine, 'in accordance with standards prescribed by the Secretary,' whether a particular student, without regard to whether his attendance is at a college or vocational school, is a student 'regularly attending' a bona fide school. [4] This particularization of the area of state authority is itself cogent evidence that Congress did not also authorize the States to limit eligibility to students attending vocational school. ”

“ They said that the legislature might exempt from taxation 'such property as they might deem necessary' (not for the use of schools, but) 'for school purposes.' The distinction is, we think, very broad between property contributing to the purposes of a school, made to aid in the education of persons in that school, and that which is directly or immediately subjected to use in the school. The purposes of the school and the school are not identical. The purpose of a college or university is to give youth an education. ”

“ They are to be punished for not accepting the new grant and taking its benefits. This, it must be confessed, is rather a summary mode of settling a question of constitutional right. Not only are new trustees forced into the corporation, but new trusts and uses are created. The college is turned into a university. Power is given to create new colleges, and, to authorize any diversion of the funds which may be agreeable to the new boards, sufficient latitude is given by the undefined power of establishing an institute. ”

“ The institution owed its origin to federal land grants; it is maintained by the state, the United States, and by small fees paid by the students; tuition is free in all colleges except the college of law. ”

“ The mere fact that the trustees can, with restrictions, levy taxes, issue bonds, and condemn property for school purposes does not detract from the crucial consideration that the sole purpose for which the district exists is the operation of a junior college. If the Court adhered to the Avery line, marginal cases would of course arise in which the courts would face difficulty in determining whether a particular entity exercised general governmental powers, but such a determination would be no different in kind from many other matters of degree upon which courts must continually pass. ”

“ All the authorities speak of fellowships in colleges as freeholds, notwithstanding the fellows may be liable to be suspended or removed, for misbehavior, by their constituted visitors. Nothing could have been less expected, in this age, than that there should have been an attempt, by acts of the legislature, to take away these college livings, the inadequate, but the only support of literary men, who have devoted their lives to the instruction of youth. ”

“ Doubts have often been expressed whether a private corporation can be dissolved by the surrender of its corporate franchise into the hands of the government, but the question presented in this case is not of that character, as the act of the legislature uniting the two colleges did not contemplate that either college as an institution of learning should cease to exist, or that the funds of either should be devoted to any other use than that described in the original charters. ”

“ The students are fluctuating, and no individual among our youth has a vested interest in the institution, which can be asserted in a court of justice. Neither the founders of the college, nor the youth for whose benefit it was founded, complain of the alteration made in its charter, or think themselves injured by it. The trustees alone complain, and the trustees have no beneficial interest to be protected. Can this be such a contract, as the constitution intended to withdraw from the power of state legislation? ”

“ Will they pass over to the control of the University a fair portion of the money they now spend either on scholarships and fellowships confined to boys from a few schools, or on the maintenance of choirs and tutors, or on new buildings? It is not enough that one or two colleges make a grant to support some workmen’s centre. Workmen will resent the patronage of a college. The money must be transferred to the University, the tutors must have a University standing, and the scholarships, which enable men to reside in Oxford, must be both ample and numerous. ”

“ Our conclusion is that after the confirmation by the first section of the act of July 23, 1866, of the lands in controversy selected in place of the school sections, the township in which the selected lands are situated having been previously surveyed by authority of the United States, the premises were not subject to the grant to the state for the establishment of an agricultural college. ”

“ When we begin to consider the vast conglomerate of institutions that are incorporated as colleges, universities and technical schools we enter a region of chaos. If a school applies to a state legislature for a charter of incorporation as a college there is at present no standard generally recognized by legislators to determine what is a college. ”

“ In the sixteenth century the colleges opened their doors to the admission of pensioners and fellow-commoners. Collegiate teaching and arrangements were superior to those of the private hostels, and before the middle of the century the latter had disappeared: their revival was rendered impossible by a regulation that membership of the University should be confined to those who were members of a college. Shortly afterwards it became the custom not to require residence for degrees after the baccalaureate, and thus a course limited to three or four years became usual for the average student. ”

“ Of the 1500 scholarships sold, several hundred were bought and are held by residents of Canonsburg. All the 114 complainants are of this class. What did the contributors expect at the time the contracts were made? What did the trustees know that they expected? And what did the trustees themselves intend? What, in short, did all parties mean? Certainly to get the tuition from Jefferson College, at Canonsburg; from that college, permanently fixed there. A college is not an ambulatory institution, but a stationary one. ”

“ Dear Sir,—The proposition to remove William and Mary College to Richmond with all its present funds, and to add to it a musical school, is nothing more nor less than to remove the University also to that place. Because, if both remain, there will 384 not be students enough to make either worthy the acceptance of men of the first order of science. They must each fall down to the level of our present academies, under the direction of common teachers, and our state of education must stand exactly where it now is. Few of the States have been able to maintain one university, none two. ”

“ No man ever did or will found a college, "believing at the time that an act of incorporation constitutes no security for the institution; believing that it is immediately to be deemed a public institution, whose funds are to be governed and applied, not by the will of the donor, but by the will of the legislature. ”

“ And the bigger it gets the more regulating it wants to do. Why, they tell me that at the University of Chicago there hasn't been a riot for nine years, and that over in Washington Park, three blocks away, an eleven-ton statue of old Chris. Columbus has lain for ages and no college class has had spirit enough to haul it out on the street-car tracks. That's what regulating a college does for it. There are more policemen in Chicago than there are students in the University. If you give your yell off the campus you have to get a permit from the city council. ”

“ But would it not be possible to so change public opinion that no college could be founded with a less endowment than say $1,000,000, or no university with less than three or four times that amount? From the report of the Commissioner of Education I learn that such a change is taking place; that the tendency towards large institutions is increasing, and that it is principally in the West and Southwest that the multiplication of small institutions with big names is to be feared most, and that the East is almost ready for the great coming university. ”