October 2, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



465 



of heart burning in the process. The per- 

 spective of time answers ever the same — 

 some of those involved, and they may be 

 trustees, presidents, faculty members, or 

 the public at large, have never learned or 

 have temporarily forgotten what consti- 

 tutes a university. 



And what does constitute a university? 

 Time again writes : It is a collection of men 

 at work solving the problems that our uni- 

 verse presents and standing ready to teach 

 to others the methods of such analysis. 



This definition will doubtless strike many 

 a reader as strangely incomplete. As a 

 first omission will be felt the ignoring of its 

 legal status which in our modern day plays 

 so large a part in the constitution of the 

 university. To understand properly the 

 national, state or municipal aspects of a 

 university we must go back to the original 

 charters granted the original institutions, 

 when we will see in them nothing but the 

 sovereign guarantee of special protection 

 to the workers which constitute the univer- 

 sity. The reasons for the necessity of such 

 special protection we shall discuss shortly; 

 but here it is well to ponder for a moment 

 the mere fact. It can hardly be said that 

 such protection of the men of our faculties 

 in America has ever made itself apparent. 

 There are plenty of illustrations to the 

 contrary. Would we find any virtue in the 

 legalization of our privately or publicly 

 controlled universities, we may say that 

 this guarantees a certain protection to the 

 tools with which our faculties work and 

 legal supervision of the custodianship of 

 such things of value which private citizens 

 have at times given to the university to 

 improve the tools of the faculty. 



It is well to understand of what such 

 tools consist. They are the records of past 

 workers and the material necessities of the 

 present — among the first, books and such 

 other evidences of its labors as a bygone 



generation may have seen fit to leave be- 

 hind ; among the second, our buildings and 

 their contents from penwipers and kitchen 

 chairs to tubes of rare gases and janitors. 

 It is entirely in keeping with America's 

 veneration of property rights that legal 

 supervision of the university should he 

 most evident in the protecting hand which 

 it spreads over her material aspects. Some 

 day perhaps our country will attain the 

 standard of the middle ages and extend an 

 equal protection to the men that constitute 

 the university, for, after all, the carpenter's 

 chest is not the carpenter, and while the 

 workman may make him new implements, 

 the rarest tools need hands and minds to 

 guide them. 



It is evident from these simple considera- 

 tions that the sine qua non of a university 

 ever has been and ever must be a group of 

 clear thinking individuals possessed of ex- 

 pert knowledge gotten at first hand. The 

 wobbly logician is useless from the start. 

 Neither does mere possession of much or 

 even expert knowledge make the university 

 type. Teachers in primary grades and the 

 high school are supposed to have as much, 

 and certainly the teaching staff of a tech- 

 nical school. The university man is more 

 than a mere animated manual of useful 

 information in captivity. What we expect 

 of him is not instruction in facts but in- 

 struction in methods, and how can he teach 

 others to analyze world problems who has 

 not learned himself? 



Let it not be assumed that this obvious 

 point of view so glibly and generally as- 

 sented to in spirit is as readily adopted in 

 the specific university problem. There is 

 ever a deal of cry for the "practical" man 

 in university instruction who will give our 

 sons and daughters the immediately appli- 

 cable formulae for curing headache, shoe- 

 ing horses, freezing ice cream and raising 

 hay. I am by no means opposed to such 



