UNIVERSITY-BUILDING. 33 x 



influences and in response to actual needs, is changing to the American 

 university. It is no longer a school of culture alone, a school of per- 

 sonal growth through personal example. It is becoming in addition 

 to this a school of research, a school of power. It stands in the advance 

 guard of civilization, responsive not to the truth of tradition alone, but 

 to the new truth daily and hourly revealed in the experience of man. 



In the movement of events the American university unites in itself 

 three different functions, that of the college, that of the professional 

 school and that which is distinctive of the university. 



The college is now as ever a school of culture. It aims to make 

 wise, sane, well-rounded men who know something of the best that 

 men have thought and done in tins world, and whose lives will be the 

 better for this knowledge. It has not discarded the Latin, Greek and 

 mathematics winch were so long the chief agents in culture, but it has 

 greatly added to this list. It has found that to some minds at least 

 better results arise from the study of other things. Culture is born 

 from mastery. The mind is strengthened by what it can assimilate. 

 It can use only that which relates itself to life. We find that Greek- 

 mindedness is necessary to receive from the Greek all that this noblest 

 of languages is competent to give. We find for the average man better 

 educational substance in English than in Latin, in the physical or 

 natural sciences than in the calculus. But more important than this, 

 we find that it is safe in the main to trust the choice of studies to the 

 student himself. The very fact of choice is in itself an education. It 

 is better to choose wrong sometimes, as we do a hundred times in life, 

 than to be arbitrarily directed to the best selection. Moreover, so far 

 as culture is concerned, the best teacher is more important than the 

 best study. It is still true, as Emerson once wrote to his daughter, 

 that 'it matters little what your studies are; it all lies in who your 

 teacher is.' A large institution has many students. It has likewise 

 many teachers, and an Arnold or a Hopkins, a Warner or a Thoburn^ 

 can come just as close to the students' hearts in a large school as in a 

 small one. But 'the knowing of men by name,' the care for their per- 

 sonal lives and characters, must be the essential element in the new 

 college course, as it was in the old. And the college function of the 

 university must not be despised or belittled. Because Germany has 

 no colleges, because her students go directly from the high school at 

 home to the professional school or the university, some have urged the 

 abandonment by the American university of this primal function of 

 general culture. In their eagerness to develop advanced work, some 

 institutions have relegated the college function almost solely to tutors 

 without experience, and have left it without standards and without 

 serious purpose. It is not right that even the freshmen should be 

 poorly taught. On the soundness of the college training everything 



