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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XL. No. 1031 



things, only let us not forget what their 

 real place is, and by over-emphasizing them 

 as ends in themselves create in our univer- 

 sities an atmosphere in which a thinking 

 doctor, an engineer who knows principles, 

 a real physiologist or a real agriculturalist 

 can never be made. John M. Coulter has 

 summed it up well : ' ' We are interested in 

 the practical application of knowledge 

 rather than in practical work without 

 knowledge. ' ' 



It does no harm to try to visualize the 

 university as we have defined it. Its begin- 

 nings go back to before the days when the 

 word was bom. The shepherd who first 

 distinguished the wanderers from the fixed 

 among the stars breathed its spirit. Soc- 

 rates and Galileo were good-sized univer- 

 sities in themselves. The academies of the 

 middle ages were the beginnings of the 

 modem, more formal conception of the 

 university. They were collections of men 

 who thought for themselves of matters uni- 

 versal, and taught others how to think. 

 There are some universities in Germany. 

 The name is no guide to them in America. 

 A change in name hardly makes a college, 

 a finishing school or a state-controlled 

 chicken ranch into a university. No doubt 

 degrees may be acquired, and the ambition 

 "to make friends that will be useful in 

 after life, ' ' to dress simply and yet expen- 

 sively, to gain the assurance necessary to 

 live off father's farm, may all be satisfied 

 in many of these places, but is this a uni- 

 versity education? "With what mixed feel- 

 ings one reads the autobiography of a 

 Darwin! After two years in Edinburgh 

 and after three in Cambridge he writes, 

 wasted. Only his open holidays stand out 

 when he walked the fields with Henslow 

 and in him found the university. And 

 what shall we say of the institutions usurp- 

 ing the name which for a quarter century 

 allowed Darwin to work at their doors, to 



achieve that which brought a new salvation, 

 to attain universal recognition, before they 

 themselves invited him in? Must every 

 generation learn anew that a university is 

 not a neat package of fixed ideas, but a 

 place offering sanctuary to unshackled 

 thinking ? 



A faculty does not, however, constitute 

 the whole university in the minds of the 

 average public. There are boards of trus- 

 tees, presidents, and we might add, deans, 

 to be considered. Few institutions in the 

 flesh have given rise to bitterer discussion. 

 To understand the why of this and the 

 merits of such discussion we need but re- 

 call the history of their development and 

 interpret their acts in the light of what 

 constitutes the spirit of a university. 



The best universities, perhaps the only 

 universities known, and the spirit of which 

 every country is busy copying, have no 

 boards of trustees whatsoever, and no 

 presidents. The faculties in them elect 

 each year a dean, and since there is but one 

 of him he might be called a president. But 

 he is not chosen because of his ability to 

 get money for a hard-up institution, to col- 

 lect or dismiss a faculty, to meet the legis- 

 lator in the lobby or the well-to-do in their 

 homes, but as an acknowledgment on the 

 part of his confreres of his contributions to 

 the thought of his day. His influence over 

 his faculty is the silent influence of leader- 

 ship, not the noisy one of accidental 

 power. For trustees in these universities 

 there is no need, for auditing clerks are 

 sufficient to vise bills, the amounts of which 

 may not exceed appropriations originally 

 settled upon when the professor assumed 

 charge. A department is judged by results 

 and not by the neatness of its correspon- 

 dence files and signed bills. 



There was something of this same spirit 

 in the original American universities. 

 There were boards of trustees, but originally 



