University extension

“ When little centers are established, permanent buildings erected and permanent teachers secured, then the university extension work can be used as a sort of circuit riding organization for the still higher grades of work until the needs of the higher grades are supplied by permanent organization. In this way the university extension work can form the means of building up the whole system from one which deals even with the needs of a single individual in a little community to a complete system for the whole state. ”

“ For persons of leisure and means such growing demand can be met by increased activity of the universities. University Extension is to be the university of the busy.
My definition puts the hope of extending university education in this sense to the whole nation without exception. I am aware that to some minds such indiscriminate extension will seem like an educational communism, on a par with benevolent schemes for redistributing the wealth of society so as to give everybody a comfortable income all round. ”

“ The old Universities and industry must, if this analysis be near the truth, co-operate for social reform. There are many ways to bring them together. The University extension movement might be worked by the hands of the great labour organizations—legislation might adapt the constitution of the Universities to the coming days of labour ascendancy—workmen might be brought up to graduate in colleges, and they might, as an experiment, be allowed to use existing colleges during vacations. ”

“ And the foundation for university extension is a change, subtle but clear, that may be seen to be coming over the attitude of the public mind to higher education, varying in intensity in different localities, but capable of being encouraged where it is least perceptible,—a change by which education is ceasing to be regarded as a thing proper to particular classes of society or particular periods of life, and is coming to be recognized as one of the permanent interests of life, side by side with such universal interests as religion and politics. ”

“ This differentiates University Extension from local colleges, from correspondence teaching, and from the systems of which Chautauqua is the type. The chief function of a university is to teach, and University Extension must stand or fall with its teachers. It may or may not be desirable on other grounds to multiply universities; but there is no necessity for it on grounds of popular education, the itinerancy being a sufficient means of bringing any university into touch with the people as a whole. ”

“ But it surely ought not to be necessary to explain that in proposing a universal system of education we are not meaning that what each individual draws from the system will be the same in all cases. In this as in every other public benefit that which each person draws from it must depend upon that which he brings to it. University Extension may be conceived as a stream flowing from the high ground of universities through the length and breadth of the country; from this stream each individual helps himself according to his means and his needs ”

“ The University Extension Movement was an attempt to answer these questions in a practical fashion, and my friend does full justice to the spirit which initiated that movement, and to the men—such as the late Lord Grey—who led it. But I suppose he speaks from experience when he says: "University Extension, as it is, will never become established in working-class villages. Forty-five to fifty pounds is too big a sum to be raised in three months, and is also considered too much to be paid for a man coming to lecture once a week for twelve weeks, and then disappear for ever like a comet." ”

“ The wisest guidance, accordingly, may not lead the movement to any long success. If, however, university extension will keep itself clearly detached from other educational agencies and make a quiet offer of humble yet serviceable instruction, there is a fair prospect that by somewhat slow degrees a permanent new power may be added to the appliances for rendering busy Americans intelligent. ”

“ A professor of history, political economy, or literature has, in addition to his college teaching, also given a course of instruction elsewhere. This feature of the American system, one may say with confidence, must prove a constant damage to the work of the colleges and, if persisted in, must ultimately destroy the extension scheme itself.
In England the extension teachers are not university teachers. To have no independent staff for extension work is a novelty of the American undertaking. ”

“ The Universities, hating to be reformed, and allowing the misuse of their resources by undergraduates, sometimes described by Rhodes scholars as “British babes,” have been unable to do their part for the nation. They have stood aside from elementary education, only coldly tolerating the establishment of training colleges in their neighbourhood, and only timidly following a few of their members when they have led the way in the extension of University teaching. ”

“ Of the work of improving the efficiency of teaching, the Colleges must bear the brunt; the central or administrative body of the University can contribute but little to it, and that too only by the inspection of the Colleges, wise regulation of the courses, and judicious direction of examinations with a view to influence the teaching in the right direction. Therefore, the creation of a new University, while the colleges are as much starved as before, cannot in itself improve the teaching and raise the efficiency of the education given. ”

“ But while it would be madness to abolish such an institution as our normal school, and undesirable if not impossible to graft it on the new university, our school, like its elder sister in Paris, should be enabled to gain by each increase in the teaching power of the university. ”

“ Editors, essayists, college presidents and reformers assure us that we are on the verge of a change, and perhaps a great change, in our system of higher education. They dilate upon the indisputable fact that most of our older colleges have made rapid strides within the past ten years, augmenting their endowments, erecting handsome buildings, establishing new departments of study and increasing the number of students. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, were never so well off, in point of money and men, as they are at this day. ”

“ But the magnitude and comprehensive aims of the new establishments are such as to take them out of the category of auxiliaries and throw them into the lead. They are assuming to take over the advance in science and scholarship, which has by tradition belonged under the tutelage of the academic community. This move looks like a desperate surrender of the university ideal. The reason for it appears to be the proven inability of the schools, under competitive management, to take care of the pursuit of knowledge. ”

“ If we had fewer colleges, each one would have a larger number of pupils, and be more fully provided with all that is necessary for education. Yet there appears to be a stronger desire to open new colleges than to perfect those actually in existence. Why do we thus weaken and scatter our forces? Why do we render success and large, grand centres of learning next to impossible? Grammar-schools, or schools in which boys are prepared for college, should be multiplied, but not colleges. Then our colleges would resemble a university more than they do to-day. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I establish my own free colleges and schools of law and medicine, and I proceed to tax all others at their full valuation." There is not a college in the country, not even Harvard, that could compete upon such terms. The state need not even express its sovereign will so precisely. It can content itself with establishing a university of its own, and facilitating the direct influence of this university over the public and private schools. ”

“ As these high powers exist only potentially and in our own imagination, we can be certain that they will not take offence if we presume to offer them our opinion and advice.
What is the first and most obvious want which we seek to satisfy by founding a university? It is the want of a collegiate system of education and discipline superior to the one already existing in our colleges, and equal to any existing elsewhere. The first thing to be done, then, is to select some already existing college, or to establish a new one, as the nucleus of the future university. ”

“ The cure will come only by a fundamental educational reform below the level of the university. The great tragedy of American education is that our universities were founded just at the time when genuinely liberal colleges were ceasing to exist. In fact it was the developing university which, imposing the elective system, helped to kill the liberal arts curriculum of the colleges. ”

“ Our system of higher education must be made more coherent. The public university system should be reorganized to avoid proliferation of institutions and unnecessary and expensive duplication of courses. ”

“ Still less should the imperfect ways in which they manifest themselves induce us to condemn them. It is the modern tendency to undervalue the University as an institution which we had inherited from the middle ages, and with which we could at present dispense. This is an error. The university presents just as necessary a form of instruction as the elementary school or the technological school. Not the abolition of the university, but a reform which shall adapt it to the spirit of the age, is the advance which we have to make. ”

“ The establishment of a university is, in my opinion, a matter alone for the future. At this time it is neither expedient nor is it good policy to provide for the sale of those lands set apart for the university fund. If at some future period it should be deemed expedient or in keeping with a more enlarged policy to devote our entire energies to a more general diffusion of knowledge than a university would afford, or even if the voice of the State should demand the establishment of one, these lands will then provide the means of advancing the cause of education. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And indeed it is quite certain that, unless this bill, or some similar bill, be passed, a new college will soon be founded and endowed with that munificence of which the history of the Free Church furnishes so many examples. From the day on which such an university arises, the old universities must decline. Now, they are practically national, and not sectarian, institutions. And yet, even now, the emoluments of a professorship are so much smaller than those which ability and industry can obtain in other ways, that it is difficult to find eminent men to fill the chairs. ”

“ But, while they will thus lose the broader knowledge and larger scope which a university education affords, the university will also lose their sympathy and powerful support. Such students are now wholly repelled from the university, and, under a more liberal policy, they would form an important and clear addition to our numbers, and—as I have said in another place—without diminishing by a single man the number of those who come to college through the classical schools. ”

“ The main defect of the system is probably the want of co-ordination between primary and higher education, which in turn reacts upon the efficiency of the secondary institutions and to a great extent confines university colleges to the unsatisfactory function of mere finishing schools. The universities have suffered from having been allowed to drift into the position of institutions that are expected not so much to educate in the true sense as to provide the student with the means of entering an official or a professional career. ”

“ There is, then, no foundation whatever for the assumption that it is the duty of our government to establish a national university. I venture to state one broad reason why our government should not establish and maintain a university. If the people of the United States have any special destiny, any peculiar function in the world, it is to try to work out under extraordinarily favorable circumstances the problem of free institutions for a heterogeneous, rich, multitudinous population, spread over a vast territory. ”

“ Speaking generally, the state universities have large incomes and good facilities. They require high standards for admission and graduation. Wherever feasible, they maintain professional schools and schools of applied science. They do this upon the theory that the state should both regulate and provide professional education in the interest of proper standards, and that, in the interest of the state and of the individual, such education should be made available to the sons of the poor. Every leading state university is developing a graduate school. ”