518 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXII. No. 565. 



we may look forward with confidence to 

 his success in whatever he undertakes. I 

 mention it at this moment as indicating the 

 kind of public work which makes the mod- 

 ern university something more than a mere 

 group of schools and elevates it to its high- 

 est possible rank— that of a public servant. 



Besides its function in maintaining these 

 public collections and lectures, a university 

 should also be governed by a sense of public 

 obligation in arranging its courses of study. 



I have in a previous report spoken of 

 this public duty as affecting the freedom 

 of a university in determining the require- 

 ments for admission to its professional 

 schools. However convenient it might be 

 to insist on the possession of a bachelor's 

 degree by all pupils in the schools of law 

 and medicine, I feel that it would be a vio- 

 lation of our duty to these professions to 

 hedge ourselves about by any such artificial 

 limitations. We should make the standard 

 of admission to our law and medical schools 

 higher than it is at present ; but we should 

 base it upon qualifications for professional 

 study which we could test by an examina- 

 tion, rather than upon previous residence 

 at an institution entitled to give a bach- 

 elor's degree. If a man is really fit to 

 study law or medicine we should encourage 

 him to study law or medicine with us, with- 

 out making arbitrary restrictions. 



Considerations of public duty have an 

 important bearing in determining what we 

 shall require for entrance to our under- 

 graduate courses also. 



The whole question of entrance require- 

 ments is often discussed as though these 

 were things which the college had a right 

 to fix for itself. This is an error. There 

 is a great difference in this matter between 

 the position of a public institution, such as 

 we think Yale to be, and a purely private 

 one. If a man keeps a private school he 

 can make any rules which he pleases re- 

 garding the admission of his pupils. If 



we think these rules are arbitrary or whim- 

 sical we may question their wisdom, but 

 we can never for a moment question his 

 right to make them. The case is different 

 with a public institution. If a place like 

 Yale, honored by the presence of the high- 

 est officers of the commonwealth in its cor- 

 poration, and exempt by law from many 

 of the taxes which are paid by others, 

 should choose to make its rules arbitrary, 

 the public would have a grievance. It 

 would say, and say justly, that Yale had 

 exceeded its rights. 



Yale is charged with the public duty of 

 educating a large number of boys who, 

 having reached the age of seventeen or 

 eighteen years, and having acquired the 

 freedom which naturally goes with that 

 age, desire to spend time in the acquisition 

 of general culture and broad points of view 

 before narrowing themselves down to the 

 work of the office or the shop. She will 

 err if she makes her requirements so lax as 

 to encourage the coming of idlers, who will 

 waste their own time and interfere with 

 the seriousness of purpose of their fellows. 

 But she will also err in the opposite direc- 

 tion if for her own convenience she makes 

 those requirements so narrow that hard- 

 working boys in the high schools and acad- 

 emies of different parts of the country can 

 not get the teaching which is needed in 

 order to enable them to enter Yale. 



It is wrong to say that whatever Yale 

 requires the schools will furnish. Some 

 schools doubtless will; others will not. If 

 the Yale requirements should get so far out 

 of the line of work furnished by the better 

 kind of high schools in the country that we 

 could not expect to get boys from those 

 schools, we should soon become a local in- 

 stitution. Yale would be a school for boys 

 of one kind of antecedents, instead of for 

 boys of all kinds of antecedents ; and as 

 soon as it became a school for boys of one 

 kind of antecedents only, it would lose its 



