University college

“ The size of a college is a matter of small importance, except that under modern conditions a large college and one in immediate contact with the life of a university is almost certain to command larger intellectual resources than is an institution of a different type. The important thing about a college is its spirit, its clearness of aim, its steadiness of purpose, and the opportunity which it affords for direct personal contact between teacher and student. ”

“ A university now appears to mean “a college as good as it can be,” a stimulating conception, but not a finished or precise one. I would not disparage it. It is a term of aspiration, good to conjure with. When we want to elevate men’s ideas, or to obtain their dollars, it is well to talk about creating a true university: just as it is wise to bid the forward-reaching boy to become “a true gentleman.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whenever a college has a chair to fill, it is necessary to hunt far and wide for a suitable person to fill it. The demand is not from the old places alone. Almost every year a new college is founded. Every year the old ones grow. In twenty-five years Harvard has quadrupled its staff. Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Yale, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania,—indeed almost every strong college 118 in the country,—shows an immense advance. ”

“ It seems to me that the socialization of the college can not proceed very far until the principle of university extension is pretty fully recognized. The college must be in constant and vital touch with the farmers and their associations. Therefore each agricultural college should as rapidly as possible develop a definite tri-partite organization which reveals the college in its threefold function as an organ of research, as an educator of students, and as a distributor of information to those who can not come to the college. ”

“ A trustee of one of our eastern universities has recently affirmed that the greatest need of these institutions is not money, but the services of men who have just and definite ideas of the essential characteristics of a university. If our higher institutions of learning are ever to keep pace with the intellectual progress of the nation (the question of actual leadership can not yet be considered) , there is immediate need of a statement emphasizing the distinction existing between university and college, in order that such an institution may develop a healthy independent existence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The tendency of recent discussion is toward a fuller recognition of the value of the college principle in American education. It may be well to clear our notions of what the college principle is. The business of the college is not to make specialists; that belongs to the university. It is not to prepare a man immediately for any profession or occupation; that belongs to the technical and professional schools. It is not primarily the business of the college to make its students original investigators. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ There is a great difference between a university and a college. A university is great enough to shelter many colleges, and its chancellor is ruler over all. When we reflect that Christ Church College, alone, included as many important buildings as are to be found in some of our modern American universities, we may have some idea of the extent of Oxford University, within whose boundaries twenty such colleges could be counted. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 ”

“ The college—the university as it in time came to be—early broadened its scope, but it has from the first continued to aim at the needs of those unable to secure education without such help as, through its methods, it affords.
It was chartered in 1888, at which time its numbers had reached almost six hundred, and it has ever since had a constant flood of applicants. [Pg 137] "It has demonstrated," as Dr. Conwell puts it, "that those who work for a living have time for study." ”

“ The good and bad features of the English college system as a whole should not be hard to distinguish. In all social aspects the colleges are as nearly perfect as human institutions are capable of becoming, and they are the foundation of an unequaled 244 athletic life. Educationally, their qualities are mixed. For the purpose of common or garden English gentlemen, nothing could be better than a happy combination of tutorial instruction and university examining. ”