336 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



science of famous men from whom newspaper science derives its in- 

 spiration. 



While the university on its human side is interested in all that 

 touches the life of to-day, on the scientific side it deals with the eter- 

 nal verities and cares nothing for those things which are merely local 

 or timely. 



The university must conduct research to ends of power. This it 

 has hardly begun to do in America. Half our graduate students are 

 not ready for anything to be called investigation. They are not real 

 students of a real university. The graduate departments of our uni- 

 versities are now engaged almost exclusively in training teachers. That 

 profession may be the noblest — where noble men make it so — but it 

 is only one of many in which success must rest on original investi- 

 gation. We are proud of our crop of Doctors of Philosophy, dozens 

 or hundreds turned out every year. But most of them are trained 

 only to teach, and we know that half of them are predestined to fail- 

 ure as college teachers. We must broaden our work and widen our 

 sympathies. We must train men in the higher effectiveness in every 

 walk in life, men of business as well as college instructors, statesmen 

 as well as linguists, shipbuilders as well as mathematicians, men of 

 action as well as men of thought. This means a great deal more than 

 annual crops of Doctors of Philosophy to scramble for the few dozen 

 vacant instructorships open year by year. 



But with all these discouragements original research is the loftiest 

 function of the university. In its consummate excellence is found the 

 motive for its imitation. There is but one way in which a university 

 can discharge this function. It can not give prizes for research. It 

 can not stimulate it by means of publication, still less by hiring men to 

 come to its walls to pursue it. The whole system of fellowships for ad- 

 vanced students is on trial with most of the evidence against it. The 

 students paid to study are not the ones who do the work. When they 

 are such they would have done the work unpaid. The fellowship sys- 

 tem tends to turn science into almsgiving, to make the promising youth 

 feel that the world owes him a living. 



All these plans and others have been fairly tried in America. There 

 is but one that succeeds. Only those who do original work will train 

 others to do it. Where the teachers are themselves original investi- 

 gators devoted to truth and skilful in the search for it, — men that 

 can not be frightened, fatigued or discouraged, — they will have stu- 

 dents like themselves. To work under such men, students like-minded 

 will come from the ends of the earth. It is the part of the investi- 

 gators to make the university as the teachers make the college. There 

 never was a genuine university on any other terms. It is not conceiv- 

 able that there should ever be one. It is not necessary that all depart- 



