THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY.

The Growth of the College.

COLUMBIA COLLEGE.

GRADUALLY the older American Colleges as they come into possession of larger resources, and a few recent universities (so-called) more richly endowed at the start each on somewhat different lines, are aiming to provide the necessary facilities of higher culture for American young men and young women, who, heretofore, could only secure them by a residence, more or less prolonged, in some European capital or university town. These facilities will doubtless be increased and enlarged, and more and more widely enjoyed, as our preparatory schools are better equipped, and the smaller colleges restrict themselves to the work of secondary instruction. But in all probability we shall never have a university of the best American type, until we have a larger number of institutions, public or endowed, to do the work which the German Gymnasia, and the French Lycee and college, and the English public school and endowed grammar school, now do for their respective great High Schools; and added to this better preparation of students, our Universities must have within themselves a body of unattached instructors corresponding to the English private tutor, or the German docent.

The immense development of Columbia College in the last fifteen years, since the Trustees found themselves out of debt and in possession of larger resources, under the guidance of a wise educator, as narrated in the annual Report of the President for 1879-1880, is full of interest and instruction. A few more steps

by the Trustees in the direction indicated by the President will place Columbia College, by whatever name it may be called, in a position to offer the facilities of a real American university to the young men and young women of the country, and there is no one measure so important as the establishment of a Superior Normal School, and the gradual formation of a teaching body, from which the chairs of instruction may be filled. We need the German Seminär, or the French Superior Normal School. (241)

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AIM OF COLLEGE EDUCATION.*

There seems to be a singular confusion in the public mind as to what a college ought to do. The notion was distinct enough a century ago. It was then understood that the business of a college is not so much to teach as to train. It was held that the benefit to the student is not so much the knowledge he acquires, as the mental discipline he receives. In this view a well-stored mind is per se of little consequence; a well-developed mind is the main thing, though it be stored with rubbish. And in fact, when we consider the monstrous tasks of original Latin and Greek verse-nonsense and otherwise-with which the college lads of the earlier times had to wrestle, it would seem as if, in the eyes of the teachers of those days, rubbish had the preference.

Mental discipline, however, and not the acquisition of knowledge, having been the recognized and exclusive end of the early collegiate education, it followed, as a necessary and inevitable consequence, that the curriculum of study chosen for the purpose should be, as it was, extremely limited in range. It was made up almost wholly of Latin, Greek, and the pure mathematics. A little rhetoric, a little logic, a little astronomy, and later a little psychology, completed the circle. The last named subjects were only the efflorescence of the course, making their timid appearance in the final year. The earlier three years and all the preparatory course were absolutely solid with Latin, Greek and the pure mathematics.

In a certain sense, considering the object in view, this was wise; for as in physical training, neither strength of limb, nor skill of hand, nor command of muscular movement can be acquired except on the condition of often repeated and long continued practice of the same identical forms of exercise; so in education, no increase of mental vigor, no sharpening of the faculties, no facility of wielding to purpose the intellectual energies will be secured, unless the subjects employed to provoke the mind to exertion are so few as to make it certain that such exertion shall be steady and continuous. Therefore it is that the early educators were wise when they limited the curriculum to the narrow range represented by Latin, Greek, and the pure mathematics.

It may be said of them, indeed, that their wisdom in this matter was not a conscious wisdom, that the world at that earlier day had little else worth knowing except Latin, Greek, and the pure mathematics, and that they merely took what they found. If this is the case, they probably builded better than they knew."

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But a greater wisdom has been claimed for them than that they limited the curriculum; it is that the subjects they placed in it are the very best, educationally considered, that could have been selected for their purpose; that Latin, Greek, and the pure mathematics are so infinitely superior to all other instrumentalities for exciting the intellectual activities, as to make them the sole necessary, perhaps the sole

Report of President Barnard to Trustees of Columbia College for 1881.

fit, means for imparting to the growing mind a complete, symmetrical, and rounded development. If this is so again (and the question whether it is so or not can hardly be discussed with profit here) it is possible once more, considering the suggestion made above, that they were not so greatly wise as greatly fortunate. Whether wise or fortunate, or wise and fortunate, or not, however, they created a system very fit for the purpose in view, and a system to which we ought to go back -in form and principle, at least, if not in substance-if it is indeed true that we contemplate, or ought to contemplate, in our colleges of to-day, the identical object which they set before them in theirs.

In saying that we should adopt their system in form and principle, it is simply meant that we should return to a curriculum of two or three subjects; but whether these two or three should be Latin, Greek, and the pure mathematics, or French, German, and physics, or any other triad which may be selected from the copious répertoire of an American university of the present day, it is not intended to suggest.

But the question returns, is the object which we aim at to-day in our colleges the identical one contemplated in the colleges of the last century? Do we still design them to be merely mental gymnasia, and not schools for the acquisition of useful knowledge at all? If we do so, we have practically ruined them for the avowed purpose, by overloading them with so large and so distracting a variety of subjects as practically to eliminate the gymnastic feature altogether. The well known fact is that these subjects have been added, not on the ground that they improve the disciplinary efficacy of the course, which manifestly they do not, but for the reason, distinctly avowed, that they are subjects which educated men ought to know something about. If their advocates talk, as they sometimes do, of their disciplinary value, it is not because they attach importance to this view, but to soften opposition to their introduction. All of them, or most of them, at least, would have a disciplinary value, if opportunity were afforded to make it felt. But in the conflict of contending claims, it is hardly possible to secure the attention of the learner to any one for a period sufficiently long or sufficiently continuous to afford anything like a fair test of what, in this respect, it might be worth.

Age of Admission Fifty Years Ago.

When our colleges were first founded, there was nothing between them and the elementary schools, and the elementary schools themselves were very imperfect. The requisitions for admission were very humble, and their attendance was principally made up of lads of tender ** age. Ogden Hoffman, one of our own distinguished alumni and a former member of this board, was graduated in 1812, at the early age of thirteen. The eminent physician and surgeon, T. Romeyn Beck, was graduated at Union College, in 1804, at the same age.

The senior member of this board, Samuel B. Ruggles (senior in the order of appointment), graduated at Yale College in 1814, at the age of fourteen. Benjamin Rush, chairman of the committee of the Penn

sylvania State Provincial Conference (June, 1776) on the Declaration of Independence, and an eminent member of the medical profession, graduated at Princeton in 1760, also at fourteen.

Gulian C. Verplanck, famous in many ways, graduated at our College in 1801, at the age of fifteen, and made the day of his graduation memorable by an exciting scene in Trinity church, in which his indiscretion nearly lost him his degree. Our former professor of chemistry and physics, James Renwick; Richard Stockton, Senator from New Jersey in 1796; the Rt. Rev. Manton Eastburn, Bishop of Massachusetts; J. McPherson Berrien, of Georgia, and Nicholas Biddle of Pennsylvania, also graduated at the age of fifteen.

Governor and Chief Justice Hutchinson, of Massachusetts; Gouverneur Morris, of the Continental Congress; Aaron Burr, of unhappy memory; Chief Justice Joel Parker, of New Hampshire; Edward Holyoke, and John Thornton Kirkland, presidents of Harvard College; Nathan Lord, president of Dartmouth College; Samuel Provoost, second chairman of this board; Joseph Reed and William B. Reed, of Pennsylvania; John Tyler, of Virginia; Joseph Hopkinson and John Sergeant, of Pennsylvania; Jonathan Dayton, of New Jersey; Professors J. W. Alexander and Henry Vethake; George Ticknor, of Boston, and the eminent surgeons, S. W. Dickson and A. C. Post, of this city, all graduated at sixteen.

Among graduates at the age of seventeen may be enumerated Cotton Mather and Increase Mather; Chief Justice James Winthrop; John Hancock, first signer of the Declaration of Independence; Governor Jonathan Trumbull; Edward Livingston; Jared Ingersoll; William Samuel Johnson, first president of Columbia College under the new charter; Richard Rush; James A. Bayard; James Blair Smith, first president of Union College; John Wheelock, second president of Dartmouth College; Jonathan Edwards, third president of the College of New Jersey; Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College; Sereno Edwards Dwight, president of Hamilton College; Francis Wayland, president of Brown University; Edward Everett, president of Harvard University; Henry Reed; De Witt Clinton; Gouverneur Kemble; Henry Wheaton; Theodore Frelinghuysen; Emory Washburne; Benjamin Silliman; George Bancroft; J. Addison Alexander; John McVickar; and Charles Anthon.

Graduating at eighteen, we find John Caldwell Calhoun; James Kent; Robert R. Livingston, chancellor; John Wentworth, governor; John Cotton Smith, governor; James Otis; Timothy Pickering; Elbridge Gerry; Oliver Wolcott; Ambrose Spencer; William Cranch; Samuel Johnson, first president of King's College, now Columbia; Eliphalet Nott, president of Union College; Josiah Quincy, president of Harvard College; Jeremiah Day, president of Yale College; Jona than Dickinson, president of the College of New Jersey; Horace Holley, president of Transylvania University; Isaac Ferris, chancellor of the University of the City of New York; William Ellery Channing;

Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry W. Longfellow; Bishop John Henry Hobart; Bishop Benjamin T. Onderdonk, and Bishop Charles P. McIlvaine. It would be easy to extend this list.

It is true that, in the early period of which we are speaking, there were students in the colleges above the age of boyhood. They were there because there were no better schools. But the system both of education and of discipline had to be adapted to the prevailing character of the academic body, and that was determined by the predominance of the juvenile element. Students more advanced in years could, of course, accommodate themselves to this; but it would have been an unpardonable mistake as well as a perversion of the original design, to have attempted to accommodate the system to them. From this consideration resulted naturally the establishment of an invariable and strictly limited curriculum of study. ** With the progress of time, the extremely juvenile element has been eliminated from our colleges almost completely.

The average age of the student body in an American college of the present time is greater than it was a century ago, by about three years. The college of that day stands to the college of this, very nearly in the same relation as that which Eton College in England bears to the colleges of the University of Oxford. Eton and not Oxford was in fact the model on which our early colleges were constructed. That has remained substantially unchanged to the present time; ours have been so transformed that they have lost all resemblance to the original type. The average age of the Eton boys at the completion of their course is eighteen years, and they then go to Oxford. The average of applicants for admission to Harvard University, as reported by President Eliot, is also eighteen years.

Now it is certain that the educational system which is best adapted to the case of boys between fourteen and eighteen, cannot be equally beneficial for young men between seventeen and twenty-one. During the earlier period, the mind is plastic, and a uniform system which disregards native differences between individuals, and assumes that a perfectly equal and symmetrical development is practically possible in every case, is susceptible of being plausibly defended. But experience teaches the hard and unalterable fact that nature cannot be forced beyond a certain limit which time distinctly brings to view; that there are differences between minds as decided as those between faces; and that when, in the process of development, these have become distinctly pronounced, it is worse than a waste of energy to attempt to extinguish them by any process of educational forcing. A true theory of education, a wise plan of instruction, is one which first seeks to detect these differences, and then endeavors to adapt itself to them. Nothing is easier than their detection. There is no educator of any experience who will not, after a few months' careful observation, pronounce with the most unhesitating confidence that such or such a pupil will never be a mathematician, or that such or such another will never make a