University town

“ But as the colleges are many, and the gentlemen entertained in them are a very great number, the trade of the town very much depends upon them, and the tradesmen may justly be said to get their bread by the colleges; and this is the surest hold the university may be said to have of the townsmen, and by which they secure the dependence of the town upon them, and consequently their submission. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Imagine a journalistic foreigner visiting the University, lunching at the station refreshment-room, hurrying to half-a-dozen of the best known colleges, driving in a tram through the main thoroughfares, looking on at a football match, interviewing a Town Councillor, and being presented to the Vice-Chancellor—what would be the profit of such a record as he could give us? ”

“ How far may we accept a certain vague popular sentiment which attributes city rank to a town that possesses a university? That, to be sure, would be a criterion of civic status unrecognised by, and unknown to, the lawyer and the politician. But universities are not institutions that appeal to juristic and political minds. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They were encouraged and in many ways helped to go to the university. Gifts were left to their old schools to help the likely boys to go to the university; many of the monasteries and colleges sent their pupils there, and it was looked upon as a pious work and a work of mercy to help poor scholars in this way.
119 Scholars flocked in hundreds to various universities, and we find Oxford and Cambridge rising as university towns. We cannot say exactly when this began, but we read that in King John's reign, in the year 1209, there was a great "town and gown" riot at Oxford. ”

“ Many old customs are kept up still at Oxford and Cambridge; the scholars and officials of the colleges and universities go about in their gowns, as they have done for centuries, and each university has still rights and privileges in the government of the town which have naturally come to it in the course of time. The town and the townsfolk have their interests and government ”

“ Instead of being scattered in a town, the students of Oxford and Cambridge are united in colleges; their maintenance is provided at their own expense, or that of the founders; and the stated hours of the hall and chapel represent the discipline of a regular, and, as it were, a religious community. The eyes of the traveller are attracted by the size or beauty of the public edifices; and the principal colleges appear to be so many palaces, which a liberal nation has erected and endowed for the habitation of science. My own introduction to the university of Oxford forms a new aera in my life ”

“ Fine gentry are our people of the university, not to have caused our privileges to be respected on such a day as this! However, there is a maypole and a bonfire in the town; a mystery, Pope of the Fools, and Flemish ambassadors in the city; and, at the university, nothing! ”

“ In every village there will be a school, a reading-room, a theatre, closely associated with the health service and recreation of the place. It will be the central architectural fact of the place, the group of buildings about which the homes will cluster. In [Pg 302] every town there will be the district schools and the great high school, the art studios, the theatres, the laboratories. Every considerable town will have a University as its chief expression and its crowning glory. The agricultural and industrial life of the land will be closely linked to the technical research of the colleges ”

“ It has never been full of distracting temptations: indeed, it is a town which seems to have been so arranged that the student should find in study alone relief from its manifold discomforts. The advantages it possessed were very great, and they were fully appreciated by the young American, who came from what in comparison was almost an intellectual wilderness to the rich stores of learning this university contained. ”

“ And some years after the establishment of the college it was ordered in all the Puritan colonies “that every township, after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to teach all children to write and read; and where any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families, they shall set up a grammar school, the master thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university.” ”

“ In the earliest and broadest sense of the term, a university had no necessary connexion with schools or literature, being merely a community of individuals bound together by some more or less acknowledged tie. Regarded collectively in this light, the inhabitants of any particular town might be said to constitute a university, and in point of fact the Commonalty of the townsmen of Oxford was sometimes described as a university in formal documents of the middle ages. The term was, however, specially applied to the whole body of persons frequenting the schools of a large studium. ”

“ So valuable an asset was a university to a city, and so easy was it for a university to move almost overnight, that cities often, and at times even nations, encouraged not only the founding of universities, but also the migration of both faculties and students. ”

“ They must eat in a big dining room or hall, with oak beams across the ceiling, and the stained glass in the windows, and with a shield or tablet here or there upon the wall, to remind them between times of the men who went before them and left a name worthy of the memory of the college. If a student is to get from his college what it ought to give him, a college dormitory, with the life in common that it brings, is his absolute right. A university that fails to give it to him is cheating him. ”

“ Imagine a university and a campus of forty-seven acres of lawn and grove where Trinity Church stands in New York or where the post office stands in Chicago or St. Louis. In Washington we have something like it in the mall where the National Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Agricultural Department are. Trinity College, Dublin, has an equally expansive setting of green grass and grove and flowering shrubs, cricket grounds, and tennis courts, surrounded on all sides by business houses, clubs, and hotels. It is like an island of verdure in the midst of an ocean of trade and commerce. ”

“ The college, with its long corridors and its vast staircases, preserves a monastic appearance, which would be severe and harsh if the countryside, the grass plots, the park and the pool did not display their gayety about the old walls. When M. Demolins and his imitators created their new schools, they followed the example of England; but, in a certain manner, they revived a French tradition. Before any one thought of crowding children into the university barracks of the nineteenth century, there were in France colleges where life was lived in the open air, in the midst of a beautiful park. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we define a university as a degree-granting institution, then there are over 700 universities in the United States of America. It is the aspiration of every American city to possess its own university. The university is, in a sense, the cathedral—a somewhat truncated one doubtless—of the American city, and every citizen is unhappy until his city gets what he conceives to be its full complement of culture, in the possession of a university. ”

“ I suppose it is inevitable that a visitor should see the constituents of a university out of proportion, but I came away with an impression overwhelmingly architectural. The library dome, I confess, was fine, and the desks below well filled with students, the books were abundant, well arranged, and well tended. But I recall marble staircases, I recall great wastes of marble steps, I recall, in particular, students' baths of extraordinary splendor, and I do not recall anything like an equivalent effect of large leisure and dignity for intellectual men. ”

“ There is something in spacious grey buildings and perfect Gothic architecture, shared too by broad grass lawns and studious, quiet places and{178} uneventful lives, that cannot be altogether left out of the reckoning when one adds up the total value of a University as compared with a modern endowed plan of education, or the admirable schemes of University extension. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Before taking this turn we should give a glance northward along Trumpington Street at the splendid mass of Collegiate and University buildings which here come into view. High above all rises the glorious fabric of King's College Chapel, while, beyond it, the classical façades of the Senate House and the University Library, the fine gateway of Caius College, and the further off tower of St. John's College, fill the eye with a delightful sense of aesthetic culture and harmony. ”

“ The down-trodden race is quickly hiding the University with its new towns of houses and churches, and the very University has lost the monastic rule that allowed its members to camp as an alien garrison in the place. ”

“ A handsome military college on a height, 389 wide streets lined by well-built houses with projecting upper stories, and well-supplied and busy markets, in which an enormous quantity of mutton is exposed for sale, are among the chief features of this very striking town. ”

“ The system of licensed lodgings introduced by the University soon caused the numbers of the ordinary commoners to increase, so that in 1875 one-third of the resident undergraduates were living in lodgings outside the college. ”

“ Upon a beautifully situated campus of fifty acres, twenty imposing stone buildings house the seven departments of what is really a large, well-equipped university of eighty instructors and nearly a thousand students, with observatory and library and scientific laboratories and hospitals, as well as literary, dramatic, musical and scientific societies and its own printing-press and monthly magazine. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The agitation which has caused the business man to look upon the rural community as more desirable than the city, leads him to send his son to an agricultural college in preference to other departments of the university.”
This city-to-country movement is naturally strongest where the country-to-city movement has long been developing. The Massachusetts State College reports only about 25% of its new students sons of farmers and 50% of its enrollment from the cities. ”

“ 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. ”