Maggie's Farm

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.