Foreigners, commenting on our civilization, have with great unanimity
remarked the privileged position that institutions of learning occupy
in America as receivers of benefactions. Our typical men of wealth, if
they do not found a college, will at least single out some college or
university on which to lavish legacies or gifts. All the more so,
perhaps, if they are not college-bred men themselves. Johns Hopkins
University, the University of Chicago, Clark University, are splendid
examples of this rule. Steadily, year by year, my own university,
Harvard, receives from one to two and a half millions.
There is something almost pathetic in the way in which our successful
business men seem to idealize the higher learning and to believe in its
efficacy for salvation. Never having shared in its blessings, they do
their utmost to make the youth of coming generations more fortunate.
Usually there is little originality of thought in their generous
foundations. The donors follow the beaten track. Their good will has
to be vague, for they lack the inside knowledge. What they usually
think of is a new college like all the older colleges; or they give new
buildings to a university or help to make it larger, without any
definite idea as to the improvement of its inner form. Improvements in
the character of our institutions always come from the genius of the
various presidents and faculties. The donors furnish means of
propulsion, the experts within the pale lay out the course and steer
the vessel. You all think of the names of Eliot, Gilman, Hall and
Harper as I utter these words--I mention no name nearer home.
This is founders' day here at Stanford--the day set apart each year to
quicken and reanimate in all of us the consciousness of the deeper
significance of this little university to which we permanently or
temporarily belong. I am asked to use my voice to contribute to this
effect. How can I do so better than by uttering quite simply and
directly the impressions that I personally receive? I am one among our
innumerable American teachers, reared on the Atlantic coast but
admitted for this year to be one of the family at Stanford. I see
things not wholly from without, as the casual visitor does, but partly
from within. I am probably a typical observer. As my impressions are,
so will be the impressions of others. And those impressions, taken
together, will probably be the verdict of history on the institution
which Leland and Jane Stanford founded.
"Where there is no vision, the people perish." Mr. and Mrs. Stanford
evidently had a vision of the most prophetic sort. They saw the
opportunity for an absolutely unique creation, they seized upon it with
the boldness of great minds; and the passionate energy with which Mrs.
Stanford after her husband's death, drove the original plans through in
the face of every dismaying obstacle, forms a chapter in the biography
of heroism. Heroic also the loyalty with which in those dark years the
president and faculty made the university's cause, their cause, and
shared the uncertainties and privations.
And what is the result to-day? To-day the key-note is triumphantly
struck. The first step is made beyond recall. The character of the
material foundation is assured for all time as something unique and
unparalleled. It logically calls for an equally unique and
unparalleled spiritual superstructure.
Certainly the chief impression which the existing university must make
on every visitor is of something unique and unparalleled. Its
attributes are almost too familiar to you to bear recapitulation. The
classic scenery of its site, reminding one of Greece, Greek too in its
atmosphere of opalescent fire, as if the hills that close us in were
bathed in ether, milk and sunshine; the great city, near enough for
convenience, too far ever to become invasive; the climate, so friendly
to work that every morning wakes one fresh for new amounts of work; the
noble architecture, so generously planned that there room and to spare
for every requirement; the democracy of the life, no one superfluously
rich, yet all sharing, so far as their higher needs go, in the common
endowment--where could a genius devoted to the search for truth, and
unworldly as most geniuses are, find on the earth's whole round a place
more advantageous to come and work in? _Die Luft der Freiheit weht_!
All the traditions are individualistic. Red tape and organization are
at their minimum. Interruptions and perturbing distractions hardly
exist. Eastern institutions look all dark and huddled and confused in
comparison with this purity and serenity. Shall it not be auspicious?
Surely the one destiny to which this happy beginning seems to call
Stanford is that it should become something intense and original, not
necessarily in point of wealth or extent, but in point of spiritual
quality. The founders have, as I said, triumphantly struck the
keynote, and laid the basis: the quality of what they have already
given is unique in character.
It rests with the officials of the present and future Stanford, it
rests with the devotion and sympathetic insight of the growing body of
graduates, to prolong the vision where the founders' vision terminated,
and to insure that all the succeeding steps, like the first steps,
shall single out this university more and more as the university of
quality peculiarly.
And what makes essential quality in a university? Years ago in New
England it was said that a log by the roadside with a student sitting
on one end of it, and Mark Hopkins sitting on the other end, was a
university. It is the quality of its men that makes the quality of a
university. You may have your buildings, you may create your
committees and boards and regulations, you may pile up your machinery
of discipline and perfect your methods of instruction, you may spend
money till no one can approach you; yet you will add nothing but one
more trivial specimen to the common herd of American colleges, unless
you send into all this organization some breath of life, by inoculating
it with a few men, at least, who are real geniuses. And if you once
have the geniuses, you can easily dispense with most of the
organization. Like a contagious disease, almost, spiritual life passes
from man to man by contact. Education in the long run is an affair
that works itself out between the individual student and his
opportunities. Methods of which we talk so much, play but a minor
part. Offer the opportunities, leave the student to his natural
reaction on them, and he will work out his personal destiny, be it a
high one or a low one. Above all things, offer the opportunity of
higher personal contacts. A university provides these anyhow within
the student body, for it attracts the more aspiring of the youth of the
country, and they befriend and elevate one another. But we are only
beginning in this country, with our extraordinary American reliance on
organization, to see that the alpha and omega in a university is the
tone of it, and that this tone is set by human personalities
exclusively. The world, in fact, is only beginning to see that the
wealth of a nation consists more than in anything else in the number of
superior men that it harbors. In the practical realm it has always
recognized this, and known that no price is too high to pay for a great
statesman or great captain of industry. But it is equally so in the
religious and moral sphere, in the poetic and artistic sphere and in
the philosophic and scientific sphere. Geniuses are ferments; and when
they come together as they have done in certain lands at certain times,
the whole population seems to share in the higher energy which they
awaken. The effects are incalculable and often not easy to trace in
detail, but they are pervasive and momentous. Who can measure the
effects on the national German soul of the splendid series of German
poets and German men of learning, most of them academic personages?
From the bare economic point of view the importance of geniuses is only
beginning to be appreciated. How can we measure the cash-value to
France of a Pasteur, to England of a Kelvin, to Germany of an Ostwald,
to us here of a Burbank? One main care of every country in the future
ought to be to find out who its first-rate thinkers are and to help
them. Cost here becomes something entirely irrelevant, the returns are
sure to be so incommensurable. This is what wise men the world over
are perceiving. And as the universities are already a sort of agency
providentially provided for the detection and encouragement of mental
superiority, it would seem as if that one among them that followed this
line most successfully would quickest rise to a position of paramountcy
and distinction.
Why should not Stanford immediately adopt this as her vital policy?
Her position is one of unprecedented freedom. Not trammelled by the
service of the state as other universities on this coast are
trammelled, independent of students' fees and consequently of numbers,
Utopian in the material respects I have enumerated, she only needs a
boldness like that shown by her founders to become the seat of a
glowing intellectual life, sure to be admired and envied the world
over. Let her claim her place; let her espouse her destiny. Let her
call great investigators from whatever lands they live in, from
England, France, Germany, Japan, as well as from America. She can do
this without presumption, for the advantages of this place for steady
mental work are so unparalleled. Let these men, following the happy
traditions of the place, make the university. The original foundation
had something eccentric in it; let Stanford not fear to be eccentric to
the end, if need be. Let her not imitate; let her lead, not follow.
Especially let her not be bound by vulgar traditions as to the
cheapness or dearness of professorial service. The day is certainly
about to dawn when some American university will break all precedents
in the matter of instructors' salaries, and will thereby immediately
take the lead, and reach the winning post for quality. I like to think
of Stanford being that university. Geniuses are sensitive plants, in
some respects like _prima donnas_. They have to be treated tenderly.
They don't need to live in superfluity; but they need freedom from
harassing care; they need books and instruments; they are always
overworking, so they need generous vacations; and above all things they
need occasionally to travel far and wide in the interests of their
souls' development. Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing
of supreme quality is cheap, whatever be the price one has to pay for
it.
Considering all the conditions, the quality of Stanford has from the
first been astonishingly good both in the faculty and in the student
body. Can we not, as we sit here to-day, frame a vision of what it may
be a century hence, with the honors of the intervening years all rolled
up in its traditions? Not vast, but intense; less a place for teaching
youths and maidens than for training scholars; devoted to truth;
radiating influence; setting standards; shedding abroad the fruits of
learning; mediating between America and Asia, and helping the more
intellectual men of both continents to understand each other better.
What a history! and how can Stanford ever fail to enter upon it?
[1] An Address at Stanford University on Founders' Day, 1906. Printed
in _Science_, for May 25, 1906.