SHORT PAPERS 155 



show themselves also in education, but the fact that they are felt there is of too 

 great importance to be disregarded. 



The increase in requirements for admission to college has meant a corresponding 

 development in the equipment and courses offered by the secondary school, and 

 the affiliation of some of these schools with the university presents an entirely new 

 problem to the college. With the affiliated school leading directly to advanced 

 standing in the university and the undergraduate course merging into the pro- 

 fessional work, the casual observer may feel that the college is in an uncomfortable 

 position between the upper and the nether millstone, when the new conditions 

 in reality emphasize the important work of the college and its peculiar fitness for it. 



First. The university stands for specialization, the college for liberal culture. It 

 may be dangerous to make sweeping assertions, since they open the way for 

 exceptions, but they also have the virtue of furnishing a starting-point for dis- 

 cussion. To say that the university cannot give a liberal education is as far from 

 the truth as to maintain that highly specialized work is impossible for the college; 

 but general culture is the forte of the college, specialization of the university, 

 which is only another way of saying that the emphasis in the college is naturally 

 placed upon the undergraduate work, in the university upon the graduate course. 

 That the tendency of the university is toward making the undergraduate course 

 an adjunct of the graduate work and the professional school is shown by the 

 courses elected by the undergraduates; by the fact that the movement in favor 

 of shortening the course required for the A.B. degree, that the student may more 

 quickly enter upon his professional work, comes from the university; by the 

 argument so often urged that it is to the advantage of the student to take his 

 undergraduate course there, that it may play into his professional work. 



The college can and should insist upon a symmetrical undergraduate course 

 which shall send out, not specialists, but liberally educated men and women. 

 That such a course must be flexible goes without saying, and to a certain extent 

 each college must work out its own salvation while cooperating with others. 



Liberal culture implies something different from unrestricted elective. The 

 elective system has been responsible for a great and salutary change in education, 

 broadening the curriculum, meeting the needs of differing types of mind, and 

 giving opportunity for wider preparation, but even a good thing may be carried 

 to excess. A freshman is not always ready to be thrown entirely on his own 

 resources. The college, with its greater insistence upon a prescribed course and 

 with certain restrictions upon the elective, emphasizes a more symmetrical 

 development. 



Second. The university is characterized by a spirit of laissez-faire, the college 

 by attention to the individual. The university considers the subject rather than 

 the student, the college has a better opportunity to regard the student in relation 

 to the subject, and thus understanding his possibilities and limitations, to " edu- 

 cate " in the truest sense. The head of a department in the university has an 

 important executive position, must be the man of affairs as well as the scholar, 

 and cannot ordinarily come into as close touch with the undergraduate life as is 

 both possible and necessary for the college professor. The old ideal of the 

 personal influence of the instructor as a factor in education, at least partially 

 obscured by the modern conception of him as a specialist simply, whose respon- 

 sibility extends no further than the classroom, is far more easily preserved in 

 the college. 



In other ways the college has more of the personal element, for the law of com- 

 pensation works in academic as well as in other relations, and the very magni- 

 tude of the university means a certain sacrifice of unity and of esprit de corps. 

 At Oxford and Cambridge the personal feeling for the individual college, the 

 pride of belonging to Balliol or Magdalen, to King's or Trinity, cannot be over- 



