Vilas County news. [volume] (Eagle River, Vilas County, Wis.) 1896-1927, 1905-10-23
NOW PRESIDENT OF UNIVERSITY
OF ILLINOIS.
FAITH IN STATE SCHOOLS
Compares Educational Institutions
Great Privately-Endowed Establish
ments-Distinguished Represents
tives Present.

] Champaign, ILL.,, Oct. 19.-The exer-
cises incident to the installation of Ed
mund James as president of the state
university were opened with prayer by
Bishop Seymour of Springfield. Adj
dresses were made by Governor De-
neen, Samuel A. Billiard, Springfield,
president of the board OF trusi ees; also
DR.. A. S. Draper of New York Then
followed the address of President
| James.
| Letters of congratulations we're re-
ceived from the university of Glasgow,
Scotland: Gonville and Gains college,
| Cambridge, England, and Brasenose
college, Oxford, England. Most of the
! foreign speakers spoke in Latin. The
representative of the Hanover Tech
nische Hochschule read his letter in
German. A message Of regret and good
wishes was received from President
Roosevelt.
The subject of the inaugural adj
dress of President Edmund J. James
of the University of Illinois was The
| Function Of the State University. He
said in part:
Endowed institutions, whether I'M
der private or church control, have
done vast service, but, on the other
hand, they have the defects of their
| virtues. Educational institutions,
whether private or state, are by ma
ture conservative. They resist changes
and improvements. They fight prog
| ress almost as a law of their being,
and, the greater their endowments,
the more completely they are re-
moved from the necessity of appeal
to the lie of their own generation for
support, the more set do they become
in their conservatism, the more bull
warked in their opposition to all
progress. They may by their wealth
defy the currents of progress. They
may oppose themselves to all forward
movements. They not only may do
so, but in nearly every instance in his,
tory they have done so. The history
OF every European country demon
strates that these bodies, the univer-
stiles and colleges, have had to be re-
formed by law Left to themselves
they have suffered Of dry rot in an
extreme form. Oxford and Cam
bridge fought bitterly all attempts to
force them into line with modern
progress. 1T was the forcible subiec-
ton of the German university to the
directing power of the government
| which broke up the crust of conser-
vatism and paved the way for that
wonderful career of progress which
put Germany at the head of scientific
progress Even in our own country
our colleges and universities have the
same opposition to education and
progress to record. If the people in
this country had handed over to col
lege anduni versity faculties the deci-
sion of the important educational
questions which they have had to set
tie in the last so years, we should
have today practically no high school
system, or one Of comparatively little
value. We should have no system of
state universities. We should have,
to a large extent, no professional
schools of high quality at ALL Fortu-
nately for us, however, our institu-
tons as a whole have been so poverty
stricken that they have been com
PEELED to appeal to the community con-
tinually for funds, and in so doing they
have been forced into lines OF progress
which have become more and more
evident in the past few years.
so | believe it is necessary, by
the side of this system of private, en-
dowed, church institutions, to main
tain system of state institutions
By the side of these other great insti
tutiOns OF learning it is necessary in
this country to maintain the state
university, which, because of it's en-
tirely different origin, because Of the
different influences to which it is sub
jected, can work out a supplemental