124 THE COLLEGE 



buildings and galleries of the world --these are the essentials of 

 the college curriculum. 



Each of the leading subjects should be presented in at least three 

 consecutive courses extending over a year each: one elementary; 

 one or more broad, general, interesting, practical; at least one 

 specific, intensive, involving research, initiative, and a chance for 

 originality. These broad middle courses are the distinctive feature 

 of the college, and they are the hardest to get well taught. For one 

 man who can teach a college course of this nature well, you can 

 find ten who can teach a university specialty, and a hundred who 

 can teach the elementary-school course. But if you dare to leave 

 out these broad, comprehensive college courses, or if you fail to get 

 men who are broad and human enough to teach them, you miss the 

 distinctively college teaching altogether; you have in place of 

 the college one or another of the four institutions previously 

 described. 



These real college professors, these men who can make truth 

 kindle and glow through the dead cold facts of science; who can 

 reveal the throbbing heart of humanity through either ancient or 

 modern worlds; who can communicate the shock of clashing wills 

 and the struggle of elemental forces through historic periods and 

 economic schedules; who can make philosophy the revelation of 

 God, and ethics the gateway of heaven, these men are hard to 

 find, infinitely harder to find than schoolmasters on the one hand, 

 and specialists on the other. Yet unless you can get together at least 

 half a dozen men of this type you must not pretend to call your 

 aggregation of professors a college faculty; you cannot give your 

 students the distinctive value of a college course. 



The discipline of a college is different from that of either a school 

 or a university. The true college maintains a firm authority; and 

 will close its doors rather than yield any essential point of moral 

 character or intellectual efficiency to student clamor and caprice. 

 Yet this authority is kept well in the background, delegated perhaps 

 to some form of student government, and is used only as a last resort 

 when all the arts of persuasion and all the influences of reason fail. 

 Not more than once or twice in a college generation of four years will 

 it ever be necessary to draw the lines sharply and fight out some 

 carefully chosen issue on grounds of sheer authority. 



On the other hand, the college has much of the liberty of the 

 university; yet in such wise that it cannot be perverted into license 

 to do whatever may seem for the time being right in the eyes of 

 immature and inexperienced youth. Spies and threats, and petty 

 artificial penalties are as foreign to a true college as to a university. 

 Yet the college does make the way of the transgressor hard -- much 

 harder than the university even attempts to do. 



