Mabch 12, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



403 



will more and more be felt in the organiza- 

 tion of the whole system of public educa- 

 tion in their respective provinces, as 

 trainers of our new coming foreign popu- 

 lation to the duties of citizenship, as ser- 

 vants of the state, as centers of guidance, 

 both for technical education and for re- 

 search, the older eastern universities will, 

 like the western state universities, under- 

 take a variety of tasks which they now very 

 unequally recognize and pursue. Hence, 

 as I believe, when we think of the future 

 of the "American college," we should 

 remember that this future is bound up, 

 inseparably, with the future of the Ameri- 

 can state universities, and with the future 

 of institutions whose functions will be in 

 more and more ways analogous to that of 

 the state universities. It is, therefore, 

 simply useless to try to think of something 

 called "the college" as if its function 

 could be sharply separated from that of 

 very various grades and types, both of 

 technical and of professional schools. I 

 think that the usual disposition of many 

 educational theorists to insist that, for the 

 sake of a dictionary definition of the term 

 college, and for the sake of some historical 

 tradition, such a sharp separation of the 

 functions of "the college" from the tech- 

 nical school on the one hand, and from 

 those of the graduate professional school 

 on the other hand, should be made where 

 it does not at present maintain itself 

 —I think, I say, that this usual disposi- 

 tion is misleading. Look at the state 

 universities and see what the work of "the 

 college" with them always has been. It 

 is a work that in various parts of the same 

 institution may involve training ia agri- 

 culture, in mining, in classics, in political 

 science, in philosophy, in music and in 

 civil engineering. One may protest as one 

 will that one misuses the term college when 

 one talks of a college of agriculture, and 

 that one ought instead to speak of a tech- 



nical school of training in agriculture. 

 One may raise as much as one pleases the 

 question whether a liberal education, de- 

 vised by some one who does not love agri- 

 culture, should first be required of stu- 

 dents of agriculture, who should then only 

 be allowed, as graduates, to undertake 

 their more technical studies. One may 

 insist as one chooses that agricultural 

 schools, if they are to exist at aU, should 

 be separated from the institutions that 

 undertake to educate their pupils in the 

 sense of a higher cultivation. But what- 

 ever one thus does by way of formulation, 

 of definition, and of criticism, the state 

 universities will continue to show that the 

 best thing you can do for an agricultural 

 school is to make it an integral part of an 

 academic institution wherein Greek and 

 metaphysics and history and the science 

 of government are also taught; while one 

 of the best things that you can do for the 

 young men who are to be trained in the 

 humanities is to keep both them and their 

 teachers in pretty close contact with the 

 pupils and teachers who are engaged in 

 technical studies. The history of more 

 than one western state university has been 

 the history of the gradual humanizing of 

 a little group of technical schools. A col- 

 lege of agriculture, as it grows, adds to its 

 resources, perhaps, a department of music, 

 a ' ' classical college ' ' is joined to schools of 

 engineering which have already been 

 formed, and thus something is developed 

 which is indeed a highly composite institu- 

 tion. Its functions include those of grad- 

 uate and undergraduate, technical and 

 professional schools, and also the functions 

 of which we are talking when we speak of 

 the American college. The interesting 

 feature of such institutions is that our 

 lines of division become more and more 

 obviously artificial when applied to them. 

 The function of "the college" in their 

 case becomes intertwined with other func- 



