University city

“ The mission university with its big campus backed by a splendid landscape and reached by a hole cut specially for it in the main city wall continues to look utterly incongruous in its setting of ignorance and filth. ”

“ Most likely these Universities grew as a tree grows from a seed blown by chance of the wind. It seems easy enough to understand why Paris, that great city, should have possessed a great University; yet I surmise the processes at Oxford and Cambridge to have been only a little less fortuitous. ”

“ The old associations of a town or a street or a building, linked as they often are with the history of a nation, are a valuable possession, not always placed in the account when the advantages or disadvantages of proposed changes are discussed; but a University which for four hundred years has seen the tide of human life flow round it in a great city, is instinct with memories which even the demolition of its walls can only partially destroy. ”

“ What beneficent influence such an association exerts on the whole life with which it is surrounded, we see strikingly when we turn our eyes elsewhere, when we compare the fresh and living spirit which a university inspires, with the unintellectual existence of a mere mercantile city. ”

“ Every young man who can compass it by any reasonable outlay of energy and sacrifice had better go to college and stay there until graduation day. There is a deal of education to be gained outside of books or college halls. The business life of a great city is a university in itself with its lectures and recitations, its examinations and other requirements. Its courses of instruction have a value all their own and its exacting demands flunk more men ten to one than either Harvard or Yale, Stanford or California. ”

“ Although these colleges do not approach the ideal of a university—i.e., a great city of learning, which can no more be built in a day than a great commercial metropolis—nevertheless there is no reason to be ashamed of our colleges. ”

“ But besides all this, there is in and about this city a whole university, as it were, of students, practicers or pleaders, and judges of the laws of this realm, not living of common stipends, as in other universities it is for the most part done, but of their own private maintenance, as being altogether fed either by their places or practice, or otherwise by their proper revenue, or exhibition of parents and friends; for that the younger sort are either gentlemen or the sons of gentlemen, or of other most wealthy persons. ”

“ An institution of this character, which embodies in its external impressiveness as well as in its work and aims civic duty and pride, represents the best ideals of modern civilization.
The College of the City of New York is maintained by the people of the city for the education of its young men, and is in some respects unparalleled in this country or elsewhere. Philadelphia and Baltimore have high schools of nearly college rank, and Cincinnati has a municipal university, and these four institutions represent a movement likely to become general throughout the country. ”

“ When the need arose for a supervisor of city playgrounds, the physical director at the university was called upon to assume the position. Several of his sub-directors are city university students. Thus the city is beginning to regard the university as a laboratory to which it may, at any time, turn for technical advice and help. Through experience with problems thus offered, students are given the opportunity for training in the service of their community. They are taught to study and know city activities and interests—they become better citizens. ”

“ Some idea of the extension of university opportunities can be judged from the fact that, according to the best and most conservative statistics available, there were more students at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to the population of the England of that day, than there are {280} to the population of even such an educationally well provided city as Greater New York in the present year of grace 1910. ”

“ That the students of the University may feel the interest of the city in their work, preference is given to the University graduates in appointments of teachers, of municipal engineers, and of employees on such municipal work as testing food, inspecting construction, and the like. ”

“ There are Societies now at the following colleges and universities: Boston University, Brown, California, Chicago, Cincinnati, College of the City of New York, Clark, Colorado, Columbia, Cornell, Denver, Harvard, Hunter, Illinois, Johns Hopkins, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York University, North Carolina, Ohio State, Omaha, Pennsylvania, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Radcliffe, Rutgers, Texas, Tufts, Valparaiso, Washington, Western Reserve, Wisconsin, and Yale. New Societies are in the process of formation at several other universities. ”

“ There are, undoubtedly, certain advantages which come to the modern university in a larger city, which becomes in a way a laboratory for various forms of scientific investigation; but the disadvantages are no less obvious. ”

“ In the summer term Oxford teaches the exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach, and possibly as the first-fruits of the dreaming in grey cloister and silent garden, which either makes or mars a man, there has just appeared in that lovely city a dainty and delightful volume of poems by four friends. ”

“ Now at Princeton, what there is of a town is little more than a setting for the University. There are no outside distractions, such as theatres and the like, as at most large institutions of learning. The campus life is the only life, and the college students are dependent upon the college world for all their amusements and between-hour interests. Everyone keeps in touch with everything that is going on. ”

“ Surely, he said, in the greatest State there should be the greatest of universities; in central New York there should arise a university which, by the amplitude of its endowment and by the whole scope of its intended sphere, by the character of the studies in the whole scope of the curriculum, should satisfy the wants of the hour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we had had at Toronto, when I was a student, the kind of dormitories and dormitory life that they have at Oxford, I don't think I would ever have graduated. I'd have been there still. The trouble is that the universities on our Continent are only just waking up to the idea of what a university should mean. They were, very largely, instituted and organised with the idea that a university was a place where young men were sent to absorb the contents of books and to listen to lectures in the class rooms. ”

“ Permit me, however, to measure this independence of yours by the standard of this culture, and to consider your university as an educational institution and nothing else. If a foreigner desires to know something of the methods of our universities, he asks first of all with emphasis: 'How is the student connected with the university?' We answer: 'By the ear, as a hearer.' The foreigner is astonished. ”

“ And if to this day the University building, in its exterior aspect and accidents, is startling to those who knew its site when as yet in a state of nature, its interior also, when traversed and explored, tends in the same persons to produce a degree of confusion as between things new and old; as between Canada and elsewhere. Within its walls are to be seen appliances and conveniences and luxuries for the behoof and use of teacher and student, unknown a few years since in many an ancient seat of learning. ”

“ But that was before they met little Herbux!
The University sprawled casually, unashamed of its disordered ranks, over a hundred thousand acres of grassy, rolling countryside. It was the year A.D. 3896, and the vast assemblage of schools and colleges and laboratories had been growing on this site for more than two thousand years.
It had survived political and industrial revolutions, local insurrections, global, inter-terrestrial and nuclear wars, and it had become the acknowledged center of learning for the entire known universe.
No subject was too small to escape attention at the University. ”

“ Before deciding, he wrote to three eastern colleges, amongst others to Yale, the only American university which by its buildings and surroundings can lay any claim to compare, even at a long distance, in beauty and associations, with the least among European universities. ”

“ It is necessary, moreover, to remember that universities in the earliest times had not infrequently a very vigorous life as places of learning, long before they received Royal or legal recognition; and it is equally necessary not to forget that colleges for the lodging and maintenance and education of students are by no means an essential feature of the mediæval conception of a university. ”

“ The private houses are numerous and tastefully built, and have, with few exceptions, large gardens and orchards attached to them. On an elevated and beautiful spot of ground, a short distance from the town, stands the University of King’s College, which has the power of bestowing degrees, similar to those granted by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. ”

“ Thinking over my visit, during the return journey, I realized that the whole question of the relative usefulness of the metropolitan university and the rural college reduces to an estimate of the comparative values of the large and the small, the near and the remote, of efficiency and culture. Our national environment and history have emphasized the importance of the large, the immediate, the efficient. But there is always much to be said on both sides of every question, and it is at least possible that enough importance has not been attributed to the small, the distinctive, the fine. ”

“ While the universities, as is typically exemplified by the histories of Bologna and Paris, and even to a noteworthy degree of Oxford, grew up around the cathedrals, they cannot be considered in any sense the deliberate creation, much less the formal invention, of any particular set of men. The idea of a university was not born into the world in full panoply as Minerva from the brain of Jove. No one set about consciously organizing for the establishment of complete institutions of learning. ”

“ May the university which commences its practical activity to-morrow abundantly fulfil its high purpose; may its renown as a seat of true learning, a centre of free inquiry, a focus of intellectual light, increase year by year, until men wander hither from all parts of the earth, as of old they sought Bologna, or Paris, or Oxford. ”

“ It is fitting that the sunflower should bloom in a garden, and so it does. This time it is not a walled garden like that of Lal Bagh; the Women's College is situated out from the city in a green and spacious suburb, where the little River Cooum wanders by its open spaces. The ten acres have much the air of an American college campus,—the same sense of academic quiet, of detachment from the work-a-day world. ”

“ What is a University almost everywhere else? It announces little more, as respects the academic buildings, than that here is to be found the place of rendezvous—the exchange, as it were, or, under a different figure, the palæstra of the various parties connected with the prosecution of liberal studies. This is their "House of Call," their general place of muster and parade. Here it is that the professors and the students converge, with the certainty of meeting each other. Here, in short, are the lecture-rooms in all the faculties. ”

“ If we would completely understand the meaning of offices, titles, ceremonies, organizations preserved in the most modern, most practical, most unpicturesque of the institutions which now bear the name of 'University,' we must go back to the earliest days of the earliest Universities that ever existed, and trace the history of their chief successors through the seven centuries that intervene between the rise of Bologna or Paris, and the foundation of the new University of Strassburg in Germany, or of the Victoria University in England. ”

“ The historic conditions of universities such as Harvard and Yale may make necessary their extension over an ever-wider territory, but it seems a pity that when universities must erect their buildings from the start, as has been necessary for Columbia and Chicago, there is not at hand sufficient artistic and educational imagination to plan a building that is beautiful because it best serves the purposes of a university. ”

“ These small colleges possess many 309 of the virtues of the English universities; they train the mind and cultivate it, and at the same time develop the social man. If now the American university were to divide its undergraduate department into organized residential halls, it would combine the advantages of the two types of American institution, which are the two types of instruction the world over. Already our college life at its best is as happy as the college life in England ”

“ Years ago in New England it was said that a log by the roadside with a student sitting on one end of it, and Mark Hopkins sitting on the other end, was a university. It is the quality of its men that makes the quality of a university. You may have your buildings, you may create your committees and boards and regulations, you may pile up your machinery of discipline and perfect your methods of instruction, you may spend money till no one can approach you ”

“ The severe front of University neither kills nor is killed by the seventeenth-century work, with eighteenth-century cupola and statue of George II's consort, just across the way. The old-world shops and gabled houses contrast with the modern buildings, which contain the new Examination Schools, or show where some college or other has forced its way into the High. ”