156 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



transition and with the morality of the average educated man or 

 woman, and you have the great, prime essential of a college. Without 

 such a faculty, all the fine buildings, all the magnitude, all the alumni 

 associations and other institutional paraphernalia in the world are dross 

 and tinsel. 



It is a popular saying in the colleges that the business of the college 

 professor is to teach. Often this carries the implication that a man can 

 be an ideal teacher and not be doing some original work in his own 

 particular field. No educational fallacy ever did more mischief than 

 this. Different ideals of work and purpose must no doubt govern the 

 college professor and the university research professor, but in the long 

 run it goes without saying that even the college professor will teach 

 better if he has some time for what the universities call productive 

 work. It is an error to suppose that a man can teach a subject without 

 knowing it; and it seems self-evident that his knowledge will be more 

 thorough and more effectively interesting to his students if he himself is 

 trying, in however modest a way, to advance human knowledge within 

 his subject. The man of fine, keen scholarship in his own line, who 

 tries to see the relation of his subject to life as a whole, will develop in 

 the long run not only the strongest intellectual capacity, but also the 

 strongest and most desirably influential personality. Moreover, he will 

 ordinarily be scrupulous in the use of his influence. A scathing criti- 

 cism might be made of the practise of some college professors who seek 

 by their own personal hold on a student to close his mind once for all 

 to ideas contrary to those they themselves happen to entertain. The net 

 result of such influence is too often an arrested development of the stu- 

 dent's mind before it has had a fair chance to open. 



Why now do the universities possess so many men of fine scholarship 

 and the great personality that so often goes with it, while the colleges 

 show comparatively so few? Some will deny the truth of this allega- 

 tion, but no denial can really stand against the fact that the greatest 

 teachers of the country are nearly always to be found in its universities. 

 The colleges can not ordinarily hold their best men permanently and 

 there are two valid reasons why they can not do so — lack of money, and 

 lack of stimuli. It takes stimulating surroundings to develop a scholar. 

 The university affords the stimulus to productive scholarship which the 

 college lacks. The stimulus offered by the college is usually " the oppor- 

 tunity one has here to influence young men and women through per- 

 sonal character." Now it must be admitted that this is an effective 

 appeal, very often, but how much more effective is it when it adds the 

 opportunity of influence through solid, vital scholarship ! The uni- 

 versities draft away the men the colleges need most — those who com- 

 bine large scholarship with fine personality — because these men tire of 

 the restricted horizon of life in a small college town, and because they 

 perceive that they must have larger opportunities for growth and con- 



