136 THE COLLEGE 



home the conviction of sin. Since 1893 university presidents, like all 

 other American scholars, have realized that our American univer- 

 sities are not universities in the German sense of an assemblage of 

 graduate professional schools, and it is in order to reform this con- 

 dition of affairs that many of them have joined President Eliot in 

 endeavoring to shorten the American college course. Obviously one 

 way to make our professional schools graduate schools (in name, if 

 not in fact) is to lower the standard of the degree we require for 

 admission. This is the method adopted by Harvard, which since 

 1902 has required the B.A. degree for admission to its schools of law, 

 medicine, and theology, but has reduced the time requirement for its 

 bachelor's degree from four to three years. Another and more rapid 

 method of producing graduate professional students has been in 

 operation at Chicago University since 1898. The college course has 

 there been cut in half, and a certificate of what we may call " im- 

 maturity," but which Chicago calls a diploma of " University [sic] 

 Associate," has been given at the end of the sophomore year, and it 

 is hoped to require this certificate for admission to the professional 

 schools of the university. 1 The president of Columbia is now 

 urging still more radical action which, if generally adopted, will, in 

 my opinion, sound the death-knell of the college. He proposes two 

 B.A. degrees, one to be conferred at the end of the sophomore year 

 for those who take up professional study, and one to be conferred 

 at the end of the present senior year for such other students as may 

 chance to linger to receive it. 2 Graduate professional schools obtained 

 by such a sacrifice of culture and efficiency will, it seems to many of 

 us, be graduate schools only through the quibble of a misused name. 

 Another and even more insidious plan for securing graduate 

 students in professional schools is now in operation in many uni- 

 versities. The last year of college work is permitted to be taken in 

 the law or medical school, and is counted double, -- once as the senior 

 year of the B.A. course, and twice as the first year of the professional 

 course. The student himself also counts double, once as an under- 

 graduate senior, and twice as a graduate member (which he is 

 not) of the graduate professional school. Nothing more disastrous 

 to honest standards of academic work can be conceived of. Yet 



1 See the decennial publications of the University of Chicago, series I, pp. So, 

 86, 92, 93, 95, 96. 



2 [I greatly regret that I should have overlooked President Butler's suggestion 

 (see President's Report, Columbia University, 1902, p. 44) that these two B.A. 

 courses should be differently lettered, although I confess that to my mind the 

 substitution of an M for a B in the degree conferred at the end of the present four 

 undergraduate years will do little, or nothing, to avert the disastrous conse- 

 quences to be feared. The sentence in question should have read as follows: 

 He proposes in reality two undergraduate courses, one to be known as the B.A. 

 course, ending with the present sophomore year for those who take up professional 

 study, and one to be known as the M.A. course, ending with the present senior 

 3'ear for such other students as may chance to linger on to complete it. AUTHOR. ] 



