170 THE UNIVERSITY 



too familiar to those who are charged with the duty of providing 

 and administering such collections. Another temptation, particu- 

 larly hard to resist, is that of devoting the endowments chiefly to 

 things that bring in an immediate return --the " things that pay/' 

 as the phrase is. How to touch the generous impulses of the men 

 of wealth, or convince the rulers of the state of the university's 

 needs, and to do this without sacrificing the ideal of the university 

 to please the whim or vanity of the one or the other - - this is one of 

 the greatest and most insistent problems, and it grows greater and 

 more insistent with every year, because of the constant advance 

 and ramification of human knowledge. 



The question of the best organization for the work that the uni- 

 versity has determined to do is no sooner apparently settled than it 

 again raises its head. Of course in the United States, where new 

 organization and reorganization are constant, this problem is par- 

 ticularly pressing. It here presents itself in different aspects to 

 East and West. To the older East, with its great institutions of 

 learning built up on a collegiate foundation, for generations under- 

 graduate colleges, on w r hich have been grafted from time to time 

 professional schools with little or no organic relation to each other 

 or to the central stem, the problem has been largely one of favoring 

 the new without sacrificing the old, of bringing to the institution 

 as a whole that feeling of solidarity which naturally inheres in an 

 " undergraduate " college. In the West, in the state universities, 

 where the professional and technical schools have from the first held 

 the more important place, the conditions are almost reversed. In 

 Europe the technical schools have from their first establishment stood 

 on altogether different ground, as something apart from the uni- 

 versity, requiring a different preparation of candidates for admission, 

 and in most cases possessing decidedly inferior social prestige. But 

 this condition is passing away in Europe; it is coming to be seen, for 

 example, that medicine and law are quite as truly technical pro- 

 fessions as engineering and architecture, and the latter quite as well 

 entitled to be called " learned professions " as the former. Ger- 

 many has begun to wipe out the invidious distinctions between 

 Hochschulen pure and simple, i. e., universities, and technische Hoch- 

 schulen, formerly called Polytechnica. In Prussia the technische 

 Hochschulen have had, since 1899, the right of giving the doctor's 

 degree in engineering, and the other states of the Empire have fol- 

 lowed suit. This has naturally reacted upon the secondary schools 

 which are feeders to these institutions - - a point to be touched upon 

 presently. 



What is to be the attitude taken toward technical schools by the 

 university which includes them in its corporate membership? For 

 the United States this is indeed a burning question. Are the tech- 



