THE CASE OF HARVARD COLLEGE 6n 



The president of Harvard tells us that the engineering student 

 "labors without a groan on mathematics, which most college under- 

 graduates shun like a pestilence," and most curiously he holds that the 

 engineering student gets no culture from his mathematics, while the 

 college student does, and must by force be exposed to the pestilence he 

 shuns unless he chooses philosophy as the milder disease. If culture is 

 " a little knowledge of everything " and " those things which ordinarily 

 educated men around a dinner table are expected to know " — to quote 

 again — it has little more real significance than the white shirts and 

 black coats of these gentlemen. But surely the intangible trait that 

 we should like to strengthen by our education is almost the reverse of 

 this — something that makes the white shirts and gossip of the dinner 

 table insignificant, seen at times in primitive peoples, in seafaring and 

 farming folk, in hereditary nobles, in scholars — a certain detachment 

 from the here and now and the narrower self, the quality of greatness 

 in a man. This is almost unconcerned with any kind of information, 

 but to a limited degree comes from mastery in one's own field, from 

 historical perspective, from appreciation of the forces of nature. 



There are three things that the university would do — represented by 

 the college, the professional schools and ttie graduate faculty. Through 

 the college it would give men broader interests and wider sympathies, 

 through the professional schools it would teach the routine methods of 

 practise, through the graduate faculty it would improve these methods 

 and enlarge our knowledge. But while the partial separation of these 

 three objects in the university has a historical explanation, it has no 

 real justification. Every child and every man should unite continu- 

 ously in his education and in his life what the university artificially 

 separates — he should always be doing and learning to do his share of 

 the world's work, he should try continuously to improve the methods 

 of doing it, and he should learn to appreciate the work of others. 



In our actual courses we can not do much more than teach efficient 

 methods of routine work. The student can learn to do something in 

 particular, not things in general. Hence our professional schools are 

 on the whole more successful than our colleges or our graduate faculties. 

 Eoutine research and routine scholarship can be taught in the graduate 

 faculty, which is at present essentially a professional school for univer- 

 sity teachers. For original research and productive scholarship we 

 must wait for the man, or possibly search for him, give him a chance 

 and let him alone. But we should welcome him and give him oppor- 

 tunity in whatever department of the university he may be found. The 

 right way to give a man interests that are broad and permanent is 

 not to put him in elementary courses in all sorts of subjects, but to 

 encourage him to learn to do well his work in life and to connect with 

 this by natural associations the larger world in which he may live. 



