Maggie's Farm

Forty-six years ago, when Johns Hopkins University was founded, it offered for the first time in the United States a distinctive university programme. The faculty that President Gilman gathered was an extraordinary group of able men. The university addressed itself to scholars. It assumed that the students who came to it had already completed undergraduate courses of study entitling them to enter upon scholarly and professional work. The effect of this example upon American university schools has been far-reaching. The graduate schools of the older universities have, in large measure, arisen out of the example set by Johns Hopkins.

Unfortunately, Johns Hopkins University very soon departed from its original university conception. The desire for undergraduate students, for a college of its own, and for all the things that go with undergraduate life became apparently too strong, and to-day Johns Hopkins, apart from its medical school, has few of the characteristics of a university. It removed to a suburban campus, the activities of the ordinary undergraduate college were expanded, and the university became essentially what other American universities are-a mixture of college and university, with the activities in athletics and other student undergraduate pursuits playing a larger and larger rôle in the life of the institution. To-day, except for its medical school, Johns Hopkins has to a large extent lost the primacy which it once enjoyed.

The stimulus given by the first twenty-five years of the history of Johns Hopkins to graduate studies in American institutions took the form of graduate schools superimposed upon and mingled with the undergraduate college. A few efforts, such as that at Clark University, to meet the distinctive university conception, were made, but in general the pressure for numbers and the desire for a large undergraduate body, the ever-present tendency to conform to the conventional educational scheme, brought it about that few of these efforts assumed significance. The University of Chicago, while maintaining an undergraduate department, has succeeded in creating a university alongside of its undergraduate school, which is but little affected by the extramural activities of the undergraduate college.

In the nearly fifty years, therefore, since the inauguration of Johns Hopkins, the progress of higher education in the United States has resulted in the transformation of our former American colleges into mixed institutions, part college, part university. In most the undergraduate college overshadows the university, in a few the university overshadows the undergraduate college, but in the main the institutions which we are building up under the name of university are incongruous mixtures of the sports and recitations of college boys, and the more serious and scholarly efforts of men and women who are primarily students and candidates for professions. In the public eye, the activities of the undergraduate college subtend a larger angle than those of the graduate and professional schools, and the public in the main conceives of the university in terms of its undergraduate college.

The university part of our mixed institutions consists of a graduate school, devoted to teaching and to research, certain professional schools in law, medicine, engineering, teaching, and, in some institutions, to theology. The graduate schools, apart from the professional schools, have suffered in considerable measure from the fact that they have been attended by a large body of students who are not primarily scholars or investigators. For the last twenty or thirty years every ambitious American college has felt that it could not maintain fair academic dignity unless its teachers were able to write after their names Ph.D. The graduate schools have been invaded, therefore, during the comparatively short period of their existence by an army of degree-hunters who desired the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as a preliminary to obtaining positions as teachers.

The mingling of college and university has its disadvantages for the undergraduate college no less than for the graduate university to which it is bound. The most serious is the weakening of the college sense of responsibility for good teaching. A false notion of research in the conglomerate institution has gone far to discredit the good teacher and to weaken the appreciation of the fact that the chief duty of the college is to teach.