The Days of a Man 1900 



document on the back of a menu card. This my 

 colleagues signed and, thus prepared, it still remains 

 practically unchanged. Annual meetings are regu- 

 larly held at one or another .university. Each sends 

 sh{ p as many delegates as it pleases, though having but 

 one vote; at the same time all resolutions are advisory 

 only, so as not to limit the free action of any institu- 

 tion within the group. In a small way, the make-up 

 of the association and its relation to colleges generally 

 bear a strong resemblance to that proposed for the 

 "League of Nations." The "Big Fourteen" group 

 of 1900 has since increased to about thirty. The 

 charter members were : 



California Johns Hopkins 

 Catholic University Michigan 



Chicago Princeton 



Clark Stanford 



Columbia Virginia 



Cornell Wisconsin 



Harvard Yale 



At a meeting held at Yale, President Arthur Twin- 

 ing Hadley read a scholarly paper on the organization 

 Eliot on of the medieval university. In the discussion which 

 medieval- followed, Dr. Eliot (with a clear-cut audacity we 



ism . . . ^ J 



younger men could not venture to emulate) rose to 

 say that "the American university has nothing to 

 learn from medieval universities, nor yet from those 

 still in the medieval period." 



I shall now touch briefly on a painful and trying 

 episode which, originating in September, 1896, be- 

 came gradually critical during the next four years. 

 If the matter concerned only myself and my own 

 shortcomings, temperamental or otherwise, I should 



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