The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-08-02
CONFLICTING UNIVERSITY.
IDEALS.

10ELAlAD.
 In some ways it is unfortunate that the American university ideal as op- posed to the traditional ideal of Oxford and Cambridge should have been pro- claimed in England this summer by Dr. Nicholas Murray Mutler of Colum- bia, for he represents an academic radi- calism that is not acceptable to the majority of collegiate educators in the United States. He stands for much shortened college course; he has been quoted in favor of a reduction of this course even to two years; he is the exponent of university socialism, and, it may be added without offence, he is the executive head of an institution in which the technical and professional schools conspicupusly overshadow the undergraduate. collegiate department. In such circumstances it could not be expected that Dr. Buffers English au- diences would obtain from him the impression that there is much sym pathy in the United States with the staid classicism to which the ancient universities on the Cam and the Isis are still bound.~ Yet the very fact that it was a radical representative of uni- versity speciafisfn who presented the contrast of the so-called modern sys- tenn with the old-fashioned ideal may i have helped to disclose the latter's mer- 1 it's an defect. Dr. Buffers visit has in any event served to arouse a i discussion in which the strong and weak points alike of the Oxford and i Cambridge regime have been striking ] ly displayed.
 The characteristic features of this regime may be said to be the empha- sizing of the college rather than the university unit, the close personal re- lationship of the teacher and student, faithful adherence to the Greek lan- guage and philosophy and constant drilling for examination honOrs. Of these the least attractive in American eyes is the last named yet it is the almost inevitable result of the first. Each of the constituent colleges at Ox- ford, for example, desires to make a record for itself in the accumulation of scholarship honors, and to this de- sire the tutoriaI system immediately adapts itself The student is coached by his instructor as carefully as the oarsman is prepared by his trainer for | the great race over the Putney-Mort- lake course. The tutorial system has,. in phrase, the defects of it's quali- ties. Up to a certain point is is more effective than the American system, which requires professor to sit in isolate dignity on a platform, raised above a class of fifty or sixty youths to whom his relations are hardly more educative than disciplinary. But pushed beyond that point it becomes machine for grinding out pedants of a day. mere scholastic chatterboxes. whose marvellous learning is warrant ed to last at least until the exanina- | tion test is at an end.
 l It is true that the American trend as a whole has been away from the conventional academic training of an earlier genera tion and that Dr. Butler 1 is natural product of this trend. But | he is a pioneer and extremist, a reader l eXcursionist into the field of the Ger man university than President Hadley, or President Wilson, or even, it might | | educators who have listened to him ! with interest and doubtless also with profit should understand that there is | already reaction in America, bark ing back to the old ideal. Not that | any less emphasis is to be placed on | specialism for those whose needs re- quire it, but that the old-time classical education is to be set free from the bondage of stigma to which it has been ! subjected, and the merits of the mar row" nineteenth century New England college are to be recognized and pro- | claimed. President Butler probably did not enlarge, in his English addresses, on this phase of the American edu- cational situation, but it is neverthe- less true that there is a growing feel ing in this country that the division ] of the English university into compact and convenient coteries, in which a large reliance is put on the unconscious processes of absorption and assimila- tion for the satisfactory training of