November 18, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



697 



This crowning glory of the university is 

 not yet a fact in America ; it is only an ex- 

 pectation, or at most a promise. "When the 

 realization comes — and come it certainly 

 will, at Cornell or elsewhere — it will mark 

 the final and culminating stage in the de- 

 Telopment of the university idea. At pres- 

 ent the graduate schools of American 

 universities have not been so much depart- 

 ments of research as colleges for the ad- 

 vanced training of prospective teachers 

 and professors. 



Here is the multi-millionaire's opportun- 

 ity for the greatest and best investment in 

 America! By means of a large endow- 

 ment for research (say $20,000,000, which 

 might be given at once or spread over ten 

 or twelve years) he would make it possible 

 for at least one American university to 

 enter upon the highest stage of university 

 life and activity and to discharge its su- 

 preme functions to the American public 

 and human civilization. A university 

 dedicated by such an endowment to ad- 

 vanced work and research would challenge 

 comparison with the best European uni- 

 versities and set an example which would 

 prove contagious among the other leading 

 universities of the United States. 



In Science for August 19 last, there are 

 comparative tables showing the number of 

 doctor's degrees granted by the graduate 

 schools of the universities of the United 

 States for a series of years. It is shown 

 that in the year 1910 Cornell conferred 

 more doctorates in science than any other 

 university in America, and also that the 

 total number of doctorates conferred by 

 Cornell both in the sciences and in the lib- 

 eral arts ranked third in the list. There is 

 also another very striking and encouraging 

 feature of this tabular exhibit. The num- 

 ber of young investigators earning doctor's 

 degrees at Cornell was twice as great in 

 1910 as it was on the average for the de- 



cade from 1898 to 1907, and furthermore, 

 the increase since 1907 has been steady 

 and uninterrupted. 



The fact that there is in American uni- 

 versities a professorial problem itself 

 shows that something is seriously wrong. 

 The university began as a guild of scholars 

 and throughout the seven or eight hundred 

 years of its history the faculty essentially 

 constituted the university. If here and 

 now other elements of the organized uni- 

 versity have pushed the faculty from its 

 controlling position, this illustrates, on 

 the one hand, the universal tendency of an 

 organization to suppress the free play of 

 personality and, on the other hand, the hu- 

 man and specially American disposition to 

 entrust the highest interests of mankind — ■ 

 intellectual, moral and spiritual — to a 

 corporate body whose mechanism and 

 operations easily usurp the place of the 

 ends it was designed to subserve. 



Whatever organization may be necessary 

 in a modern American university the in- 

 stitution will not permanently succeed 

 unless the faculty as a group of free indi- 

 vidual personalities practically control its 

 operations. 



Now, if stress is laid on duty and service 

 and not on rights and prerogatives, if the 

 university is conceived not as monarchy 

 or aristocracy or "mobocracy" but as a 

 genuine brotherhood in which the president 

 is merely the first servant of the institu- 

 tion, there would seem to be little difficulty, 

 given a reasonable amount of tact and for- 

 bearance, of administering the American 

 university as at present organized to the 

 satisfaction of all parties. One danger in- 

 deed lurks in the disposition of some 

 presidents to identify themselves vdih. the 

 board of trustees, to adopt an exclusively 

 administrative attitude, to become merely 

 men of business and men of affairs, and to 

 lose touch with the work and sympathy 



