of whom is elected for life. To belong to this is esteemed a high
honour. Beside these, there is the board of overseers of thirty members,
elected by the graduates from among their own number. Five men are
elected every June to hold office for six years in this advisory
council. Every Harvard man, five years after he has received his degree
of bachelor, has the right to vote. Every appointment and all policies
of the university must be confirmed by this board of overseers. Only the
best sons of the alma mater are elected to this body. Thus the
university administration has an upper and lower house, and it is clear
that with such closely knit internal organization the destiny of the
university is better guarded than it would be if appointments and
expenditures were dependent on the caprice and political intrigues of
the party politicians in the state legislature. Just on this account
Harvard has declined, for almost a hundred years, all aid from the
state; although this was once customary. On the other hand, it would be
a mistake to suppose that, say in contrast with Germany, this
self-government of the university implies any greater administrative
rights for the professors. The German professors have much more
administrative influence than their colleagues in America. If, indeed,
the advice of the professors in matters of new appointments or
promotions is important, nevertheless the administrative bodies are in
no wise officially bound to follow the recommendations of the faculty.
The president of the university is Charles W. Eliot, the most
distinguished and influential personality in the whole intellectual life
of America. Eliot comes from an old Puritan family of New England. He
was a professor of chemistry in his thirty-fifth year; and his essays on
methods of instruction, together with his talents for organization, had
awakened considerable attention, when the overseers, in spite of lively
protestations from various sides, were prompted by keen insight in the
year 1869 to call him to this high office. It would be an exaggeration
to say that the tremendous growth of Harvard in the last three decades
is wholly the work of Eliot; for this development is, first of all, the
result of that remarkable progress which the intellectual life of the
whole land has undergone. But the fact that Harvard during all this time
has kept in the very front rank among all academic institutions is
certainly due to the efforts of President Eliot; and once again, if the
progress at Harvard has resulted in part from the scientific awakening
of the whole country, this national movement was itself in no small
measure the work of the same man. His influence has extended out beyond
the boundaries of New England and far beyond all university circles, and
has made itself felt in the whole educational life of the country. He
was never a man after the taste of the masses; his quiet and
distinguished reserve are too cool and deliberate. And if to-day, on
great occasions, he is generally the most important speaker, this is
really a triumph for clear and solid thought over the mere tricks of
blatancy and rhetoric. Throughout the country he is known as the
incomparable master of short and pregnant English.
His life work has contained nothing of the spasmodic; nor have his
reforms been in any case sudden ones. To whatever has been necessary he
has consecrated his patient energy, going fearlessly toward the goal
which he recognized as right, and moving slowly and surely forward. Year
by year he has exerted an influence on the immediate circles of his
community, and so indirectly on the whole land, to bring up the
conditions for entrance into college and professional schools until at
the present time all the special faculties of Harvard demand as an
entrance requirement a complete college course. He has made Harvard
College over into a modern academy, in which every student is entirely
free to select the course of studies which he desires, and has
introduced through the entire university and for all time, the spirit of
impartial investigation. Even the theological faculty has grown under
his influence from a sectarian institution of the Unitarian Church into
a non-sectarian Christian institution in which future preachers of every
sect are able to obtain their preliminary training. And this
indefatigable innovator is to-day, as he now has completed his
seventieth year, pressing forward with youthful energies to new goals.
Just as he has introduced into the college the opportunity of perfectly
free specialization, so now he clearly sees that if a college education
is necessary for every future student in the special departments of the
university, that the college course must be shortened from four to three
years, or in other words, must be compressed. There is much opposition
to this idea. All traditions and very many apparently weighty arguments
seem to speak against it. Nevertheless, any student of average
intelligence and energy can now get the Harvard A. B. in three years;
before long this will be the rule, and in a short time the entire
country will have followed in the steps of this reform.
It is true that Eliot’s distinguished position has contributed very much
to his outward success—that position which he has filled for thirty-five
years, and which in itself guarantees a peculiar influence on academic
life. But the decisive thing has been his personality. He is
enthusiastic and yet conservative, bold and yet patient, always glad to
consider the objections of the youngest teacher; he is religious, and
nevertheless a confident exponent of modern science. First of all, he is
through and through an aristocrat: his interest is in the single,
gifted, and solid personality rather than in the masses; and his
conception of the inequality of man is the prime motive of his whole
endeavour. But at the same time he is the best of democrats, for he lays
the greatest stress on making it possible for the earnest spirit to
press on and emerge from the lowest classes of the people. Harvard has
set its roots as never before through the whole country, and thereby has
drawn on the intellectual and moral energies of the entire nation.
Under the president come the faculties, of which each one is presided
over by a dean. The largest faculty is the faculty of arts and sciences,
whose members lecture both for the college and for the Graduate School.
There is really no sharp distinction, and the announcement of lectures
says merely that certain elementary courses are designed for younger
students in the college, and that certain others are only for advanced
students. Moreover, the seminaries and laboratory courses for scientific
research are open only to students of the Graduate School. The rest is
common ground.
As always happens, the faculty includes very unlike material, a number
of the most distinguished investigators, along with others who are first
of all teachers. In general, the older generation of men belongs to that
time in which the ability to teach was thought more important than pure
scholarship. On the other hand, the middle generation is much devoted to
productive investigations. The youngest generation of instructors is
somewhat divided. A part holds the ideal of creative research, another
part is in a sort of reactionary mood against the modern high estimation
of specialized work; and has rather a tendency once more to emphasize
the idealistic side of academic activity—the beauty of form and the
cultivating value of belles-lettres as opposed to the dry details of
scholarship. This last is generally accounted the peculiar work of
German influence, and in opposition to this there is a demand for Gallic
polish and that scientific connoisseurship of the English gentleman.
Since, however, these men are thinking not of the main fact, but rather
of certain insignificant excrescences of German work, and since after
all nothing but the real work of investigation can lead to new
achievements which justify in a real university any advancement to
higher academic positions, there is no ground for fearing that this
reactionary mood will exert any particularly harmful influence on more
serious circles of workers. Such a movement may be even welcomed as a
warning against a possible ossification of science. Particularly the
college would be untrue to its ideals, if it were to forget the
humanities in favour of scientific matters of fact.
The lectures naturally follow the principle of thorough-going
specialization, and one who reads the Annual Report will probably be
surprised to discover how many students take up Assyrian or Icelandic,
Old Bulgarian, or Middle Irish. The same specialization is carried into
the seminaries for the advanced students; thus, for instance, in the
department of philosophy, there are special seminaries for ethics,
psychology, metaphysics, logic, sociology, pedagogy, Greek, and modern
philosophy. The theological faculty is the smallest. In spite of an
admirable teaching staff there remains something still to do before the
spirit of science is brought into perfect harmony with the strongly
sectarian character of the American churches. On the other hand, the
faculty of law is recognized as the most distinguished in the
English-speaking world. The difference between the Anglo-American law
and the Romano-German has brought it about that the entire arrangement
and method of study here are thoroughly different from the German. From
the very beginning law is taught by the study of actual decisions; the
introduction of this “case system,” in opposition to the usual text-book
system, was the most decisive advance of all and fixed the reputation of
the law faculty. And this system has been gradually introduced into
other leading schools of law. The legal course lasts three years, and
each year has its prescribed courses of lectures. In the first year, for
instance, students take up contracts, the penal code, property rights,
and civil processes. Perhaps the departure from the German method of
teaching law is most characteristically shown by the fact that the law
students are from the very first day the most industrious students of
all. These young men have passed through their rather easy college days,
and when now they leave those early years of study in the elm-shaded
college yard and withdraw to Austin Hall, the law building of the
university, they feel that at last they are beginning their serious
life-work. In the upper story of Austin Hall there is a large
reading-room for the students, with a legal reference library of over
sixty thousand volumes. This hall is filled with students, even late at
night, who are quite as busy as if they were young barristers
industriously working away on their beginning practice.
The German method is much more followed in the four-year medical course
of studies, and still there are here striking differences. The medical
faculty of Harvard, which is located in Boston on account of the larger
hospitals to be found in the city, is at this moment in the midst of
moving. Already work has been commenced on a new medical quadrangle with
the most modern and sumptuous edifices. In somewhat the same way, the
course of studies is rather under process of reformation. It is in the
stage of experimentation, and of course it is true throughout the world
that the astonishing advance of medicine has created new problems for
the universities. It seems impossible now for a student to master the
whole province, since his study time is of course limited. The latest
attempt at reform is along the line of the greatest possible
concentration. The student is expected for several months morning and
night to study only anatomy, to hear anatomical lectures, to dissect and
to use the microscope; and then again for several months he devotes
himself entirely to physiology, and so on. Much is hoped, secondly, from
the intuitive method of instruction. While in Germany the teaching of
physiology is chiefly by means of lectures and demonstrations, every
Harvard student has in addition during the period of physiological study
to work one hundred and eighty hours on prescribed experiments, so that
two hours of experimentation follow every one-hour lecture. In certain
lines of practical instruction, especially in pathological anatomy, the
American is at a disadvantage compared with the German, since the supply
of material for autopsy is limited. Popular democratic sentiment is very
strong against the idea that a man who dies in a public poor-house must
fall a prey to the dissecting knife. The clinical demonstrations are not
given in special university clinics, but rather in the large municipal
hospitals, where all the chief physicians are pledged to give practical
instruction in the form of demonstrations. In the third place, there is
an increasing tendency to give to the study of medicine a certain
mobility; in other words, to allow a rather early specialization. As to
the substance itself which is taught, Harvard’s medical school is very
much like a German university, and becomes daily more similar. In the
American as in the German university, the microscope and the retort have
taken precedence over the medicine chest.
Harvard has about five thousand students. Any boy who wishes to enter
must pass, at the beginning of the summer, a six-day written
examination; and these examinations are conducted in about forty
different places of the country under the supervision of officers of the
university. Any one coming from other universities is carefully graded
according to the standard of scholarship of his particular institution.
The amount of study required is not easily determined. Unlike the German
plan, every course of lectures is concluded at the end of the year with
a three-hour examination, and only the man who passes the examination
has the course in question put to his credit. Whoever during the four,
or perhaps three, college years has taken eighteen three-hour lecture
courses extending through the year receives the bachelor’s degree. In
practice, indeed, the matter becomes enormously complicated, yet
extensive administrative machinery regulates every case with due
justice. In the legal and medical faculties, everything is dependent on
the final examinations of the year. In the philosophical two, or more
often three, years of study after the bachelor’s degree lead to the
doctorate of philosophy.
The graduate student always works industriously through the year, but
the college student may be one of various types. Part of these men work
no less industriously than the advanced students; while another part,
and by no means the worst, would not for anything be guilty of such
misbehaviour. These men are not in Harvard to learn facts, but they have
come to college for a certain atmosphere—in order to assimilate by
reflection, as they say. Of course, the lectures of enthusiastic
professors and a good book or two belong to this atmosphere; and yet,
who can say that the hours spent at the club, on the foot-ball field, at
the theatre, in the Boston hotel, on the river or on horseback do not
contribute quite as much—not to mention the informal discussions about
God and the world, especially the literary and athletic worlds, as they
sit together at their window seats on the crimson cushions and smoke
their cigarettes? Harvard has the reputation through the country of
being the rich man’s university, and it is true that many live here in a
degree of luxury of which few German students would ever think. And yet
there are as many who go through college on the most modest means, who
perhaps earn their own livelihood or receive financial aid from the
college. A systematic evasion of lectures or excessive drinking or
card-playing plays no role at all. The distinctly youthful exuberance of
the students is discharged most especially in the field of sport, which
gets an incomparable influence on the students’ minds by means of the
friendly rivalry between different colleges. The foot-ball game between
Harvard and Yale in November, or the base-ball game in June, or the New
London races, are national events, for which special trains transport
thousands of visitors. Next to the historical traditions it is indeed
sport, which holds the body of Harvard students most firmly together,
and those who belong to the same class most firmly of all—that is, those
who are to receive their A. B. in the same year. Year after year the
Harvard graduates come back to Boston in order to see their old
class-mates again. They know that to be a Harvard man means for their
whole life to be the body-guard of the nation. They will stand for
Harvard, their sons will go to Harvard, and to Harvard they will
contribute with generous hands out of their material prosperity.
Harvard reflects all the interests of the nation, and all its social
contrasts. It has its political, religious, literary and musical clubs,
its scientific and social organizations, its daily paper for the
discussion of Harvard’s interests, edited by students, and three monthly
magazines; it has its public and serious parliamentary debates, and most
popular of all, operatic performances in the burlesque vein given by
students. Thousands of most diverse personalities work out their life
problems in this little city of lecture halls, laboratories, museums,
libraries, banquet halls, and club buildings, which are scattered about
the ancient elm-shaded yard. Each student has come, in the ardour and
ambition of youth, to these halls where so many intellectual leaders
have taught and so many great men of the outside world have spent their
student years; and each one goes away once more into the world a better
and stronger man.
One thing that a European visitor particularly expects to find in the
lecture room of an American university is not found in Harvard. There
are no women students in the school. Women graduates who are well
advanced are admitted to the seminaries and to scientific research in
the laboratories, but they are excluded from the college; and the same
is true of Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins. Of course,
Harvard has no prejudice against the higher education of women; but
Harvard is itself an institution for men. In an indirect way, the
teaching staff of Harvard University is utilized for the benefit of
women, since only a stone’s throw from the Harvard College gate is
Radcliffe College, which is for women, and in which only Harvard
instructors give lectures.
This picture of the largest university will stand as typical for the
others, although of course each one of the great academies has its own
peculiarities. While Harvard seeks to unite humanitarian and specialized
work, Johns Hopkins aims to give only the latter, while Yale and
Princeton aim more particularly at the former. Johns Hopkins in
Baltimore is a workshop of productive investigation, and in the province
of natural sciences and medicine Johns Hopkins has been a brilliant
example to the whole country. Yale University, in New Haven, stands
first of all for culture and personal development, although many a
shining name in scholarship is graven on the tablets of Yale. Columbia
University, in New York, gets its peculiar character from that great
city which is its background; and this to a much greater extent than the
University of Chicago, which has created its own environment and
atmosphere on the farthest outskirts of that great city. Chicago, and
Cornell University at Ithaca, the University of Pennsylvania, Ann Arbor
in Michigan, Berkeley and Stanford in California are the principal
institutions which admit women, and therein are outwardly distinguished
from the large institutions of the East.
The male students from the West have somewhat less polish, but are
certainly not less industrious. The Western students come generally out
of more modest conditions, and are therefore less indifferent with
regard to their own future. The student from Ann Arbor, Minnesota, or
Nebraska would compare with the student at Yale or Princeton about as a
student at Königsberg or Breslau would compare with one at Heidelberg or
Bonn. Along with that he comes from a lower level of public school
education. The Western institutions are forced to content themselves
with less exacting conditions for entrance, and the South has at the
present time no academies at all which are to be compared seriously with
the great universities of the country.
Next to Harvard the oldest university is Yale, which a short time ago
celebrated its two-hundredth anniversary. After Yale comes Princeton,
whose foundation took place in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Yale was founded as a protest against the liberal tendencies of Harvard.
Puritan orthodoxy had been rather overridden at Harvard, and so created
for itself a more secure fortress in the colony of Connecticut. In this
the mass of the population was strictly in sympathy with the church; the
free spirit of Harvard was too advanced for the people, and remained so
in a certain way for nearly two centuries. Therein has lain the strength
of Yale. Until a short time ago Yale had the more popular place in the
nation; it was the democratic rallying-ground in contrast with Harvard,
which was too haughtily aristocratic. Yale was the religious and the
conservative stronghold as contrasted with the free thought and progress
of Harvard. For some time it seemed as if the opposition of Yale against
the modern spirit would really prejudice its higher interests, and it
slowly fell somewhat from its great historic position. But recently,
under its young, widely known president, Hadley, the political
economist, it has been making energetic and very successful endeavours
to recover its lost position.
The history of Columbia University, in New York, began as early as 1754.
At that time it was King’s College, which after the War for Independence
was rechristened Columbia College. But the real greatness of Columbia
began only in the last few decades, with a development which is
unparalleled. Under its president, Seth Low, the famous medical, legal,
and political economical faculties were brought into closer relations
with the college, the Graduate School was organized, Teachers’ College
was developed, the general entrance conditions were brought up, and on
Morningside Heights a magnificent new university quadrangle was erected.
When Seth Low left the university, after ten years of irreproachable and
masterly administration, in order to become Mayor of New York in the
service of the Reform party, he was succeeded in the presidency by
Butler, a young man who since his earliest years had shown extraordinary
talents for administration, and who for many years as editor of the best
pedagogical magazine had become thoroughly familiar with the needs of
academic instruction. Columbia is favoured by every circumstance. If
signs are not deceptive, Columbia will soon stand nearest to Harvard at
the head of American universities. While Harvard and Yale, Princeton,
Pennsylvania, and Columbia are the most successful creations of the
Colonial days, Johns Hopkins and Chicago, Cornell and Leland Stanford
are the chief representatives of those institutions which have recently
been founded by private munificence. The state universities of
Wisconsin, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, and
California may be mentioned, finally, as the most notable state
universities.