May 31, 1912] 
For administrative and financial pur- 
poses it seems necessary to organize the 
university into schools, divisions or de- 
partments, although for educational pur- 
poses as much flexibility as possible should 
be maintained. The scope and size of such 
a division should depend on convenience 
and local conditions, rather than on logical 
distinctions among the subjects taught. 
A small college or a small medical school 
can be conducted to advantage under one 
faculty. In a large university there is no 
need to have a separate department for 
each of the oriental languages because they 
differ from one another more than do the 
European languages, though it may be de- 
sirable to have separate departments for 
German and French. When a medical 
school, or even the work in a special sci- 
ence, such as chemistry, becomes large, it 
may be advisable to organize it into partly 
autonomous divisions. There is no gain 
in economy and usually a loss in coopera- 
tion and effectiveness when the entering 
class of a college or professional school ex- 
ceeds fifty or a hundred, and when its fac- 
ulty exceeds twenty or thereabouts. Col- 
leges should remain small; if a university 
must have a great crowd of college stu- 
dents, they should be divided among sep- 
arate colleges, as in the English universi- 
ties. These colleges should not, however, 
consist of freshmen, as President Lowell 
plans, or of students belonging to a certain 
social class, as is likely to happen under 
the fraternity and club system, but of men 
having common intellectual interests. 
Even small colleges for general education 
should aim to excel and to do research 
work in some special direction. In the 
large university the residential colleges 
and departments should coincide, so that 
younger men will join a group of older 
students and instructors having similar in- 
terests and ends in life. As I have else- 
where remarked: 
SCIENCE 
855 
The ideal is the zoological hall of the old Har- 
vard, where apprentices of a great man and a 
great teacher lived together. This is told of again 
in the charming autobiography of Shaler. A boy 
from the aristocratic southern classes, with ample 
means and good abilities but no fixed interests, 
fell into this group. There he discovered his life 
work and pursued it with boundless enthusiasm. 
Nor did the fact that he devoted himself exclu- 
sively to professional work in natural history in 
college prevent him from writing Elizabethan plays 
in his old age. The number of men of distinction 
given to the world from this small Agassiz group 
is truly remarkable. 
A group of some 10 to 20 instructors, 
having registered primarily under them 
from 50 to 200 students, is a good size for 
a school, division or department. Each 
can be well acquainted with the others and 
take a personal and intelligent interest in 
all the work of the department. At the 
same time the number is sufficient to per- 
mit the representation of diverse kinds of 
work and points of view, and to make pos- 
sible the election of officers and a demo- 
eratic control. The chairman or head and 
an executive committee should of course 
be elected, not named by a semi-absentee 
president. In a group of this character 
questions are not usually brought to a vote. 
In reaching decisions each member is likely 
to be weighed as well as counted. In my 
experience the junior members of a fac- 
ulty or department take too little rather 
than too much share in its discussions and 
its control. If they obtained constitutional 
rights they might become more aggressive ; 
if they should, so much the better. One of 
the serious difficulties of the present sys- 
tem is that the younger men do not share in 
the conduct of the university and do not feel 
themselves to be part of its life. Those 
who do not have their ideas before they 
are thirty are not likely to have them. The 
paraphernalia and camp baggage of mod- 
ern civilization have become so heavy that 
they threaten to block its further advance. 
If men must devote thirty years to mere 
