SECTION D-THE UNIVERSITY 



(Hall 12, September 24, 10 a. m.) 



SPEAKERS: PROFESSOR EDWARD DELAY AN PERRY, Columbia University. 

 PROFESSOR CHARLES CHABOT, University of Lyons, France. 



PRESENT PROBLEMS OF THE UNIVERSITY 



BY EDWARD DELAY AN PERRY 



[Edward Delavan Perry, Jay Professor of Greek and Dean of the Faculty of 

 Philosophy, Columbia University, New York. b. Troy, New York, 1854. 

 A.B. Columbia College, 1875; Ph.D. Tubingen, 1879; LL.D. Columbia College, 

 1904. Postgraduate, Leipzig and Tubingen, Germany; Columbia University.] 



WHEN one examines in turn the universities of the great nations 

 which lead the world's civilization one is struck by the diversity of 

 their history, of their aims, of their organization and operation, and 

 by the difference in the measure of influence which they exert in the 

 several countries which support them. Starting mostly from the 

 model of the University of Paris, passing through endless vicissitudes 

 of ecclesiastical, governmental, or corporate control; in turn en- 

 dowed and plundered, fostered and suppressed; the centres now of 

 ultra-conservative, now of extreme radical tendencies in religion, 

 in politics, or in scientific theory; in one place content merely to 

 impart to youth of still tender age a modest measure of inherited 

 learning, altogether theoretical and unpractical, in another sub- 

 ordinating, even sacrificing, everything else to the development and 

 maintenance of technical schools, in yet another unwearied in the 

 pursuit of advanced scientific investigation of all sorts; in one age 

 and place if not actually stationary, yet rather moved than moving 

 in the resistless current of the world's progress with faces firmly 

 fixed upon the past, in another eagerly peering into the gloom of 

 the unknown which their own light shall yet illumine - - do these 

 protean institutions contain a common element that justifies us in 

 assuming the existence of problems that affect them all alike, be 

 they European or American or Asiatic, ancient or of yesterday, 

 poor and struggling or proud in the rich endowments of centuries 

 or in the more than princely benefactions of a single generation? 

 When even the name university seems to have taken a new signi- 

 fication and use in every country where it occurs (and in none so 

 many or so puzzling applications as in our own United States), 

 what problems can there be, common to them all, that are not 

 in equal degree problems of the secondary school, or of the college, 



