614 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVI. No. 671 



that there is any definite relation between 

 the size or wealth of an educational insti- 

 tution and its real effectiveness, so that it 

 might be said for example in the case of 

 an institution having a million dollars in- 

 vested in its plant and another million in 

 endowments, that, if these were doubled the 

 institution would be capable of doing 

 doubly efficient work. I take it that no 

 reasonable person would undertake to 

 maintain such a proposition as this, and 

 yet some such notion seems to be enter- 

 tained by some people who are unreason- 

 ably impressed by large figures and dis- 

 cover a relation between bigness and excel- 

 lence that is invisible to more judicious ob- 

 servers. If the money given to education 

 Was in all cases as wisely employed as that 

 which has been applied to the establish- 

 ment of free technical and trade schools, 

 for example, it is doubtless true that great- 

 er and more beneficent results might be 

 accomplished, but when much of it goes 

 into unendowed and often unequipped 

 buildings which can only be maintained by 

 calling upon alumni and friends for aid, 

 or by raising tuition and other fees, we can 

 understand why many colleges are property 

 poor and constantly begging. The build- 

 ing of great dormitories often makes sharp- 

 er the lines of social cleavage in the student 

 body, places a premium on wealth, en- 

 courages luxury and ostentation, and makes 

 life the harder for the poor and self-re- 

 specting student, and money expended for 

 building gorgeous chapels, great gymna- 

 siums, magnificent dining-halls and the like 

 is generally misapplied and productive of 

 few good results. Even great library 

 buildings and museums are often useless 

 duplications, the maintaining of which 

 makes large drafts upon income, and they 

 may be of little direct benefit to the under- 

 graduate student, and none at all to the 

 advanced worker for whose needs they may 



be quite insufficient. These external and 

 material things, often imposing, even mag- 

 nificent in themselves, contribute little in 

 any direct way to the legitimate educational 

 work of an institution, and they often limit 

 its activities and interfere with its real 

 usefulness. Theirs is a fictitious value, 

 largely sentimental, but the cost of main- 

 taining them is great, and in this do we find 

 further explanation of the fact that oiir 

 largest and richest educational institutions 

 are most expensive to their patrons. Nor 

 can much satisfaction be obtained from a 

 consideration of the claim that in many of 

 our larger colleges opportunities in the way 

 of scholarships are open to able and de- 

 serving students, because it is not so much 

 the poor man of brilliant parts, able to 

 secure these prizes, that needs aid and en- 

 couragement, as the man who is both poor 

 and of average ability. He it is who most 

 needs aid and for him more should be done. 

 Thei-e is danger that the conditions in some 

 of our endowed eastern universities may in 

 the not far distant future come to resemble 

 those existing at Oxford and Cambridge. 

 Bishop Gore in the House of Lords has 

 recently denied that these universities are 

 training the "governing classes." "The 

 working classes," he asserts, "are begin- 

 ning to govern the kingdom, and they are 

 excluded from universities which are play- 

 grounds for the sons of the wealthy, the 

 majority of them idlers." The influx of 

 foreign students at Oxford, due to the es- 

 tablishment of the Rhodes scholarships, has 

 shown the insufficiency of much of its ma- 

 chinery for latter-day needs, and in Amer- 

 ica we shall be losers and not gainers if 

 through mistaken sentiment we copy the 

 imperfections of English universities in- 

 stead of aiming to develop a type natural 

 to our soil, adapted to our needs and in 

 keeping with our institutions and social 

 system. Chancellor MacCracken, in an 



