FUNCTION OF THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 575 



since the discovery and promoting of peculiar intellectual excellence is 

 perhaps the most obvious statement of the end of higher education, we 

 find a strong disposition of late among those who care for the theory 

 of education, and like logical neatness, to look forward to the day when 

 the college as an institution shall have been shorn of its present im- 

 portance. The tendency is rather strongly in favor of cutting off the 

 college proper at both ends — assigning the last two years to the univer- 

 sity as a preparation for technical professional work, and either adding 

 the first two to the high school, or leaving it a torso which would seem 

 bound to approximate to the type of the academy. 



A defense of the college as a peculiar institution will need to recog- 

 nize first, I think, two sets of distinctions. One is the distinction be- 

 tween professional or scientific efficiency in specialized tasks, and an 

 intellectual leadership in the sense in which this affects directly the gen- 

 eral life and ideals of the nation. Now that the university is the in- 

 strument for developing the first or specialized intellectual capacity, of 

 course goes without saying. But that this is identical with the second 

 sort of eminence and leadership, pertinent to the political problems of 

 democracy, is not in the least self-evident. At present I simply call 

 attention to the distinction, and to the fact that if we think fit to intro- 

 duce at all the social need into the argument for education, we should 

 not identify this with the sort of scientific leadership which the univer- 

 sity does confessedly aim to develop. 



But now my argument for the college would be, that while the pur- 

 pose which gives it a right to continued existence alongside the univer- 

 sity is distinctly its social rather than its professional, or, in the narrow 

 sense, scholarship, value, it is not primarily social leadership that it 

 should aim directly to provide for. The second distinction is that be- 

 tween the comparatively small body of notably able men who will al- 

 ways have to direct the course of society and interpret for it its ideals, 

 and the larger body of enlightened opinion which is needed to direct 

 this in turn and keep it from substituting a caste ideal for the people's 

 will. And it is in the creation of this last that I should find the special 

 purpose of the college to lie. 



That the tendency of the university ideal to emphasize too exclu- 

 sively the importance of special ability constitutes a possible social 

 danger is, I believe, coming to be felt. An emphasis on ability turns al- 

 most inevitably under modern educational conditions in the direction of 

 specialized ability. The exaltation of the university ideal is therefore 

 coming to mean a sacrifice of breadth and perspective to the demands 

 of technical proficiency. This may mean, if it goes farther, that our 

 most highly educated classes no longer will possess the qualifications 

 that are needed for sound human political judgment in a democracy. 

 A catholicity of interest and sympathy is required here rather than 



