July 12, 1912] 



SCIENCE 



43 



sity rich enough to carry out with success 

 so vast a program. In truth, all the uni- 

 versities in the world are not now rich 

 enough to do so. The richest university is, 

 therefore, in peril of so multiplying the 

 lines of its work that all the lines of its 

 work shall be lowered in quality. It is 

 very possible in this way for a university 

 with a million or more of income to so scat- 

 ter its resources that it can do nothing at 

 all of first-rate quality. "Whether a uni- 

 versity be relatively rich or poor, its great- 

 est mistake, financial and educational, is to 

 indulge in a policy of expansions which 

 fail to elicit their own support and which 

 must, therefore, live by sapping the 

 strength from established lines of work. 

 This mistake may be made by the regents 

 and the president in establishing new de- 

 partments, schools or colleges, or by heads 

 of departments in establishing new subde- 

 partments or new sporadic courses, or by 

 individual members of the faculty in 

 undertaking indiscriminately wide lines of 

 research. All these different forms of ex- 

 pansion come to the same thing if they in- 

 volve spending money upon more things 

 than can be done well. 



The penalties which fall upon an insti- 

 tution which sins greatly in this respect 

 are severe. The library suffers. The lab- 

 oratories suffer. Salaries are kept down. 

 The best men escape. Those who remain 

 lose heart. The quality of everything done 

 about the institution is lowered. The final 

 calamity is that all this tends to bring to 

 and establish in the institution a faculty of 

 mediocre men. There is no known remedy 

 for this calamity. If the institution grows 

 suddenly rich, the way to progress is 

 blocked by a group of men who can not be 

 removed except by death, and whose medi- 

 ocrity will pervade the institution for a 

 generation. It is my belief that there is no 

 American university which has not suffered 



more or less by expansions which have af- 

 fected the quality of its work. It is certain 

 that some of the universities with small in- 

 comes, in their effort to cover every field, 

 have brought themselves in every field to 

 a deplorable weakness. And it is certain 

 that some among the universities with large 

 incomes have, through the same error, 

 grown large without having grown great. 

 By way of remedy, I venture to make 

 four suggestions, two of which I have dis- 

 cussed at greater length in a former paper. 



1. Heads of departments should, I be- 

 lieve, resist the constant temptation to 

 multiply courses of elementary collegiate 

 grade in order, as the phrase is, to cover 

 the ground represented by the department. 

 Instead of this policy, which tends toward 

 waste and lowered efficiency, there should 

 be severe selection of a narrow program of 

 freshman-sophomore courses which shall 

 represent typically the best things in that 

 field. I believe that this second policy, car- 

 ried out with intelligence by men who be- 

 lieve in it, means, for one thing, a radical 

 economy in university resources, and, for 

 another, greatly improved work. Even if 

 there were no question of finance involved, 

 the greatest pedagogical need in our col- 

 leges, as in all our schools, is the selection 

 of a few essentials, so that students may 

 master something intensively, and acquire 

 the habit of mastery. 



2. Heads of departments should resist 

 the constant temptation to allow the multi- 

 plication of redundant junior-senior elec- 

 tives. Whenever a new elective of this 

 grade is proposed, it should be confronted 

 with two questions: (1) Is this course an 

 essential part of the department's under- 

 graduate program? (2) Is the course an 

 essential part of a program of research 

 which the department is prepared to under- 

 take? If it serves neither of these two in- 

 terests, it is the enemy of both. It should 



