PROFESSOR FREER AND THE UNIVERSITY. 
XXVll 
t^ 
The methods of successful men are always interesting and 
instructive. Professor Freer's methods were very simple. In 
dealing with his superiors he usually made a direct request and 
reenforced this request by a presentation of all the facts bear- 
ing upon the subject. If the first effort failed, he would repeat 
the request until he secured what was wanted or was ordered 
to desist. In dealing with his colleagues and assistants, his 
watchword was efficiency and all men were judged upon this 
basis, a very satisfactory method for a man of his broad learn- 
ing and experience, but a hazardous one for a less experienced 
leader. 
Something of Doctor Freer's conception of the function of a 
medical school is shown in his Commencement Address to the 
graduating class in 1910 in which he said: 
The exact training which the graduate of a modem medical school ob- 
tains from his work in the various laboratories; the development of hia 
powers of observation by a study of physics, chemistry, bacteriology, pathol- 
ogy; by his contact with the methods of diagnosis and clinical reasoning 
in the h9spital and by the broad phases of hospital discipline which 
surround him during the final years of his course of study, will have been 
without meaning if they have not shown him one fundamental fact, that 
all of this hard work will have been valueless, if he has not had introduced 
within his being the divine spark of independent thought * * *• If he 
has not this ambition, his future will be first one of stagnation, then of 
retrogression. It has been one of the chief missions of the Faculty to 
cultivate this spirit among the students, and the members of the latter body 
themselves must be constantly extending their view-points and developing 
the various special branches to which they are devoting their attention. 
What is true of the individual members holds good of any institution of 
learning, a condition of dependence on what is already known and a tend- 
ency to look backward into the past is in reality retrogression; and 
intellectually such an institution must die, no matter how magnificent its 
buildings, how extensive its equipment, or how generous its means. The 
teaching force must itself not only be capable of advancing new thought 
and of developing new methods, but it must utilize these capabilities to the 
best advantage, continually and restlessly pressing forward to higher 
ground. Otherwise, the teacher is not capable of inspiring his pupils, he 
becomes a mere repeater or reciter of text-books, a monitor or supervisor 
of method which of itself is cast into fixed molds and is already passing 
toward its end. 
