University administration

William Bennett Munro

Harvard University

Cambridge, Maes

H. E. M.
WJPL

THE N. W. HARRIS LECTURES
FOR 1908

$L. Wi. ^arrte Hectares

were founded in 1906 through the generosity of Mr.
Norman Wait Harris of Chicago, and are to be given
annually. The purpose of the lecture foundation is,
as expressed by the donor, "to stimulate scientific
research of the highest type and to bring the results
of such research before the students and friends of
Northwestern University, and through them to the
world. By the term ' scientific research ' is meant
scholarly investigation into any department of human
thought or effort without limitation to research in the
so-called natural sciences, but with a desire that such
investigation should be extended to cover the whole
field of human knowledge."

UNIVERSITY
ADMINISTRATION

BY

CHARLES W. ELIOT

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

1908

COPYRIGHT, ICJOS, BY CHARLES W. ELIOT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published November, iqdS

CONTENTS

I. UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES 1

II. AN INSPECTING AND CONSENTING BODY

— ALUMNI INFLUENCE 44

IH. THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY 81

IV. THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 131

V. METHODS OF INSTRUCTION 174

VI. SOCIAL ORGANIZATION — THE PRESIDENT

— GENERAL ADMINISTRATION 214

INDEX 255

UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION

UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

THE principal governing board of an Ameri-
can university is most commonly called the
trustees or the regents. In endowed institu-
tions the members of the board usually serve
for life ; but in State and city institutions they
ordinarily serve for a limited term of years,
being reeligible term after term. The number
of members in such boards varies very much,
.being sometimes as small as seven or nine,
and often as large as twenty to forty, and
even larger. The endowed institutions have a
decided advantage over the institutions sup-
ported by taxation, in that they can select
comparatively young men as trustees, and get
from them a long service; and they are also
free, as regards the choice of trustees, from
the political, commercial, or class influences

2 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

which sometimes control the choice of trus-
tees or regents in institutions maintained from
public revenues. In the American State and
city universities and colleges the objectionable
political influences have diminished with time ;
but class influences such as that exerted by
farmers as a class, or trade-unionists as a class,
are still apt to prove potent.

The kind of man needed in the governing
board of a university is the highly educated,
public-spirited, business or professional man,
who takes a strong interest in educational and
social problems, and believes in the higher
education as the source of enlightenment and
progress for all stages of education, and for
all the industrial and social interests of the
community. He should also be a man who has
been successful in his own calling, and com-
mands the confidence of all who know him.
The faculty he will most need is good judg-
ment; for he will often be called upon to de-
cide on matters which lie beyond the scope of
his own experience, and about which he must,
therefore, get his facts through others, and

SEVEN THE BEST NUMBER 3

his opinions through a process of comparison
and judicious shifting.

The best number of members for a univer-
sity's principal governing board is seven; be-
cause that number of men can sit round a small
table, talk with each other informally without
waste of words or any display or pretence,
provide an adequate diversity of points of view
and modes of dealing with the subject in hand,
and yet be prompt and efficient in the despatch
of business. In a board of seven the different
professions and callings can be sufficiently
represented.

In State institutions it has been the practice
to put into the governing board of the State
university a considerable number of ex-officio
members ; as, for instance, the Governor, the
Chief Justice, and the Secretary of the State
Board of Agriculture, — following in this re-
spect the early example of Harvard College,
whose first governing board, established in
1642, contained the Governor and Deputy
Governor, the Magistrates of the Jurisdiction,
together with the teaching elders of the six

4 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

next adjoining towns. In an infant colony or
state this method is a natural one ; but in an
adult community, ex-officio members are ordi-
narily undesirable, because they are inevitably
men fully occupied with other affairs, who
were selected for skill in those other affairs,
and not because of their fitness to govern
a university. If, however, the trustees are a
numerous board, meeting but seldom, and in-
trusting the real work to a few selected mem-
bers, the ex-officio members may be as good
figure-heads as the community can supply.

It might be supposed that the ordinary life-
service on boards of trustees of endowed insti-
tutions would result in boards composed of
old men; but this undesirable result will not
occur i£ pains be taken to fill each successive
vacancy in the board from a generation younger
than that to which most of the surviving
members belong. There is a natural tendency
in any such cooptative board to fill a vacancy
by electing some contemporary of the remain-
ing members; but this tendency should inva-
riably be resisted.

LENGTH OF SERVICE 5

The average length of service of members
of such boards is by no means so long as is
usually supposed. A few men serve for long
terms; a few others serve for short terms;
but the main body of members, during fifty
or a hundred years, will have a length of
service which can fairly be called moderate.
Thus between 1792 and 1893 thirty-seven
men served as Fellows in Harvard's principal
governing board, called the President and
Fellows of Harvard College; and the aver-
age term of service of these thirty-seven men
was eleven and seven-tenths years. It should
be said, however, first, that to serve on this
board has always been considered a high
honor in Massachusetts; and secondly, that
the service is decidedly exacting, claiming the
entire attention of the members during about
four morning hours once a fortnight, except
during the summer vacation, and entailing a
variety of work on committees in addition.

When a board of trustees is large, and the
residences of its members are scattered over
a wide area, the meetings of the board are sure

6 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

to be infrequent, and its business has to be
delegated to an executive or prudential com-
mittee. The board itself then becomes a sort
of confirming or consenting board, and in some
cases a court of appeal, its real work from
week to week being done by a small commit-
tee which can easily come together for consul-
tation and action. Any board for which a
membership of national range is desired will
turn out to be of this nature, as, for example,
the regents of the Smithsonian Institution and
the trustees of the Carnegie Foundation. It
is a curious and interesting fact that the uni-
versity with the most fortunate organization
in the country is the oldest university, its
principal governing board, the President and
Fellows of Harvard College, consisting of
seven men, who still act under the Charter
of 1650, in which no line or word has ever
been changed.

The functions of the board of trustees or
regents of an American university are of fun-
damental importance. They relate to the man-

FUNCTIONS OF TRUSTEES 7

agement of the property both "real and per-
sonal ; to the distribution of the annual income
of the university among the different depart-
ments of instruction and research ; to the ap-
pointment of all officers and teachers in the
university ; to salaries and retiring allowances ;
and to the enactment of the rules or statutes
under which the regular work of the univer-
sity proceeds. The board also passes finally on
all the educational policies of the university ;
but in this function it ordinarily follows the
advice of the university faculties, or of com-
mittees to which faculties have delegated their
authority on certain subjects.

In the endowed institutions the care of the
property of the university takes much of the
time of the trustees. A salaried treasurer is
responsible for all administrative details, and
for the suggestion of new investments and
changes of investments. He needs the aid of
a small finance committee; and consequently,
in the choice of trustees, attention should be
given to providing the treasurer with a small
number of competent and easily accessible

8 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

advisers. Experienced boards follow a few
plain rules with regard to their investments.
The first rule is to use an adequate variety of
sound investments, such as mortgages, busi-
ness notes, — especially notes of corporations,
— railroad stocks and bonds, bonds of public-
utilities companies, — such as street railways,
telegraph and telephone companies, and light,
heat, and power companies, — real estate trust
stocks, and real estate. Some endowed uni-
versities have profited greatly by real estate
investments in rapidly growing towns and
cities; but others have found urban real estate
investments to be not only troublesome but
insecure, and fluctuating as to the amount of
their income. The insecurity results from the
sudden and unforeseen migrations of popula-
tion and trades which have occurred in many
American cities. As to agricultural holdings,
they are in most communities too insecure for
university investments, as English Cambridge
and Oxford learnt to their dismay in the last
third of the nineteenth century. Under the
tax laws of some States, mortgages, which

UNIVERSITY INVESTMENTS 9

were formerly a favorite form of investment
for universities, as for other trusts, have ceased
to be desirable. A conservative board inevit-
ably tends to make local investments, because
local investments can be more easily investi-
gated at the beginning, and watched as the
years go by. Nevertheless, a prudent board of
university trustees will endeavor to keep the
range of its investments wide; so that the
university may not suffer deeply when some
one section of the country becomes unpros-
perous, or some one industry ceases to be
profitable. Railroad stocks and bonds have
been favorite university investments of late
years, partly on account of their convenience
and easy negotiability, but partly also because
their ultimate security rests on the success of
an immense variety of industries and pro-
ductive activities all over the country. It is a
striking fact that university investments in
our days, with the exception of real estate
and mortgages, are made chiefly in forms of
property which had no existence seventy years
ago.

10 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

University trustees naturally prefer that
funds given them for specific objects should
not be invested in specified securities, but
should be merged with the general invest-
ments of the institution, the average income
on the general investments being credited to
each separate fund and applied to its specific
object. In this way the mass of the general
investments insures the capital of each fund
and the perpetual accomplishment of its spe-
cific object. The benefactor who does not pre-
fer this method has either a speculative turn
as regards investments, or a remarkable confi-
dence in his own judgment concerning to-day's
investments, combined with a willingness to
trust for the perpetuity of his endowment
to the sagacity the trustees will exhibit from
generation to generation in reinvesting his
fund. Since, however, benefactors appear from
time to time who prefer the chances of higher
income for their funds and of profits on
changes of the funds' securities to a more
moderate but assured income, the trustees
must be prepared to accept gifts which are

UNIVERSITY EXPENDITURE 11

to be specially invested. The trustees may
also have reasons of their own for temporarily
holding a gift in the particular securities in
which it was turned over to them. The se-
curities may not be salable at the moment on
advantageous terms, and yet be good enough
to hold for the object of the gift.

Next to the exercise of good judgment in
making sound investments of the university
property, comes the discretion of the trustees
in expending the university income. There
are certain fundamental questions concerning
university expenditure which the trustees, or
some committee acting for the trustees, must
settle. What proportion of the university
income shall be devoted to salaries, and
what proportion to expenses, — such as light,
heat, cleaning, maintenance of buildings, ser-
vices and wages, apparatus, and the care of
grounds? The large part of a university's
income which must go to other objects than
salaries is often a disagreeable surprise for
inexperienced trustees. Of late years this pro-
portion devoted to general expenses has been

12 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

increasing, on account of the increased pro-
vision of apparatus and other supplies, and
the rising cost of the maintenance of build-
ings and of the mechanical equipment. The
establishment of a wise scale of salaries is
another very important duty of the board of
trustees. Since the physical surroundings and
social conditions of the American universities
differ greatly, widely different scales of sala-
ries exist in them, and these differences seem
likely to be permanent. Each institution,
therefore, must study out for itself that scale
of salaries which best suits its special needs
and circumstances, and this study and the
responsibility for ultimate action belong to
the board of trustees.

The general features of a good scale of
salaries are as follows: The salary of an an-
nual appointee at the start should be low, —
about the amount needed by a young unmar-
ried man for comfortable support in the uni-
versity's city or village. When, after a few
years, this young man receives an appoint-
ment without limit of time, a somewhat higher

THE SCALE OF SALARIES 13

salary should be given him, with a small ad-
vance each year for, say, three years. If this
instructor so commends himself that the uni-
versity desires his further service, he should
receive, as assistant professor, a salary which
will enable him to support a wife and two or
three children comfortably, but without lux-
ury or costly pleasures. It is well to have the
appointment of assistant professor given for a
fixed term of years, as, for example, five. If,
at the end of his first term as assistant pro-
fessor, a second appointment with the same
title be given, a moderate advance of salary
should accompany the second appointment.
By the time the end of a second term as assist-
ant professor is reached, the candidate for
further employment in the university will be
approaching forty years of age, and is ready
for a full professorship. On promotion to this
life-office, another advance of salary should
be given, so that the salary of the full pro-
fessor may easily be four times the sum which
the young man received at his first annual
appointment. The salary of a full professor

14 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

should then rise by moderate steps — say once
in five years — until the maximum is reached,
the maximum being ordinarily attained be-
tween fifty and fifty-five years of age, unless
in the cases of men who demonstrate their
fitness for a professorship earlier in life, and
have the chance to fill some vacancy or new
post. This scale of salaries is arranged for
persons who begin at the bottom, and rise
through all the stages to the top of university
employ. When men of ability, proved else-
where, are taken into the university's service,
a position on the scale must be assigned to
them by the trustees, who will naturally be
guided by the extent of their experience and
services elsewhere, their desirableness, and
the inducements other than salary which are
likely to influence them. To fix this scale of
salaries, and to modify it from time to time,
according to changing social conditions, and
the general scale of living in the community
which surrounds the university, is one of the
most important duties of trustees, and one of
the most difficult.

ADMINISTRATIVE SALARIES — PENSIONS 15

In a large university there will always be
.numerous administrative officers besides the
teachers. The salaries of these administrative
officers can be, for the most part, assimilated
according to their age and academic stand-
ing to those of teachers ; but in general the
administrative posts in a university are less
attractive than the teaching posts, because
they do not offer the satisfaction of literary
or scientific attainment, the long, uninter-
rupted vacations which teachers enjoy, or the
pleasure of intimate, helpful intercourse with
a stream of young men of high intellectual
ambition. Accordingly, salaries for able and
altruistic young men ought to be somewhat
higher in administrative posts than they are
for men of corresponding age and merit in
teaching posts.

A prudent and far-seeing board of trustees
will make sure that a system of retiring
allowances or pensions is provided for all the
teachers and administrative officers that they
employ. This provision is needed to attract
the right sort of man to university work, to

16 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

make promotion more rapid than it would
otherwise be, and to keep the university staff
fresh and efficient. It is not an extravagant
or luxurious provision, but a true economy.
So far as the endowed universities are con-
cerned, the Carnegie Foundation has in large
measure relieved trustees of this function.

In the endowed institutions which depend in
part on tuition-fees, the trustees have a diffi-
cult function in determining what tuition-fees
may safely be charged, without reducing the
number of students, or impairing their quality
by excluding the able and ambitious sons of
families whose income is small. Experience
has taught that well-conducted universities,
in which a moderate number of scholarships
and fellowships are accessible to promising
young men, and a variety of remunerative
employments can be offered to students for a
part of their time, can be successfully main-
tained, and, indeed, rapidly enlarged, although
they charge considerable tuition-fees, and are
all the time in competition with universi-
ties which charge nothing, or but little, for

INCREASING UNIVERSITY RESOURCES 17

tuition. To accomplish this end, however,
requires prudence and good judgment on the
part of the trustees, together with a broad
outlook on the general conditions of Ameri-
can society.

Every university board of trustees has to
study carefully the means of enlarging the
resources of the university. An endowed uni-
versity needs a stream of new gifts, in order
to enable it to maintain its old departments,
and provide the new ones which the social
and industrial changes in the community at
large make desirable, or, indeed, indispen-
sable. The most effectual means of procuring
new gifts is to demonstrate that all previous
gifts have been used with consideration for
the givers' wishes, with safety as regards the
permanence of the trusts, and with discretion
as regards their steady usefulness. The win-
ning of new endowments depends on wide-
spread confidence in the wisdom and success
with which the trustees have used their exist-
ing endowments. To this end any experienced
and successful board of trustees will make the

18 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

most complete publication possible of their
annual accounts and of the state of their pro-
perty. They will also secure in some way the
public announcement of the pressing needs
of the university in the immediate future.

In a State university the function of the
board of trustees or regents in this respect is
similar to, but not identical with, that in an
endowed. There is the same need of the ut-
most publicity with regard to all the financial
doings of the board and the condition of the
property ; but their attention needs to be di-
rected chiefly to convincing the people of the
State, and particularly the members of the le-
gislature, first, of the usefulness of their uni-
versity; secondly, of its merits and defects
in comparison with the universities of other
States ; and thirdly, of its urgent needs. As in
the case of the endowed institutions, the trus-
tees or regents will need to use all means of
spreading among educated people throughout
the State a knowledge, not only of the actual
condition of the university, but of its potency
and promise. If the industries of the State are

INCREASING UNIVERSITY RESOURCES 19

developed in any particular direction, as, for
example, towards mining, or agriculture, or
forestry, or manufacturing, the university trus-
tees will naturally endeavor to serve conspicu-
ously the special industry of the State; be-
cause a popular interest in the university thus
aroused can be depended on to promote en-
largements in many other directions. The ex-
perience of such universities as those of Michi-
gan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri,
Kansas, and California, illustrates amply all
phases of this important function of university
trustees in increasing university resources.

It is the duty of the trustees of a college or
university to promote in every possible way
the interests of the municipality in which the
institution is situated. As a rule, whatever
helps the college or university will help the
municipality, and whatever improves the muni-
cipality as a place of residence will help the
college or university. It has been abundantly
proved that the presence of exempted institu-
tions in any municipality is a clear advantage
to that municipality, especially if the institu-

20 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

tions maintain open grounds and erect inter-
esting buildings. Indeed, exempted areas, if
they possess natural or artificial beauty, and
are kept in good order, are always a pecuniary
advantage to a municipality, whether they
belong to the town or city, or to exempted in-
stitutions within its limits. Since, however,
it is the duty of university trustees to see to it
that safe and convenient lodgings are acces-
sible to their students, and that wholesome
food can be obtained at low prices, it is pos-
sible for trustees, who attend to their duties
in these respects, to interfere somewhat with
the business of those residents of the muni-
cipality who let rooms to students, or feed
them. University trustees may reasonably re-
gard it as their duty also to see to it that all
the supplies which students need, such as
books, stationery, clothing, and furniture, are
brought within the reach of students at moder-
ate prices through the agency of a cooperative
society ; and if such a society be established
with the assistance of the trustees, it will
interfere somewhat with the business of local

LODGINGS, FOOD, AND SUPPLIES 21

dealers in such supplies. A due regard to the
•welfare of the students and the institution
makes it impossible for careful and judicious
trustees to leave the prices of the things which
all students — rich and poor alike — must buy
to be determined by competition between
private persons only, particularly at an insti-
tution at which the number of students is
increasing with some rapidity. Unless a uni-
versity be willing to take its students only
from well-to-do families, it must see to it that
lodgings, food, fuel, and indispensable sup-
plies are accessible to students at moderate
prices. Moreover, halls of chambers and large
dining-halls increase not only the enjoyments
of student-life, but also its ethical and demo-
cratic influences. To overcome this inevitable
difficulty in its relations to the municipality
in which it is situated, a college or university
should be careful to offer facilities and grati-
fications to the residents of the place, such as
interesting lectures open to the public, and
museums of art, history, and archaeology, to
keep the view of its grounds open from the

22 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

outside, and to give the use of its halls and
grounds to the town or city on festival occa-
sions, A college or university may also reason-
ably contribute to the construction of good
roads on the borders of its estate, and of any
sewers of which it makes large use.

It is an imperative duty of university trus-
tees to take all possible measures for pro-
moting the health and bodily vigor of the
students under their charge. These measures
include a safe water-supply, adequate warmth
and ventilation in university buildings, good
play-grounds and other means of exercise, an
infirmary or hospital for the treatment of in-
juries and of contagious and non-contagious
diseases, and a system of medical inspection
and free medical examination for students. It
is nowadays quite possible, through foresight
and adequate expenditure for the means of
immediate isolation and treatment, to reduce
very much the chance of epidemics, even
among young men who live together in such
intimate contact as obtains at a college or uni-
versity. It is for the board of trustees to de-

UNIVERSITY GROUNDS AND BUILDINGS 23

vise and provide all such means of combating
disease. It is for them to adopt all measures
•which preventive medicine has proved to be
useful, and thereby reduce to lowest terms not
only the death rate among students, but also
the losses of study-time through sickness.

A difficult function for university trustees
is the provident care of the university estate,
including the selection of designs for build-
ings, the determination of the grouping of
buildings, the laying-out and decoration of
the university's occupied grounds, and the
provision of an amount of land sufficient for
future needs. To secure by gift or purchase
adequate space for the buildings of the pre-
sent and in good part for those of the future
is a primary duty. The beauty of university
buildings, of their site, and of the grounds
about them, makes an important part of its
teaching. On this account urban universities
whose buildings are situated in compactly
built streets can never exert on their students
all the beneficial influences which suburban
or rural universities can exert. Every large

24 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

university should own and maintain in good
order decorated open spaces about its build-
ings, interior quadrangles between groups of
buildings, gardens, and groves. Shabbiness
and untidiness should never be permitted on
university grounds. If the site provides wide
prospects or beautiful vistas, these landscape
beauties should be carefully utilized, and pre-
served from impairment by the growing up
of trees, or the planting of buildings across
the lines of view. In order to discharge well
this function of university trustees, the board
should obtain the best professional advice
which the country affords, and is never justi-
fied in employing for local or political reasons,
or in deference to the wishes of benefactors,
any advisers about the designs of buildings,
their sites, and the lay-out of grounds, who
are not of the first class. In accepting the
gift of a building, prudent trustees will always
make the condition that the design and site
of the building shall be acceptable to the ex-
pert advisers of the board. Since architecture
and landscape architecture have now become

BEAUTY OF GROUNDS AND BUILDINGS 25

well-recognized professions for highly trained
men in the United States, it has become
inexcusable in university trustees to erect
buildings without the most careful possible
consideration of their designs and of the re-
lation of each building to its neighbors, or to
plant buildings about their grounds without
reference to the future buildings which the
university is sure to need.

The poverty in which almost all American
universities have grown up has compelled
their trustees to accept any provision for the
needs of the moment, and to use their limited
means in the most economical way for present
purposes without regard to the needs of the
future. They have, therefore, too much neg-
lected the study of order and beauty in the lay-
out of university grounds, and have incurred
great losses through the erection of build-
ings which were not fireproof. They needed
spacious shelters so urgently, that they ran
the risk of building large combustible struc-
tures instead of smaller fireproof ones. These
conditions of poverty are now passing away,

26 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

and it is emphatically the duty of university
trustees to erect buildings, lay out their open
grounds, and plant them, with reference to
the sure centuries of affectionate use. Uni-
versity grounds and buildings can now be ar-
ranged to last, which seems to be more than
can be said for any other buildings in the
United States, with the possible exception of
some government buildings and some country
churches. It may not be very important to
study carefully the design of a house, factory,
shop, office-building, or church, which is likely
to be burnt, torn down, or converted to new
uses within seventy years; but grounds and
buildings which really have a chance to prove
permanent ought to be studied in the most
careful manner possible. Because of the im-
portance of this function of university trustees,
it is highly desirable, whenever the conditions
permit, that trustees should be selected who
feel a real affection for the university which
they are to govern, and for its surroundings.
Strangers will, as a rule, not make so good
trustees as children of the house.

PRUDENCE IN ACCEPTING GIFTS 27

The trustees of an endowed university have
a somewhat difficult duty in regard to the
acceptance of gifts. There are gifts which it
is highly inexpedient to accept, — as, for in-
stance, a gift for a specified object which is
not of a surely durable nature, and yet comes
without discretion for the trustees as to other
applications of the gift when its specified use
shall be no longer possible, or a gift which
would impair religious toleration or academic
freedom, or a gift which cannot be utilized with-
out bringing new charges on the university it-
self. The trustees must endeavor to divert bene-
factors away from any such gifts as these and
towards safe objects, or must procure modifica-
tions of the terms of proposed gifts, so that these
dangers may be avoided. Thus a small building
with an adequate endowment for its running
expenses and maintenance will generally be
a more acceptable gift than a larger build-
ing without endowment. Living benefactors
are generally willing to modify terms of gift
in accordance with well-considered university
policies which have been avowed and declared,

28 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

and have served as guides in other instances.
Indeed, many benefactors are grateful for ad-
vice which, if acted on by them, will tend to
make their benefactions more useful and more
durable. In order to maintain public respect
for the endowment method, it is highly de-
sirable that university trustees exercise a sound
discretion as to the terms of proposed gifts.
Thus far there have been very few instances
in the United States of objectionable endow-
ments, — objectionable because pauperizing,
illiberal, or useless; and in consequence the
endowment method, far from being distrusted
by the American public, is looked upon with
high favor, as a beneficent application of pri-
vate resources to public uses. It is for univer-
sity trustees, by the exercise of good judgment
in the acceptance of endowments, to maintain
and extend the public's appreciation of their
value.

The trustees of a State university need much
wisdom and foresight in suggesting to the
legislature which appropriates money for the
university the specific objects of appropria-

SPENDING ALL AVAILABLE INCOME 29

tion. The legislature itself cannot be expected
to discern and contrive the wisest appropria-
tions for the university, and therefore should
receive from the trustees advice based on a
thorough knowledge of the work already done
by the university, and a clear anticipation of
the new work it ought to do, in order to de-
velop the intellectual resources and powers of
the entire population. In order to perform
this function well, they will need the best
advice which presidents, deans, faculties, and
faculty committees can give them ; but they
must finally take action on their own best
judgment concerning the needs of the univer-
sity and the State.

. A university should not be carried on, like
a business corporation, with any policy of lay-
ing up undivided profits, or of setting aside
unused income for emergencies or future
needs. On the contrary, it should endeavor
to expend all its available income. While it
should never live beyond its means, it has no
call to accumulate for the benefit of future
generations. For enlargements, new equip-

30 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

ments, and the occupation of new fields of
usefulness, it should rely on new endowments
or new annual receipts; or, if it be a State
university, on new appropriations. In endeav-
oring to use all its proper income, it may
sometimes incur a deficit ; but it should forth-
with take measures to prevent the recurrence
of such a deficit, since habitual deficits, how-
ever incurred, must be charged either to past
endowments which ought to be held unim-
paired, or to future resources which are only
hoped for. Each of these methods is objec-
tionable in itself, and each sets a bad example
to educational, charitable, and religious insti-
tutions.

From the board of trustees issue the stat-
utes which determine tenures of office in the
university, the constitution and powers of the
faculties and other academic bodies, the defi-
nitions of the duties of the president, the
deans, and other administrative officers, the
division of the academic year into term-time
and vacation, and the general rules under
which libraries and scientific collections are

STATUTES AND STANDING VOTES 31

to be used. The enactment of the statutes
which keep in tolerably stable form all these
definitions and regulations is a weighty part
of the duty of the trustees. It is by means of
statutes and standing votes that the trustees
formally delegate a large part of their powers
of management and control to various aca-
demic bodies and officers ; but in many insti-
tutions custom or usage, their own or imitated,
has much to do with the distribution of powers
among the different academic bodies. It is
the common custom for trustees to consign to
faculties the determination of the require-
ments for admission and for the several de-
grees, of the methods and limits of instruc-
tion, and of the daily routine of duty for
students and teachers, the administration of
discipline, and the immediate supervision of
the conditions of the academic life. Trustees
should never interfere with matters once con-
signed to a faculty by statute or custom,
unless in the way of inquiry or informal sug-
gestion, or exercise any powers delegated to
a faculty. Such interference will impair very

32 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

injuriously a faculty's sense of responsibility
and its authority. Trustees should also be
careful not to impair the due effect of official
action on the part of a faculty by listening
to the private representations of individual
members of the faculty who do not agree with
the action of the majority. In grave cases the
opinion of a faculty minority may properly be
presented officially to the trustees.

The statute which defines the tenures of
office throughout the university is of funda-
mental importance; for it is practically the
expression of a contract between the univer-
sity and its teachers and administrators. This
contract ought to provide for life-tenures
after adequate periods of probation. Life-
tenures in a permanent service are by far the
most economical and effective ; but they are
impossible in a service which must always be
kept in a high state of efficiency, unless the
incumbents have been so well proved, that
nothing but bodily disability, or some similar
calamity, can interfere with their usefulness,
and also unless a pension system provides for

TERM-TIME AND VACATION 33

the humane retirement of incumbents whose
efficiency is impaired.

The determination of the limits of term-
time and vacation by statute necessarily be-
longs to the trustees in a university ; because
all the teachers and other officers of the uni-
versity have a direct personal interest — not
necessarily pecuniary — in the amount of vaca-
tion. The trustees, in making the division of
the year, must consider not only the interest
of the teachers, but that of the students, and
the interests of these two parties are some-
what divided. Some of the richer students
want short terms for study and long vacations
for purposes of pleasure and travel; while
many of the poorer students also want long
vacations for the purpose of earning money in
outside occupations. On the other hand, some
of the richer sort are entirely ready to occupy
a large portion of the summer vacation with
reading and study ; and some of the poorer
students find it easier to earn money in term-
time than in vacation, because they can then
teach other students, and obtain a variety of

34 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

employments at the seat of the university which
are not obtainable during the summer vacation.
In a country like Scotland, where many sons
of poor families resort to the universities, the
amount of term-time during the year will natu-
rally be made short, in order that the student
may have at least half the year to earn the
money which he spends at the university dur-
ing the other half. In universities like the
English Oxford and Cambridge, on the other
hand, which are chiefly resorted to by the sons
of well-to-do families, a quite different motive
may determine short periods of residence at
the university in each academic year, and long
vacations and recesses. Athletic and social
distractions from study are urgent during resi-
dence, and are the main objects of unambi-
tious or sportive youth ; while serious students
find the long vacation more available for study
than the short terms spent in residence. Hence
in England short terms and long vacations.
The American universities in general require
residence for something less than thirty-seven
weeks out of the year, a period of residence

CHANGES IN UNIVERSITY VACATIONS 35

'decidedly longer than that of the European
universities in general. During the nineteenth
century the arrangement of terms and vaca-
tions in the American universities underwent
many changes, because of changes in the
habits of the families from which their stu-
dents were derived, and in the customs of the
trades and professions. Changes in the mode
of conducting country elementary schools also
brought about changes in college vacations.
Thus, fifty years ago undergraduates in the
American colleges left college in large num-
bers about Thanksgiving to teach country
schools during three months of winter ; and
one of the long vacations of the year at the
colleges was made to fall within this period.
With the substitution of women teachers for
men in the country schools, this practice
among collegians has disappeared, and with it
has gone the long vacation in winter.

University trustees, in considering the
division of the academic year into term-time
and vacation, have also to consider the value
of a long vacation for the teachers of a uni-

36 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

versity, and especially for those teachers who*
wish to give a large portion of their time to
literary or scientific labors which lie outside
of their teaching, though contributory to it.
The long summer vacation is for many univer-
sity officers the most laborious and productive
season of the whole year, and trustees who
value this sort of activity on the part of the
university's officers will be slow to interfere
with that vacation, even though they recog-
nize that in the interest of the majority of the
students a shorter vacation would be better.

The general rules under which libraries
and scientific collections are to be used are
subjects for careful consideration on the part
of university trustees. On the one hand these
expensive collections can have but one justifi-
cation, namely, that they are constantly and
effectively used ; on the other hand, they need
to be preserved in good condition for the
benefit of future generations of students. The
problem of the trustees is to lay down rules
which will provide a safe middle way between
use which tends towards destruction and se-

LIBRARIES AND COLLECTIONS 37

curity which is inconsistent with use. The
tendency at the present time among trustees
is to divide the collections into two parts, one
part to be preserved at the risk of not being
so serviceable to the present generation as it
might be, the other to be made as serviceable
as possible to the present generation, even at
the risk of destruction.

An experienced board of university trus-
tees will always maintain a considerate and
even deferential attitude towards the experts
whom they employ as regular teachers, occa-
sional lecturers, and permanent administrators.
They stand to these experts in an entirely
different relation from that in which a busi-
ness board of directors stands towards its
employees. In the first place, the trustees are
not themselves expert in any branch of the
university teaching, and they are not experts
in the policy or discipline of a university.
They are completely dependent for the com-
petent performance of the university's main
work on the attainments and the good-will of
the university teachers. Moreover, the supply

38 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

of competent teachers and investigators for
the service of universities is ordinarily scanty
and irregular ; so that university trustees, who
seek all possible aids, often fail to find men
well fitted to undertake the more difficult
functions of university teachers. On this ac-
count the trustees may be quite unable to
carry out well-made plans, and be forced to
take up with inferior or modified designs.
Again, the advanced teaching of a university
cannot be obtained on a telegraphic order.
It must often be long prepared, through years
of anticipatory selection, watching, and wait-
ing. It is often impossible for trustees to pro-
cure in the market the human article they
need, or think they need. From this state of
things it results that competent trustees, who
are responsible for the university and under-
stand their own situation, treat the scholars
who compose the university's staff with great
consideration, and try to secure for them the
respect of the entire community.

Experience in the management of a farm,
a shop, a railroad, a factory, or a bank may

A TRUE UNIVERSITY ORGANIZATION 39

be of some use to the business man called to
the function of a university trustee ; but many
of the things he has learnt to value in his
business experience he will have to discard
absolutely in contributing to the management
of a university, because they are inapplicable.
Thus, a pure business man generally thinks
that he can buy such service as he needs, if
he is willing to pay its price; and in this view
he is ordinarily right. That conception, how-
ever, has but a smah" place in the management
of a university; for money cannot buy the
best of the services that are really needed.
Money is not the appropriate reward for the
quick sympathy, genuine good-will, patience,
and comprehensive learning which go to the
making of a first-rate university teacher.

The trustees of the American universities
have a difficult problem to solve in the near
future in creating a definite university or-
ganization, and bringing the new organiza-
tion into fitting relations with the secondary
schools on the one hand and the professions
on the other. The American universities

40 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

have grown in a casual, agglutinating way,
without any definite plan or framework to
tie together the different departments which
were successively created. They have ordina-
rily started with the somewhat definite organi-
zation called a college, and around this college
have grown up an undergraduate department
of applied science including agriculture and
engineering, and so-called professional schools
of law, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, finance
or commerce, and, in a few cases, divinity.
The standard of admission to the professional
schools has usually heen much lower than
the standard of admission to the college; and
indeed in many universities there have been
no requirements at all for admission to the
professional schools; so that anybody could
enter them, with or without any preparatory
education. Their students were therefore very
heterogeneous in quality, and were, as a rule,
looked down upon by the college students who
were candidates for the degree of Bachelor
of Arts. Now a group of detached, unrelated
schools is not a university; and it is for the

GRADUATE PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS 41

trustees of the larger American institutions of
the higher education to convert these groups
of schools into true universities. As a matter
of history, the first steps towards this reform
were taken by instituting courses of instruc-
tion for the higher degrees in arts, such as
the Master's degree and the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy, admission to this advanced in-
struction being conditioned on the possession
of a Bachelor's degree.

The graduate schools of arts and sciences,
most of which have been established during
the past thirty-five years, were organized in
this way, and the success and high usefulness
of these graduate schools indicated that the
method they had used could be applied to
other professional departments. All the pro-
fessional schools of a university ought to re-
quire the preliminary degree of Bachelor of
Arts, or of Science, for admission ; and only
when this requirement has been successfully
enforced will the unorganized group of sepa-
rate departments which now passes for a uni-
versity in the United States be really converted

42 UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES

into a true university. This conversion, how-
ever, presents many difficulties, among which
not the least is the pecuniary difficulty. It is,
therefore, a difficult piece of work for the
trustees of a university to undertake ; and to
accomplish it well will task both their far-
sightedness and their judgment.

Much has been written about the distinc-
tion between a college and a university. It is
no wonder that public opinion has been at
a loss on that subject, since it has had no
correct standard of university organization.
When the American university is properly
organized, it will become clear to the public
that a college is a place of training for the
first degree in arts or science obtainable at
about twenty-one years of age, and that a
university is a place for older students who
already possess the preliminary degree in arts
or science, and are studying for higher de-
grees in large variety. Of course a university
may or may not carry on also a college. This
change of organization should be accompanied
by a change in the common ideal of the culti-

AN HONORABLE SERVICE 43

vated man, and of cultivation itself. The pro-
fessional students in a university under the
new regime will be, on the average, decidedly
the superiors in age and cultivation of the
college students; because they will be older
men, who have already received the college
training; and whatever may be the subjects
of their advanced studies, they will all be re-
cognized as cultivated men, — and cultivated
through their professional studies quite as
much as through their college studies. The
bread-and-butter motive should not prevail in
a university's professional school to any greater
extent than it should prevail in a college. In
both departments it is reasonable for the indi-
vidual student to keep in view the means of
by and by earning a livelihood ; but in both
alike the dominant motive should be the de-
sire to be serviceable, and to be well equipped
to give, and to enjoy giving, effective service.
It is obvious from this description of the
functions and responsibilities of university
trustees that service on such boards is in high
degree interesting, useful, and honorable.

II

AN INSPECTING AND CONSENTING
BODY — ALUMNI INFLUENCE

THE trustees of an American college or uni-
versity, whether the institution be endowed or
tax-supported, are as a rule "one body corpo-
rate and politic in deed, action, and name," to
use the language of the charter of Dartmouth
College given in 1769. This one body holds
all the property of the institution, controls its
expenditures and its policies, and makes all
its laws. Even boards of directors for busi-
ness corporations are generally less independ-
ent and absolute than this educational board.
The number of trustees is very various. Thus
at Dartmouth College the trustees must be
twelve and no more. The original corporators
of Brown University numbered forty-seven per-
sons; but the Corporation consisted of two
branches, " to wit : that of the Trustees and that
of the Fellowship, with distinct, separate, and

A SINGLE GOVERNING BOARD 45

respective powers," the number of the Trus-
tees being thirty-six, and that of the Fellows
twelve, inclusive of the President, who must
always be a Fellow. The charter of the Col-
legiate School of Connecticut, now called Yale
University, given in October, 1701, created a
body of "Trustees, Partners, or Undertakers
[originally ten ministers], together with such
others as they shall associate to themselves,
not exceeding the number of eleven, or at any
time being less than seven." In 1792 the Gov-
ernor, Lieutenant-Governor, and six Senior
Assistants in the Council were made by virtue
of their offices Trustees, or Fellows, of said
College; in 1819 six Senior Senators were
substituted for the six Senior Assistants; and
in 1872 six persons elected by the graduates
of Yale College were substituted for the six
Senators. The constitution of Michigan pro-
vides for the election by the people of eight
Regents of the University, elected two at a
time every other year, so that each Regent
serves eight years. The government of the
University of Wisconsin is vested "in a

46 AN INSPECTING AND CONSENTING BODY

Board of Regents to consist of one member
from each congressional district, and two from
the State at large, at least one of whom shall
be a woman, to be appointed by the Gov-
ernor." In addition, the State Superintendent
of Instruction and the President of the Uni-
versity are ex-officio members of the board.
The term of office of the appointed Regents is
three years. The government of the Univer-
sity of California is vested in an incorporated
board called " The Regents of the University
of California." This board consists of twenty-
two members, six ex-officio, eight appointed
by the Governor with the consent of the Senate,
one every other year for a term of sixteen
years, and eight chosen by the official and ap-
pointed members who also hold office for the
term of sixteen years, one member going out at
the end of each successive two years. It will be
noticed that the term of service in this board
is long, and that the renewal of membership
is gradual. Since ex-officio members are rarely
able to give much time or thought to such a
trust, the control of the university may fairly

CLOSE COLLEGE CORPORATIONS 47

be said to be in the hands of sixteen persons,
or a majority thereof. This board is provided
by Statute (Chap. CCXLIV, Sect. 16) with
an unusual sort of secretary, whose extensive
duties and large qualifications are minutely
prescribed. Under this statute the Secretary of
the Regents might easily become the most im-
portant official connected with the university.

The board of trustees of many endowed
institutions fills its own vacancies, which is
never the case in State-supported institutions.
Such boards are close corporations indeed. In
some denominational colleges and universities
the trustees, or a majority of them, are selected
or appointed by denominational authorities.
Thus, in institutions under the control of the
Methodist denomination, a majority of the
trustees is often chosen by a group of Meth-
odist Conferences.

However selected, chosen, or appointed, the
members of the board of trustees of an Ameri-
can college or university ordinarily constitute
a single governing board which is not respon-
sible to any affiliated or independent board,

48 AN INSPECTING AND CONSENTING BODY

and is not obliged to procure the concurrence
or consent of any other body. They therefore
need the steady influence of a larger inspect-
ing and criticising body with some concurrent
powers, in order that they may escape the
dangers of perpetual corporations subject to
no external control. When the trustees are
somewhat numerous and meet but rarely, be-
cause their residences are widely separated,
the main body may exercise in an imperfect
•way this function of inspection and control
over the small executive committee to which
the powers of the full board are of necessity
delegated; but whenever the board of trustees
is of moderate number, not widely separated
as regards residence, and consequently dili-
gent and active, it is highly desirable that a
second and larger board should be created to
represent public educated opinion, and par-
ticularly the opinion of the graduates of the
institution. This is especially the case if the
board of trustees is empowered to fill its own
vacancies.

In this respect the organization of Harvard

HARVARD BOARD OF OVERSEERS 49

University is a most fortunate one; for the
University possesses a second Board, called
the Overseers, and consisting of thirty mem-
bers, since 1866 elected by the Alumni in
groups of five to serve six years, together with
the President and Treasurer of the University
ex-officio. Other institutions have endeavored
to gain some of the advantages which Harvard
derives from its Board of Overseers by con-
triving the election of some of their trustees
by the Alumni, or inventing some equivalent
device; but none of these contrivances are as
effective as the Harvard Board. The composi-
tion of that admirable Board underwent many
changes between 1642 — the date of the first
Act establishing the Board — and 1902, when
the legislature finally placed in the hands of
"the President and Fellows of Harvard Col-
lege and the Board of Overseers of said Col-
lege" the power to determine "what degrees
issued by said College . . . shall entitle the
recipients thereof to vote for Overseers"; but
for more than forty years, since 1866, its
statutory constitution has left nothing to

50 AN INSPECTING AND CONSENTING BODY

desire. By statute and custom the Board of
Overseers must give consent to the election of
every member of the Corporation, — the short
title of the President and Fellows of Harvard
College, — of every professor, assistant pro-
fessor, preacher to the University, and admin-
istrative officer, and of all other officers of in-
struction elected for terms exceeding one year.
They must also act on appointments by the
Corporation of directors for scientific estab-
lishments, and of librarians. In short, the
Board exercises a control over all important
appointments within the University. It is also
entitled to take concurrent action with the
President and Fellows on the adoption of all
statutes or standing votes affecting general
policies of the University, and on the confer-
ring of all degrees.

The influence on the President and Fellows
of this constant need to procure the consent of
the Board of Overseers is strong. Every ap-
pointment and every statute or standing vote
must be capable of defense before the Over-
seers. The fact that the consent of the Board

HARVARD BOARD OF OVERSEERS 61

of Overseers is almost invariably given to the
action of the President and Fellows does not
diminish this influence, or have any tendency
to prove that the influence does not exist. The
President and Fellows always feel that they
must be able to make a strong case before
the Board of Overseers in favor of any action
which requires the consent of that Board; and
this feeling is a very wholesome one in a small
board the members of which are elected for
life. The Board of Overseers may fairly be
said to represent public educated opinion and
the opinion of the Alumni on all questions of
University policy. For many years the Massa-
chusetts Statutes required members of the
Board of Overseers to be "all inhabitants
within the State " ; but in 1880 this restric-
tion was repealed; so that members of the
Board have for twenty-eight years been eligi-
ble from any part of the country, or, indeed,
from any part of the world. The Board meets
ordinarily nine or ten times a year; but in
spite of the frequency of the meetings, it has
been found possible to take members from

62 AN INSPECTING AND CONSENTING BODY

distant parts of the country. The existence of
the Board of Overseers greatly increases pub-
lic confidence in the management of the Presi-
dent and Fellows, and this confidence extends
to all the functions of the President and Fel-
lows, financial as well as educational.

Besides this right of consenting to or dis-
senting from all important actions taken by
the President and Fellows, the Overseers exer-
cise freely the right of inspecting, or examining
the condition of, any and every department of
the University. This inspection or examina-
tion is conducted by committees appointed
by the Board, and these committees may or
may not consist, in whole or in part, of mem-
bers of the Board. All the instruction given in
the University is thus liable to be inspected
by visiting committees appointed by the Over-
seers ; and the reports of these committees are
made public, or kept private, at the discretion
of the Board. The nature of the instruction in
any department, and of the examinations held
by any department, may thus be made the
subject of a public report. It is of course diffi-

HARVARD VISITING COMMITTEES 53

cult to obtain for all departments men, not
members of the University's staff, who are
competent to criticise the work of university
teachers, particularly as the service of the
Overseers themselves, and of all the commit-
tees that they appoint, is gratuitous. Neverthe-
less, this function of inspection or examination
has a high value, now in one department of
the University and now in another. It checks
eccentricities, brings out defects, and signal-
izes merits. The Visiting Committees have au-
thority to examine all question-papers prepared
for university examinations, and all the papers
written by students in answering those ques-
tions. Since at Harvard, as at the American
universities in general, the instructors have
charge of the examinations in the courses they
have themselves given, this disinterested judg-
ment of outsiders on the question-papers and
answer-papers may at any time have a high
value.

The Overseers' Visiting Committees have,
however, a function which is more effective
than that of criticism. In inquiring into the

54 AN INSPECTING AND CONSENTING BODY

condition of any department — as of French,
Physics, Zoology, Law, or Medicine — the
Committee naturally puts itself into contact
with the teachers of the department, confers
with them, and learns from them the needs
and hopes of the department as a whole.
These needs the Committee, as an impartial
body appointed for purposes of inquiry and
examination, can put before the President and
Fellows, the other academic bodies, and the
public much more effectively than the teachers
themselves can. Thus the Visiting Committees
become instrumentalities for cooperating with
the departments in raising money to meet
urgent needs, or make improvements. In an
endowed institution the cooperation of such
Committees in giving publicity to needs and
procuring the means of meeting the needs is
of great value. Over and over again the Vis-
iting Committees of the Harvard Board of
Overseers — now in one department and now
in another — have procured additional re-
sources for the University, — sometimes by
contributing themselves, but more frequently

HARVARD VISITING COMMITTEES 65

by calling upon public-spirited persons known
to be interested in the objects the Commit-
tees were trying to promote. The Visiting
Committees thus enlarge the circle of Har-
vard's benefactors, and place in the hands
of the President and Fellows new resources,
sometimes to be expended for immediate
needs, and sometimes to be funded as per-
manent endowments. At Harvard there were
forty-eight such Visiting Committees of the
Board of Overseers during the year 1906-07,
two Committees having three members, sev-
eral having four, and the larger Committees
numbering from nine to eleven members.
The members of the Committees generally
have their interest in some department of the
University's work much quickened, and this
quickened interest they diffuse, each in his
own circle of acquaintances ; so that there re-
sults a large body of persons who have some
exact knowledge of the University's work and
needs, and are interested in supporting the
University in every way. This system at Har-
vard is an outgrowth of an ancient practice

56 AN INSPECTING AND CONSENTING BODY

of the Board of Overseers to appoint commit-
tees to attend the oral examinations of the
four classes in Harvard College held twice a
year, at the end of each of the two terms.
When the periodical examinations ceased to
be oral, these semi-annual visits from commit-
tees of the Board of Overseers were discon-
tinued, and the present system was gradually
developed as a substitute. By 1881-82, fifteen
years after members of the Board of Over-
seers began to be chosen by the Alumni, the
present system was well under way. It has,
however, been continuously enlarged and im-
proved. It is primarily an admirable means of
publicity, and therefore affords protection not
only against errors or abuses in administration
and instruction, but against indifference and
sluggishness on the part of the administration,
or of any of the academic bodies or officials
who exercise delegated powers. Since a uni-
versity inevitably tends to undue conservatism,
a friendly criticising, probing, and stimulating
agency can be very useful to it. The organi-
zation implies the existence within easy reach

HARVARD BOARD OF OVERSEERS 67

of the University of a large community in
which the higher education has long been well
established, and public spirit and constructive
benevolence towards education are held in
high honor.

It is a grave problem how to get the advan-
tages of the Harvard system in a university
which has but one governing body, and that
a large one meeting infrequently. Something
can be done by small sub-committees of this
large body; but unless many of the trustees
are elected by the Alumni, these sub-commit-
tees will not be believed to represent Alumni
opinion. Any board of trustees might organize
visiting committees analogous to the Harvard
Committees ; but committees so selected could
hardly command the same confidence as critics
and inspectors which the Harvard Committees,
appointed by a separate body whose primary
duty is supervision, can reasonably command.

The influence of the Harvard Board of
Overseers is not exerted through criticism and
inquiry only. Their action has sometimes been
constructive in a high degree. Thus in 1766

68 AN INSPECTING AND CONSENTING BODY

it was the Board of Overseers, and not the
President and Fellows, that accomplished the
great reform of making the college instruc-
tion departmental by subject. Before that
date one tutor had been assigned to each enter-
ing class, and had taught that class in all its
subjects for four years. At the instance of
the Board of Overseers, each tutor thereafter
taught the same subject, or kindred subjects,
to all the four classes. The president and the
three professors of that day had already dealt
with their several subjects before each suc-
cessive class ; so that all the instruction in the
College became from that date departmental.
This reform was as fundamental as the similar
reform now, made in a high school or acad-
emy. In the first quarter of the nineteenth
century, it was the Board of Overseers that
planted the seeds of the elective system, which
was to have but a feeble growth for forty
years. It survived, however, and then throve
and blossomed. Again, it was the Board of
Overseers that, in 1826, ordered that the
president of the University should make to

CONSTRUCTIVE WORK OF THE OVERSEERS 69

them an annual report accompanied by a com-
plete treasurer's statement, the report to cover
all important acts and events for the year,
together with remarks on the state of the in-
stitution, and on the measures recommended
for its improvement. This report was ordered
to be printed and laid before the members of
the Board at the stated meeting in January.
This order was a piece of first-rate construc-
tive legislation, and has been obeyed to this
day with good results to Harvard University
and American education in general; for the
president's annual report to the Overseers has
always described frankly and completely the
state of the institution, its defects and merits,
the results of its experiments, its progress, and
its needs. In so doing, it has put the experi-
ence of Harvard University at the service
of all other institutions. Again, in the year
1866-67, the Board of Overseers, after a long
interchange of divergent views between the
President and Fellows and the Board, suc-
ceeded in introducing an important change in
the distribution of the income of the general

60 AN INSPECTING AND CONSENTING BODY

investments of the University among the funds
belonging to the College on the one hand, and
to the professional departments on the other.
The President and Fellows had long been in
the habit of allowing 5% on the funds belong-
ing to the non-College departments, and ap-
propriating to the College the rest of the
income of the general investments. The Board
of Overseers procured the distribution of the
average income of the general investments to
all the funds held by the President and Fel-
lows, after reserving a moderate allowance for
the expenses incurred in the care and manage-
ment of the funds. This measure, which was
not welcome to the President and Fellows of
the day, has turned out to be a very wise one.
It has been highly satisfactory to benefactors,
has prevented the creation of separate boards
of trustees for special objects at the University,
and has exerted a distinctly unifying influ-
ence in the whole University administration.
No more important improvements in Harvard
University have been made in the past one
hundred and fifty years than the four above

OVERSEERS REPRESENT PUBLIC OPINION 61

mentioned, and all four proceeded from the
Board of Overseers.

A good example of another mode of action
of the Overseers is to be found in the aboli-
tion, in 1886, of the required attendance of the
students at the religious exercises maintained
by the University. For nearly two hundred
and fifty years attendance at numerous re-
ligious services had been required of all stu-
dents in Harvard College. The two governing
boards came very slowly to the abolition of
that requirement. Beginning in 1873, the
College Faculty four times declared that, in
their judgment, attendance at prayers should
be voluntary. The students had twice peti-
tioned that the statute which prescribed at-
tendance be changed. The President and Fel-
lows were in favor of making the change,
whenever it should appear that the public
opinion of educated men, and particularly of
the Alumni, would sanction it. For ascertain-
ing the state of public opinion, the President
and Fellows relied on the Board of Overseers.
Under the guidance of a committee of the

62 AN INSPECTING AND CONSENTING BODY

Board of Overseers, the two governing boards
first made a more impressive and interesting
provision for the conduct of religious services
in Appleton Chapel than the University had
ever had before. The Plummer Professorship
(then vacant) was filled, and five preachers to
the University taken from four denominations
were appointed for the term of one year, the
appointments to be renewable indefinitely. To
this board of six ministers the conduct of the
Chapel services and the pastoral care of the
body of students were committed, with a large
discretion as to their methods of action. This
board then advised the Corporation and Over-
seers to abolish required attendance at reli-
gious exercises; and the necessary change in
statutes was immediately made.

The first board of preachers consisted of
Edward Everett Hale, Phillips Brooks, Alex-
ander McKenzie, George A. Gordon, and
Richard Montague; but Mr. Montague was
unable to serve because of the failure of his
health. Messrs. Hale and Brooks were at the
time members of the Board of Overseers,

THE SELECTION OF OVERSEERS 63

where they had taken an influential part in
the discussion. In this instance the time of
action in a very important matter was deter-
mined by the Board of Overseers ; because the
President and Fellows, the Faculty, the other
academic bodies, and the Alumni felt that the
Board fairly represented public opinion in all
its different shades, and that it would be safe
to make a great change in a matter which
easily stirs strong sentiments and passions,
whenever the Board of Overseers were clearly
in favor of making it.

The meetings of the Board give opportu-
nity for able men engaged in different pro-
fessions to give utterance to their ideas on
education in general, or on some special edu-
cational topic which has interested them. The
Alumni, who elect the Board, naturally select
men of letters or science, and men eminent in
the learned or scientific professions or in busi-
ness, who have shown public spirit, and devo-
tion to the interests of the University, and
of the higher education in general. A Board
so selected is naturally capable of improving

64 AN INSPECTING AND CONSENTING BOUl

sometimes the measures which come to them
from the Corporation. Their rules and habits
prevent hasty action, and often provide for an
examination by a committee of the measures
laid before them. They save the University
from making changes which, although pro-
mising and even of demonstrated merit, are
nevertheless too much in advance of public
opinion. When the President and Fellows, led
by the Faculties, are too rapid or too experi-
mental in their action, the Board of Overseers
will serve as a brake ; but if the President and
Fellows become inert or too conservative, the
Board of Overseers will provide the needed
stimulation.

On the whole, the services of the Board of
Overseers to Harvard University are so varied
and so great as to suggest strongly the wis-
dom of procuring some analogous boards for
purposes of inspection, review, criticism, and
support in all other American institutions
of the higher education. Indeed, the history
of the Harvard Overseers suggests that simi-
lar boards to inspect, make criticisms and

ADVICE AND SUPPORT FROM GRADUATES 65

suggestions, and procure publicity would be
useful additions to the boards of directors
which manage business corporations, and to
one-chambered municipal governments or com-
missions.

The American colleges and universities re-
ceive a deal of valuable advice and assistance
from their graduates, not only from individu-
als, but from the numerous organizations of
the graduates. These organizations are all the
more interesting, because they are of purely
American growth, being a natural adaptation
of democratic principles to educational insti-
tutions, and a vigorous expression of the
American faith in education of all grades as
the best means of promoting wise democratic
government, industrial efficiency, and public
happiness. As active organizations they have
nearly all been created within the last fifty
years.

The first organization to attain real effi-
ciency was the permanent organization of what
is called a college Class, that is, the group of

66 ALUMNI ORGANIZATIONS

men who took the first degree in arts or science
in the same year. This Class organization is
now maintained not only for social purposes,
but as a group of men who distinctly propose
to befriend and support each other in every
practicable way throughout life, and who also
intend, as a group, to befriend and support
the college or university at which they took
their first degree. Every Class maintains a
standing committee and a secretary and treas-
urer. At or near graduation they raise a fund
the income of which is to be used for future
festivities and other Class expenses, and is to
be made over to the college for some good
purpose when the Class becomes extinct. When
general subscriptions are undertaken for the
benefit of their college, every Class organiza-
tion takes part in the effort, and all the Classes
vie with each other in making contributions.
At Harvard College, it is the custom for each
Class, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of its
graduation, to make a considerable gift to the
College ($100,000 or more) for an object se-
lected by the Class. Every Class tabulates the

THE COLLEGE CLASS 67

vital statistics of the whole group, including
the dates of marriage, births of children, and
deaths of members and of their children, and
also a record of the career of each member of
the Class. Many Classes keep these records for
all the men who have ever been members of
the Class, whether they graduated or not. As
the Harvard graduating Classes have lately
increased much in size, the labor of keeping
these records, and printing them every three
or five years, has become too great for the
Class Secretary — presumably a busy man —
to perform ; so that it has become the custom
for the Class officers to hire an expert to pre-
pare the vital statistics of the Class. At the
Commencement season every Class holds a
social meeting, and on the third, sixth, tenth,
and every later quinquennial anniversary of
graduation, special festivities are held, particu-
larly on the twenty-fifth and fiftieth anniver-
saries. At Harvard the wives and children of
members attend the twenty-fifth anniversary,
and the celebration lasts for several days. To
the fiftieth anniversary children and grand-

68 ALUMNI ORGANIZATIONS

children are invited ; and, moreover, the Class
just fifty years out of College entertains the
members of all older Classes who come to Com-
mencement. As each Class grows older, the
surviving members are drawn nearer together,
and the more interesting becomes the compari-
son of careers, experiences, achievements, and
services. Several Harvard Classes have under-
taken to make photographic albums in which
the portrait of each member at graduation
faces the portrait of the same person forty or
more years later, if he has survived so long.
These documents are extraordinarily optimis-
tic, the comparison of the faces at twenty-two
or twenty-three with the faces at sixty-two or
sixty-three offering convincing evidence that
educated men's experience of life develops both
capacity and character to an extraordinary
degree.

The vital statistics of the American College
Classes, as they accumulate, will supply to the
statistician a large body of interesting materi-
als ; the photographic albums will demonstrate
the continuous and prolonged good effect of

ALUMNI ASSOCIATIONS 69

an education which occupies from a quarter to
a third of the entire span of life ; and the re-
cords of the careers of the graduates will sup-
ply the best possible evidence of the efficiency
and usef ulness of the institution at which they
were trained. All these Class activities are
highly desirable in all colleges and universi-
ties, and with appropriate modifications are
universally practicable.

Next to the Class organization comes the
organization of the association which embraces
all the Alumni of a college, that is, all the men
who took their first degree of arts and science
at the institution, some of whom may take a
higher degree or degrees in arts and sciences,
or a professional degree. It has been the cus-
tom at Harvard, as at other American institu-
tions, for the graduates of the professional
schools to maintain Alumni associations of
their own, as, for instance, an organization of
all graduates and students of the Law School ;
so that four, five, or more Alumni associations
may be created from the graduates in the
different departments of the same university.

70 ALUMNI ASSOCIATIONS

The objects of all these Alumni associations
are, however, essentially the same. They keep
in touch with all Alumni of the department
whose name they bear, keep their addresses,
and prepare lists showing the geographical
distribution of the Alumni by states and cities.
At a large university which graduates many
hundred men each year, it is a difficult task to
keep these address-lists valid. A small number
of men fail to communicate with the secretary
of the association to which they ought to be-
long, and after a time are lost to view. The
address-lists serve several purposes. In the first
place they enable the officers of the association
to keep in communication with the men whose
addresses are recorded. Secondly, they enable
the administrative officers of the university to
keep graduates of the university in all depart-
ments supplied with printed information con-
cerning the growth of the university, the
changes in its methods, and the additions to
its resources. Thirdly, the geographical lists
enable the graduates of any college who have
settled in any particular district or region of

GATHERINGS AT COMMENCEMENT 71

the country to find each other out, and come
together.

The various Alumni associations at Harvard
University recognize early, and then help to
bring to public knowledge, improvements in
their several Departments, as well as needs,
and they then confirm and settle the educa-
tional changes by embodying their results in
their own constitutions and modes of social
action. At Commencement time most of them
hold meetings which bring together large bod-
ies of professional men interested not only in
meeting each other, but in promoting the wel-
fare of their several Departments, and in up-
holding and advancing the ethical standards of
their several callings. The gathering at Com-
mencement of the Association of the Alumni
of Harvard College, which now includes grad-
uates of the Scientific School and holders of
the degree of Master of Arts or Science and
of Doctor of Philosophy or Science, is always
a noteworthy gathering, which by its public
proceedings and its hospitalities to distin-
guished guests adds to the dignity and prestige

72 ALUMNI ASSOCIATIONS

of the University. This association now main-
tains a paid secretary with an office and staff
in the business centre of Boston, in order to
be of service to visiting Alumni, in both busi-
ness and social ways. This new provision is an
outcome of the democratic and national qual-
ity of the University, and of the distribution of
the residences of the Alumni over the whole
country, and over great areas beyond. It marks
also the purpose of the Alumni to cooperate
with each other throughout life in the pro-
motion of the interests of the University, of
higher education, and of public serviceableness
of all sorts.

The next form of organization is the local
club, composed of the graduates of a single
institution who live in one place, as, for ex-
ample, of the graduates of Harvard, or Dart-
mouth, or Michigan, living in or near New
York City, or in or near Chicago, or in the
State of Kentucky, or in the State of Califor-
nia. These local organizations can exert a
strong influence in favor of the university with
which its members were connected, provided

LOCAL COLLEGE CLUBS 73

that they prove to be possessed of enthusiasm,
mutual good-will, and public spirit. They can
add to the security and happiness of the recent
graduates who flock year by year to the great
cities. They can easily promote the interests
of the universities to which they are grateful
by instituting scholarships at the college or
university of their love, for which scholarships
young men from the locality which the club
represents have a preference. Such clubs can
also debate actively new policies which are
under discussion at their college or university,
and express their opinions thereon by resolu-
tion adopted in public meetings after discus-
sion. Their members can inspire each other to
rendering good public service in the municipal,
state, or national administrations, and to ser-
viceableness to the communities in which they
live. The local clubs can be effective in re-
cruiting the colleges or universities to which
they are severally attached, by endeavoring to
improve the programmes of the best secondary
schools in their neighborhood, and taking an
interest in the bright pupils of those schools.

74 ASSOCIATION OF HARVARD CLUBS

They can also give information about the
terms of admission and the necessary expenses
at their several colleges. Among the members
of these local clubs the diversity of age is very
great — all the way from twenty to twenty-
three up to seventy to eighty — a fact which
sometimes makes their social meetings rather
hard to conduct in an enjoyable way ; yet this
very diversity of age contributes much to the
good influence of the clubs. The achievements
of the elders inspire the juniors, and the older
men get interested in the younger, and help
them on by advice and influence.

A considerable number of Harvard Clubs,
most of which are situated between the Al-
leghanies and the Rocky Mountains, have
united in an Association of Harvard Clubs
which holds large, animated, annual meetings
by delegates, at which college policies are dis-
cussed, the condition and prospects of the
various clubs are compared, and desirable
candidates for election to the Board of Over-
seers are mentioned and discussed in private.
At these representative meetings of Harvard

ADDRESS-LISTS OF LIVING ALUMNI 75

Alumni gathered from a large area, officers
and active friends of the University have an
opportunity to be heard.

The university administration itself can as-
sist in the maintenance of these organizations
of its Alumni by publishing periodically the
catalogue of all its graduates from the begin-
ning, and a list of the present addresses of all
living Alumni. Every American college or uni-
versity performs the first function ; but com-
paratively few perform the second, although
the second is the more effective for promoting
the influence and increasing the resources of
a university. Some institutions have refrained
from issuing such a list, or delayed so doing,
for fear that these address-lists, if printed,
would be used in an annoying way by diligent
advertisers through circulars and letters. The
demonstrated usefulness of the lists for right-
ful purposes has, however, overcome this appre-
hension.

The natural interest of older Alumni in help-
ing the younger is now utilized in a systematic
way by colleges and universities which main-

76 AN APPOINTMENTS OFFICE

tain offices devoted to securing appointments
and promotions for their graduates. This very
useful sort of bureau was first copied by Har-
vard University from Oxford University, and
thence spread into other American institutions.
The method is not yet fully comprehended
among American college graduates, but it is
so natural and helpful a method that it is sure
to become general. At first the profession
served by the Harvard Appointments Office
was almost exclusively that of teaching ; but
in a few years the work of the office came to
cover a great variety of professions including
business. The same office can readily provide
various employments for undergraduates, and
so make easier the successful passage through
college of young men of limited means. Both
these functions are obviously democratic in a
high degree. They enable well-educated young
men who have neither money nor helpful
family connections to obtain high-grade em-
ployments, and rapid promotions therein, on
the strength of their college records, and with
the help of the acquaintances they made in

UNIVERSITY PUBLICATIONS 77

college. They are often equally useful, how-
ever, to sons of well-to-do families who are
seeking employments with which their older
friends have never been connected.

The interest and affection of an institu-
tion's graduates may be utilized to its advan-
tage and that of education in general through
the graduates' support of publications which
record all important events at the institution,
commemorate the achievements of its grad-
uates, describe the athletic games and contests
in which its undergraduates take part, and
give interesting accounts of the acquisitions
at its museums, the investigations in its labora-
tories, and the publications of its teachers. At
Harvard University, for example, a Graduates'
Magazine, issued quarterly, an official Gazette,
and an unofficial Bulletin, issued weekly, are
maintained through the annual subscriptions
of the Alumni ; and all three publications are
highly serviceable to the University.

Two comparatively new universities —
Johns Hopkins and Chicago — have paid es-
pecial attention to the issue by the university

78 ALUMNI INFLUENCE

itself of learned publications in considerable
variety and volume, quite surpassing in this
respect tbe earlier efforts of some older Ameri-
can universities. Such publications undoubt-
edly strengthen a university, and promote the
progress of letters and science. Since they are
costly and pecuniarily unremunerative, they
are good objects of endowment.

Since many graduates of the principal
American universities are connected with the
public press as editors or contributors, univer-
sity doings and events are frequently dealt with
by the public press in a friendly way, with the
distinct object of strengthening the universities
in the estimation of the public. Most univer-
sity administrators have had occasion to study
the problem of legitimate advertising ; but
few, if any, have reached any clear conclusion
on this difficult subject. It is extremely doubt-
ful if any of the ordinary forms of advertising
do a university any good. It is the general
reputation of a university, its literary and sci-
entific activity, and the achievements of its
graduates which commend it to young men

THE DESIRE FOR MORE STUDENTS 79

and women, and to their parents ; and these
things cannot be set forth by the university
itself in an ordinary advertisement. Public at-
tention must, however, be called to them over
wide areas of country, since otherwise they will
not be brought to the notice of teachers, super-
intendents of schools, families, and the eligible
youth ; hence the usefulness of the university
publications maintained by graduates or by
the university itself, and of all the descriptive
contributions to the public press by interesting
and interested writers.

The American universities have always and
everywhere been desirous of increasing the
number of their students; and this is a true
instinct of university governors in a demo-
cratic country. A university ought to desire to
serve all classes and conditions of men, and
not a single class or but one condition. More-
over, the serviceableness of the university to
the community is increased by increasing the
number of its students; unless, indeed, the
university admits students without suitable
preparation, and by so doing injures itself

80 ALUMNI INFLUENCE

and the secondary schools which underlie it. In
short, in a democratic society, it is important
that the university should serve all classes, and
therefore command the respect and affection
of all classes, else its pecuniary resources will
not be so secure as they ought to be, and it
will be difficult for it to obtain the new re-
sources which in the changing condition of
the professions and industries it will be sure
to need.

Ill

THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

FOB determining the educational policy of a
seat of learning the faculties are the most im-
portant bodies in the entire institution. The
trustees being ordinarily only men of general
culture and trustworthy character, presumably
interested more or less in all branches of learn-
ing, but expert in none, it devolves upon the
faculties of the several departments of a uni-
versity to discern, recommend, and carry out
the educational policies of the institution.
Under ordinary conditions a university has
need of at least five faculties, namely, — a fac-
ulty for arts and sciences, and faculties for
divinity, law, medicine, and applied science.
There are many examples of the creation of
separate faculties in addition to these five, as,
for instance, a faculty for agriculture, for en-
gineering by itself, or for the fine arts ; but
the sciences on which agriculture depends all

82 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

come under the head of applied science, just
as engineering does, and the fine arts should
certainly make part of the instruction given
by the faculty of arts and sciences.

The five indispensable faculties are very
unlike. The faculty of arts and sciences in
a broadly developed university will necessarily
be large, and its individual members will prob-
ably have a thorough knowledge of only one
or two out of the numerous departments of
instruction within the faculty. The mathe-
maticians may often have little sympathy with,
or knowledge of, the language departments,
and will be closely affiliated only with the de-
partments of physics, chemistry, mechanics,
and astronomy. The professors of history will
probably know little, and perhaps care little,
about the scientific departments; but will
maintain rather close relations with the de-
partments of government and economics. Dis-
tinguished men and admirable teachers in such
a faculty may easily know nothing to speak
of about more than half of the subjects of
instruction dealt with by their faculty.

DIVERSITY OF THE FACULTIES 83

It is very different in the faculty of law,
which in American universities devotes itself
chiefly to court-made law and the training of
practitioners. There every teacher will know
a great deal about the work of every other
teacher in the faculty, and have a good under-
standing of every other teacher's method and
mode of thought. In that faculty it is possi-
ble for one professor to teach in the course of
twenty-five years nearly all the subjects taught
in the school ; and it is feasible for a professor
well advanced in life to change his subjects
completely, abandoning all the subjects he
has taught for twenty years or more, and
taking up a new set. A faculty of law there-
fore resembles what is called a department in
the faculty of arts and sciences; for in the
latter faculty the members of any given de-
partment are usually acquainted with the
whole field of the department, and with the
work of each member of it. The faculty of
law will have very slight connection with any
other faculty, unless, indeed, like a European
law faculty, it takes up the general subject of

84 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

jurisprudence, and such topics as Roman
law, constitutional law, and international law,
which are appropriate also to the faculty of
arts and sciences.

The divinity faculty, on the other hand,
unless unfortunately devoted chiefly to dog-
matic denominational instruction, will have
many and intimate connections with the fac-
ulty of arts and sciences; so much so, that
many courses of instruction offered by profes-
sors of divinity are just as good for students
in arts as they are for students in divinity,
and, conversely, many courses offered by pro-
fessors in the faculty of arts and sciences will
be perfectly suitable for students of divinity,
such, for example, as courses in philosophy,
ethics, history, sociology, the languages of
the scriptures, and the history of the bibli-
cal peoples and of the great religions of the
world.

The faculty of medicine has two quite dis-
tinct functions. First, to train thoroughly prac-
titioners of medicine and surgery ; secondly, to
advance medical science and preventive medi-

DIVERSITY OF THE FACULTIES 85

cine. It is, however, almost exclusively a fac-
ulty of applied biology, although it also
utilizes fields of physics and chemistry which
lie outside of biology. This faculty is, of
course, intimately related to the biological de-
partments of the faculty of arts and sciences,
because pure zoology and botany make inces-
sant contributions to applied biology; and
it has many affiliations with the faculty of
applied science; but its connections with the
other faculties are but slight.

The faculty of applied science has a differ-
ent temper or spirit from that which prevails
in the scientific departments of the faculty of
arts and sciences. It is bent on teaching useful
and profitable applications of all the sciences,
and is apt to be dissatisfied with the modes of
instruction in the pure sciences, including
mathematics, under the faculty of arts and
sciences, unless a great deal of attention is
devoted day by day to applications and to
practice in those applications.

It is natural and desirable that members of
the divinity faculty and of the faculty of ap-

86 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

plied science should belong also to the faculty
of arts and sciences ; but members of the fac-
culties of law and medicine rarely belong to
any other faculty.

Two of these five faculties are distinguished
from the others by the fact that many of their
members act both as teachers and as practition-
ers. Thus all the clinical teachers in a medical
school are active practitioners, — always in
hospitals, and often in both hospitals and
private practice. In a school of applied science
it is common for the teachers to give part of
their time to commercial designing and con-
sulting; and this mixture of functions is on
the whole desirable, because it keeps the teach-
ers well acquainted with the present conditions
and needs of the industries which their teach-
ing ought to serve. Some of the teachers in
a law school may also combine teaching with
practice. This double function resembles the
double function of teachers of economics,
government, and business administration, who
divide their time between teaching and author-
ship, or between teaching and giving advice

THE MEMBERSHIP OF A FACULTY 87

on questions relating to the public service or
industrial administration. Indeed, in all depart-
ments it is desirable that university teachers
keep in touch with the outer world of liter-
ature, science, and art, and contribute not
only to the progress of the arts and sciences,
but also to the diffusion of knowledge among
the educated public outside the confines of
the university.

To arrive at the right rules to govern mem-
bership of a university faculty is obviously a
matter of the first importance. Shall the fac-
ulty be composed of the full professors in all
departments, or only of the heads of depart-
ments? Shall it include assistant professors?
In these days a large part of the instruction
given in well-organized universities is contrib-
uted by comparatively young men, who are
called instructors, tutors, or preceptors. Shall
they, too, be full members of a faculty? If as-
sistant professors and instructors be included,
they will probably outnumber the full profes-
sors, and may therefore have the prevailing

88 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

voice in determining the policy of the univer-
sity. In all well-organized and comprehensive
universities, the number of instructors, demon-
strators, and assistants will greatly exceed the
number of professors and assistant professors,
and many of these instructors, demonstrators,
and assistants will be men who are on trial, or
who have not yet determined to give their
lives chiefly to teaching and research. It does
not seem reasonable that the policy of a uni-
versity should be determined by the votes of
young men whose connection with the uni-
versity may be brief, and who have not yet
decided to be teachers. Membership in a fac-
ulty should therefore be limited to professors,
associate professors, and assistant professors,
and to those instructors who have received
appointments without limit of time.

Under this rule a majority in any large
faculty of arts and sciences is likely to consist
of comparatively young men who are not sure
to advance to the position of full professor.
It is impossible, even in a large staff, that all
assistant professors should be promoted to

YOUNG MEN DESIRABLE IN A FACULTY 89

be professors, and that all instructors ap-
pointed without limit of time should be pro-
moted to be assistant professors. Many of these
younger men must necessarily go into the ser-
vice of other institutions, — schools, colleges,
and universities. In this way the influence of
the university is extended and its serviceable-
ness increased.

It is of the utmost importance that every
faculty contain enough young men to bring
forward in debate the views and feelings of
the recent college generations. To have its
administration fall chiefly into the hands of
elderly men is a grave misfortune for any uni-
versity. There is always good work that vet-
erans who retain their physical and mental
alertness can do; but the control of a univer-
sity's policy should not be confided to them
alone. A small college is often in more danger
of having an old faculty than a large college,
for the reason that some of the teachers grow
old in their places without having had the op-
portunity of going into the service of other in-
stitutions, and vacancies which might be filled

90 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

by young men occur but seldom. This diffi-
culty has been relieved or removed of late years
in some small colleges, because the larger and
richer institutions have acquired the habit of
calling into their service comparatively young
men who have proved their merit in good
small colleges. The small college is thus en-
abled to recruit its faculty with a series of
young men of promise, though not of proved
performance. It is natural, but not wise, for a
college or university to recruit its faculties
chiefly from its own graduates, — natural, be-
cause these graduates are well known to the
selecting authorities, since they have been
under observation for years ; unwise, because
breeding in and in has grave dangers for a
university, as also for technical schools and
naval and military academies.

A university president, or a selecting com-
mittee, in search of a new professor, or of new
professors, has means of forming a judgment
which are fairly trustworthy, if patiently col-
lected and sifted. In the first place, there is
the candidate's record as a student at his col-

CRITERIA FOR SELECTING PROFESSORS 91

lege or university ; secondly, his reputation as
a teacher, wherever he may have been em-
ployed ; thirdly, his activity [in the learned
societies with which he has been connected;
fourthly, his productiveness as an investigator
and author ; and fifthly, his general repute as
a man of character and influence. Experienced
officials pay but scanty attention to testimo-
nials and letters of recommendation, partic-
ularly if they have been forwarded through
the candidate or procured by him. Americans
are apt to be too charitable and good-natured
when writing letters of recommendation. They
are also fond of superlatives, and are too apt
to deal only with merits, omitting defects,
when they write testimonials at the request of
a candidate. The prudent selecting official or
board will therefore be careful about giving
weight to testimonials, and will greatly prefer
to see and talk with the candidate himself
face to face, except in the case of a man whose
character and professional standing are well
known and unquestionable.

Within twenty years past, numerous learned

92 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

societies have arisen in the United States, each
of which is devoted to some special branch of
knowledge, such as the classics, pure mathe-
matics, engineering, chemistry, physics, archi-
tecture, landscape architecture, forestry, pedi-
atrics, and psychiatry. To the annual meetings
of these societies men come from all parts of
the country, and spend a few days together in
earnest discussion of topics in which they have
a common interest. The professor, or professors,
of these several subjects in any one university
will gradually have opportunities to measure
and weigh all the other active members of the
same society, and particularly to see and hear
the younger members of the society. Much
valuable information is, therefore, to be ob-
tained through these meetings of specialists
concerning candidates for teachers' places in
the colleges and universities of the country.
At these meetings much can be learnt about
the personality of the men who come to them.
The whole meeting will learn that such a
one is high-minded and winning, and a mas-
ter of his subject, and that such another

RECRUITING A FACULTY 93

is rude and unattractive, though doubtless
able.

In selecting university teachers, young or
old, it is always a question what sort of quali-
fication should have most influence on the se-
lection, — knowledge of a subject, capacity to
expound it in an interesting manner, published
works, success as an investigator, or the total
personality, including manners and customs,
temper, bearing, and quickness of sympathy.
In every case there must be a balancing of
these different qualities, which are rarely com-
bined in a single individual, and a comparison
with like balances in other candidates.

That university is fortunate whose faculties
have been recruited in a considerable variety
of ways; but first, by advancing young men
who are graduates of the institution through
all stages of the service, beginning with the
lowest. This process should require three or
four years to be spent in professional study
after receiving the Bachelor's degree; then
three or four years of service on annual ap-
pointments to subordinate places; next, as

94 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

many years in the position of instructor ap-
pointed without limit of time ; and next, five
or ten years of service as assistant professor
before the grade of full professor is at last
attained. It may therefore take the young
graduate in arts from fifteen to twenty years
to obtain a full professorship, and it will be
from six to eight years after his graduation
as a Bachelor before he gets an appointment
which commits him to teaching and investi-
gating as his life-work. The rapidity of his
advancement will depend, first, on the number
of vacancies which happen to occur in the
upper part of the department to which he
belongs, and secondly, on the chance that the
institution with which he is connected will make
a rapid growth. Both these favorable chances
have frequently occurred together in the expe-
rience of young men who have gone into uni-
versity work in the United States within the
past thirty years.

The second mode of recruiting the univer-
sity staff is to discover and make proposals to
men still young who have distinguished them-

RECRUITING A FACULTY 95

selves in the service of other institutions. The
larger institution does not need to offer such
men full professorships. They can ordinarily
be obtained for assistant professorships, or
even for instructorships without limit of time.
Such persons are not taken at once into the
permanent staff of the university which invites
them. They receive what may be called pro-
bationary appointments, and if they do not
succeed in such places, after a reasonable time,
the university is under no obligation to con-
tinue them in its service.

The third mode of recruiting a faculty is
to invite to full professorships men of proved
capacity, industry, and intellectual productive-
ness. To such men the university commits
itself for life.

All these ways ought to be used in recruiting
any university faculty, and all three are com-
monly used except in the faculty of medicine.
That faculty is affected by a peculiar and very
unfortunate set of considerations in regard to
its recruitment. A medical school is ordinarily
situated at some considerable centre of popu-

96 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

lation, where hospitals have been provided for
the treatment of the sick and wounded. These
hospitals are usually administered each by its
board of trustees, and this board feels itself
to exist for the hospital alone, and is distrust-
ful of the claims of medical education or of
medical and surgical research. The hospital's
medical and surgical staff is ordinarily selected
by the board of trustees without reference
to the capacity of its members as teachers.
They are selected for unusual capacity in treat-
ing the sick and wounded. Nevertheless, the
only men who can fitly hold clinical professor-
ships in a medical school are men who have
access to large hospitals capable of providing
them with the cases of disease or injury which
must serve as material for their teaching.
The medical school, desiring to appoint a pro-
fessor of surgery or obstetrics, for example, is
limited in its choice to the men who hold hos-
pital services for at least a part of the year in
the city or town in which the school is situated.
It is not free to call the most distinguished
surgeon or obstetrician that the country con-

INDUCEMENTS TO AN ACADEMIC LIFE 97

tains ; because it cannot offer the newcomer
a hospital service. This is the reason that the
conduct of a great hospital has become in
some universities an indispensable function
of the faculty of medicine, in spite of the fact
that the conduct of a hospital is enormously
expensive, and requires an administrative staff
quite distinct from that of the medical school.
Other universities have had the good fortune
to make serviceable alliances with independent
bodies of hospital trustees, who have realized
that the advancement of medical and surgi-
cal teaching and research is a fundamental
interest of hospitals as well as of universities
and States.

The motives which induce suitable young
men to devote themselves to an academic life,
and therefore to become members of a college
or university faculty, are somewhat different
from those which impel young men to enter
the learned and scientific professions or to
seek business careers. Those professions and
business careers offer large money prizes,

98 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

although the general average of income in
them is by no means high. In the United
States the profession of teaching and scientific
research offers absolutely no money prizes,
and the average annual income of the univer-
sity teacher is sure to be moderate. Germany
offers exceptional payment to brilliant teachers
of staple university subjects which are indis-
pensable to large groups of students, gives
generous pecuniary rewards to successful in-
vestigators in applied science, chemical, physi-
cal, or biological, and confers valued titles
and decorations on her leading scholars in all
departments. No such practices have ever ob-
tained in the United States, and it is hard to
imagine how they could be introduced under
the democratic regime. The young American
who chooses a university career must then
abandon all expectation of riches, and of the
sort of luxuries which only wealth can pro-
cure. What he may reasonably expect is a se-
cure income, a life-tenure, long vacations, the
gratification of his intellectual tastes, good
fellowship in study, teaching, and research,

UNIVERSITY SALARIES ARE SMALL 99

plenty of books, and a dignified though simple
mode of life. To young men who grow up in
humble circumstances, the probable income of
a college professor sometimes looks large ; but
to the sons of well-to-do families it always
looks small, and, on the average, the college
or university salary in the United States is
really small in comparison with the intellectual
outlook of the recipients and their reasonable
needs. Undoubtedly college and university
salaries need to be raised above their present
level in the United States ; but it should be
distinctly understood that the profession can
never be properly recruited by holding out
pecuniary inducements. In drawing good men
from one institution to another, the prevailing
inducements are apt to be, not increase of
salary, but wider companionship, better access
to books, better schools for the children, a
wholesomer life for the family, more social
and educational advantages, and the general
prestige of the inviting institution. That insti-
tution is fortunate which attracts to its service
young men from all conditions of life. The

100 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

recent tendency of sons of well-to-do, and even
rich, families, to go into the ministry, the
medical profession, academic life, and the pub-
lic service, is one in which all patriots may
well rejoice. Such young men, if they have
intellectual ambition, and the needed capacity
for teaching and investigation, contribute very
much to the total wisdom and efficiency of any
university faculty.

In spite of the fact that professorships are
ordinarily held for life in a well-managed uni-
versity, the rate at which the membership of
a faculty changes is much more rapid than is
generally supposed. The larger the proportion
of assistant professors and instructors in any
faculty, the more rapid will be the changes ;
because assistant professorships are best made
terminable at stated periods, and instructors
frequently win promotion in other institutions
than their own. In twenty-five years nearly
two thirds of an active faculty may be re-
placed, and more than half in twenty years.
The existence of a system of retiring allow-
ances, such as the Carnegie Foundation now

MANY ANNUAL APPOINTMENTS 101

provides, tends to make the replacement of a
large staff more rapid than it used to be before
retiring allowances were provided. It is not at
all uncommon for one fifth of the members of
a faculty to disappear within five years. These
facts indicate that there is no difficulty in
keeping a faculty young on the average, in
spite of the fact that long tenures and life-
service are the rule in well-managed univer-
sities.

It is of great importance that there should
be a large body of young men on a univer-
sity's staff who hold only annual appointments.
In these places young men have the oppor-
tunity to prove their capacity as teachers and
advanced students, and, on the other hand, the
university by carefully observing the young
men who hold annual appointments can select
the most promising men to be instructors with-
out limit of time. These selections ought in
practice to be made by the departments in
which the annually appointed instructors work,
that is, by the body of professors, assistant
professors, and instructors without limit of

102 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

time, who are members of a single department
like history, mathematics, or physics. These
persons really know the capacities and char-
acters of the annual appointees ; for they have
become intimate with them as undergraduates,
and they also see them at work as assistants
and annually appointed instructors. It is im-
possible that the president or the board of
trustees should know these young men ; so that
the authority and responsibility for the selec-
tion are best placed with the departments that
have the necessary knowledge of the candi-
dates.

In recruiting a university's staff, a long
period of probation for all candidates, who rise
from the ranks and advance gradually towards
a full professorship, is necessary, and it is
desirable that this long period of probation
should cover the period within which marriage
is probable. Marriage is quite as apt to affect
either favorably or unfavorably the efficiency
and general usefulness of a university teacher,
as of professional and business men in any
other line. It is a good deal safer to give a life

RECRUITING A FACULTY 103

office to a married man on whom marriage has
proved to have a good effect, than to a single
man who may shortly be married with un-
certain results.

An interesting question with regard to the
recruiting of a faculty by calling proved men
from other institutions to full professorships
is the limit of age beyond which such calls are
inexpedient. Opinions and practices differ
widely in this matter ; but general experience
in several different nations seems to indicate
that the most vigorous and productive period
of a teacher's and investigator's life is from
twenty-five to forty-five; although there are
many cases in which a great student continues
to develop after forty-five the corollaries or
consequences of the principles which he con-
ceived and first applied at a much earlier age.
Accordingly, a university which calls to its
service a man over forty-five takes the chance
of getting a man of declining rather than
of mounting efficiency. The same principle
applies to university administrative officers.
They should begin young, and attain their

104 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

highest rank while their mental and moral
efficiency is still mounting. These rules are
necessarily qualified by the fact that some
exceptional men continue to exhibit mental
elasticity and vigor unusually late in life.
Nevertheless, a university which counts on
such exceptions will run serious risks, and
occasionally pay heavy penalties for venture-
someness in this respect. An institution eli-
gible for Carnegie Foundation pensions can
prudently invite rather older men to its service.

A competent faculty having been created
on sound principles of selection and promo-
tion, the question next to be discussed is what
a faculty's functions ought to be. As good a
definition as exists of the functions of a fac-
ulty is to be found in the Statutes of Har-
vard University, Section VI, in which it is
stated that each of the Schools of the Uni-
versity is " under the immediate charge of a
faculty." This phrase means in the practice of
Harvard University that the several faculties
have immediate charge of the requirements

FUNCTIONS OF A FACULTY 105

for admission ; of the courses of instruction
provided; of the daily demands upon both
teachers and students ; of the times and sea-
sons of university work during term-time ; of
the conditions on which degrees are conferred ;
and of the government of the students in all
respects. Each faculty lays down the rules to
which instructors and students must conform,
and each faculty has power to define the pen-
alties for infringement of these rules, and to
apply them. In order to discharge these ex-
tensive functions, each faculty has a dean at
its head, and a secretary, and is authorized to
delegate any of its powers relating to ordinary
matters of administration and discipline to
standing committees which prepare its busi-
ness, or act with full power on matters con-
cerning which clear precedents have been
firmly established. In institutions to which
large numbers of students resort, and which
offer instruction in great variety, a faculty
tends to become a large body ; and since large
bodies are ill adapted for the discharge of ad-
ministrative functions in detail, this power to

106 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

delegate its functions to administrative offi-
cers and boards, or committees, is essential to
the efficiency of the faculty. A wise faculty
will, however, keep in its own hands a firm
control over its officers and committees, and
will itself lay down all the general lines of
educational policy.

From time to time questions of policy come
before a faculty which obviously have a direct
pecuniary bearing. Thus the raising of the
terms of admission to any department of a
university may affect the resort of students,
and therefore the receipts from students,
particularly in an institution which depends
largely on tuition-fees. On such subjects the
faculty should invariably send their recom-
mendations to the board of trustees before
publishing them, in order that the body re-
sponsible for the pecuniary welfare of the uni-
versity should have opportunity to consider
and approve, or disapprove, the proposed mea-
sures. All measures which affect the ordinary
period of residence for a degree given by the
university, or which make it more difficult, or

RELATIONS OF FACULTY AND TRUSTEES 107

less difficult, to obtain a degree, are measures
having pecuniary significance. So are pro-
posals to add new branches of instruction, or
to increase the amount of instruction offered
in old departments, unless the faculty sees its
way to procure more instruction without in-
creasing the staff, and therefore the total
amount of salaries. In general, new proposals
which might affect strongly the serviceable-
ness of a university, or the feeling towards
it of its Alumni, the State, or the public at
large, ought not to be put in force by a fac-
ulty without previous consultation with the
trustees.

There is one matter of etiquette concerning
the relations between a faculty and a board
of trustees which has some importance with
reference to a faculty's sense of responsibility,
but is not always observed. An individual
member of a faculty should not approach a
member or members of the board of trustees
with opinions of his own in opposition to an
official opinion already conveyed to the trus-
tees by the majority of the faculty to which

108 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

the professor belongs. If minority opinions
existing within the faculty deserve or need to
be expressed to the board of trustees, they
should be forwarded by the faculty itself as
minority opinions. In serious emergencies this
rule admits of exceptions; but, in general,
single members of a faculty should strictly
observe it out of respect for the influence and
authority of the faculty.

The large faculty of arts and sciences, large
because of the multitude of subjects of instruc-
tion which it deals with, is necessarily sub-
divided into departments by subject, such as
the classics, the modern languages, history,
government, physics, geology, architecture,
fine arts, and so forth. Within each depart-
ment the interests of its members are homo-
geneous and accordant ; and each department
is naturally ambitious to enlarge its opera-
tions, and win more and more of the attention
and time of an increasing number of students.
The faculty should exercise a vigilant watch-
fulness over all its own departments, and
endeavor to keep their development propor-

NORMAL NUMBER OF WEEKLY EXERCISES 109

tionate and moderate, and should not allow
any department to urge its needs and wishes
directly on the board of trustees, at least until
they have been examined and approved by
the faculty. One of the standing committees
of every faculty should be a committee on in-
struction, whose function is to examine and
report on all propositions which come from
departments concerning courses of instruction.
A very important function of a faculty is
to determine the normal number of weekly
exercises for which each registered student
shall be responsible. This number is naturally
different in different schools or divisions of
the university, as, for instance, in the under-
graduate schools on the one hand, and the
graduate schools on the other. And, again,
attendance on fifteen hours a week in one
institution may not be a greater task than
attendance on ten in another, everything de-
pending on the standard of work by the
student for each weekly appointment. The
total labor of the student per week may be
greater at one institution which requires at-

110 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

tendance at ten exercises a week than at
another which requires attendance at fifteen.
At each institution the faculty is the only
competent body to determine the most expe-
dient number of weekly exercises to be at-
tended by each student; because it is the
only body which can know what the standard
of labor per exercise is within its own pro-
vince.

It is for a faculty to determine what amount
of control it will exercise over the methods of
instruction adopted in its several departments,
or by the professors, assistant professors, in-
structors, and tutors. As a rule, tutors and
instructors are responsible in regard to their
subjects and methods of teaching to their
several departments, and the departments are
responsible to the faculty. The freedom of a
teacher to give instruction in just the method
which suits him being very precious, a faculty
cannot wisely interfere often with the teach-
ing methods of individual teachers. Never-
theless, a faculty can properly criticise the
results of any professor's, or other instructor's,

FACULTY'S CONTROL OVER INSTRUCTORS 111

work as they appear in certain easily visible
ways. Among such visible evidences are dis-
order in a professor's lecture-room ; the resort
of obviously incompetent or uninterested stu-
dents to his courses ; examination papers of a
trivial or pedantic sort ; uniform high grades
or uniform low grades returned by the pro-
fessor; an extraordinary number of distinc-
tions earned in his courses ; or an extraordi-
nary number of rejections and failures. These
are legitimate subjects of inquiry by a faculty
committee or by faculty officials, and can be
dealt with by a faculty without impairing
just academic freedom. The knowledge that
this power of revision resides in a faculty is a
valuable control over individual eccentricities.
The faculties in some American universities
exercise the power to nominate to the board
of trustees new professors, the trustees as a
rule accepting these nominations. This power
of nomination has generally been acquired by
custom, and does not rest upon any written
law. The practice probably arose at a time
when faculties were small, and its members

112 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

were intimately related one to another, and
more interested in keeping the faculties strong
than any other set of men connected with the
institution. The trustees presumably met but
seldom, and had no time to inquire into the
claims and merits of different candidates.
Moreover, when the range of college studies
was small, and all members of the faculty had
passed through the same curriculum in their
youth, they were fair judges of the qualifica-
tions of candidates whose range of knowledge
and intellectual interests was similar to their
own.

The problem of selecting new members of
a faculty is utterly different to-day. In a large
university faculty of arts and sciences the
members rarely feel competent to pass on the
qualifications of candidates for election who
do not belong to their own department, or to
some closely allied department. Thus a pro-
fessor of Latin, Sanskrit, or comparative lit-
erature, will ordinarily declare that he knows
nothing about the qualifications of a candi-
date for a professorship of mathematics, geo-

FACULTY NOMINATION OF PROFESSORS 113

logy, or chemistry; and all members of the
faculty are conscious of this sort of ignorance
on their own part. The official nomination
by a faculty under such circumstances is a
formality or a convention, and not a piece of
real advice. The president of the university,
the dean of one of its schools, or a committee
of the trustees, when charged with the nomi-
nation of a professor, will naturally consult
the professors of the department in which the
vacancy is to be filled, and often the profes-
sors of allied departments, and will so obtain
much more direct and valuable advice than
the vote of a faculty could give. This func-
tion of nominating professors for election by
the trustees is therefore not one to be recom-
mended for the faculties of an expanding and
hopeful institution. Other methods of selection
already exist which work better in practice, and
are theoretically sounder. The method was
natural in a private-venture medical school,
because the professors were there really part-
ners in a business the proceeds of which they
divided, and as such had a right to decide on

114 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

the admission of new members to the firm;
but since all the best medical schools have
been taken on by universities, this method of
selecting professors has been modified or aban-
doned in the new medical faculties. The func-
tion is still sometimes exercised by a committee
of all the full professors in a medical faculty,
but is of doubtful expediency even when thus
limited.

What is called discipline in an American
university is ordinarily committed entirely to
its several faculties. This discipline may vary
in the different faculties of the same institu-
tion. In general, it is a government which
uses no force except the force of public opin-
ion; and this opinion is compounded of the
opinion of the older scholars who are the
teachers, and of the younger students who
are the junior members of the university for
the time being, with an admixture of the
opinion of the graduates of the institution,
which, though somewhat remote and infre-
quently appealed to, is yet felt by faculty
and students alike as a real unofficial force of

COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 115

a wholly disinterested character. The only
penalties which a faculty uses, after warnings,
reproofs, and exhortations, are temporary ban-
ishments, and in the last resort, final sepa-
ration from the institution after all other
measures have failed. These penalties are, how-
ever, highly effective, because of the univer-
sal recognition of the fact that membership
in a college or university is a high privilege.
From the long and varied experience of Amer-
ican colleges in trying to maintain a just and
effective discipline, certain general rules or
principles of administration have been evolved,
the most important of which are as follows :
No faculty, or official, should ever try to make
•a student, who is merely suspected of hav-
ing taken part in an offence, incriminate
himself. Students should never be required
to testify against other students. When the
guilty cannot be detected, there should be
no wholesale punishment which involves the
innocent. A student's statement about his
own conduct should be accepted, unless it be
inconsistent with known facts. No publicity

116 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

should be given to students' offences or de-
fects, and the record of actual censures and
punishments should be made as little con-
demnatory as truth permits. No information
about disorders should ever be sought from
any particular set of students, such as high
scholars, recipients of money aids, church
members, members of religious societies, stu-
dents employed by the college, or students
who in some natural and right way have be-
come intimate with college officers. All col-
lege officials should bear constantly in mind
the plain fact that most college offenders, even
those who commit ordinary crimes, such as
cheating and stealing, if considerately and
mercifully dealt with, and if not ruined in
body, recover themselves completely, and turn
out to be honest men and good citizens. Since
the influence of a college faculty is primarily
a moral influence, it is indispensable that all
its methods and rules in regard to violations
of good order and right conduct should be
straightforward, reasonable, and fair.

The functions of a State university faculty

OUTSIDE FACULTY LABORS 117

differ somewhat from those of the faculty in
an endowed institution which is not depend-
ent on appropriations to be made by a legis-
lature, because the State university faculty
has a stronger sense of direct responsibility
to its State and a keener desire to be of direct
and visible service to the learned and scientific
professions, popular education, the character-
istic industries, and the public administration
within its State. It will therefore take active
part, through many of its members, in visit-
ing secondary schools, holding short courses
of elementary instruction at the university or
at a distance from it, lecturing at teachers'
institutes, women's clubs, grange meetings,
•and trade-associations, distributing through
numerous short-term students superior seeds
proved at the university, and working on
State commissions which need the help of
experts. Such useful functions as these the
faculties of endowed universities in the East
have been slow to assume. They have been
inclined to reserve themselves for teaching
and research at the seat of the university,

118 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

and to leave to others all sorts of " university
extension " work. They are, however, improv-
ing in this respect, because they now realize
that in a democratic society all institutions of
higher education, whether endowed or sup-
ported from public revenues, are ultimately
dependent on the public's appreciation of their
services, direct and indirect, and on the result-
ing good-will of the whole community. Hence
the growth at endowed institutions of summer
schools in theology, medicine, and arts and
sciences, of term-time classes for teachers in
service, and of courses of popular lectures in
divinity and medicine at times convenient for
adults who are earning their livelihood ; and
hence also the increasing participation of uni-
versity professors in various forms of public
work.

Every faculty should keep careful records
of the academic career and attainments of
every student under its charge, and should
found on these records its recommendations
for the conferring of degrees, and of all other
academic distinctions ; and it should provide

FREQUENT STATED MEETINGS 119

for the preservation of these records, and their
secure transmission from century to century.
Very few American institutions have done
their full duty in this respect; but the cus-
toms of the colleges and universities as to
records and the proper use of them are im-
proving.

Such being the functions of a faculty, how
can they be best discharged ? In the first
place, by frequent stated meetings for exam-
ining the condition of its work, for hearing
reports from its officers and committees, and
for the consideration and discussion of pro-
posals to improve its methods.

The rapidity and completeness with which
methods of instruction and fields of instruc-
tion change from generation to generation,
and even from decade to decade, is one of the
most astonishing facts in the history of edu-
cation. Thus there is not a single subject
within the whole range of instruction at Har-
vard University, from the beginning of the
undergraduate course to the end of the pro-

120 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

fessional courses, which is now taught in the
same way in which it was taught forty years
ago, or which offers the same field of instruc-
tion which it offered to the student of the last
generation. All the methods and apparatus of
teaching, and the spirit or temper of teacher
and taught alike, have changed. Some of these
profound changes begin in the faculties ; but
others begin outside the university in the
working world, and must be discerned, appre-
ciated, and adopted by the faculties; some
are university inventions ; but many are the
consequences of social, industrial, and political
changes in the outside world. Every faculty,
therefore, has to keep up with the rapid march
of educational events, and for this purpose
it must have frequent stated meetings, and
patient discussion of new proposals.

This necessity for the constant revision of
educational plans, methods, and material pene-
trates, or should penetrate, to the work of
every individual teacher in the university. A
professor who reads year after year the same
lectures is sure to become an incubus on his

VITALITY IN A FACULTY 121

department and his university. The young
instructor who does not apply the experience
of one year's teaching to vivify and improve
the next year's is a bad candidate for promo-
tion. So, in the agglomeration of university
teachers called a faculty, if they meet but
seldom, leaving to deans, secretaries, and com-
mittees all the routine work without demand-
ing of them incessant improvements, receive
from the members few new proposals, and do
their best to avoid discussion of those few,
it is certain that the institution in their charge
will not grow or thrive, and will soon cease
to play a leading part in the educational pro-
gress of the community or the nation. By the
vitality, inventiveness, and enterprise of its
faculty, it is safe to judge any institution of
learning. Nothing can take the place of vital-
ity in a faculty, no one-man power in a presi-
dent or dean, no vigor and ambition in a board
of trustees, and no affection or zeal in the
graduates of the institution.

Faculty meetings serve several other pur-
poses besides that of the promotion of educa-

122 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

tional improvements. In the first place, they
greatly promote mutual acquaintance and good
understanding among the teachers of a col-
lege or university. Good fellowship and a real
intellectual intimacy among the teachers of
a university are in themselves great objects.
They create a good atmosphere for the intel-
lectual life of the whole body of teachers and
students. In faculty meetings the different
qualities of the members who take part in the
discussions are plainly revealed. The whole
body learns that certain members are public-
spirited, generous of time and labor, and co-
operative, while other members exhibit the
opposite qualities. Some members are seen to
be clear, keen, and fair in debate, while others
are obscure, dull, or unfair; some members
are modest and retiring, and yet ready for
service, while others are more forth-putting in
talk, but not so serviceable ; some are quick,
ready, and fertile, while others are habitually
slow to speak, and even tardy in debate, and
yet sound and influential ; some say little, but
their opinions are weighty when expressed;

COMPOSITION OF COMMITTEES 123

others talk much and often, and neverthe-
less are influential because inventive and
suggestive. That the members of a faculty
understand each others' dispositions and vari-
ous capacities is often a great advantage in
university crises or emergencies; that the
president and the deans should have the op-
portunities which faculty meetings supply to
become acquainted with the powers and char-
acters of the different members of the univer-
sity staff is of primary importance. In every
large faculty the personal composition of its
committees is of great importance; and no
president, or nominating committee, can make
up these committees judiciously, unless he has
the opportunity which faculty meetings afford
to become thoroughly acquainted with the
mental and moral make-up of its different
members. In faculty meetings, and in service
on faculty committees, the men who have ad-
ministrative capacity show their quality, and
from that class deans and secretaries are best
selected. It is hardly necessary to say that the
president of a university should preside at the

124 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

meetings of all its faculties, and should give
each faculty the advantage of the experience
of all the others. A wise president will dread
nothing so much as an inert and uninterested
faculty.

There is no way to prevent a faculty of arts
and sciences, or of medicine, or of applied
science, from becoming a large body in a
prosperous and serviceable university. Mere
size brings with it difficulties for a body
which is both deliberative and administrative.
Moreover, large faculties imply numerous
appointments of young men every year. It
is, therefore, an interesting question how a
large faculty may be subdivided into effective
groups, each of which can prepare a certain
part of the faculty's business for the faculty
and the president. Within the last twenty
years experience has shown the advantageous
way of creating these effective subdivisions ;
and the increasing authority of these subdivi-
sions, each within its legitimate sphere of
action, is one of the great gains made of late
years in American university organization.

FUNCTIONS OF DEPARTMENTS 125

Every large faculty should be divided into de-
partments by subject, each department consist-
ing of the teachers of that subject who are
members of the faculty. Each department thus
organized is, as has already been said, a body
with homogeneous interests and kindred ambi-
tions and hopes. They all know much about
each other's work, and are good judges of the
young men who, year after year, aspire to teach
their subject in the university. As a group,
they know how the interests of their subject
may most effectively be promoted at the mo-
ment, and are therefore well qualified to urge
the needs of their department on the faculty,
the president, and the community. The older
members of the department also know the
young men who in former years exhibited in-
terest in the work of the department while
students, and what has become of them in
after-life. They can bring the needs of the
department before such of their former stu-
dents as have succeeded in business, or in the
professions, and can interest them better than
anybody else in promoting the interests of

126 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

the department. They can discuss within the
department the methods of instruction in
use ; the completeness or incompleteness of the
series of courses offered by the department ;
the expediency of changing the series, whether
by subtraction or addition ; and the exchange
of courses from time to time among members
of the department. In the intimacy of depart-
mental debates, the older men can inform the
younger, and the younger the older.

Each department needs a chairman, and
most large departments need also a secretary.
The policy to be followed in selecting this
chairman is a matter of grave consequence.
In small colleges which had but one professor
for each subject, it was natural that the single
professor should always be treated as the head
of his department; but in large colleges or
universities which employ many teachers in a
single department, the principle of seniority
is a dangerous one for determining the selec-
tion of the chairmen of departments. The se-
lection is best made from time to time either
by the president, or by a faculty committee of

CHAIRMEN OF DEPARTMENTS 127

•which the president is chairman. This com-
mittee may wisely treat department chairman-
ships as offices to be held only for four, five,
or six years, unless, indeed, a department be
too small to provide a series of good chair-
men. On this principle the chairmen will not
often be senior professors, and indeed will
generally be junior professors, or assistant
professors. In this way a considerable num-
ber of persons will, within twenty years, ex-
ercise the function of chairman of a depart-
ment, and will be enlarged and improved by
that exercise. Moreover, dangers from the
domination of masterful personages will be
reduced to a minimum under this system;
while the advantages of a real leadership need
not be lost.

To the departments will naturally fall the
nomination of young men for annual appoint-
ments, and in this way they will exercise
considerable power over the future of the uni-
versity. The faculty and the president will
always have to be on their guard against the
urgencies of the departments, balancing one

128 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

claim against another, and watching to see that
the development of the departments is propor-
tionate to the importance of their respective
subjects.

In the presentation of department business
to the faculty, chairmen of departments often
feel obliged to urge on the faculty the action
which the department has taken by a ma-
jority vote, without revealing the existence of
a strong minority opinion within the depart-
ment. This natural, and, perhaps, inevitable
practice enhances the importance of thor-
oughly discussing within the faculty every
proposal which is brought before it. In such
a discussion the minority view within a de-
partment can almost always be brought out,
to the enlightenment of the faculty. A well-
organized and active department will generally
procure, outside of the official programmes of
the faculty, various conferences, and public or
private lectures by experts brought from with-
out the university, which stimulate teachers
and students alike, and add to the effective-
ness of the department as a whole.

DEPARTMENT ACTIVITIES 129

A department is also very likely to interest
itself in some medium of stated publication
for papers written by members of the depart-
ment, or invited from scholars at other uni-
versities. These publications, if well managed,
not only strengthen the department which
produces them, but add to the prestige of the
university as a whole. Again, it often hap-
pens that the group of teachers and students
called a department takes a vigorous interest
in adding to the resources of the university
library on the departmental subject, and this
is one of the most legitimate of all fields for
departmental interest and labor. The books
having been procured, the department inter-
ests itself in securing a separate reading-room
for its own use. Thence arises a demand for
a departmental building where its lecture-
rooms, collections, and reading-room can all be
brought together. The departmental organi-
zation is therefore likely to affect in the
future, not only the internal, but also the
external structure of the American univer-
sities. Since departments are inevitably com-

130 THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY

mittees of a faculty, and will always need
faculty control, their increasing power and
usefulness imply the increasing power and use-
fulness of the faculty out of which they are
created.

IV

THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

GREAT changes have come over the American
college and university during the last forty
years. The greatest change is the general in-
troduction in larger or smaller measure of the
elective system; and the next in importance
is the change in methods of instruction. The
present chapter deals with the nature, objects,
and results of the elective system, and the
following chapter with methods of instruc-
tion.

In the first place, the elective system is a
system, — that is, a carefully arranged scheme
of numerous courses of instruction which are
open to the choice of students under rules
partly artificial, but chiefly natural and inev-
itable. The elective system has been described
by its opponents as a wide-open, miscellane-
ous bazaar, at which a bewildering variety of
goods is offered to the purchaser, who is left

132 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

without guidance, and acts without any con-
stant or sensible motive. Nothing could be
farther from the facts than this description.
An elective system presupposes a well-ordered
series of consecutive courses in each large
subject of instruction, such as Latin, Ger-
man, history, or physics. The division of the
courses of instruction into groups by subject
is natural and easily intelligible. Within these
groups the series of subjects is natural and
plain, except for the unexplained gaps which
often occur in the series, — gaps due to the
inadequacy of the institution's resources.

In a strong university the subjects of in-
struction taken together ought to cover all
fields of human knowledge in which it is pos-
sible to give systematic instruction; and in
each subject the schedule of courses should be
in the highest degree orderly and consecutive,
rising from the elementary, comprehensive
course, through courses of greater and greater
difficulty, becoming more and more intensive,
until the summit is reached in the conferences
or seminaries which take advanced students

THE LIMITATIONS OF CHOICE 133

to the limits of knowledge in that subject. It
is obvious that a university which undertakes
thus to deal with all subjects of knowledge
must offer a very large total of different
courses, and that in a certain sense, therefore,
the choice of the individual student has a
large range; but it is equally obvious that
in the list or schedule of courses in a given
division or department of knowledge the
choice of the individual student has strenuous
limitations. Thus, the beginner must take
the elementary course first, and he must then
advance through the long schedule of the de-
partment by well-marked steps. He cannot
choose an advanced course in any subject
until he has laid the necessary foundation.
No student is admitted to any course unless
he has fulfilled all the requirements for that
course, and the department announcements
contain numerous prescriptions concerning
the sequence of courses. He cannot take
two courses which occur in the time-tables
at the same hour; and the time-tables may
be systematically used to prevent unwise

134 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

combinations of courses. In well-conducted
institutions he cannot take an advanced
course without the consent of the instructor,
who must be satisfied that the student is
well prepared to do the work which the in-
structor habitually demands. The elective sys-
tem, then, is extensive and complex, but it
is also orderly, well mapped, and thoroughly
regulated.

The primary object of the elective system
is to enable the serious student to select his
studies in accordance with his tastes and ca-
pacities. He is enabled to select those studies
which interest him, or those teachers who
interest him, with the result that he works
much harder than he would on subjects which
do not interest him, makes more rapid pro-
gress, and arrives sooner at the satisfactory
stage of real intellectual achievement. Any
human being, whether child or adult, whether
hand-worker or brain-worker, will always work
harder and accomplish more in a task which
interests him. The first effect, therefore, of
the elective system on the individual student

SUCCESS THROUGH INTEREST 135

•who has intellectual ambition is always to
get more work from him. It also makes him
sooner a productive person, that is, a contrib-
utor to the sum of knowledge. This is the
primary object of the elective system, — to
make the serious student work hard, accom-
plish something worth while, and so win power
and happiness. The complete development of
the elective system takes place in the later
years of instruction in arts and sciences, that
is, in the school commonly called the Gradu-
ate School, because at the time of its institu-
tion it was the only school in the American
university for admission to which a previous
degree was required. Here the elective sys-
tem has full scope, although the individual
student in the Graduate School ordinarily
chooses nothing but his line of work. On
that line the steps of his progress are laid out
for him ; and his will cooperates in the limita-
tions, for the intense specialization he desires
prescribes the limitations.

But how is it with the college student who
is not serious ? There are such in most Amer-

136 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

ican colleges, although they form a much
smaller proportion of the whole body than
uneducated people generally believe. What
use will he make of the broad range of op-
tional subjects? What is the object of an elec-
tive system for him ? He will tend to avoid
advanced study, and make his selection there-
fore among the more elementary courses, in
the hope that they will prove easier than the
advanced courses, or more level to his intelli-
gence. Among the elementary courses he will
undoubtedly choose those which present most
interest to his unawakened mind, and he will
also diligently inquire for the inexperienced,
less strict, or more soft-hearted instructors, in
the hope that his shortcomings may by such
men be gently dealt with. He will also study
the time-tables, and avoid courses which are
scheduled for too early morning hours or too
late afternoon hours. In general he will select
the courses which seem to him safest with a
view to timely graduation, and to this end he
will seek the advice of older students of his
sort.

ITS VALUE FOR THE UNAMBITIOUS 137

What will be the result of this mode of
selecting his studies by a student without
any intellectual ambition ? His total course, or
total selection of courses, will probably resem-
ble the old prescribed course in the American
college, that is, it will remain in the elements
of all subjects ; it will continue in college some
of the subjects studied at school, because those
are the subjects in which the youth has some
acquired capital ; and it will contain a greater
variety of subjects than any ambitious stu-
dent will include in his programme. It will
be what is ordinarily called an " all-round "
course. It will, however, be a course which
will procure from the chooser more work than
such a person would ever have done under a
prescribed system ; because in some degree it
is selected on the ground of the mental inter-
ests of the individual, or on the ground of the
attractive and influential personality of some
teacher or teachers.

It would be difficult to overestimate the
value of an elective system for the lowest quar-
ter of a college class. It not only gets much

138 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

more work out of that quarter, but also offers
them their only chance of experiencing an
intellectual awakening while in college. By
following, though almost unconsciously, their
natural bent, such young men have the best
chance of developing some power of applica-
tion, and some desire for intellectual achieve-
ment. The object of the elective system for
a student disposed to follow the line of least
resistance is to give him a chance to get
roused from his childish state of mind and
will, and to feel stirring within him the mo-
tives of a considerate and fore-looking adult.
There is another class of students to whom
an elective method is a great blessing, namely,
the late-developing young men, and the young
men whose minds are not quickened by any
of the subjects usually taught in secondary
schools. The old prescribed college curricu-
lum, which was in the main a continuation
of school subjects, rarely offered' these men
any new advantages or opportunities ; but the
wide-ranging elective system may easily give
them entrance to fields in which they have

MIXING STUDENTS OF DIFFERENT AGES 139

some chance to excel. Here, again, an elective
system brings opportunity, and with it inspi-
ration and hope.

It is another object of a broad elective sys-
tem to mix the students of the different col-
lege classes together, and to mix graduates
with undergraduates in the same course. Be-
cause of the great number of elective courses
offered at any good college, it is quite impos-
sible for any single student to pursue more
than an insignificant fraction of them dur-
ing his total residence at the college. It may
easily be the interest of a student belonging
to a higher college class to pursue with mem-
bers of a lower class an elective course which
he has not previously taken. Moreover, a
graduate of the same college, or of some other
college, may desire to take up, after he has
obtained his first degree, some studies which
he did not have time to enter upon during his
college course, or had not felt the need of pur-
suing. In consequence, almost every course of
instruction largely resorted to in colleges where
the elective system is broad contains gradu-

140 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

ates, members of all the college classes, and
special students all mixed together. When
a scientific school makes part of the insti-
tution, some of the scientific courses will also
be resorted to simultaneously by members
of all the different classes. This mixing
of students of different ages, and different
academic status, is an unqualified advantage ;
provided that all are united in a common pur-
pose to master the course they are attending
together. The younger student from a lower
class is stimulated by the older men with
whom he associates, and if all the attendants
are qualified to pursue the study to advan-
tage, the older men suffer no harm.

When the Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences was first established in Harvard Uni-
versity, in the spring of 1872, the adoption of
rules determining the period of residence and
the examinations for the higher degrees was
accompanied by a vote opening all the elective
courses of instruction in Harvard College to
Bachelors of Arts of Harvard College, and of
all other colleges. The reason for this vote

GROUPING STUDENTS BY SUBJECT 141

was that no undergraduate during his four
years' course could take more than a fifth part
of the instruction the College then offered ;
so that the student who had just received his
Bachelor's degree might well find at least a
year's work among those college electives
which he could not pursue while an under-
graduate. What was true of Harvard Bache-
lors of Arts was still more likely to be true of
the recent graduates of other colleges. Thirty
years later, the number of courses of instruc-
tion offered in Harvard College and the Grad-
uate School had greatly increased; so that
the correctness of the principle laid down
by anticipation in 1872 has been abundantly
demonstrated. Graduate and undergraduate
students are to be found together in scores
of the courses of instruction now offered by
Harvard University, although there are also
many advanced courses in which none but
graduates appear. This grouping of older and
younger students by subject is one distinct
object of the elective system, although a sub-
ordinate one.

142 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

The grouping of students of various ages
and various academic standing by their sub-
jects of study has certain valuable social ef-
fects. It leads to intercourse among students
based on like tastes and intellectual interests,
particularly in elective courses which are
chosen by a moderate or a small number of
students. There is no better starting-point
for a college friendship than sympathy in an
intellectual pursuit, or than a common devo-
tion to an interesting subject or an interesting
teacher.

An excellent effect of the election of his own
studies by each individual student is the added
sense of responsibility which this freedom
gives. A prescribed course alike for all leaves
no freedom to the student in his studies, and
imposes on him no responsibility. Here, as
everywhere else, it is only under a regime of
liberty that the individual can acquire the ca-
pacity for self-direction and self-control, and
the sense of responsibility for his own conduct.
A college in which a good elective system pre-
vails furnishes instruction in great variety,

STUDENTS NOT FREE TO DO NOTHING 143

offers guidance and aid in the daily work of
the student, and holds rigid examinations; but
it throws the responsibility of selecting his
fields of work on the student himself. Experi-
ence has shown that young Americans of the
college age possess as a rule the intelligence
and character to win mental and moral profit
from this responsibility. To provide the occa-
sion and the means for this great profit is one
important object of an elective system.

It is perhaps unnecessary in these days to
meet the unenlightened criticism which used
to be made on the elective system, namely, that
choice of studies for college youths must mean
the gratification of a desire not to study at
all. Experience has demonstrated that there
is no foundation for this apprehension. An
elective system does not mean liberty to do
nothing. It allows every student to choose his
subjects of study; but the amount of his work
remains prescribed, and its quality is tested
by means of periodical examinations, essays,
laboratory work, and frequent conferences
between teacher and student. Under a well-

144 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

administered elective system not only is a
minimum of attainment prescribed, but there
are numerous competitive inducements to
strenuous study. As a method in education it
has emphatically a moral as well as an intel-
lectual end.

It is important to discriminate between the
fundamental principle of freedom of choice
and the administrative methods which exact
from each student a reasonable amount of
work, and estimate the quality of that work.
The main principle being settled once for all,
the administrative methods will be capable
of indefinite improvement. Under election,
as under prescription, it is an altogether
separate question whether or not a college
chooses to retain within its walls young men
who do no work, or who will work only in
their plays. Under an elective system, quite as
well as under a prescribed system, a college
may say that it does not care to keep young
men who do not reach a certain minimum of
attainment. That is a question of discipline,
altogether apart from the question whether

ENFORCING A MINIMUM ATTAINMENT 145

studies should be elective or prescribed. A
college with a wide range of elective studies
may easily be the strictest of colleges with
regard to the minimum attainment of its stu-
dents. Six long-service teachers in Harvard
College between 1850 and 1900 had close ob-
servation of the minimum attainment of stu-
dents in Harvard College between the years
1849 and 1869 under a system almost com-
pletely prescribed ; and since 1880 a prolonged
period of observation of the minimum attain-
ment of Harvard undergraduates under a sys-
tem almost completely elective. Comparing the
two minima, they all agreed that the latter
minimum was unquestionably much higher
than the former. This result, however, was
obtained by applying during the later period
to indifferent, lazy, and incompetent students
a stricter supervision than was exercised over
students from forty to sixty years ago. It is
one of the great advantages of the elective
system that the intelligent, self-directing, re-
sponsible student can have all the advantages of
freedom, while the irresponsible, thoughtless,

146 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

or lazy student can be made to do some work,
without driving him into studies for which
he has no capacity and in which he feels no
interest. The free choice of studies can pre-
vail under a variety of disciplinary policies ; it
is compatible with a severe exclusion of idlers
and dullards.

It is time to consider briefly some of the
limits and bounds of the elective system. It is
only in the Department of Arts and Sciences
that an elective system has wide application.
As soon as a young man has chosen his pro-
fession, his series of studies is prescribed to
him in large measure. Every student in a pro-
fessional school has, of course, chosen his pro-
fession and marked out his life-work; but it
is only a small proportion of college students
who know from the start what calling they are
to follow. Many of the professions are now
divided into specialties, each of which involves
a peculiar training. Accordingly, in good pro-
fessional schools there is a moderate appli-
cation of the elective principle, designed to

LIMITS OF THE SYSTEM 147

enable young men to prepare for specialties in
their profession. Thus, in engineering a young
man may be sure that he is destined to be a
mechanical, a civil, or an electrical engineer;
and his professional studies may wisely be
determined in some measure by the foreknow-
ledge of this specialty. In a medical school,
in the latter part of the course, the students
ought to have a moderate range of elective
studies, in order that they may begin while
in the school the preparation for medical spe-
cialties.

In general, a college student who knows
what his profession is to be will ordinarily
find that some of his college studies are prac-
tically prescribed for him, because he feels the
force of the advice to take certain preliminary
studies. Thus, the young man destined to en-
gineering will inevitably choose a large amount
of mathematics and physics during his college
course; and a young man who is destined
for medicine will, if he follow good advice,
study chemistry, physics, biology, French, and
German on the way to his A. B. or S. B. The

148 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

student who has no clue to the profession he
is to follow will be guided in his selection of
college studies, if he is wise, by his individual
tastes, inclinations, and capacities. If he fol-
lows this guidance, it will probably turn out,
when he chooses his profession, that he has
already taken in college subjects related to his
future professional work ; for the wise choice
of the profession will be based upon the same
consideration of his tastes and powers which
determined his choice of college studies. In
both kinds of choice, the wise chooser will rely
on the same sort of guidance.

In a well-managed college competent advice
is always offered to the newcomer in planning
his own schedule of studies; but the main
function of the adviser will be to interpret
the printed announcements, time-tables, and
regulations, and to show him how to lay out
his own course with due regard to the fences
of the elective system. Thus, for young men
who have no purpose to be students, the mini-
mum requirements for the degree afford guid-
ance which they can disregard only at consid-

GUIDANCE TO SOUND CHOICES 149

erable peril. For ambitious young men, the
rules about degrees with distinction give clear
and acceptable guidance. The rules for ob-
taining honors at graduation also afford guid-
ance for students who desire to make a judi-
cious specialization in their studies.

An example of this sort of guidance may
be found in the rules about Honors in Litera-
ture in Harvard College. The requirements
are as follows : A good reading knowledge of
at least two languages, one ancient, one mod-
ern; an amount of reading in at least two
literatures, one ancient, one modern, which
shall be satisfactory to the Committee on
Honors in Literature; an acquaintance with
the general history of two literatures, one
ancient, one modern, to be tested by an ex-
amination; a thorough study of two special
subjects from two different literatures, one
ancient, one modern. Such rules as these
will give good guidance to any real student
throughout his entire college course, not only
in the selection of individual courses, but in
the grouping of those he selects.

150 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

The largest effect of the elective system is
that it makes scholarship possible, not only
among undergraduates, but among graduate
students and college teachers. While college
curricula were prescribed, and therefore dealt
almost entirely \vith the elements of the sub-
jects taught, there was little in the work of a
college teacher which stimulated him to broad
and deep intellectual attainments. His col-
lege work became an absolute routine. Out-
side of the college he perhaps gave popular
lectures, or compiled school and college text-
books, or preached, if a minister, as he often
was. He but seldom became an advanced stu-
dent or investigator; and when in rare cases
he did become a real scholar, it was by force
of innate genius impelling him to advanced
work under most unfavorable conditions.

Since the elective system became the gen-
eral practice of the American colleges and
universities, so far as their resources have
permitted, the whole aspect of the profession
of teaching in the higher institutions of learn-
ing has changed. Even the young teachers

SCHOLARSHIP MADE POSSIBLE 151

have received each a competent training in
some specialty, while the assistant professors
and professors are always chosen from men
who have demonstrated their capacity for per-
sistent, productive, scholarly work. A success-
ful professor is an enthusiastic student, an
inspiring teacher, and an indefatigable inves-
tigator. In all departments of scholarly work,
such as modern languages, classics, oriental
languages and literatures, history, economics,
botany, and zoology, there now exist societies
or associations which bring together statedly
scholars in these specialties from all the uni-
versities and scientific establishments of the
country. Fifty years ago, these societies for
specialists were unknown. They are now nu-
merous, and their number and strength mark
the arrival of the American scholar, not as
an accidental product outside of the teaching
profession, but as a well-equipped professional
man, systematically produced in and for the
higher institutions of education.

It is difficult for the present generation to
imagine the condition of the American col-

152 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

leges when there was no instruction given in
any of them beyond the elementary courses in
the few arts and sciences which led to the A. B.
With few and narrow exceptions, no instruc-
tion in arts and sciences, that could possibly
be called advanced, was given in the Ameri-
can colleges before the Civil War. Down to
1872 there was no systematic provision made
at Harvard University for instruction in arts
and sciences beyond the Senior year of the
College. If any young man wanted to pursue
the study of literature, history, philosophy,
or science beyond the limit set by the require-
ments for the degree of Bachelor of Arts, he
had to go to Europe. No other gain from
the elective system can be compared with
this development of scholarship in the United
States.

In any college or university which under-
takes to present a series of graded courses in
all the common subjects of knowledge, elec-
tion of studies in some large measure by the
individual student, or selection for him, is
absolutely inevitable; for no single student

FREEDOM WITH RESPONSIBILITY 153

can take in three or four years more than a
small fraction of the instruction in the liberal
arts offered at such an institution. But if
election by the individual with the natural aids
works well in practice, it is of course to be
preferred to any method of selection for the
individual by an authority outside himself,
since freemen are best trained by practice
in freedom with responsibility. Now, the ex-
perience of forty years in a great variety of
American institutions has proved that elec-
tion by the individual works well, wherever
the administrative methods which should ac-
company such an elective system have been
well devised and well executed. Hence, the
system is not only inevitable, but in the high-
est degree expedient and profitable.

Inasmuch as Harvard University has a wider
elective system than any other American in-
stitution, and has devised successful adminis-
trative methods in connection with the system,
it is fair to use the experience there obtained
as evidence of the superiority of election by
the student over selection for the student by

154 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

faculty, administrative board, dean, or other
authority. The results obtained at Harvard
University may be conveniently discussed
under six heads.

(1) The elective system permits the student
to concentrate his work upon the subjects in
which his capacity is greatest, and so to make
rewarding progress in his chosen lines of
study. This freedom for the student to special-
ize has the great incidental advantage of de-
veloping the advanced instruction in college,
and such a development, limited only by the
pecuniary resources of the institution, will
result from every well-administered elective
system, and cannot be obtained so promptly
and completely under any other system. This
specialization might conceivably be extreme,
or too common, under free election. Has it
proved so ? Not at Harvard College. The or-
dinary college student does not wish to special-
ize to an extreme. The number of students in
advanced courses at Harvard is small in all
departments. The great body of the under-
graduates frequent the elementary courses in

SPECIALIZATION — CONTINUITY 155

languages, mathematics, history, philosophy,
economics, government, and the natural sci-
ences, wishing to obtain initiatory surveys of
many fields rather than a detailed knowledge
of one. Twenty years ago, it was demonstrated
that not more than 8% of the undergradu-
ates in Harvard College wished to specialize
their work to any high degree, and all sub-
sequent experience tends the same way. It is
only in the Graduate School of Arts and Sci-
ences that any large percentage of the stu-
dents tend to a high degree of specialization ;
and of course in such a school of mature
students, specialization is wholly desirable.

(2) What does the experience at Harvard
College show with regard to the wisdom of
the choices made by students as regards con-
tinuity of study, or persistence in the same or
kindred studies, from year to year? Critics of
the elective system have often assumed that
free choice of studies would generally result
in a capricious selection of heterogeneous,
elementary studies for trivial motives. This
criticism is founded, not on observation of

156 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

the actual facts, but on a presupposition as to
what American youth would be likely to do.
What occurs may now be plainly seen by any
competent person who will patiently examine
the records of the students' choices at Har-
vard College during the last thirty-five years.
Careful inspection of the records will satisfy
any candid mind that the elective system does
not produce the evil imagined ; but, on the
contrary, results in almost all cases in con-
sistent plans of individual study throughout
the college course. Inconsecutive or aimless
selections are hard to find. More than twenty
years ago, three experts, all familiar with the
relations and sequences of the courses of in-
struction given during the period of 1881 to
1885, carefully examined the entire series of
three hundred and fifty choices made by the
students of that time, being the entire classes
of 1884 and 1885 in Harvard College. They
endeavored, independently of each other, to
pick out those selections which, in their judg-
ment, lacked coherency or consecutiveness.
These three agreed upon only six cases of

CHOICES ARE COHERENT 157

incoherence — three in the class of '84, and
three in the class of '85. Two out of the
three experts — but not the same two in every
instance — agreed on twenty-one cases within
the two classes. When three experts cannot
agree that a given selection of studies lacks co-
herency, it may well be that knowledge of the
circumstances and conditions under which the
individual selection was made would fully ex-
plain or indeed justify it. The general result
of this particular examination was that inco-
herent choices were very few, and that the
intelligence in selection was nearly as great
in the lower half of a class as in the upper.
This verdict would stand unchanged to-day,
except that the recent gross exaggeration of
athletic sports has added slightly to the num-
ber of incoherent or wrong-motived elections
of studies.

When thousands of young men thus make
for themselves judicious and coherent selec-
tions of lines of study which run through three
or four years, it is plain that there must
be some guiding principles, or demarcations,

158 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

natural or artificial, which avail to make free
choice judicious in the main, and particularly
to make it coherent. A just appreciation of
these guiding principles is absolutely necessary
to an understanding of the elective system.
The purely natural guides are obvious and
authoritative. The most thoughtless youth
cannot help taking up a new subject at the
beginning, and not in the middle. If he would
continue a study which he has already pur-
sued, he must take it up again at the point
where he left off. He soon discovers that
many subjects taught at a university cannot
be advantageously studied without a previous
knowledge of some other subject, or subjects.
He perceives that every advanced course pre-
supposes acquaintance with some elementary
course, or courses, in the same department.
He obeys the natural tendency to pursue a
congenial subject, once entered on. To be
sure, in order to render these natural guides
effective, the Faculty must supply full infor-
mation about the inevitable sequence of studies
in each department, and the mutual depend-

ELEMENTARY COURSES WISELY CHOSEN 159

ence of related courses. The giving of this
information in clear and compact form is an
important part of the administrative regula-
tion which must accompany any successful
elective system.

Students who, while in college, discover what
their future profession is to be, have another
natural guide through the intricacies of a wide
elective system. They can, and do, select those
college subjects which afford the best foun-
dation for their future professional studies. It
has already been pointed out that the rules con-
cerning honors and degrees with distinction
give a certain amount of artificial guidance
towards effective groups of studies.

(3) It has been supposed that American
students, when allowed to choose their studies,
would simply inquire for the easiest courses,
and take them. Such critics point to the
courses which are selected by large numbers
of students in any college with a wide elective
system, and say these largely attended courses
are all elementary, therefore they must be
easy, and they are chosen because they are

160 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

easy. Neither part of this proposition is founded
on fact. The elementary courses in a well-
conducted college ought to be as well taught
as any others, and ought not to be easy in any
proper sense. They are chosen by large num-
bers because they relate to subjects concerning
which almost all students want to know some-
thing. They represent in part the courses which
used to make up the old prescribed curriculum
in the American colleges, only they are now
taught in a much more interesting and effective
manner. They deal, indeed, with the inevitable
subjects of the less advanced courses under
any conceivable college system, prescribed
or elective. In the languages and mathe-
matics these courses carry on instruction from
the more elementary stages already reached
at school; in philosophy, political economy,
history, and the natural sciences they are the
necessary courses for beginners, that is, they
are the only gates to the more advanced
courses. They treat of topics full of interest
for the general mass of the students. They
are selected by college students who wish to

THE GROUP SYSTEM 161

carry on the studies they have previously pur-
sued, or to take up new subjects early in their
college course in preparation for more ad-
vanced instruction in the later years. They
are prudently selected by young men of limited
capacity who cannot succeed in the more ad-
vanced courses. They also afford the most pro-
mising refuges for the few lazy students who
exist, and will exist, under all college systems.
(4) In extending the elective system into
secondary schools, and in introducing it into
some colleges, a system called the group sys-
tem has naturally come into use, because it
is cheaper and easier to administer than a
thoroughgoing elective system. A consider-
able show of options for the individual may
be made by grouping a moderate number of
studies in several different ways. Thus in a
high school, nine or ten groups, bearing as
many different names, can easily be made with
from twenty to thirty different studies during
a total school course of four years. Certain
studies will appear in all the groups, though
in varying proportions, while other studies

162 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

will appear only in three or four groups, and
others in only one or two. This is an econo-
mical mode of producing an effect of large
variety. There are, however, serious objections
to the group system in schools, and still more
in colleges. When, under a free elective sys-
tem like that of Harvard, individuals exercise
freely their spontaneous diversity of choice, it
will appear in the end that no two individ-
uals follow the same path through a course
of four years. Out of hundreds or thousands
of four-year selections, no two will he found
to be exactly alike. This diversity corresponds
to the infinite diversity of mind and charac-
ter in the choosers. No two minds will spon-
taneously elect the same studies in the same
proportions and in the same sequence. Minds
left in freedom do not fall into nine or ten
categories, or fit into artificial groups of
studies arbitrarily compounded by some other
mind. It is, moreover, quite unnecessary for
some authority to prescribe these arbitrary
groups of studies, inasmuch as all desirable
concentration and continuity of work can be

OBJECTIONS TO THE GROUP SYSTEM 163

secured without doing such violence to liberty
of choice. The group system is also objection-
able because it commits a schoolboy of four-
teen, or a college student of eighteen, to a set
of studies from which he will find it difficult
to escape later in his course, however much
he may wish to. There is no need of this early
committal, either in high school or college.
To impose upon a boy for several years an ill-
fitting group of studies from which he can
hardly extricate himself, is a much more seri-
ous matter than to allow him to choose amiss
one or two studies which he can easily replace.

Again, the group system does not give
every teacher the precious privilege enjoyed
under a system of free election, the privilege
of having no student in his class who has not
chosen to be there. The group system forces
a student who desires to study some of the
subjects which compose a group to take the
rest, in which he may have no such inter-
est, and consequently it compels teachers to
receive reluctant pupils.

Lastly, the group system, if enforced, com-

164 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

pels specialization in studies, a kind of com-
pulsion which is peculiarly unwarrantable. If
the student be permitted to cut across the
groups — as often happens in practice — and
so to make up his own course of study, the
avowed objects of the group system will be
defeated, and the school or college might as
well have a free elective system within the
limits which its resources impose. In short,
the group system is only to be recommended
as a temporary makeshift, while resources are
narrow, or the raw material of a school or
college is crude.

(5) An elective system leads to a great in-
crease of intercourse between teachers and
students for intellectual objects, and of spon-
taneous association for the same objects among
the students. Conferences, clubs, and societies
are maintained by young men who find them-
selves associated in the pursuit of the same,
or kindred, studies, for the discussion of sub-
jects connected with these studies. The plea-
sure and profit derived from these societies
or clubs are much enhanced by the variety of

SIGNIFICATION OF THE A. B. 165

studies and intellectual interests found among
the members of each society, alongside of the
common study ; for to the benefits and de-
lights of intellectual companionship diversity
of gifts and acquisitions contributes quite as
much as community of interests. Every small
elective course, every laboratory course, and
every seminary or conference at Harvard is
a focus of common intellectual interests, and
the occasion of profitable personal relations
between teachers and students.

(6) It has been a common criticism of the
elective system that inasmuch as no two can-
didates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts
will have pursued the same studies in the
same proportions, the degree itself cannot have
a definite, constant signification alike for all
its recipients. Fortunately, it is quite true
that the degree of Bachelor of Arts in the
United States no longer means that the young
men and women who hold it have passed
through the same course of studies. Neverthe-
less, the possession of this degree testifies that
the holder has enjoyed certain valuable privi-

166 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

leges, and made certain definite attainments.
All Bachelors of Arts have spent from seven
to ten years somewhere between the ages of
thirteen and twenty-three in studies properly
called liberal. At school they have all learnt
the elements of Latin, and of some modern
language besides English, the elements of
mathematics, a little ancient history, and
something of English literature ; and in some
foreign language, and in mathematics, they
went somewhat beyond the bare elements. At
Harvard College they have further spent three
or four years upon a prescribed quantity of
liberal studies, — all studies being accounted
liberal which are pursued in the scientific spirit
for truth's sake, and as means of intellectual
discipline. The degree of Bachelor of Arts
therefore remains the common goal of liberal
study pursued through many years. In many
institutions the degree of Bachelor of Science
or Bachelor of Philosophy has a similar signi-
fication, except that the terms of admission to
the course of study which leads to this degree
have generally been lower than those to the

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE HIGHER DEGREES 167

course which leads to the degree of Bachelor
of Arts.

The objection — if it be an objection —
that the A. B. has no definite and uniform
signification applies with much more force to
the higher degrees of Master of Arts or Sci-
ence and Doctor of Philosophy or Science.
No one of these degrees has any definite sig-
nification in regard to subjects of study or
specific achievements.

It will now be obvious that the advantages
of an elective system in a college cannot be
reaped, unless choice of studies is wide open
to the student for at least three years. Any
college which keeps the curricula for the Fresh-
man and Sophomore years mainly prescribed,
and allows free election only in the Junior
and Senior years, must fail to train advanced
students except in those subjects which are
well pursued for long periods in secondary
schools as well as in colleges; as, for instance,
in Latin, Greek, mathematics, English, and
history. A college student in any single de-
partment like chemistry, zoology, philosophy,

168 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

or economics, who begins his study of that
subject not far from its elements, must, never-
theless, follow a sequence of courses through
the successive half-years of his college course.
Thus, for example, he cannot attack the sub-
ject of quantitative analysis until he has stud-
ied general chemistry and qualitative analy-
sis. For developing this sequence properly, he
needs several half-years. If he has but two
years in all to give to the subject, a proper
sequence will not bring him near the top of
his subject.

In the period from 1870 to 1890— the pe-
riod of the rapid development of the elective
system at Harvard College — a long time
elapsed before the faculty thought it pos-
sible to admit Freshmen to the elementary
classes in economics and philosophy. Fresh-
men were not considered mature enough for
these studies. Accordingly, the students who
were attracted towards these subjects found
themselves compelled to begin them in the
Sophomore or even in the Junior year. Yet
the advanced courses could not be attacked

ITS EFFECTS ON TEACHERS 169

until the long elementary course had been
mastered. Experience of the difficulty of pro-
ducing advanced students of these subjects
under such conditions within the period of
college residence, finally led the faculty to
risk abandoning its theory that a young
American of nineteen was not prepared to
grapple with either of these subjects. By trial
they made the encouraging discovery that
some Freshmen are more mature than some
Seniors. In general, an elective system limited
to two years will fail to develop advanced
teachers, as well as advanced students, unless,
indeed, they can expand and continue their
college teachings in a graduate school. No-
thing can replace for a teacher the inspiration
and incitement of training a few genuine ad-
vanced students, who become his devoted dis-
ciples and the diffusers of his doctrines. The
attention of faculties and the public has been
too often concentrated on the effects of the
elective system on young students; whereas
its effects on teachers, and on the develop-
ment of real scholarship throughout the coun-

170 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

try, ought to have received more attention ;
for it is there that its effects have been the
most beneficent.

The expediency, and even necessity, of a
broad elective system in colleges will be seen
clearly by all those who consider the great
variety of professional studies for which a
modern college prepares its graduates. In
a properly constituted university, all the pro-
fessional schools will prescribe for admission
a preliminary degree, such, for instance, as
the degree of Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor
of Science. Now these university professional
schools divide among them the whole field of
knowledge, each taking so large a region that
further subdivision becomes necessary in order
to meet the wants of the young men who pur-
pose to practice professional specialties. It is
perfectly understood that under each profes-
sional course of study lie certain college studies
which are peculiarly appropriate to that pro-
fessional course, — as, for instance, mathe-
matics and physics in preparation for a pro-
fessional course in engineering ; chemistry,

AN ELECTIVE SYSTEM IS COSTLY 171

physics, and biology as preliminary to the
study of medicine ; and Latin, Greek, Hebrew,
and philosophy as preliminary to the appro-
priate studies of a divinity school. When,
therefore, the American universities come to
be properly organized, with their professional
departments on top of their colleges and sci-
entific schools, and are therefore closed to
young men who have had no college or scien-
tific school training, the expediency and ne-
cessity of free election of studies in college
will be amply demonstrated.

Looking back on the development of the
elective system in the American colleges and
universities during the past thirty years, one
sees that the rate of the development and the
width of the resulting system in each case has
been in the main a question of the pecuniary
resources of the institution. There is no doubt
that a prescribed system is indefinitely cheaper
than an elective system; for with only one
curriculum of elementary courses to provide,
a college can get along with a comparatively
small number of inferior teachers. A broad

172 THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

elective system requires many teachers of high
quality ; a prescribed curriculum needs only a
few teachers, and those need not be advanced
students or investigators. A professor who
gives half his time to advanced work with
classes of five to fifteen students is a far more
costly article than a professor who deals only
with classes of fifty to two hundred students.
Nevertheless, the great increase in number
and merit of the teaching staff in American
universities of late years is not all due to the
development of the elective system. A signifi-
cant part of the increased expense for salaries
is due to the increased amount of individual
instruction given to students by experts in
their several subjects. It is unnecessary to say
that although this increased cost has hindered
many institutions in the process of develop-
ing a wide elective system, the money thus
spent is the most productive of all educational
expenditures.

Finally, the permanence of the elective sys-
tem is assured by the demonstrated fact that
it provides on a large scale an invaluable

AN ADDITION TO HUMAN FREEDOM 173

addition to human freedom, and provides this
precious freedom for the most highly trained,
and therefore the most productive and influ-
ential, persons. When the student of history
reviews the great achievements of the human
race, he comes to the conclusion that those
achievements which have brought deliverance
from some form of terror or oppression, or
have been gains for some sort of freedom,
have proved to be institutionally the most
durable achievements, — one might almost say
the only durable.

METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

METHODS of university instruction have
changed almost completely within fifty years.
The method of recitation from a book is al-
most extinct, except in language instruction ;
the lecture method, after being greatly ex-
panded, has been subsequently reduced quan-
titatively, and much changed in quality; the
laboratory method with its congeners has been
introduced, and now occupies a large part of
the field; and the demand made on the stu-
dent for written work of many sorts — themes,
note-books, problems, reports, and theses —
has become incessant. Fifty years ago, the uni-
versity teacher at the end of the hour gave
out a lesson in a text-book — so many pages —
and expected his class to recite that lesson to
him at the next meeting. Fifteen or twenty
students would take part in this recitation,
which was in the main an exercise of the

THE RECITATION METHOD 175

memory. The student recited a bit of the book ;
the teacher ordinarily made no comment what-
ever on a good recitation, confining himself to
efforts to extract some fragments of the text
from the incompetent or neglectful members
of the class. The good students could of course
derive no profit whatever from such an exer-
cise, except practice in making a brief state-
ment from memory before the class. The poor
students made public exhibition of their insuf-
ficiency ; but were seldom either mortified or
stimulated thereby, for experience taught them
that the consequences of habitual failure in
recitations were not serious — they remained in
college, if they were regular in attendance on
prescribed exercises, both secular and religious.
Fifty years ago, the lectures were few in
number, and were not supported, as lectures
are to-day, by lantern-slide illustrations, and by
combination with note-taking, prescribed read-
ing, quizzes, and examinations. The lecture
courses were short, and lay outside the main
system. They were, however, oases of intel-
lectual interest in a thirsty land. In those days

176 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

there were no laboratories open to college
undergraduates ; so that the individualistic
teaching of students in laboratories, now so
common, was then unknown except in a few
embryonic scientific schools.

The prime object of university methods of
teaching to-day is to make the individual stu-
dent think, and do something himself, and
not merely to take in and remember other
people's thoughts ; to induce the student to do
some thinking and acting on his own account,
and not merely to hear or read about other
people's doings. Bearing this main object
in mind, the student of educational adminis-
tration will review with interest the various
methods of instruction now in use.

The recitation still persists and will persist in
the language departments of a university. In
a recitation the student can be called upon to
translate the foreign language into English, to
comment on the text, and to translate English
into the foreign language. He can read aloud
in the foreign language, and write it from
dictation. These are all acts indispensable to

USE OF THE RECITATION 177

his acquiring the language ; and, on the whole,
experience has shown that these activities on
the student's part are the most helpful pro-
cesses in acquiring any new language. To that
end the recitation is the most profitable exer-
cise which has been invented. Experience has
proved, however, that for the individual stu-
dent the recitation is advantageous in direct
proportion to the fewness of the students who
take part in it. It requires a very skilful and
energetic teacher to make a language reci-
tation profitable for a class numbering more
than thirty or thirty-five students. Twenty
to twenty-five members is a wiser limit for the
average teacher.

Beyond the language departments the use-
fulness of the recitation in universities is
rather limited. It can be used in small propor-
tion in connection with large lecture courses,
and is there often called the quiz ; and it may
also be applied in a rather different form in
those elementary subjects which require drill
on problems or applications, as, for instance,
in mathematics, and parts of physics, and in

178 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

formal logic. Such use of the reciting method
for drilling students together in problem-
solving is facilitated by the provision of large
blackboard areas in the rooms used. Every
member of a section or class can then be
kept at work for a considerable portion of
the hour, and yet the whole class will see
the solutions of a large part of the problems
given out.

In some university departments the lecture
became the principal means of instruction as
the recitation was abandoned; but it was the
unaided lecture in the least commendable forms.
Thus in teaching law the professors gave series
of lectures which constituted treatises on the
several branches of the law, and gave the same
lectures year after year. They referred students
to cases, but the attitude of the student was
purely receptive; the student took no part in
the exercise, he was merely listening and taking
notes; and no pains were taken to make sure
that he mastered, or even looked at, the cases
referred to. When the law professor had pub-
lished a series of treatises, his lectures often

USE OF THE LECTURE 179

degenerated into running comment on his
printed books.

In medicine, the pure lecture, without illus-
tration, prevailed to an astonishing extent.
Even the clinical teaching was given largely
by lectures of a descriptive or expository kind,
often without simultaneous exhibition of spe-
cimens or pictures. In the Harvard Medical
School of fifty years ago, there was no labora-
tory open to students except the disorderly
and dirty dissecting-room ; but for nearly four
months of the year there were five consecutive
lectures — humorously called didactic lec-
tures— on as many different subjects every
morning during the week. To be sure, medi-
cal education had another side which saved it
from habitual failure, — the observation work
in hospitals and dispensaries, and the memory
work on manuals and dictionaries of medicine
and surgery.

In the arts and sciences, lectures during the
first half of the period under consideration
— the past fifty years — gradually displaced
the recitation, the lecturers relying on periodic

180 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

examinations to test the industry of the stu-
dents and their own success; but gradually
the university faculties became convinced that
the plain lecture, without carefully organized
aids, was an unsuccessful method of teaching,
because it left the student in a passive and
inactive condition, and procured from him no
output, except spasmodic efforts of memory
just before the periodic examinations. The
last twenty years have seen a great reduction
in the number of lectures, and the invention
of various supplements to the work of the
lecturer, and of requirements accompanying
attendance at lectures.

The first of these supplements is prescribed
reading. This reading is of various kinds and
degrees in different subjects, and under dif-
ferent professors. Sometimes it consists of a
series of books used thoroughly one at a time ;
sometimes of three or four books to be used
simultaneously, though in parts only ; some-
times of a long list of books from which the
student may make his own selections, or to
•which the lecturer will make specific refer-

PRESCRIBED READING 181

ences from day to day. The selection of this
reading matter is an important part of the
professor's function. If he recommends only
a few books, the student may reasonably be
expected to buy them ; but if he recommends
many, ownership on the part of the student
is impossible, and it becomes the business of
the university library or of the department's
library to supply them. This involves large
expenditures for books on the part of the
university, if the number of students in the
courses concerned be large. The library must
be enabled to provide many copies of books
often referred to ; and to keep accessible in the
reading-rooms thousands of books which are
not allowed to leave the library, and are there-
fore called reserved books. At many Ameri-
can universities arrangements of this sort have
been successfully made, and are in good work-
ing order.

The books having been selected and made
accessible, how shall the lecturer know that
his students make use of them ; and how can
he ascertain at the same time whether his stu-

182 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

dents are absorbing what he says to them,
and reflecting on it? To accomplish these
objects, two methods are in use, — periodi-
cal written examinations, and frequent oral
or partly oral conferences or recitations con-
ducted by assistants.

Written examinations lasting one, two, or
three hours are held at intervals of about
two months or oftener. If four examinations
are held during the year, two of them may be
three-hour examinations, and the other two
one-hour. This method is open to the objec-
tion that the students may work hard only
spasmodically, namely, shortly before each
examination ; the rest of the time they may
be in a passive condition, more or less enter-
tained and interested, perhaps, but not using
their own minds actively on the subject. The
method is good enough for courses of instruc-
tion which are intended to be only introduc-
tions to a thorough survey, or outline sketches
of a great subject for persons who may, or
may not, propose a systematic and thorough
study of it. There is wholesome use in a uni-

ENFORCING REGULAR WORK 183

versity for courses of that nature ; but they
do not make part of its most serious and pro-
ductive work.

In order to enforce regular work on his
lectures and on the prescribed reading of his
course, the professor may relinquish one
period out of his three a week, or one period
out of his six a fortnight, and devote that
hour to a wholly different kind of exercise,
placing this exercise in the charge of a younger
and less experienced man, who holds the rank
of instructor or assistant. If the class be a
large one, — several hundreds, — it should be
divided into sections containing not more than
twenty-five to thirty members. The exercise
should be conducted as a recitation on the
lectures and reading of the week, or fortnight,
just elapsed; or the hour maybe divided into
two parts, the first fifteen or twenty minutes
being devoted to writing answers to a single
question placed before the whole section, and
the rest of the period to oral recitation or dis-
cussion. A skilful and alert instructor can
sometimes use the whole hour profitably for

184 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

active discussion with the students before
him, — discussion in which the students them-
selves take the major part. If a portion of the
hour be given to writing, the papers written
should be corrected and graded by the in-
structor. The exercise should always afford
the means of ascertaining whether each stu-
dent in the course has been attending to the
subject during the past week, or fortnight,
and of marking or grading his work.

In largely attended courses one instructor
or assistant can deal effectively with two or
three sections, but if there are hundreds of
students in the course, several instructors or
assistants will be required. These men ought
always to be selected with care by the depart-
ment, on nomination of the professor most
nearly concerned with the course. They should
always be advanced students of the subject,
and holders of one or more of the higher de-
grees of the university they serve, or of some
other university. On their attainments and
personal quality will depend in good measure
the effectiveness of the course in which they

THE WORK OF ASSISTANTS 185

work, and the success of the professor. If
several assistants have to be employed, the
professor should meet them each week, or each
fortnight, as the case may be, to agree with
them on the questions they shall put to their
several sections for answer in writing, to in-
quire into the progress of the several sections,
and to make the work of the instructors ac-
cordant as regards method and rate of pro-
gress, and just as regards grades or marks. In
a course of moderate size which needs only
one assistant, greater liberty can be given to
the one helper than is prudent in a large
course divided into many sections with sev-
eral assistants. In the latter case the professor
should make every effort to procure a harmo-
nious result for all the different sections.

The work done by assistants in large uni-
versity courses is, as a rule, highly profitable
to them, particularly if they are proposing to
become teachers themselves. They are brought
into intimate association with an expert pro-
fessor, who has a strong interest in guiding
them towards an effective method of teaching

186 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

for their own use, and who imparts to them in
the process the best results of his own expe-
rience. As a matter of fact, to serve as an
assistant to a successful professor in a univer-
sity course is the best thing a young scholar
can do towards getting a good position for
himself. It is therefore possible to procure
competent assistants for this important work
who will serve for two or three years; but
every department must take thought for a
steady supply of such helpers. The function is
not fit for capable and ambitious men beyond
a moderate number of years. If it were made
a long-period function, the right sort of young
scholar would not accept it.

The great change in methods of university
teaching during the last fifty years is the intro-
duction of laboratory teaching in the sciences,
pure and applied. So long as these subjects
were taught by means of books and lectures
more or less illustrated, the student got from
them a training similar to that he obtained
from the study of languages, history, and phi-
losophy. They trained his memory for facts

LABORATORY WORK 187

and his powers of comparison, discrimination,
and classification ; but when, between forty
and fifty years ago, laboratory work for the
individual student was introduced on a large
scale, first in chemistry and physics, then in
natural history, and later in a large variety of
medical subjects, a new day dawned for the
teaching of all the liberal arts and sciences,
and for a great deal of professional teaching.
In laboratory work the individual student is
obliged to use actively and accurately his own
eyes and hands, to record correctly the results
of his observations, and to apprehend the
general principle or law which determines the
sequences of the phenomena he observes. In
any given experiment he may be dealing with
a multiplicity of details; but he must take
account of the coordinating or classifying
principle which runs through all the details.
In the laboratory he is himself at work with
body and mind, and he is at work by himself,
though under the guidance of an instructor,
not much older than himself, perhaps, but
more experienced, and fully capable of guid-

188 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

ing intelligently the work of the comparative
novice.

In well-conducted laboratory courses of in-
struction, a remarkable combination is made
of all available methods to induce the student
to think actively and apply himself vigorously.
Such courses often use one after the other the
short illustrated lecture, note-taking at the
lecture, individual work at a laboratory coun-
ter, note-making with drawings and written
descriptions during the experiments, problem-
solving on matters connected with the experi-
mentation, and the periodical quiz or oral
examination. On the other hand, many labora-
tory courses make little account of periodical
examinations in writing; because the daily
testing of the student's acquaintance with the
subject is so prompt and efficient, and the
results of the work he does in the laboratory
indicate so clearly his attainments, that exam-
inations in writing covering the work of two
months or more are relatively unimportant.
The lecture as a part of a course of instruction
which depends chiefly on laboratory work may

LECTURE — MANUAL — QUIZ 189

be either long or short, either illustrated or
not illustrated, although it is generally illus-
trated. Note-taking at the lecture may be either
required or prohibited. It is often prohibited
at short demonstrations given to small groups
of students placed close about the demonstra-
tor's table, when the object of the demon-
stration is to show what the students are
themselves to do in the laboratory during
their next period of work.

When hour-long lectures intended to bring
out relationships, principles, or laws, make
part of a laboratory course, the notes taken at
the lectures are ordinarily supplemented in the
laboratory by a manual which describes tools,
processes, and methods of work so fully that
the student need waste no time and run no
unnecessary risks. In such subjects as anat-
omy, botany, and mineralogy, considerable
quantities of material can be issued to each
student for careful examination and descrip-
tion, and at the end of two or three hours of
such study a short quiz or oral examination
may be used to advantage with a group of

190 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

students who have been examining similar,
but not the same, material. The making of
notes of experiments during the actual experi-
menting is an invaluable exercise in accuracy
and order, and in adequacy of description. In
some courses the notes of each student at
each exercise are made upon uniform sheets
of paper arranged for subsequent binding,
and these sheets are not allowed to be taken
out of the laboratory. In a natural history
subject, each sheet will ordinarily contain a
drawing or drawings, and written descrip-
tions, presumably drawings and descriptions
of what the student has seen through his mi-
croscope. These sheets, dated and signed, are
preserved in the laboratory for each student
to the end of the course, and may then be
bound as a record of the student's work within
the laboratory. In other courses the notes are
kept in plain note-books which may be taken
out of the laboratory for inserting computa-
tions which the experimenter cannot stop to
make while in the laboratory, or for writing
out the conclusions, or inferences, which the

UNREASONING LABORATORY WORK 191

data experimentally obtained warrant. The
laboratory notes, however made, are always
open to the inspection of the assistant in the
course, and supply one means of estimating
the value of the students' work.

There is a danger to be guarded against
in all laboratory instruction which has been
highly systematized, the danger that the stu-
dent may follow processes described in a good
manual without ever reflecting on the reasons
for the processes. The student's own work is
then reduced to a mechanical following of
directions. His inquiry constantly is, am I
getting the reactions or phenomena which
the manual says I ought to get? A student
who works in this way will be entirely helpless
without his manual, and will lose the training
in reasoning which his course ought to supply.
Laboratory assistants need to be constantly on
their guard against this mechanical, unreflect-
ing way of working on the part of students they
direct. It is often necessary to tell beginners
what they ought to see, or might see, under
the existing conditions ; but it is never safe to

192 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

allow the student to rest satisfied with verify-
ing the assistant's or the book's statement.
The student who goes through a well-devised
laboratory course can hardly fail to gain some
advantage from the obligatory accuracy in
seeing, touching, measuring, weighing, draw-
ing, and describing; but it is quite possi-
ble that a student whose experimental results
are satisfactory should nevertheless miss alto-
gether the training in scientific reasoning
which the subject is fitted to impart. To pre-
vent such shortcomings, the assistant should
always be on the alert, and the professor re-
sponsible for the course should exercise an
active supervision over the instruction which
his assistants give at the laboratory tables.

In many laboratory courses it is advisable
to supplement the lectures of the professor
from time to time by short lectures given to
sections of the class by the assistant or assist-
ants. Part of the hour, occasionally devoted
to this supplementary lecture on difficulties or
details, may be advantageously devoted to
answering in writing a question set before the

PROBLEM WORK 193

whole section. These short written quizzes can
be best directed to ascertaining whether the
reasoning of the subject has been apprehended
by the class. Precautions against superficial
or mechanical work are most valuable in the
comparatively elementary courses resorted to
by large numbers of students. In the advanced
courses where the numbers are small, and most
of the members of any class are persons
bent on the serious pursuit of the subject they
have chosen, these methods of control are
hardly needed, or at least may be used much
less frequently.

Problem work is an important aid in many
laboratory courses. Typewritten or printed
problems in considerable variety are given out
to a whole class for immediate solution in the
room where they are issued, the problems being
of course closely connected with the work
done in the course during the preceding three
or four weeks. The written work thus ob-
tained will enable the professor and his assist-
ants to judge whether the instruction given
to the class has been understood and assimi-

194 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

lated in fair measure ; and at the same time it
will give good students a certain confidence
in their own attainments, and reveal to incom-
petent students the nature, and perhaps the
cause, of their deficiencies. In every well-
conducted laboratory course, however, far the
greater part of the students' time and strength
should be devoted to the laboratory work, in-
cluding the making of full descriptive notes.
Lectures, quizzes oral or written, problem
working, and the study of the manual should
all take a secondary place. The main object
in view should always be the training of the
students' senses, imagination, and reasoning
power in actual experimentation.

The principles of laboratory instruction are
available in many other university departments
besides those ordinarily called scientific. Thus
in the study of the fine arts, drawing and the
careful study of objects or specimens should
have a great part. In the study of architecture
and landscape architecture, the draughting-
room plays the part of the laboratory in chem-
istry or physics. In engineering, mining, and

DRAWING — DRAUGHTING — FIELD-WORK 195

forestry, the student obtains in his field-work
much of the same sort of training which the
student of botany, zoology, histology, or bac-
teriology gets in his laboratory. This is the
reason that all universities are giving so much
more attention than they formerly did to field
studies for engineers in surveying, geodesy,
and geography, to actual work in mines and
metallurgical establishments for men who pro-
pose to be mining engineers, and to work in
woods and lumber camps for men who propose
to be foresters. This is the reason that uni-
versities are providing and carrying on summer
camps for the actual conducting by students
of the out-of-door processes of these various
industries. Young men cannot be initiated into
these professions by the use of books, models,
drawings, photographs, and lantern-slides
alone. They must have the training of actual
labor in the real laboratories of these indus-
trial processes. To reading they must add
doing in their own persons. The student of
these subjects must combine study of theory
with practice; and he must be personally

196 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

familiar with the best applications of the
soundest theories. It is this combination of
theoretical and historical knowledge with
practical skill which in these days makes the
successful investigator, professional man, or
business man. In his training neither the the-
oretical part nor the practical part can be
safely omitted.

A method of instruction has come into use
in many university departments which was
imported from Germany, or adapted from the
work done there for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy, namely, the thesis, or long written
paper on a subject assigned by the professor,
or selected by the student in consultation with
the professor. The thesis in its original sense
is used here without much change as one of
the qualifying tests for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy, except that in American prac-
tice the thesis tends to surpass in length and
elaborateness the German original ; but as an
element in undergraduate work the thesis has
been shortened and has lost its character of
an original contribution to learning. It has

THESES — REPORTS — BRIEFS 197

become rather a report on some limited sub-
ject which the student can be supposed to
make by a process of summarizing and digest-
ing his reading on a given theme. It is now
often used as a means of ascertaining that the
student has really read the books prescribed
to him. When thus used, the best way of ob-
taining a satisfactory thesis is to require the
student to present to the professor or his as-
sistant several weeks before the thesis is due,
and after he has accomplished the reading
prescribed, a brief of his proposed thesis in
duplicate. The professor or his assistant should
go over this brief with the student, listening
to the student's explanation of the manner in
which he proposes to fill out the brief. One
copy of the brief should then be left with the
professor or assistant in charge. The thesis
should then be handed in punctually on the
day appointed, and should never be accepted
at all on any later day. The evils of postponed
written work are very great, so that the pre-
sentation of written work at the appointed
time should be rigidly enforced. Care should

198 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

also be taken that the theses demanded of
the same student by different departments
be properly distributed throughout the year ;
so that there may be no unreasonable de-
mand for written work in any one part of the
year. Thesis work can be made analogous to
problem work in some departments, — as, for
instance, in physics, by converting the thesis
into a report on some critical investigation or
famous experiment, or in economics by con-
verting the thesis into a report upon some
special industrial or financial problem which
has been solved in practice, or is in process of
solution.

All this written work gives the student
who does it thoroughly, excellent practice in
accumulating and sorting materials for dis-
cussion, summarizing arguments, and describ-
ing clearly complicated proceedings j and in-
asmuch as facility in such work is often highly
useful to its possessor in after-life, much is to
be said in defense or advocacy of the thesis.
On the other hand, the thesis often raises
grave questions in the minds of both student

THE CASE METHOD 199

and instructor as to the degree of independ-
ent labor which it represents, or rather as to
the amount of copied and quoted matter which
it may properly contain. The same difficulties,
however, occur in after-life whenever a writer
tries to give a new account of transactions or
processes not of his discovery or invention,
the materials for his description being already
in print.

One of the most valuable methods of uni-
versity instruction which has been developed
within the last thirty-five years is the so-called
case method of teaching law, a method in-
vented about 1871 by the late Professor C. C.
Langdell of the Harvard Law School, and
developed by himself and his colleagues in
that School in the course of about fifteen
years. Professor Langdell's fundamental idea
was that the law should be taught, not from
treatises or from lectures which would prob-
ably be either imperfect treatises or commen-
taries on treatises, but at first hand from the
records of actual cases in which important
principles or practices had been laid down

200 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

and established by judicial tribunals. He
began by teaching the subject of contracts
through a selection of leading cases, to which
he referred his students as the raw material
of their studies. When his students had read
the cases on a given topic, to which he had
referred them, he discussed with them the
facts of each case, and the principle or doc-
trine established therein. The students were
expected to state from memory the facts of
the case, and to give a summary of the argu-
ments, and of the decision of the judge. Pro-
fessor Langdell took part in and guided the
discussion by both questions and answers of
his own; but the class did the larger part of
the work during the lecture hour. It soon
appeared that it was highly inconvenient for
the many students to get timely access to the
few copies of the reports to which Professor
Langdell referred them, and he therefore un-
dertook the preparation of a collection of
select cases on contracts. This selection was
followed in a few years by a series of volumes
of select cases on the subjects of instruction

BOOKS OF SELECTED CASES 201

in the Harvard Law School, almost all of
which were prepared by Professor Langdell's
colleagues ; and his method was gradually
adopted by most of the teachers in the School.
The possession of these volumes of cases makes
it unnecessary for the student to resort inces-
santly to the volumes of reports on the library
shelves, unless the professors revise their se-
lections of cases, or wish to add cases of a
date later than that of the volumes in use.
With this method there is no lecturing in the
ordinary sense ; there is active discussion on
the statement of the cases as made by the
students, a discussion in which the professor
and many students take part. The better stu-
dents like to be called upon to state the main
features of a case, and like to discuss them
when stated. Not all the students of a given
class take part ; but the Socratic process is
more interesting to a mere listener than a
lecture, and more impressive. The method
requires an unusual degree of alertness and
vivacity on the part of the professor in put-
ting questions and keeping the discussion to

202 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

the point, and skill on his part in making a
quick and concise resume of the discussion
for the benefit of the whole class. It is, on
the whole, a more fatiguing operation for the
professor than that of lecturing ; because he
is obliged to give the keenest attention to all
the inquiries and suggestions of the eager
students before him. He must also see that
the time is divided proportionately among the
different topics which he intends to have
covered during the hour.

The method was much derided at the start
by lawyers who had been brought up on
treatises and commentaries on treatises; but
it soon justified itself in a conclusive way.
After a few years it was demonstrated that
young men who had been thus trained to the
practice of the law could make themselves
more useful to their seniors in the offices they
entered than fresh law graduates had ever
been before, and than young men contempo-
raneously trained in other methods. There
followed a rapid growth of the Harvard Law
School which has continued to this day, in

SPREAD OF THE CASE METHOD 203

spite of numerous restrictive measures which
demanded better "preparation for admission,
more years of residence, and finally a prelimi-
nary degree in arts or science as a condition
of entrance to the School.

The method has now spread to many other
law schools, and to other departments of
American universities — to the latter with
interesting modifications. It is directly appli-
cable to the study of constitutional law, and
in large measure to the study of diplomacy,
because collections of original documents can
be made for the study of these subjects which
are analogous to the case-books used in the
study of legal subjects. In economics also
the method is applicable, with only slight
modifications. Thus, the century-long warfare
between capital and labor can be profitably
studied from a collection of reports on the
most important lockouts and strikes of the
period, condensed and summarized if need be.
The successive gains made by the trade
unions, the good and evil they have done,
the defences set up by capital, and the inven-

204 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

tions made by capital to meet the new condi-
tions of the labor market, can all be brought
home to the student vividly and impressively
through the reports of the actual conflicts,
without the use of any treatise, or history, or
of any theoretical statement of doctrine on
the subject.

One of the most interesting applications of
the case method in other departments occurs
in clinical medicine, a department where the
ordinary method has been to show the stu-
dents, gathered about the patient, how the
history of the case has been obtained by the
physician and the nurse, how the symptoms
have been studied and recorded, and how the
just diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis are
to be arrived at. This lesson is given on or
near the patient in a hospital, dispensary, or
out-patient department. To supplement this
instruction given over sick or injured per-
sons, a case-book has been contrived in which
a large number of cases are described, with
all the records used by the physician making
a hospital visit, and with the results of thor-

SOURCE-BOOKS 205

ough examination of the patient. From this
printed report of the case, the student is ex-
pected to make his own diagnosis, to prescribe
the proper treatment, and to make the prog-
nosis. It is evident that this method can be
profitably used with regard to a great variety
of diseases and injuries; so that the stu-
dent shall find in such a case-book means of
reviewing his knowledge, and of testing his
capacity to deal with actual cases. This is a
combination of the case-book in the law with
a book of problems in geometry, or physics,
or economic geology.

Useful modifications of the case-book are
the source-books which are now found useful
in university departments of history, philoso-
phy, and public finance. These books are of
course various in character according to their
subjects ; but the fundamental idea is that of
Professor Langdell's book of cases. They are
intended to put at the disposition of the stu-
dent documents which have proved to be of
fundamental importance, summaries of life-
careers which were extraordinarily influential,

206 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

or extracts from great authors which contain
the substance of their teachings, or the seeds
of later growths. Books of this nature can be
profitably used either to supplement lectures,
that is, as parts of prescribed reading, or to
supply the themes of oral discussions which
replace lectures.

Finally, university examinations have been
greatly improved and systematized within the
last fifty years, and have become a highly pro-
fitable part of university discipline. American
experience on this subject is brief compared
with English. The first written examinations
ever held in Harvard University were intro-
duced there in the year 1857 by two young
tutors in mathematics. The written examina-
tion has since been studied from every possible
point of view, and adopted in all departments
of university work. They are much more than
means of grading students and compelling
the indifferent or careless student to do some
work; they constitute a valuable means of
training, inasmuch as they prepare young
men to meet the similar crises which they

EXAMINATIONS 207

constantly encounter in after-life, particularly
in the professions, — both learned and scien-
tific,— in the public service, and in business
administration.

The professional man is constantly brought
to tests much severer than any university
examination can ever be. The lawyer must
prepare himself, often under great difficul-
ties, to plead his case on a given day. The
physician may find himself called at any mo-
ment to a sick or injured person, whose real
condition he must discover as soon as pos-
sible, and must treat forthwith. He must also
decide what to say to the patient, and to the
patient's friends and relatives. He needs to
have at his fingers' ends all the knowledge
and skill applicable to the case in hand, and
he needs it on a sudden. The architect finds
it to his interest to present within a few weeks
a design for a kind of structure which is not
familiar to him, or which must be adapted to
new conditions of construction and use. He
must quickly summon all his forces, and work
at high speed to produce within a few weeks

208 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

an attractive competitive design. In all intel-
lectual callings there are periods of intense
labor to prepare for a crisis. For all such
•work the university examinations provide ap-
propriate and invaluable training. On this
account the disappearance of promotion and
graduation examinations from many schools
— both elementary and secondary — is greatly
to be deplored; the more so because college
and university examinations are sure to be
lowered in standard when the students who
enter the colleges and universities have had
no experience in examinations prior to be-
coming members of their college or university
on certificates from the secondary schools.
A generation is growing up in many parts of
the country which has successfully avoided
examinations, having acquired the belief that
examinations are an evil, instead of a profit-
able means of sound training.

A peculiar form of examination which has
been developed in some university departments
deserves mention. When an examination is to
be held on a half-year's course in the differen-

LONG QUESTION-PAPERS 209

tial calculus, for example, instead of preparing
a question-paper containing eight or ten ques-
tions, the instructor responsible for the course
prepares a set of forty or fifty questions which
really cover the field of instruction in that
course, so that any one who could answer all
the questions would demonstrate that he had
possessed himself of the substance of the in-
struction given during the half-year. This long
paper is given to the students three or four
weeks before the date of the examination. On
the examination day the class is told to answer
six or eight of the questions on the list. This
method is analogous to the use of a full syl-
labus to define to a class at the beginning the
professor's conception of the subjects he shall
cover during the entire course which they
are entering on. In any university there will
be some departments in which this mode of
examination can be occasionally adopted to
advantage.

The highest instruction given in the Ameri-
can universities is given in those intimate
meetings of small groups of advanced students

210 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

with their teachers, which are variously called
seminaries, conferences, or research courses.
The manner of conducting these meetings
varies considerably in different departments.
In the mathematical, scientific, historical, and
philosophical departments the main object is
often to give students opportunities of making
acquaintance at first hand with original au-
thorities, and to teach them by great examples
the methods of research. The work is then
apt to consist of reading typical texts and
documents, and the records of epoch-making
experiments or inquiries, of short studies on
special topics of ancient or modern inquiry,
and of comments, discussions, and criticisms
by the members of the class. One field of
study may be chosen by the teacher for the
whole group, or a special topic may be assigned
to each individual student. While the main
purpose of such work is to gain familiarity
with the processes of investigation and with
the weighing of evidence, the incidental know-
ledge acquired is an important part of the
total result. In seminaries or conferences on

SEMINARIES — CONFERENCES 211

natural history subjects, the critical exami-
nation of specimens may find a place, and
particularly the study of materials which the
students have collected in the field. In eco-
nomics the instructors undertake the guidance
of students in independent investigations of
financial, industrial, and transportation prob-
lems ; and the seminary gives opportunity for
the presentation and discussion of the results
of the students' researches. In languages and
literature the seminary courses generally have
two purposes in view. First, to make a thor-
ough study of selected works with special ref-
erence to text criticism, etymology, and the
history of grammatical forms. Secondly, to
acquaint the student with the methods of lin-
guistic and literary research by means of lim-
ited original investigations carried on by him
under the supervision of the teacher.

The members of any seminary may follow
special lines of inquiry, pursue their own work,
and confer individually at stated times with
the instructors under whose guidance they are
conducting their researches ; but the seminary

212 METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

or conference also gives opportunity to the
instructor to present results of his own work
to the advanced students in his subject. A
teacher who is developing a given subject for
his own purposes may often get valuable aid
from his seminary students, partly in collect-
ing materials, partly in verifying facts or cita-
tions, and partly through student discussion
and criticism of his own processes and state-
ments.

In some departments, meetings, called con-
ferences, of all the instructors and advanced
students are held statedly to promote inde-
pendent research and close intercourse be-
tween instructors and students, and to hear
and discuss papers prepared by the student
members. This conference method of instruc-
tion has been usually developed in the gradu-
ate schools of arts and sciences ; but it is now
used in various university departments, under-
graduate as well as graduate. It is the climax
of university teaching.

One excellent result of the changes in uni-
versity teaching during the past fifty years is

CONTACT OF TEACHER AND STUDENT 213

that the amount of direct intercourse between
teacher and student has greatly increased, so
that the personal influence of teacher on stu-
dent has been much enhanced.

VI

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION — THE PRESI-
DENT—GENERAL ADMINISTRATION

THE American colleges and universities, with
a few exceptions in peculiar communities, con-
tain representatives of all grades of American
society, namely, some small number of rich
men's sons, a much larger number of young
men whose families can help but little, or not
at all, towards their education, and a strong
majority of students whose families are neither
rich nor poor. In any college or university
the rich class will be represented to a higher
percentage than in society at large; because
most men who succeed greatly in business, or in
the professions, endeavor to get their sons into
college, knowing that the only way to maintain
through several generations a good family
position once won is through superior educa-
tion. In the large proportion of poor young
men in any college there will be a consid-

THE COLLEGE A SOCIAL MIXTURE 215

erable number of youths who have distanced
the mass of their contemporaries and associ-
ates because of some unusual mental gift, or
of some bodily excellence which has enabled
them to bear an unusual amouDt of work, as,
for example, the work of earning their living
while pursuing strenuous studies. There will
naturally be a larger percentage of idlers
among the rich students than in either of the
other groups, because the rich lack the motive
of impending need; but nevertheless, many
of the richer students will be found in the
upper quarter of their respective classes. In
Harvard College, for example, there are both
honorary and stipend scholarships, an honor-
ary scholarship being conferred on every stu-
dent, having no need of pecuniary aid, who
stands as high as, or higher than, the lowest
scholar in his class who receives a stipend
scholarship. Now, in almost all the classes in
Harvard College there are as many honorary
scholarship-holders as there are stipend schol-
arship-holders; indeed, there are often more
honorary than stipend scholarship-holders. The

216 SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

poor students are as a rule steady workers.
They bring that quality with them to college ;
for without it they could not have reached the
college. In the great majority of students who
are neither rich nor poor, every variety of dis-
position and capacity appears ; and it is they
who in the long run determine the social
quality of a college, for their manners and cus-
toms and their common sentiments naturally
prevail, although modified somewhat by the
manners and sentiments of the richer students
on the one hand and of the poorer on the
other.

When a college or university is started early
in a new or pioneer community, its students
may for a time reproduce the homogeneous-
ness of the surrounding community as regards
occupation, education, and habitual family
life; but even a single generation may suffice
to introduce into that college the heteroge-
neousness above described.

It is of course highly desirable that stu-
dents of all sorts mix together freely, and
come to understand each other during the

DORMITORIES 217

period of college life. What are the means of
promoting this desirable mixing? In the first
place, college halls of chambers, in which stu-
dents can live in large bodies under healthy
conditions and in close association. It is more
desirable that each dormitory contain rooms
of different sorts at different prices, than that
one dormitory should have rooms at high
rents, and another rooms at low rents; and
it is also much more desirable that each dor-
mitory should contain students of different
ages than that Seniors should be massed in
one dormitory, and Freshmen in another. The
managers of dormitories should always seek
to promote the association of students of dif-
ferent college standing, and of different scales
of expenditure. A good invention in college
halls of chambers is the common-room, a large
apartment or suite of rooms on the lower floor,
pleasantly furnished as a common meeting-
place for the occupants of the hall.

Under a general regime of liberty for the
student, it will ordinarily be found impossible
to prevent groupings of students according to

218 SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

their scales of expenditure ; but this tendency
should be resisted, so far as it is possible to
do so, by the renting arrangements of col-
lege dormitories. It is of course impossible to
prevent private investors offering students
desirable suites of rooms at high prices, and
thereby segregating the richer ; although such
buildings may always be kept under the su-
pervision of college officers resident therein,
and in the last resort may be made bad in-
vestments by means of restrictive college reg-
ulations.

It used to be thought among the governors
of some of the newer American universities
that students' halls of chambers were natural
centres of disorder and turbulence, and there-
fore were undesirable possessions; but this
view has now been generally abandoned, partly
because some colleges with dormitories have
proved to be habitually quieter and more or-
derly than some colleges without dormitories,
and partly because experience has shown that
well-managed dormitories make college life
more enjoyable and more profitable. Moreover,

DINING-HALLS 219

it has now been generally recognized that
wherever women go to college, well-constructed
halls of chambers are well-nigh indispensable
for them.

Another means of promoting the desirable
association of students whose families live on
different scales is the provision of large din-
ing-halls which can be carried on in a coop-
erative fashion by associations of students.
In this way a thousand or more students can
habitually eat together, at a moderate general
charge, each individual having the liberty of
adding to the common diet special articles
which he orders and pays for individually.
In such halls some tables may be set apart
for groups of acquaintances, while others are
used as in a restaurant. Both dormitories and
dining-halls, if well managed, will keep down
the average price of board and lodging in the
town where the college or university is situ-
ated, and thereby tend to promote the growth
of the college, and to maintain its democratic
quality.

The mixing of all sorts of students may

220 SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

further be promoted by providing large club-
houses for the use of the whole body of stu-
dents. A club which contains no more than
five hundred members is highly useful in this
respect ; but a club like the Harvard Union,
which contains fifteen hundred active mem-
bers, is of course much better; indeed, such
a club is a very efficient means of promoting
an advantageous breadth and variety of ac-
quaintance among students. Inasmuch as such
a club must inevitably have a low annual fee,
it cannot be supported without endowment,
such as the gift of its building, or the pro-
vision of a fund the income of which helps to
pay the running expenses.

In any old and large university there will
be found numerous associations of students
whose membership is determined by some com-
mon taste or capacity, such, for instance, as
musical associations, dramatic clubs, and so-
cieties which meet statedly to discuss a sub-
ject of common interest, — like the natural
history societies, and the clubs containing the
students who are interested in philosophy,

FRATERNITIES 221

economics, history, government, law, or medi-
cine. These groups are made up without the
slightest reference to the social standing or
mode of life of their members, membership
being conditioned solely on capacity and de-
sire to contribute to the object of the associa-
tion. These associations often establish among
their members lifelong intimacies based on
intellectual affinities.

The absence, or inadequate supply, of dor-
mitories in some American colleges and uni-
versities has given opportunity for the intro-
duction and successful development of the
fraternity system. The fraternities, with their
large and comfortable houses, and their inter-
esting secrecies, good libraries, and pleasant
relations with graduate members, organize a
part of the students of a college or university
into a number of fixed groups, the new mem-
bers of each group being ordinarily selected
within a few weeks of the advent of a Fresh-
man class, if, indeed, not earlier pledged. In
a small college the fraternities may each year
divide among themselves almost the entire

222 SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

body of newcomers, leaving but a small rem-
nant invited into no fraternity, who are
usually regarded as unfortunates. The fra-
ternity groups thus hastily formed persist
throughout the whole college course, and, in-
deed, last in some measure throughout life ;
so that when a graduate returns at Commence-
ment time, he revisits his fraternity quite as
much as his college.

In large universities, where fraternity influ-
ence is comparatively feeble, other means have
been found of gratifying the desire to meet
frequently, or even live with, a small group
of congenial individuals, whose habits of ex-
penditure are approximately on a level. The
small clubs, so called, gratify this propensity.
Twenty to forty men associate themselves to-
gether, and maintain a house, or some rooms,
to which they habitually resort for social in-
tercourse. These clubs, like the fraternities,
are often helped pecuniarily by former mem-
bers, who remember gratefully the pleasure
their club gave them in their own college
days. These clubs are ordinarily conducted

SORORITIES 223

with much privacy; so that some of them
may occasionally become centres of luxurious,
or even vicious, living, without this perver-
sion coming to the knowledge either of the
college authorities, or of the main body of
the students. Such lapses are, however, only
occasional, and are usually corrected either
by graduate members, or by new members who
replace the men who have led the club astray.
The small social clubs generally illustrate the
principle that " birds of a feather flock to-
gether,"— a principle which obtains in all
human as well as bird society, and which demo-
cracy cannot eradicate, and need not wish to.
Sororities have, in general, the same merits
and advantages as fraternities, but being of
more recent origin and serving the sex which
does not, as a rule, make and accumulate
money, they have difficulty in procuring en-
dowment or adequate revenues. They add to
the social enjoyments of their members, and
give them a sense of mutual support and of
good fellowship. They are especially useful
in co-educational institutions which do not

224 SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

possess an adequate number of dormitories
for women.

The fraternities and sororities and the social
clubs in American colleges and universities,
being small, exclusive, and secretive groups,
seem inconsistent with democratic principles in
general, and particularly with the liberal spirit
of a society of scholars. The fact is, however,
that the natural human being wants and needs
for social purposes some group or groups larger
and more various than the family, but much
smaller and less various than the entire com-
munity, or even than the entire membership
of a society of scholars. For social purposes
democracy is too near an approach to infinity.
The limited human being, even when fairly
educated, craves a limited group of congenial
associates having some common interest, which,
for the purposes of a social bond, may as well
be narrow as broad.

Fraternities and clubs alike can be utilized
by sympathetic and respected college officers
in confidential ways to support good order,
to root out evil practices, and to control and

COLLEGE SPIRIT 225

reform young men who have shown danger-
ous tendencies. Public misconduct on the part
of any of its members is held to discredit a fra-
ternity or club ; so that the officers and past
members of any respectable fraternity or club
will labor diligently with erring members, and
at the instance of college officers will take a
great deal of trouble to protect a weak brother
against himself, and to prevent him from in-
juring the reputation of the society to which
he belongs. Fraternity or club companions can
often exert more influence and a more constant
influence on young men who are going wrong
than any college officers can exert directly. It
is essential to this good influence that it be
private and unofficial so far as the college is
concerned.

The phrase college spirit undoubtedly de-
scribes a real thing, but this spirit is, on the
whole, much the same in all the American
colleges and universities which are old enough
to have traditions and inheritances, variety of
spirit existing in them only in comparatively
small proportion. Nevertheless, slight differ-

226 SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

ences in tone or atmosphere may produce
striking effects on the prevailing quality of
the graduates of different colleges, and these
effects are often traceable to differences in
social organization, — the complex result of
traditions, manners and customs, and trans-
mitted opinions and sentiments. Even real
differences of policy may mean only choices
of different means towards a common end.
Thus, a real difference among colleges is the
difference in the degree of freedom permit-
ted to the individual, and in the importance
attached to the development of individual
mental and moral power. Some institutions
think first of developing individual initiative
through freedom of the will, and through
offering to each individual all the best means
of developing his own personal faculty ; but
they prefer this course because they believe
that is the way to promote freedom, efficiency,
and happiness for the mass of mankind. By
working primarily for the individual, they
think they best promote the interests of the
mass. Such institutions naturally desire to serve

TRAINING LEADERS — SERVICE ABLENESS 227

all professions, elevate all occupations, train
leaders of thought, and equip good administra-
tors or managers for industries which direct the
physical and moral capacities of hundreds of
thousands of people. They believe that effec-
tive leaders can be produced only in freedom,
and through the most assiduous attention of
teachers and governors to individual capacity
and promise; but the benefit of the led is
the ultimate object of training leaders. Other
institutions believe more in prescription, an
average product, a gregarious enthusiasm, and
a unanimous motive. They believe that stud-
ies should be accessible only in groups made
up by educational sages, and that sports are
meritorious in proportion to the amount of
team-play which they develop. They believe
in collective wisdom, in cheering sections, and
consentient multitudes. These differences, how-
ever, are after all relatively superficial. At
bottom most of the American institutions of
the higher education are filled with the mod-
ern democratic spirit of serviceableness. Teach-
ers and students alike are profoundly moved

228 THE PRESIDENT

by the desire to serve the democratic commu-
nity, to strengthen and maintain free institu-
tions, and to prove that in time free institutions
will bring forth in abundance all the best
fruits of liberal culture, such as artists, schol-
ars, musicians, poets, and investigators, great
judges, statesmen, and public servants, as well
as honorable practitioners in all the learned
and scientific professions. All the colleges
boast of the serviceable men they have trained,
and regard the serviceable patriot as their ideal
product. This is a thoroughly democratic con-
ception of their function.

We pass now to a consideration of the
administrative offices of a university, and take
up first the office of president.

The president of a university is in the first
place its chief executive officer ; but he should
also be its leader and seer. In order to give
the competent man every opportunity to exer-
cise the functions of a leader and inspirer, he
should be the presiding officer of the trustees,
or other property-holding and controlling

HIS RIGHTS AND FUNCTIONS 229

board, a member ex-officio of any supervising
board which the constitution of the university
may provide, and the presiding officer of every
faculty within the university. There are Amer-
ican universities in which the president is not
by right a full member of the board of trus-
tees; but this is an unfortunate arrangement
which diminishes to a serious degree the presi-
dent's authority and influence.

Fifty years ago, it was not unusual for the
president of a so-called university to restrict
his interests and his functions to the college
or academic department, and to take no part
in the administration or conduct of the pro-
fessional schools. This day, however, has gone
by; and every university president worthy of
the name now finds opportunities for useful-
ness in all the professional departments. He
is able to carry the results of experience in
one faculty to all the other faculties, and to
contribute to the proper coordination of the
work of one faculty with that of another, or
of all the others.

In the board of trustees and in all the fac-

230 THE PRESIDENT

ulties the president should invariably name
all committees, never allowing this important
function to be usurped by any private member
of these boards. If he uses this power with
fairness and discretion, he will obtain in the
standing committees excellent bodies for select-
ing and formulating those progressive ideas or
projects which have a chance of commending
themselves to the governing boards ; and mem-
bership in such committees will be the means of
interesting the most serviceable men in feasi-
ble improvements of policy and practice. The
selection of members of special committees on
measures of current interest is also an impor-
tant function of the president, which calls for
good judgment on his part in regard to both
men and measures. Indeed, the selective dis-
cretion of the president in such matters will,
in the long run, go far to determine his success
or non-success in a large and well-established
university, the government of which is neither
autocratic nor democratic, but constitutional.
The relation of the president to the finances
of a university is different in different States

HIS FINANCIAL FUNCTION 231

of the Union, and in State universities as dis-
tinguished from endowed and tuition-fee uni-
versities. In a State university the president
needs the capacity to present persuasively and
vigorously to a legislature the case of the uni-
versity as an institution which repays many-
fold, and with extraordinary promptness, every
appropriation which the legislature makes for
it, especially when the appropriations are lib-
eral. To such ends the president of a State
university ought to know how to use the pub-
lic press, the granges, the popular lecture, and
the teachers' institutes as means of awakening
and diffusing popular interest in the univer-
sity as a whole. With the help of the most
far-sighted deans and professors in the several
departments, the president of a State univer-
sity ought to prepare to meet future needs
of the population which the university chiefly
serves, and to meet every appropriate demand
for the services of the university as soon as
the demand is appreciable. Every new service,
or demand for service, should be made the
ground of an application to the legislature

232 THE PRESIDENT

for additional resources. The president should
seize every opportunity to give a demonstra-
tion that the university has made a direct con-
tribution to the welfare of the State, the pros-
perity of its industries or manufactures, the
success of its schools, or the influence of the
learned and scientific professions within its
borders. He must know how to appeal to State
pride, in order to increase the resources of his
university.

The president of an endowed university is
rarely called upon to guide the thoughts or
influence the action of legislative bodies.
Occasionally he may have to defend the
exemption of educational institutions from
taxation, or to support projects for the im-
provement of public secondary schools, or of
normal schools; but in general his methods
of adding to the resources of his university
are different from those of the president of a
tax-supported university.

The head of a denominational institution
of learning must necessarily appeal to denom-
inational zeal in general, and in particular to

PROCURING BENEFACTIONS 233

the denominational organizations which main-
tain interest in the educational institutions of
their denomination, and provide a large part
of their resources. In an institution which has
no denominational affiliations, the president
will be exempt from the necessity of keep-
ing such affiliations close and warm, but of
course cannot draw upon any denominational
treasuries.

The popular imagination attributes to the
presidents of endowed universities a habit of
soliciting contributions from very rich men,
rich childless men, and sick rich men and
women ; and the correspondence of rich men
would doubtless supply evidence that some
presidents of endowed institutions make such
applications. There are also cases in which
prosperous business men who, as presidents
of endowed universities, become greatly inter-
ested in the success of their institutions, ask
their prosperous business friends and associ-
ates to join them in making up an annual
deficit, erecting a new building, or completing
a new endowment. In the older and richer

234 THE PRESIDENT

universities, which have the steady support of
a large body of grateful Alumni, the president
need not engage in personal solicitation of
gifts to his university. There are more effec-
tive methods in use, to which the president
should contribute to the best of his ability.
Thus, he should secure complete publicity in
regard to the financial situation of his uni-
versity; its annual receipts and expenditures,
the gifts annually received, — whether for
funding or for immediate use, — and its most
pressing pecuniary needs, should all be pub-
lished. Secondly, publicity should be given
to the fact that the university scrupulously
respects in theory and in practice the wishes
of all givers, and makes the beneficent ac-
tion of every endowment perpetual, so far as
human prudence and fidelity can go. Thirdly,
the president should see to it that all the in-
come of the university is used appropriately
and frugally, so that there shall be no mis-
directed expenditure and no waste. Any com-
petent president will be watchful against the
increase of administrative and equipment ex-

THE INDUCEMENT TO BENEFACTIONS 235

penditures at the expense of salaries for teach-
ers,— that is, he will be on his guard against
mounting expenditures for management and
materials as against expenditures for direct
teaching.

Finally, the president of an endowed uni-
versity, thinking to increase its resources, will
try to let the educated public know what the
product of his university is in trained men
able to render conspicuous service as authors,
men of science, members of the learned and
scientific professions, bankers, managers of
corporations, and public servants. This pro-
duct will be independent of State limits, and,
indeed, of national boundaries. Realization
of the service a strong university renders to
the country, and to mankind, is the great
inducement to educational benefactions ; and
it is therefore an important function of the
president of any endowed institution to see
that the means and opportunities of that real-
ization are supplied.

In any university, State or endowed, the
president's most constant duty is that of su-

236 THE PRESIDENT

pervision. The statutory definition of his
functions should leave no doubt as to the
universality and comprehensiveness of his su-
pervision. In this regard it would be difficult
to improve on the Harvard statute on the
president which prescribes, near the end of
the statute, that it is the duty of the presi-
dent — " to direct the official correspondence
of the University; to acquaint himself with
the state, interests, and wants of the whole
institution, and to exercise a general superin-
tendence over all its concerns." Under that
statute no question ever arises whether it is
the business of the president to do this or
that, or to concern himself with this or that
part or aspect of the university.

The president's judgment should be brought
to bear on every question of promotion within
the permanent staff, and on every selection
for an appointment without limit of time, or
for a long term. He should of course consult
the most appropriate advisers within and
without the university on every appointment ;
but his own mind should be brought to bear

PRESIDING AT FACULTY MEETINGS 237

on every important selection. The president
who delegates these selections, or takes little
interest in them, is in all probability neglect-
ing the greater for some lesser function. He
is spending his strength on less important
matters, and neglecting the duty on the right
discharge of which the future of the univer-
sity chiefly depends.

Presiding at all faculty meetings is an im-
portant part of the duty of the president of
a well-governed university, whether tax-sup-
ported or endowed. He there has opportunity
to learn the personal qualities of many mem-
bers of each faculty, and to estimate their
judgment and their public spirit. He also has
opportunity to form his own opinions as to
the feasibility of desirable changes, and as to
the means of advancing projects which are
promising but not yet ripe. He should be
better acquainted than most members of any
faculty with the prevailing discussions on ed-
ucation, sociology, and legislation, and should
be able to give the faculties the benefits of
his observations outside the university world.

238 THE PRESIDENT

He needs thorough acquaintance with the
schools which underlie the colleges and uni-
versities, with the changing conditions of the
professions which the university feeds, and
with the alterations in the national indus-
tries and habits which cause, or should cause,
the rise of new professions.

The president of a university should never
exercise an autocratic or one-man power. He
should be often an inventing and animating
force, and often a leader; but not a ruler or
autocrat. His success will be due more to
powers of exposition and persuasion combined
with persistent industry, than to any force of
will or habit of command. Indeed, one-man
power is always objectionable in a university,
whether lodged in president, secretary of the
trustees, dean, or head of department. In
order to make progress of a durable sort, the
president will have to possess his soul in pa-
tience ; and on that account a long tenure will
be an advantage to him and to the university
he serves.

Inasmuch as it is the object of the university

THE PRESIDENT'S EXAMPLE 239

to send out into the multifarious occupations
of civilized society a steady stream of well-
trained young men who mean to make them-
selves useful, it is well for the president of the
university to make himself useful in some field
of public service, without as well as within
the university. He will thus set an example
which will be more influential than personal
exhortation with the youth who pass within
the range of his influence.

Thirty-nine years ago, a young man who
had been president of a university for five
months made at his inauguration the follow-
ing remarks, among others, about the quality
and function of a president : —

" The President should be able to discern
the practical essence of complicated and long-
drawn discussions. He must often pick out
that promising part of theory which ought to
be tested by experiment, and must decide how
many of things desirable are also attainable,
and what one of many projects is ripest for
execution. He must watch and look before :
watch, to seize opportunities to get money, to

240 THE PRESIDENT'S FUNCTIONS

secure eminent teachers and scholars, and to
influence public opinion toward the advance-
ment of learning; and look before, to antici-
pate the due effect on the University of the
fluctuations of public opinion on educational
problems, of the progress of the institutions
which feed the University, of the changing
conditions of the professions which the Uni-
versity supplies, of the rise of new professions,
of the gradual alteration of social and religious
habits in the community. The University
must accommodate itself promptly to signifi-
cant changes in the character of the people
for whom it exists. The institutions of higher
education in any nation are always a faithful
mirror in which are sharply reflected the na-
tional history and character. In this mobile
nation the action and reaction between the
University and society at large are more sen-
sitive and rapid than in stiffer communities.
The President, therefore, must not need to
see a house built before he can comprehend
the plan of it. He can profit by a wide inter-
course with all sorts of men, and by every

DEANS 241

real discussion on education, legislation, and
sociology."

After thirty-nine years of experience in the
same office he finds the above description correct.

A fully organized university contains an
undergraduate and a graduate department of
arts and sciences, and four or more profes-
sional schools; and in many universities each
of the two departments in arts and sciences is
divided into two parts, — one of arts and pure
sciences, and the other of applied science. At
the head of each department a dean is ordi-
narily placed, who is its chief administrative
officer. In most cases he is also a professor
and an active teacher, who gives part of his
time to administrative work. The office is
comparatively new in American universities.
Forty years ago, there was only one dean in
Harvard University, — the dean of the medical
faculty. There are now four deans connected
with the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences,
and five other deans in the professional schools
of the University; and similar administrative

242 THE FUNCTIONS OF A DEAN

dispositions are made by many American uni-
versities.

The functions of a dean relate almost exclu-
sively to his own department of the university ;
but within that department they are compre-
hensive. He is the chief adviser of the presi-
dent concerning the instruction given in his
school, and is responsible for the preparation
and orderly conduct of its faculty business,
and for the discipline of its students. In the
undergraduate departments much of his time
is given to intercourse with students who need
advice or pecuniary aid, or who neglect their
opportunities, or become dangerous to their
associates. For the younger professors and
inexperienced teachers in his department, the
dean is a counsellor and friend. In most uni-
versities deans are selected from among the
members of the faculty, and they hold office
without limit of time. They may best be per-
sons who are capable of working cordially
with the president, although their functions
are in many respects independent of him.
Much of the work of a dean is done in con-

QUALITIES OF A GOOD DEAN 243

formity with rules laid down by a faculty, or
with well-understood, predetermined policies
of the university, and it is only on matters
for the settlement of which he finds no such
guidance, or on new pecuniary problems, or
on difficult cases, that a dean will ordinarily
consult the president.

It is obvious that for the discharge of these
functions a dean needs good judgment, quick
insight, patience, and a strong liking for help-
ful, sympathetic intercourse with young men.
The men who are most successful in the
work of a dean are neither dry nor gushing,
neither rude nor soft; they are alert, atten-
tive, sympathetic, and hopeful. In conducting
the business of his office a dean needs the
usual qualities of a good administrative officer,
namely, thoroughness in inquiry, promptness
and clearness in decision, and assiduity. In
manner and address he ought to be frank,
considerate, and cordial. He ought to inspire
confidence and win regard, and be capable
of exerting a good influence without visible
effort, and without self-consciousness.

2M WORK OF A DEAN

In a large department, containing many
students, the work of a dean makes a serious
demand upon a conscientious man -whose
feelings are quick; so that deans are often
compelled to retire from service in consequence
of the incessant drain on their sympathies, and
the exhausting nature of parts of their work.
One of the most trying parts is the inter-
course with anxious, dissatisfied, or unintelli-
gent parents. On the other hand, there is no
part of university work which brings to the
faithful worker a stronger sense of being use-
ful, or more durable satisfactions. His per-
sonal contacts with young men are numerous
and intimate. He often knows that he has
done good to people in anxiety or trouble,
and as the years go by he experiences many
of the legitimate rewards of bringing help at
critical moments in other people's lives.

It is generally a dean that in the course of
years brings to pass real improvements in col-
lege manners and customs through personal
influence on successive generations of stu-
dents. To produce such effects he needs a

SECRETARIES 245

good many years of continuous service, dur-
ing which his ameliorating influence gradu-
ally takes effect on the young men in his
charge. That institution is fortunate which
can command the services of the right kind
of men in its deanships ; and the president of
a university has no more important duty than
that of nominating with all possible care the
deans of the several departments.

The president and the deans alike need
assistance which is by no means of a clerical
nature, and hence in a large university there
will be a considerable number of graduates of
the institution who serve as secretaries, and
are charged with administrative work which
requires acquaintance with the university and
with its teachers, officers, societies, clubs, and
cooperative organizations. Each governing
board and each faculty has its secretary, and
in a large institution the president may have
in his office two or three highly educated men
who conduct the larger part of his corre-
spondence, prepare his business for the board
of trustees, communicate with persons who

246 THE SECRETARY OF A FACULTY

have business with him and make appoint-
ments for them, collect information, and look
after the official publications of the university.
These duties are often of a confidential char-
acter, requiring discretion and quickness in
action, and a robust loyalty to the institution.
The dean of a large department requires also
a good deal of clerical assistance ; because the
records of the students under his charge as
regards their attendance, and the grades which
they attain at examinations or for written
work, must be kept with accuracy. The stu-
dents' records kept in a dean's office are not
only indispensable while the students are mem-
bers of the university, but are also in many
cases useful in after years; although the
record of each individual is held to be confi-
dential, there are many proper uses to which
they can be put by request of relatives, friends,
or biographers.

The function of the secretary of a faculty
is by no means unimportant. The history of a
university may best be read in the records of
its board of trustees and its faculties ; for the

UNIVERSITY PUBLICATIONS 247

main steps of its progress are there recorded.
The secretary of a faculty, like an administra-
tion secretary, needs a capacity to grasp quickly
the thoughts of other people and reduce them
to clear and precise written form. A secretary
who can pick the kernel out of a good deal
of discursive chaff, or express concisely the re-
sult of an involved debate, will be likely to
make himself very useful. If he can do those
things, and is fair and diligent, he may be a
quiet man of infrequent speech, and yet have
a strong influence for good. If he possesses
also some gift of speech and some charm of
style, and a strong memory, his serviceable-
ness will be greatly enhanced.

Every vigorous university issues in these
days a large number of periodical publica-
tions, including catalogues, reports, and an-
nouncements, and also a considerable number
of literary and scientific publications such as
annals or memoirs of observatories and muse-
ums, theses or essays produced by the teach-
ers and graduate students of the university,

24S THE APPOINTMENTS OFFICE

contributions from the various laboratories,
syllabuses of lectures and laboratory courses,
so-called studies in classics, history, and eco-
nomics, and collections of examination papers.
These various publications are issued in a
steady stream throughout the year, and a com-
petent agent must be employed to superintend
the work of printing and issuing them. This
work needs to be done with accuracy and effi-
ciency ; it affects every teacher and student in
the university, and many of its future mem-
bers. Since all the strong American universi-
ties have undertaken a great deal of new work
within the last twenty years, it is necessary to
bring this new work to the knowledge of gradu-
ates, teachers, parents, and pupils at school.
The distribution of this information must be
as wide as the country ; for the stronger univer-
sities are now resorted to from many parts of
the United States, or indeed, from all parts.

In years still recent, several American uni-
versities have adopted a piece of administra-
tive work which Harvard University, first
among American institutions, copied in part

FOR GRADUATES AND UNDERGRADUATES 249

from Oxford University, namely, an office
through which members of the university, who
need to support themselves wholly or in part,
may obtain appropriate employment, and grad-
uates of the university ready for service may
obtain employment appropriate to the educa-
tion they have received. In England the work
of a university appointments bureau is chiefly
devoted to procuring places for young gradu-
ates as teachers, civil servants, journalists,
secretaries, or corporation officers; but in
America a wider range of employment for
graduates has been sought. At Oxford and
Cambridge, again, there are very few under-
graduates who need to earn their living while
in college ; whereas in American universities a
considerable proportion of all the undergrad-
uates must be self-supporting, or must earn a
part of their expenses. In the larger Ameri-
can universities the work of the secretary for
appointments is growing, and likely to grow,
as the managers of large producing or distrib-
uting industries realize more and more the
value of highly trained young men, and the

260 DIRECTORS OF LABORATORIES

extreme difficulty, in these days of applied
science and minute division of labor, of bring-
ing up competent managers from the ranks.

In a university in which are maintained
dormitories, dining-halls, and a cooperative
society for supplying the articles which stu-
dents inevitably need, — such as clothing,
books, stationery, furniture, athletic supplies,
instruments, and sporting goods, — two or
three administrative officers, presumably con-
nected with the treasurer's department, must
give attention to these matters, and particu-
larly must assist the students in their conduct
of cooperative undertakings, like dining-halls
and cooperative stores. Their work will be
partly administrative and partly accounting.

The directors of laboratories, libraries, and
museums have an important part in the ad-
ministrative work of a modern university. In
their accounting they need assistance from the
treasury department. Each director of a labo-
ratory, library, or scientific establishment can
employ to advantage one or more assistants in
the routine business of the establishment; but

LIBRARIANS AND MUSEUM DIRECTORS 251

"he ought to possess himself the usual admin-
istrative faculties. Every laboratory, observa-
tory, or museum is in some sense a workshop,
and the head of it ought to know how to con-
duct a workshop in an orderly, economical,
and efficient way. Inasmuch as students are to
be trained in laboratory work to the careful
and precise use of their senses, and to the
procuring of the most favorable conditions
for every experiment, every laboratory should
be tidy and clean. Every library and museum
should exhibit the most careful housekeeping,
being kept as free as possible from dust, in-
sects, crumbs, and accumulations of rubbish,
not only in the show-rooms, but in the work-
rooms and the receiving-rooms. Librarians and
museum directors should keep clearly in mind
definite policies concerning the relation of the
bulk of their collections to their working-
rooms, their exhibition-rooms, and their spaces
for storage. The collecting forces of a library
or scientific establishment are apt to outrun
the spaces for exhibition and the resources for
utilization. In such cases the director may be

252 OBJECT OF UNIVERSITY COLLECTIONS

working for some future generation, or avail-
ing himself of fleeting opportunities for col-
lecting ; but he is not doing his best for the
passing generation. In a university intended
for the instruction of each generation as it
passes, there are limits to the accumulation of
material which soon loses its interest for living
men and passes into the domain of history.
Collections of hand and machine tools and of
machinery, which for a few years may have
illustrated actual industries, soon lose all in-
terest except for students of the history of the
trades to which they belong ; yet they occupy
much space, and must be maintained in fair
condition. Thousands of books in every gener-
ation fall into a similar category. They have
been replaced by better books, and have no
interest except for students of the history of
an art or an idea.

A university which proposes to be an effec-
tive teaching implement for each new gen-
eration must be careful how it undertakes
to maintain great museums in many fields of
knowledge. It should prefer museums of mod-

COLLECTIONS SHOULD BE LIMITED 253

erate size which contain only a few specimens
of each type, and those often replaced. Its
collections should be always thought of as
teaching materials, partly for elementary stu-
dents, partly for advanced students, and partly
for the public at large. The buildings should
not be conceived of as indefinitely extensi-
ble ; but as having fixed limits, the contents
to be made choicer and more instructive by
exclusion and selection in each succeeding
generation.

This rule must be applied to books, if a
library is to be kept an effective treasure-house
for living men. The directors of collections,
whether of books, specimens, or records, need
to study constantly the relative expenditures
for collecting and for utilization. Utilization
should keep up with collection ; and due pro-
portion should be observed between the cost
of collection and the cost of utilization, else
the passing generation will not get its share
of the fruition. There is also danger that if
utilization lags behind collection, much of the
cost of collecting will be lost.

254 BREADTH OF UNIVERSITY WORK

Any one who makes himself familiar with
all the branches of university administration
in its numerous departments of teaching, in
its financial and maintenance departments, its
museums, laboratories, and libraries, in its ex-
tensive grounds and numerous buildings for
very various purposes, and in its social organ-
ization, will realize that the institution is
properly named the university. It touches all
human interests, is concerned with the past,
the present, and the future, ranges through
the whole history of letters, sciences, arts, and
professions, and aspires to teach all system-
atized knowledge. More and more, as time
goes on, and individual and social wealth ac-
cumulates, it will find itself realizing its ideal
of yesterday, though still pursuing eagerly its
ideal for to-morrow.

INDEX

INDEX

A. B., degree of, significance of,
165.

A. M., degree of, 41, 167.

Academic distinctions, 118.

Academic freedom, 27, 110.

Accounts, publication of, 18.

Address lists of Alumni, 70, 75.

Administrative boards under
faculties, 105.

Administrative officers, 228 ;
age, 103 ; duties, 30 ; salaries,
15.

Admission requirements, 31,
106.

Advanced study scanty before
Civil War, 152.

Advertising, 78.

Advisers of students, 148.

Age of administrative officers
and professors, 13, 103.

Agriculture, faculty of, 81.

Alumni, address lists, 70 ; anni-
versary celebrations, 67 ; geo-
graphical distribution, 70 ; in-
fluence on undergraduates,
114; information distributed
among, 70 ; organizations, 65,
69 ; local clubs, 72 ; of profes-
sional schools, 69 ; secretary,
72 ; photograph albums of, 68 ;
publications, 77 ; as trustees,
27 ; representation in trustees,
45, 48, 49 ; their success in life,
235 ; vital statistics, 67.

Annual appointments, 93, 95,
101, 127.

Applied biology, 85.

Applied science, faculty of, 81,

85 ; relations with faculty of

arts and sciences, 85 ; private

practice of teachers, 86.
Appointments, 7 ; confirmation

of, 50 ; nominations for, 111;

president's relation to, 236 ; of

teachers, 90, 112.
Appointments offices, 76, 248.
Appropriations from legislature,

29.

Architects, employment of, 24.
Arts and sciences, faculty of, 81,

82 ; relations with faculty of

divinity, 84.
Assistant professors as members

of faculty, 87 ; salary of, 13.
Assistants, training of, 185.
Associated Harvard Clubs, 74.
Associations of students, 220.
Athletics, fields for, 22.
Attendance at college exercises,

175.

Bachelor of Arts, degree of, sig-
nificance of, 165.

Bachelor of Philosophy, degree
of, 166.

Bachelor of Science, degree of
166.

Bachelor's degree for admission
to professional schools, 170.

Biology, applied, 85.

"Birds of a feather" in social
life, 223.

258

INDEX

Board, 20. See also Dining-halls.

Board of Overseers. See Over-
seers.

Breeding in and in, danger of,
90.

Brooks, Phillips, 62.

Brown University, corporation
of, 44.

Building plans for the future, 25.

Buildings, designs for, 23.

California, University of 19.

Cambridge, University of, 8,
249.

Campus, 23.

Carnegie Foundation, 6, 16, 100,
104.

Case method of teaching law,
178, 199; in subjects other
than law, 203.

Catalogue of graduates, 75.

Chapel, attendance at, 61.

Chicago, University of, publica-
tions, 77.

Choice of studies, guidance in,
149.

Class organization of Alumni, 65.

Clinical professorships, 96.

Clubs of Alumni in different lo-
calities, 72.

Clubs, students', 220.

Collectivistic motives, 227.

College, its relation to profes-
sional schools, 40.

College records, 118.

" College spirit," 225.

Commencement, Alumni gather-
ings at, 71.

Committees of faculty, 109 ; of
governing boards, 6; named
by president, 230.

Common-rooms, 217.

Competition of endowed with
State institutions, 16.

Conferences of teachers and ad-
vanced students, 212.

Conferences to test and help
students' work, 143, 183.

Connecticut, Collegiate School
of, 45.

Consenting bodies, 44; see In-
specting bodies ; Overseers.

Constitutional law, 84.

Cooperative societies, 20, 250.

Cooptation of trustees, 47.

Cost of living, for students, 20.

Culture, changed ideals of, 43.

Dartmouth College, charter of,
44.

Deans, 30, 105, 241 ; " one-man
power "of, 121,238.

Degrees, 118 ; requirements for,
31, 106.

Democracy in social life, 224.

Denominational institutions,
functions of president in, 232.

Denominational instruction, 84.

Denominations, control by, 47.

Departmental buildings, 129.

Departmental organization of
instruction, 58, 82, 101, 108,
110, 124, 125, 126.

Departments, relation of fac-
ulty to, 128 ; nomination of
annual appointments by, 128.

Differences among colleges, 226.

DiHing-halls, 20, 219.

Directors of laboratories, libra-
ries, and museums, 250.

Discipline, 105, 114, 144.

Divinity, faculty of, relations
with faculty of arts and sci-
ences, 84.

INDEX

Doctor of Philosophy, degree of,

41, 167.
Doctor of Science, degree of,

167.
Dormitories, 20, 217.

Easy courses, 136, 159.

Elective system, 131 ; object of,
134; in Harvard College
started by Board of Overseers,
58 ; a system, not a " bazaar, "
131 ; order and sequence of
courses, 132 ; limitations of
choice, 133, 147 ; time-table of
courses, 133; unwise combina-
tions of courses, 133 ; easy,
"soft," or "snap" courses,
136, 159 ; avoidance of early
morning and late afternoon
courses, 136 ; as used by idle
students, 136 ; value of, for
lowest students, 137 ; value
of, for late-developing minds,
138 ; graduate study pro-
moted by, 140 ; in Harvard
College, 140 ; mixture of older
and younger students, 139,
141 ; social effects of, 142 ;
responsibility of individual
student promoted by, 142 ;
examinations, 143 ; idleness
not induced by, 143 ; induce-
ments to strenuons study, 144 ;
minimum of work larger than
under prescribed system, 144 ;
moral objects, of, 144 ; free-
dom of election consistent
with strictness of require-
ments of study, 145 ; com-
pared with prescribed course,
145 ; in professional schools,
147 ; advisers of students, 148 ;

honors requirements, 149 ;
grouping of courses, 149;
group system, 161, 227; spe-
cialization forced by group
system, 164 ; stimulating to
scholarship of teachers, 150;
teaching profession affected
by, 150 ; works well under
proper administrative meth-
ods, 153 ; in Harvard Uni-
versity, 153 ; concentration
of work in the direction of
highest capacity, 154 ; con-
centration not carried too
far by undergraduates, 155 ;
actual choices of courses are
usually wise, 155 ; coherence
of studies chosen, 156; pro-
fessional career, courses lead-
ing toward, 159 ; length of
elective course, 167 ; Fresh-
man and Sophomore years,
prescribed courses in, 167 ;
two years of free election not
enough, 168 ; courses open to
Freshmen, 168 ; professional
studies, foundation for, 170;
pecuniary resources affect de-
velopment of, 171 ; liberal
study under, 165 ; promotion
of intercourse between teach-
ers and students, 164.

Employment bureaus, 76, 248.

Endowed institutions, advantage
of, 1 ; dependent on gifts, 17 ;
function of president in, 232 ;
competition with State insti-
tutions, 16.

Endowments, 28.

Engineering, faculty of, 81.

Enrolment of students, 79.

Epidemics, 22.

260

INDEX

Etiquette of relations between
trustees and faculties, 107.

Examinations, inspection of, 52,
63 ; oral, 189 ; use of, in lec-
ture courses, 182 ; written,
206.

Exemption from, taxation, 19,
232.

Expense of instruction, ques-
tions affecting, properly re-
ferred to trustees, 107.

Expenses of students, 20.

Faculty, the, 81 ; functions of,
104, 119; age of members, 87,
88, 89, 101 ; committees, how
constituted, 123 ; committee
on instruction, 109 ; deans,
30, 105, 241; delegation of
functions by, 105 ; delegation
of functions to, 31 ; depart-
mental subdivision of, 58, 82,
108, 124, 125, 126; depart-
ments, function of, in selecting
teachers, 101 ; in-breeding,
90; interference with teach-
ers' methods, 110 ; meetings,
frequency of , 119; meetings,
value of, 121 ; meetings, presi-
dent to preside at, 237 ; mem-
bership in, 87 ; membership
in more than one, 85 ; mem-
bership of, changes rapidly,
100 ; minority in, their proper
behavior toward trustees, 32,
107 ; nomination of teachers
by, 111 ; pecuniary bearing of
questions considered by, 106 ;
powers of, defined by trustees,
30, 31 ; recruiting, ways of,
93 ; relations with the public,
117 ; secretary, 105, 246 ; size

of, 124 ; trustees, relations to,
107 ; vitality, inventiveness,
and enterprise essential, 121 ;
young men in, 87, 88, 89.

Faculty, of agriculture, 81 ; ap-
plied science, 81, 85; applied
science, relations with fac-
ulty of arts and sciences, 8"> ;
arts and sciences, 81, 82 ; di-
vinity, 81, 84; engineering,
81, 85; fine arts, 81; law,
81, 83 ; medicine, 81, 84 ; how
recruited, 96 : nomination of
teachers, 113; theology, 81,
84.

Fees. See Tuition fees.

Fellowships, 16.

Finance, deficits, 30 ; surpluses,
29 ; president's concern with,
230.

Finance committee, 7.

Financial matters affected by
faculty action, 106.

Fine arts, faculty of, 81.

Fraternities, 221.

Freedom of teachers. See Aca-
demic freedom.

Freshman year, prescribed
courses in, 167.

Freshmen, courses open to,
168.

Funds, care of, 60 ; investment
in specific securities undesira-
ble, 10 ; see Investments.

" General " investments, 10, 60.

Geographical distribution of
Alumni, 70.

Gifts, 17 ; acceptance of, 27 ;
from Alumni classes, 66 ; soli-
citation of, 233.

Gordon, George A., 62.

INDEX

261

Governing boards, concurrent
powers of, 48 ; matters prop-
erly referred to the, by fac-
ulties, 106 ; see Trustees ;
Regents.

Governor a trustee, 45 ; appoint-
ment of regents by, 46.

Graduate Schools of Arts and
Sciences, 41.

Graduate study, scanty in Amer-
ica before Civil War, 152 ; re-
lation of elective system to,
140.

Graduates. See Alumni.

Grounds and buildings, care of,
23 ; open to public, 22.

Group system, 161, 164, 227.

Grouping of courses, 149.

Hale, Edward Everett, 62.

Harvard Bulletin, 77.

Harvard Clubs, 74.

Harvard Graduates' Magazine,
77.

Harvard Law School, case meth-
od, 199.

Harvard Medical School, 179.

Harvard Union, 220.

Harvard University, Alumni as-
sociation, 71 ; Alumni repre-
sentation, 49 ; appointments,
50 ; Appointments Office, 76 ;
Chapel, attendance at, 61 ;
charter, 6 ; deans, 241 ; de-
gree of A. B., its significance,
166 ; examinations, 206 ; Fac-
ulty, functions of, 104 ; gifts
from Alumni, 66; governing
board, 5 ; Graduate School of
Arts and Sciences, 140 ; hon-
orary scholarships, 215; hon-
ors, requirements in, 149

Overseers, 49 ; Overseers, gifts
from or promoted by, 53;
Overseers' influence on Corpo-
ration, 50 ; Overseers' meet-
ings, 51 ; Overseers, restric-
tion of residence within the
State removed, 51 ; Overseers,
usefulness of, 64 ; preachers to
the University, 62 ; President
and Fellows, 5 ; President's
functions, 236, 239 ; religious
exercises, attendance at, 61 ;
visiting committees, number
of, 55 ; voluntary attendance
at Chapel, 61.

Health of students, 22.

Heating and ventilating, 22.

Honorary scholarships, 215.

Honors, requirements for, a
guide in choice of studies,
149.

Hospitals, 22 ; relation to medi-
cal faculty, 96.

Hours per week of university
exercises, 109.

Illinois, University of, 19.

In-breeding in faculties, 90.

Income, insurance of, by " gen-
eral " investments, 10; should
be spent, 29 ; distribution of,
60.

Individual instruction, 172.

Individualistic motives, 226.

Industries, service rendered to,
19.

Infirmaries, 22.

Inspecting bodies, 44, 48 ; bene-
ficial influence on trustees,
50 ; checking and stimulating
influence of, 64 ; constructive
influence of, 57; needs of

262

INDEX

university inquired into, 54;
publication of reports, 52 ;
residence of members, 51 ;
meetings, 51 ; qualification of
members, 63 ; visiting com-
mittees, 52, 53.

Instruction, committee on, 109;
departmental organization of,
58; inspection of, 52, 53;
methods of, 174.

Instructors, qualifications of, 90,
93, 112 ; members of faculty,
87 ; responsibility of, 1 10 ;
salary, 12 ; selection of, 90,
93, 112 ; tenure, 13, 32 ; their
work open to criticisms of
faculty, 110.

International law, 84.

Investigation, as a qualification
for teachers, 93.

Investments, 7, 8 ; care of, 60 ;
funds should not be limited
to specific investments, 10 ;
"general," 10, 60; mort-
gages, 8 ; public utilities com-
panies, 8 ; railroad securities,
9 , " special," 10 ; variety de-
sirable, 8, 9.

Johns Hopkins University, pub-
lications, 77.
Jurisprudence, 84.

Kansas, University of, 19.

Laboratories, directors of, 250.

Laboratory manuals, 189, 191.

Laboratory notes, 190.

Laboratory principles in sub-
jects not scientific, 194.

Laboratory work, 186; danger
of, 191 ; problems, 193.

Langdell, C. C., 199.

Lantern-slide illustrations, 175.

Law as a field of arts and sci-
ences, 84 ; case method of
teaching, 199.

Law, faculty of, 81, 83 ; in
Europe, 83 ; lecture method
of teaching, 178 ; private
practice of teachers of, 86.

Learned societies, 92, 151.

Lecture courses, as method of in-
struction, 174, 178 ; use of ex-
aminations in, 183 ; use of
section work and conferences
in, 183.

Lectures, public, 21, 118 ; by
invited experts, 128.

Legislature, appropriations from,
29.

Liberal study, 165 ; definition
of, 166.

Librarians, 250.

Libraries, administration of, 36.

Lieutenant-Governor a trustee,
45.

" Line of least resistance " as
applied to elective system,
138.

Living, cost of, for students, 20.

Lodgings, 20.

Luxurious living, 223.

McKenzie, Alexander, 62.
Maintenance, relative cost of, 11.
Marriage of teachers, 13, 102.
Master of Arts, degree of, 41,

167.
Master of Science, degree of,

167.

Medical education, 84.
Medical examination, 22.
Medical inspection, 22.

INDEX

263

Medicine, case method of teach-
ing, 204; lecture method in
teaching, 179 ; observation
work in study of, 179 ; private
practice of teachers of, 86.

Medicine, faculty of, 81, 84;
clinical professors, 96 ; a de-
partment of applied biology,
85 ; nominations of teachers,
113 ; relations with faculty of
arts and sciences, 85 ; rela-
tions with hospitals, 96 ; how
recruited, 95.

Methodist denomination, ap-
pointment of trustees by, 47.

Methods of instruction, 174;
lectures, 174, 178; object of,
176 ; recitations, 174, 176.

Michigan, University of, 19 ; re-
gents, 45 ; constitutional pro-
vision for, 45.

Minnesota, University of, 19.

Missouri, University of, 19.

Money questions affected by
faculty action, 106.

Montague, Richard, 62.

Municipality, relation to, 19, 21.

Museums, 21, 36, 251.

Needs of the University, in-
quiry into by Overseers, 54.
Note-taking, 189, 190.
Number of students, 79.

" One-man power " undesirable
in universities or faculties, 121,
238.

Oral examination, 189.

Original investigation as a quali-
fication for teachers, 93.

Outside work by university
teachers, 86.

Dverseers, Board of, 48, 49;
checking and stimulating in-
fluence of, 51, 64 ; number of
meetings, 51 ; publication of
committee reports, 52 ; quali-
fications of members, 63;
visiting committees, 52, 53.

Oxford, University of, 8, 249.

Pensions. See Retiring allow-
ances.

Periodicals published by Alum-
ni, 77.

Ph B., degree of, 166.

Ph. D., degree of, 41, 167.

Photograph albums of Alumni,
68.

Play-grounds, 22.

Poor men in college, 33, 76,
214, 249.

Popular lectures, 118.

Preachers to the University,
62.

Prescribed course, compared
with elective, 145; in Fresh-
man and Sophomore years,
167.

Prescribed reading, 180.

President, the presiding officer
of each faculty, 123, 237 ; an-
nual report of, 58; appoint-
ments and promotions weighed
by, 236 ; functions of, 30, 228 ;
a member of Board of Over-
seers, 49; "One-man power,"
121, 238 ; autocratic power not
desirable in, 238 ; the presid-
ing officer of trustees and facul-
ties, 229, 237 ; tenure of, 238.

Preventive medicine, 23, 84.

Private employment of univer-
sity teachers, 83.

264

INDEX

Probationary tenure, 93, 95, 102.

Profession, courses in college as
foundation for, 147, 159.

Professional schools, admission
to, 40, 41, 42, 170 ; Alumni
organizations, 09 ; Bachelor's
degree for admission to, 170 ;
elective system limited in, 146.

Professional studies not less cul-
tivating than college studies,
43 ; relation of college studies
to, 170.

Professors, age of, 13, 103; as
members of faculty, 87 ; nom-
inated by faculty, 111 ; qual-
ifications of, 90, 93, 112;
recruited from other institu-
tions, 95 ; responsibility of,
110; salary, 13; selection of ,
90, 93, 112; tenure, 13, 32;
work open to criticism of fac-
ulty, 110.

Property, management of, 7.

Prudential committees, 6.

Public lectures, 21, 118.

Public opinion, representation
of, in inspecting body, 48.

Public service rendered by uni-
versity teachers, 117.

Publication of reports, 59.

Publications, 77, 129, 247; en-
dowment for, 78 ; of Alumni,
77.

Publicity, need of, 18 ; of ac-
counts, 18, 234; in corporate
management, 65.

Quiz, the, 177, 183, 189, 193.

Railroad securities for invest-
ments, 9.
Beading, prescribed, 180.

Real estate investments, 8.

Recitation courses, limit of size,
177.

Recitations, 174, 176.

Records of student work, 118 ;
their preservation, 119.

Regents, ex-officio members, 3 ;
president of university a mem-
ber ex-officio, 46; secretary,
47 ; number, 1, 3 ; tenure, 1,
5, 46 ; see also Trustees.

Religious denominations, con-
trol by, 47.

Religious exercises, attendance
at, 61.

Religions toleration, 27.

Reports, annual, of president
and treasurer, 59.

Research courses, 210.

" Reserved books " for refer-
ence in college courses, 181.

Retiring allowances, 7, 15, 33,
100, 104.

Rich men in college, 214, 215.

Roads, contribution toward cost
of, 22.

Roman law, 84.

S. B., degree of, 166.

S. D., degree of, 167.

S. M., degree of, 167.

Salaries, 99 ; fixed by trustees,
7; of administrative officers,
15 ; relative appropriation for,
compared with other expenses,
11 ; scale of, 12.

Scholarships, 16.

Science. See Applied science.

Scientific collections, 251.

Secretaries, 245.

Secretary of faculty, 105 ; of
regents or trustees, 47.

INDEX

265

Sectarian instruction, 84.

Section work in lecture courses,
183.

Seminaries, 210.

Senators as trustees, 45.

Seniority as the basis of se-
lecting department chairmen,
126.

Sewers, contribution toward
cost of, 22.

Sickness, loss of time from study
through, 23; provisions for,
22.

Smithsonian Institution trus-
tees, 6.

"Snap" courses, 136,159.

Social conditions, 219.

Social effects of elective system,
142.

Societies, 220.

Socratic method, 201.

"Soft "courses, 136, 159.

Sophomore year, prescribed
courses in, 167.

Sororities, 223.

Source-books, 205.

" Special " investments, 10.

Specialists, societies of, 151.

Specialization compelled by
group system, 164.

State universities, faculty in,
117 ; function of president in,
231 ; competition with en-
dowed institutions, 16.

Statutes, 30.

Student clubs, 220.

Students, number of, 79 ; health
of, 22.

Summer instruction, 118, 195.

Superintendent of instruction a
regent ex-officio, 46.

Surpluses of income, 29.

Tabular view of courses, time-
table, 133.

Taxation, exemption from, 19,
232.

Teacher's career, inducements
for entering, 99.

Teachers, qualifications of, 90,
93, 112; tenure of, 32.

Teaching profession affected
by elective system, 150.

Tenure of office, 32.

Term-time, 33.

Testimonials, unreliability of,
91.

Text-books, 174.

Theological education, 84.

Theology, faculty of, 81, 84,

Thesis, 196.

Time-table of courses, 133.

Town and gown, interests of,
19.

Treasurer, functions of, 7; an-
nual statement of, 59 ; invest-
ments cared for by, 7.

Trustees, access to, by individ-
ual members of faculty, 107 ;
selection of, 1, 26; qualifica-
tions of, 1, 39; age, 1, 4;
Alumni as, 27 ; appointments
by, 7 ; appointments made by,
with advice of departments,
102 ; class influence in choice
of, 1 ; considerate attitude
toward teachers, 37, 38; edu-
cational policy, 7; executive
committees, 6 ; ex-officio
members, 3, 45 ; faculty ac-
tion that is wisely referred to,
106; faculties, relations to,
7, 31, 37, 38, 106 ; functions, 6 ;
influence of Overseers, or in-
specting body, on, 50 ; nuiu-

266

INDEX

her, 1, 3, 44, 48 ; political in-
fluence in choice of, 1 ; powers,
44 ; property management, 7 ;
prudential committees, 6 ; sec-
retary of, 245 ; separate boards
for special objects, 60 ; tenure,
1, 5, 46 ; vacancies, how filled,
47.

Trusts, fidelity to, 17.

Tuition fees, 16.

University, significance of the
term, 40, 41, 42, 254; com-
pared with college, 52.

University career, inducements
for entering, 99.

Unmarried teachers, 102.

Vacations, 33.

Ventilation, 22.

Visiting committees, 52, 53 ; in
institutions having one gov-
erning board, 57 ; number at
Harvard, 55.

Vital statistics of graduates, 67.

Voluntary attendance at
Chapel, 61.

Water-supply, 22.

Weekly exercises, normal num-
ber of, 109.

Work of students, amount of,
fixed by faculty, 109.

Written examinations, 206.

Written work in college
courses, 174.

Yale University charter, 45.

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

CHARLES ELIOT
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT

EDITED BY CHARLES W. ELIOT

With portraits, views, plans, and sketches

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FREDEKICK LAW OLMSTED, JR.,

Instructor in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University and
member of the firm of Olmsted Brothers, Landscape Architects.

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