488 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Now it seems to me that in the process of striving to raise our 

 standards we are a little apt to slavishly copy what other people are 

 doing without clearly recognizing why we are copying them and what 

 we are striving to attain. One college opens a new department in some 

 sphere of activity; another thinks it is bound to do the same thing, 

 although the local conditions may be totally different. If one school of 

 engineering establishes a new course another is sure to follow with a 

 similar course. We need a measuring rod to determine whether our 

 level is above or below our competitors. How are we to reach a real 

 standard of efficiency ? How are we to know whether our institution is 

 better or worse than some other institution ? Of course various stand- 

 ards have been suggested. The great objection to most of them is that 

 they are too mechanical. The best part of any educational institution 

 is a spiritual thing and a spiritual thing must be spiritually discerned. 



Now one of the institutions in this country which is doing its best 

 to carry out a leveling process and trying to raise the institutions of the 

 country is the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 

 Its course is so brief that none here can have missed the opportunity of 

 following it. Founded only a few years ago by Mr. Carnegie for the 

 avowed purpose of pensioning professors who had long served their 

 country as teachers and investigators, it is being put by those who have 

 managed it to a quite different purpose and that purpose is to stand- 

 ardize our institutions. 



I am not going to discuss what the foundation has done or is doing, 

 but I should like to refer to a report, the advance sheets of which the 

 Carnegie Foundation has just issued, under the title "A Comparison 

 of Academic and Business Efficiency." The fundamental idea that 

 suggested the drawing up of the report is one that must attract us all. 

 It was to obtain a report on the efficiency of different educational 

 institutions looked at from the view-point of a business man. To this 

 end the foundation employed the services of an accomplished engineer, 

 Mr. Cooke, and asked him to report on a number of educational insti- 

 tutions in this country. He was instructed to employ the same methods 

 in his investigation that he would if he were reporting on the efficiency 

 of a cotton mill or an automobile factory. To simplify the problem he 

 was to confine his attention to eight institutions ; to further simplify it 

 he was to deal with a single department in each of these instituions; 

 that department happened to be the department of physics. The report 

 is a lengthy one — those of you who are interested will doubtless read 

 it for yourselves — but I may just sketch with extreme brevity the 

 fundamental guiding principle. 



Mr. Cooke begins with the truism that if you are to test the effi- 

 ciency of a factory from a business point of view you want to know 

 the cost of the working of the machinery. He therefore proceeds to 



