58 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



SMALL COLLEGES 



By Pkofessoe JOHN J. STEVENSON 



NEW yOBK UNIVEKSITY 



A COLLEGE-MATE recently indulged in wholesale denunciation 

 of present conditions in American colleges; classes have grown 

 so large that teaching is done mostly by instructors or assistant pro- 

 fessors and students are drilled no longer by men of mature intellect; 

 the intimacy between professors and students, which was the glory of 

 the old college, has disappeared and with it has disappeared also the 

 fatherly interest formerly shown by professors; the output of colleges 

 is inferior in quality; there is no hope of improvement except in return 

 to the small college of our youth. 



As the one who drew this indictment had not been inside of college 

 walls since graduation, his sorrow, like his knowledge, depended solely 

 upon information and belief. He had forgotten that, more than half 

 a century ago, when even Harvard and Yale were " small," some of 

 our professors declaimed in similar fashion against those overgrown 

 concerns and extolled the smaller college in which tutors were unknown 

 and students met only professors. The dissertation has been delivered 

 continuously during the intervening years, but its frequent appearance 

 in print is of recent date and is due to the exigencies of so-called col- 

 leges which have sprung up like mushrooms all over the newer portions 

 of our land. 



The lack of frankness in use of the term " professor " is as pain- 

 fully evident as it was fifty years ago. The colleges of that time, with 

 few exceptions, had only professors, no matter how large the classes 

 might be ; but the term signified no more as to age, experience or quali- 

 fications than it does in the modern " small college." When the writer 

 entered New York University in 1858, the college faculty consisted of 

 nine professors, including John W. Draper, E. A. Johnson, Elias 

 Loomis, Howard Crosby, S. E. B. Morse, Benj. N". Martin and others 

 almost equally eminent — all except two less than fifty years old. Only 

 three of the nine were more than twenty-seven years old when appointed 

 to full professorships in the university and several of them received 

 that appointment when only twenty-three. One of the others had been 

 professor for eight years in another college and was only thirty-two 

 when he came to New York. The same conditions prevailed elsewhere, 

 all colleges having some very young men occupying important chairs, 



