92 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



undue advantage, thereby limiting the work that should be accomplished 

 by the whole institution. The primary ideal of a state university should 

 be service to the state. As a great modern teacher has said, our " State 

 universities should be training schools for servants of the common weal." 

 But as institutions universities tend to take upon themselves conven- 

 tional ways and to become ends in themselves; or to set up ends of 

 their own, which are to some degree unrelated to the purposes which 

 underlie their original foundation in the civic life. Even a state 

 university may come to feel that it has its own sufficient standards and 

 its own complete internal tests as to what should be considered the con- 

 stituents of its own success. 



The university ideal has always been an aristocratic rather than a 

 democratic ideal, and it is with difficulty that the state university 

 accommodates itself completely to the democratic ideal of service to the 

 whole state. That old aristocratic ideal has held that culture is a 

 possession of the exceptional individual and an adornment of living, 

 rather than a great social goal and the preparation of all individuals 

 for real service in the common good. 



How can these two ideals — the one of public service, the other of 

 personal culture — be harmonized in a state university? The real prob- 

 lem that faces any such an institution at any time is this: how can we 

 keep the university ideal of a great institution of learning, and at the 

 same time keep the state's ideal of service to the welfare of the whole 

 people? It is easy to become purely formal, on the one hand, and to 

 insist that learning is its own excuse for being; that the idea of use 

 degrades culture ; and that the state can well afford to support an insti- 

 tution devoted to the purposes of learning, whether that learning have 

 any actual relationship to the life and problems of the state or not. On 

 the other hand, it is almost as easy to take a purely utilitarian view of 

 such an institution and to assert that any sort of activity that can call 

 itself service to the people is worth doing, and that any sort of develop- 

 ment of learning in the abstract is a waste of the state's resources. 



Neither of these two tendencies must be permitted to become domi- 

 nant. Each is an extreme from which the institution must be saved. 

 Formal culture is not a democratic ideal ; neither is a purely utilitarian 

 " service to the state " taken by itself. The former becomes aristocratic 

 and unsocial; the latter becomes inane, futile, useless. How can the 

 state university maintain both these ideals, the one, of learning, the 

 other, of service, at the same time? How can it make sure that these 

 two ideals shall mutually nourish, criticize and develop each other? 



In the first place there should be a board of control, made up of 

 representatives of the people, who have a real interest in the develop- 

 ment of such a completely democratic institution. This board should 

 be inclusive of the whole social life of the state — industrial, professional, 



