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past few years drawn to it many eminent educators not residents of New York, who are most cordially welcomed and share fully in all discussions. It elects each year a council of five to represent it in intervals between meetings. Its proceedings, issued annually, are of great value in all educational libraries.

DEPARTMENTS.

1. Administrative (regents' office).-Including incorporation, supervision, inspection, reports, legislation, finances, and all other work not assigned to another department.

Duplicate division. This is a State clearing house, to which any institution in the university may send books or apparatus which it no longer requires, and select from it in return an equal value suited to its locality and needs.

2. Examination.-Including preacademic, law, medical, dental, and veterinary student; academic, higher, law, medical, dental, veterinary, library, extension, and any other examinations conducted by the regents, and also credentials or degrees conferred on examination.

The examinations are conducted as the best lever for securing better work from teachers and more systematic and continuous study from students, and as the best means of detecting and eliminating inefficient teachers or methods. They cover 140 subjects, and required last year 1,045,950 question papers (exclusive of bound volumes), and are held the week ending the last Friday in January and March and the third Friday in June, in the 602 academies and high schools in the university and also at various central points where there are 10 or more candidates.

3. Extension.-Including summer, vacation, evening, and correspondence schools and other forms of extension teaching, lecture courses, study clubs, reading circles, and other agencies for the promotion and wider extension of opportunities and facilities for education, specially for those unable to attend the usual teaching institutions.

Public libraries division.-To promote the general library interests of the State, which through it apportions and expends $25,000 a year for the benefit of free public libraries. Under its charge are the traveling libraries for lending to local libraries or to communities not yet having permanent libraries.

The most important factor of the extension movement is provision of the best reading for all citizens by means of traveling, home, and capitol libraries, and annotated lists through the public libraries division.

4. State library.-Including general, law, medical, and education libraries, library school, bibliographic publications, lending books to students, and similar library interests.

Library school. The law authorizes the State library to give instruction and assistance in organizing and administering libraries. Students receive from the State library staff, in return for services rendered to the library during their two years' course, careful training in library economy, bibliography, cataloguing, classification, and other duties of professional librarianship.

5. State museum.-Including all scientific specimens and collections, works of art, objects of historic interest, and similar property appropriate to a general museum, if owned by the State and not placed in other custody by a specific law; also the research department, carried on by the State geologist and paleontologist, botanist, and entomologist, and all similar scientific interests of the university."

SIDNEY SHERWOOD, Johns Hopkins University.

PART I.

UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK; ORIGIN, HISTORY, AND PRESENT ORGANIZATION.1

By SIDNEY SHERWOOD, Ph. D., Associate Professor of Political Economy, Johns Hopkins University.

INTRODUCTION.

The system of higher education in New York is one of great interest to the students of State educational institutions. It has the interest of age and of historic incident, for it is closely connected with the whole development of the State. The distinguished men who aided in founding it, and their distinguished successors in its control, give to its history that interest which springs from association with conspicuous personality. But it is the greatness of the work achieved by this system in the development of the educational life of the State which chiefly entitles it to be studied. And yet the boundaries of the Commonwealth do not bound the historic or the practical importance of the university.

The American colonies were profoundly influenced during the latter half of the eighteenth century by the new educational ideas with which revolutionary France conquered the nineteenth century. The New York system shows abundant traces of this influence, and itself has become a source of an influence which has spread to the Pacific on the one hand and back to Europe on the other.

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superintendent of. Annual reports.

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port and year in parentheses].

N. Y. leg. papers.

New York a leader in innovation.-New York has always been a leader among the States in the practical methods and organization of progressive change, whether in politics, in finance, in commerce, in law, or in education. The commercial adroitness and activity of the city were strongly marked even under the Dutch régime. The plan for securing paper money issues by national banks was carried to Washington by Secretary Chase, from New York, where it had been in operation for a quarter of a century. Nearly every movement toward the organization of a new political party in the United States has had its source and center in New York. From Aaron Burr to the present time New York has been the pivot around which revolved the political destiny of aspirants to high office in the nation. Nowhere else has the spoils system in politics, this nineteenth century survival of the old Teutonic comitatus, received so splendid an illustration of its efficiency as a machine for party control as in New York.

Not even to Massachusetts does New York yield place in the number and value of her legal reforms, whether in substantive law or in procedure. In the abolition of feudal tenures, of the old cumbersome methods of conveyance of real property, and in the simplification of pleadings and procedure New York has led the way. But these are only instances. Within thirty years England has introduced two most beneficent innovations in her law, viz, the abolition of separate chancery courts and of the disabilities of married women in regard to the ownership of property and the conduct of business. New York anticipated England more than twenty years in these reforms. In the codification of law, also, New York has given the impulse which is gradually transforming the legal systems of this country.

"Innovation," says Henry Adams, speaking of the early years of this century, "was the most useful purpose which New York could serve in human interest, and never was a city better fitted for its work."1

Plan and scope of the work.-The commercial and political importance of the city tends to overshadow the achievements of the Commonwealth in other fields of activity. The University of the State of New York is an innovation in educational organization which deserves to be better known. It is the aim of the writer to make this system better known. He has attempted, by a careful outline of the organization and work of this uni ersity, to show what this State is doing for the higher education of its people, and what has been the influence of its system and its activity upon the progress of higher education in other States and countries. The University of the State of New York, comprising, as it does, all the chartered colleges and secondary schools in the State, is an institution unique in its organization and in its methods of work. The writer believes that he has thrown new light upon the beginning of the university and has shown

Adams, Henry B. History of the United States of America, v. 1,

p. 112.

its international origin. It was but one result of a great movement in educational reform which in the latter part of the eighteenth century swept over continental Europe and America. He has at the same time pointed out the particular causes which led New York to work out her peculiar system, a system admirably adapted to the needs of the State, and a model which has suggested many reforms beyond the boundaries of the Commonwealth. The Empire State has no prouder or juster claim to greatness than her imperial university. The period from the organization of the university (1784-87) until the beginning of its later increased activity with the law of 1889 has been very hurriedly passed over. This period has been treated fully and ably in a publication prepared under the auspices of the regents of the university, at the time of their centennial celebration in 18841— a work to which the writer is greatly indebted for its valuable collections of facts and the suggestiveness of its historical comments. The later activity of the university has been more fully treated in this monograph. The revision and codification of the laws relating to the university in 1889, and the extension of its powers thereunder, as well as the present plans and prospects of the university, have been carefully studied by the writer, who has made some suggestions as to a further extension of the work of higher education by the university.

In April, 1892, a new university law was enacted, the purpose of which was to revise and consolidate the laws relating to the university. It has also revised the general legislation relating to the colleges. It thus covers a wider field than the law of 1889, and might well be called a "code of higher education."

It repeals the most of former laws relating to higher education. It stands thus as the compact embodiment of that historic evolution which the writer has attempted to trace in this narrative. As such it has seemed best to print it in full as an appendix. This volume thus serves as an historic introduction to the law of 1892, which must be the starting point of all new developments. The structure, powers, and methods of the university itself remain substantially unaltered. The analysis of the law of 1889 which the writer has given will therefore be intelligible to the reader of the law of 1892, and will in turn help to make clear the scope and meaning of the latest law. There are two features in the law of 1892 which learly show the newer spirit of progress in this old historic univer ity. One is the remarkable emphasis given to libraries as an agency in higher education; the other is the incorporation of university extension as a regular and permanent department of the university work.

1N. Y. (State)-University. Historical and statistical record, 1784-1884, by Franklin B. Hough; with an introductory sketch by David Murray. Ph. D., LL. D., secretary of the regents, Albany, 1885.

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