the university and the individual
i. the ph.d. octopus
some years ago we had at our harvard graduate school a very brilliant student of philosophy, who, after leaving us and supporting himself by literary labor for three years, received an appointment to teach english literature at a sister-institution of learning. the governors of this institution, however, had no sooner communicated the appointment than they made the awful discovery that they had enrolled upon their staff a person who was unprovided with the ph.d. degree. the man in question had been satisfied to work at philosophy for her own sweet (or bitter) sake, and had disdained to consider that an academic bauble should be his reward.
his appointment had thus been made under a misunderstanding. he was not the proper man; and there was nothing to do but to inform him of the fact. it was notified to him by his new president that his appointment must be revoked, or that a harvard doctor’s degree must forthwith be procured.
although it was already the spring of the year, our subject, being a man of spirit, took up the challenge, turned his back upon literature (which in view of his approaching duties might have seemed his more urgent concern) and spent the weeks that were left him, in writing a metaphysical thesis and grinding his psychology, logic and history of philosophy up again, so as to pass our formidable ordeals.
when the thesis came to be read by our committee, we could not pass it. brilliancy and originality by themselves won’t save a thesis for the doctorate; it must also exhibit a heavy technical apparatus of learning; and this our candidate had neglected to bring to bear. so, telling him that he was temporarily rejected, we advised him to pad out the thesis properly, and return with it next year, at the same time informing his new president that this signified nothing as to his merits, that he was of ultra ph.d. quality, and one of the strongest men with whom we had ever had to deal.
to our surprise we were given to understand in reply that the quality per se of the man signified nothing in this connection, and that three magical letters were the thing seriously required. the college had always gloried in a list of faculty members who bore the doctor’s title, and to make a gap in the galaxy, and admit a common fox without a tail, would be a degradation impossible to be thought of. we wrote again, pointing out that a ph.d. in philosophy would prove little anyhow as to one’s ability to teach literature; we sent separate letters in which we outdid each other in eulogy of our candidate’s powers, for indeed they were great; and at last, mirabile dictu, our eloquence prevailed. he was allowed to retain his appointment provisionally, on condition that one year later at the farthest his miserably naked name should be prolonged by the sacred appendage the lack of which had given so much trouble to all concerned.
accordingly he came up here the following spring with an adequate thesis (known since in print as a most brilliant contribution to metaphysics), passed a first-rate examination, wiped out the stain, and brought his college into proper relations with the world again. whether his teaching, during that first year, of english literature was made any the better by the impending examination in a different subject, is a question which i will not try to solve.
i have related this incident at such length because it is so characteristic of american academic conditions at the present day. graduate schools still are something of a novelty, and higher diplomas something of a rarity. the latter, therefore, carry a vague sense of preciousness and honor, and have a particularly “up-to-date” appearance, and it is no wonder if smaller institutions, unable to attract professors already eminent, and forced usually to recruit their faculties from the relatively young, should hope to compensate for the obscurity of the names of their officers of instruction by the abundance of decorative titles by which those names are followed on the pages of the catalogues where they appear. the dazzled reader of the list, the parent or student, says to himself, “this must be a terribly distinguished crowd — their titles shine like the stars in the firmament; ph.d.‘s, s.d.‘s, and litt.d.‘s, bespangle the page as if they were sprinkled over it from a pepper caster.”
human nature is once for all so childish that every reality becomes a sham somewhere, and in the minds of presidents and trustees the ph.d. degree is in point of fact already looked upon as a mere advertising resource, a manner of throwing dust in the public’s eyes. “no instructor who is not a doctor” has become a maxim in the smaller institutions which represent demand; and in each of the larger ones which represent supply, the same belief in decorated scholarship expresses itself in two antagonistic passions, one for multiplying as much as possible the annual output of doctors, the other for raising the standard of difficulty in passing, so that the ph.d. of the special institution shall carry a higher blaze of distinction than it does elsewhere. thus we at harvard are proud of the number of candidates whom we reject, and of the inability of men who are not distingués in intellect to pass our tests.
america is thus as a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate. it seems to me high time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye upon this decidedly grotesque tendency. other nations suffer terribly from the mandarin disease. are we doomed to suffer like the rest?
our higher degrees were instituted for the laudable purpose of stimulating scholarship, especially in the form of “original research.” experience has proved that great as the love of truth may be among men, it can be made still greater by adventitious rewards. the winning of a diploma certifying mastery and marking a barrier successfully passed, acts as a challenge to the ambitious; and if the diploma will help to gain bread-winning positions also, its power as a stimulus to work is tremendously increased. so far, we are on innocent ground; it is well for a country to have research in abundance, and our graduate schools do but apply a normal psychological spur. but the institutionizing on a large scale of any natural combination of need and motive always tends to run into technicality and to develop a tyrannical machine with unforeseen powers of exclusion and corruption. observation of the workings of our harvard system for twenty years past has brought some of these drawbacks home to my consciousness, and i should like to call the attention of my readers to this disadvantageous aspect of the picture, and to make a couple of remedial suggestions, if i may.
in the first place, it would seem that to stimulate study, and to increase the gelehrtes publikum, the class of highly educated men in our country, is the only positive good, and consequently the sole direct end at which our graduate schools, with their diploma-giving powers, should aim. if other results have developed they should be deemed secondary incidents, and if not desirable in themselves, they should be carefully guarded against.
to interfere with the free development of talent, to obstruct the natural play of supply and demand in the teaching profession, to foster academic snobbery by the prestige of certain privileged institutions, to transfer accredited value from essential manhood to an outward badge, to blight hopes and promote invidious sentiments, to divert the attention of aspiring youth from direct dealings with truth to the passing of examinations — such consequences, if they exist, ought surely to be regarded as drawbacks to the system, and an enlightened public consciousness ought to be keenly alive to the importance of reducing their amount. candidates themselves do seem to be keenly conscious of some of these evils, but outside of their ranks or in the general public no such consciousness, so far as i can see, exists; or if it does exist, it fails to express itself aloud. schools, colleges, and universities, appear enthusiastic over the entire system, just as it stands, and unanimously applaud all its developments.
i beg the reader to consider some of the secondary evils which i have enumerated. first of all, is not our growing tendency to appoint no instructors who are not also doctors an instance of pure sham? will any one pretend for a moment that the doctor’s degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be successful as a teacher? notoriously his moral, social and personal characteristics may utterly disqualify him for success in the class-room; and of these characteristics his doctor’s examination is unable to take any account whatever. certain bare human beings will always be better candidates for a given place than all the doctor-applicants on hand; and to exclude the former by a rigid rule, and in the end to have to sift the latter by private inquiry into their personal peculiarities among those who know them, just as if they were not doctors at all, is to stultify one’s own procedure. you may say that at least you guard against ignorance of the subject by considering only the candidates who are doctors; but how then about making doctors in one subject teach a different subject? this happened in the instance by which i introduced this article, and it happens daily and hourly in all our colleges? the truth is that the doctor–monopoly in teaching, which is becoming so rooted an american custom, can show no serious grounds whatsoever for itself in reason. as it actually prevails and grows in vogue among us, it is due to childish motives exclusively. in reality it is but a sham, a bauble, a dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges.
next, let us turn from the general promotion of a spirit of academic snobbery to the particular damage done to individuals by the system.
there are plenty of individuals so well endowed by nature that they pass with ease all the ordeals with which life confronts them. such persons are born for professional success. examinations have no terrors for them, and interfere in no way with their spiritual or worldly interests. there are others, not so gifted who nevertheless rise to the challenge, get a stimulus from the difficulty, and become doctors, not without some baleful nervous wear and tear and retardation of their purely inner life, but on the whole successfully, and with advantage. these two classes form the natural ph.d.‘s for whom the degree is legitimately instituted. to be sure, the degree is of no consequence one way or the other for the first sort of man, for in him the personal worth obviously outshines the title. to the second set of persons, however, the doctor ordeal may contribute a touch of energy and solidity of scholarship which otherwise they might have lacked, and were our candidates all drawn from these classes, no oppression would result from the institution.
but there is a third class of persons who are genuinely, and in the most pathetic sense, the institution’s victims. for this type of character the academic life may become, after a certain point, a virulent poison. men without marked originality or native force, but fond of truth and especially of books and study, ambitious of reward and recognition, poor often, and needing a degree to get a teaching position, weak in the eyes of their examiners — among these we find the veritable chair à canon of the wars of learning, the unfit in the academic struggle for existence. there are individuals of this sort for whom to pass one degree after another seems the limit of earthly aspiration. your private advice does not discourage them. they will fail, and go away to recuperate, and then present themselves for another ordeal, and sometimes prolong the process into middle life. or else, if they are less heroic morally they will accept the failure as a sentence of doom that they are not fit, and are broken-spirited men thereafter.
we of the university faculties are responsible for deliberately creating this new class of american social failures, and heavy is the responsibility. we advertise our “schools” and send out our degree-requirements, knowing well that aspirants of all sorts will be attracted, and at the same time we set a standard which intends to pass no man who has not native intellectual distinction. we know that there is no test, however absurd, by which, if a title or decoration, a public badge or mark, were to be won by it, some weakly suggestible or hauntable persons would not feel challenged, and remain unhappy if they went without it. we dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light. they come at a time when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent; and we say deliberately that mere work faithfully performed, as they perform it, will not by itself save them, they must in addition put in evidence the one thing they have not got, namely this quality of intellectual distinction. occasionally, out of sheer human pity, we ignore our high and mighty standard and pass them. usually, however, the standard, and not the candidate, commands our fidelity. the result is caprice, majorities of one on the jury, and on the whole a confession that our pretensions about the degree cannot be lived up to consistently. thus, partiality in the favored cases; in the unfavored, blood on our hands; and in both a bad conscience — are the results of our administration.
the more widespread becomes the popular belief that our diplomas are indispensable hall-marks to show the sterling metal of their holders, the more widespread these corruptions will become. we ought to look to the future carefully, for it takes generations for a national custom, once rooted, to be grown away from. all the european countries are seeking to diminish the check upon individual spontaneity which state examinations with their tyrannous growth have brought in their train. we have had to institute state examinations too; and it will perhaps be fortunate if some day hereafter our descendants, comparing machine with machine, do not sigh with regret for old times and american freedom, and wish that the régime of the dear old bosses might be reinstalled, with plain human nature, the glad hand and the marble heart, liking and disliking, and man-to-man relations grown possible again. meanwhile, whatever evolution our state-examinations are destined to undergo, our universities at least should never cease to regard themselves as the jealous custodians of personal and spiritual spontaneity. they are indeed its only organized and recognized custodians in america today. they ought to guard against contributing to the increase of officialism and snobbery and insincerity as against a pestilence; they ought to keep truth and disinterested labor always in the foreground, treat degrees as secondary incidents, and in season and out of season make it plain that what they live for is to help men’s souls, and not to decorate their persons with diplomas.
there seem to be three obvious ways in which the increasing hold of the ph.d. octopus upon american life can be kept in check.
the first way lies with the universities. they can lower their fantastic standards (which here at harvard we are so proud of) and give the doctorate as a matter of course, just as they give the bachelor’s degree, for a due amount of time spent in patient labor in a special department of learning, whether the man be a brilliantly gifted individual or not. surely native distinction needs no official stamp, and should disdain to ask for one. on the other hand, faithful labor, however commonplace, and years devoted to a subject, always deserve to be acknowledged and requited.
the second way lies with both the universities and colleges. let them give up their unspeakably silly ambition to bespangle their lists of officers with these doctorial titles. let them look more to substance and less to vanity and sham.
the third way lies with the individual student, and with his personal advisers in the faculties. every man of native power, who might take a higher degree, and refuses to do so, because examinations interfere with the free following out of his more immediate intellectual aims, deserves well of his country, and in a rightly organized community, would not be made to suffer for his independence. with many men the passing of these extraneous tests is a very grievous interference indeed. private letters of recommendation from their instructors, which in any event are ultimately needful, ought, in these cases, completely to offset the lack of the breadwinning degree; and instructors ought to be ready to advise students against it upon occasion, and to pledge themselves to back them later personally, in the market-struggle which they have to face.
it is indeed odd to see this love of titles — and such titles — growing up in a country or which the recognition of individuality and bare manhood have so long been supposed to be the very soul. the independence of the state, in which most of our colleges stand, relieves us of those more odious forms of academic politics which continental european countries present. anything like the elaborate university machine of france, with its throttling influences upon individuals is unknown here. the spectacle of the “rath” distinction in its innumerable spheres and grades, with which all germany is crawling today, is displeasing to american eyes; and displeasing also in some respects is the institution of knighthood in england, which, aping as it does an aristocratic title, enables one’s wife as well as one’s self so easily to dazzle the servants at the house of one’s friends. but are we americans ourselves destined after all to hunger after similar vanities on an infinitely more contemptible scale? and is individuality with us also going to count for nothing unless stamped and licensed and authenticated by some title-giving machine? let us pray that our ancient national genius may long preserve vitality enough to guard us from a future so unmanly and so unbeautiful!
23 published in the harvard monthly, march, 1903.
ii. the true harvard24
when a man gets a decoration from a foreign institution, he may take it as an honor. coming as mine has come today, i prefer to take it for that far more valuable thing, a token of personal good will from friends. recognizing the good will and the friendliness, i am going to respond to the chairman’s call by speaking exactly as i feel.
i am not an alumnus of the college. i have not even a degree from the scientific school, in which i did some study forty years ago. i have no right to vote for overseers, and i have never felt until today as if i were a child of the house of harvard in the fullest sense. harvard is many things in one — a school, a forcing house for thought, and also a social club; and the club aspect is so strong, the family tie so close and subtle among our bachelors of arts that all of us here who are in my plight, no matter how long we may have lived here, always feel a little like outsiders on commencement day. we have no class to walk with, and we often stay away from the procession. it may be foolish, but it is a fact. i don’t believe that my dear friends shaler, hollis, lanman, or royce ever have felt quite as happy or as much at home as my friend barrett wendell feels upon a day like this.
i wish to use my present privilege to say a word for these outsiders with whom i belong. many years ago there was one of them from canada here — a man with a high-pitched voice, who could n’t fully agree with all the points of my philosophy. at a lecture one day, when i was in the full flood of my eloquence, his voice rose above mine, exclaiming: “but, doctor, doctor! to be serious for a moment . . .,” in so sincere a tone that the whole room burst out laughing. i want you now to be serious for a moment while i say my little say. we are glorifying ourselves today, and whenever the name of harvard is emphatically uttered on such days, frantic cheers go up. there are days for affection, when pure sentiment and loyalty come rightly to the fore. but behind our mere animal feeling for old schoolmates and the yard and the bell, and memorial and the clubs and the river and the soldiers’ field, there must be something deeper and more rational. there ought at any rate to be some possible ground in reason for one’s boiling over with joy that one is a son of harvard, and was not, by some unspeakably horrible accident of birth, predestined to graduate at yale or at cornell.
any college can foster club loyalty of that sort. the only rational ground for preeminent admiration of any single college would be its preeminent spiritual tone. but to be a college man in the mere clubhouse sense — i care not of what college — affords no guarantee of real superiority in spiritual tone.
the old notion that book learning can be a panacea for the vices of society lies pretty well shattered today. i say this in spite of certain utterances of the president of this university to the teachers last year. that sanguine-hearted man seemed then to think that if the schools would only do their duty better, social vice might cease. but vice will never cease. every level of culture breeds its own peculiar brand of it as surely as one soil breeds sugar-cane, and another soil breeds cranberries. if we were asked that disagreeable question, “what are the bosom-vices of the level of culture which our land and day have reached?” we should be forced, i think, to give the still more disagreeable answer that they are swindling and adroitness, and the indulgence of swindling and adroitness, and cant, and sympathy with cant — natural fruits of that extraordinary idealization of “success” in the mere outward sense of “getting there,” and getting there on as big a scale as we can, which characterizes our present generation. what was reason given to man for, some satirist has said, except to enable him to invent reasons for what he wants to do. we might say the same of education. we see college graduates on every side of every public question. some of tammany’s stanchest supporters are harvard men. harvard men defend our treatment of our filipino allies as a masterpiece of policy and morals. harvard men, as journalists, pride themselves on producing copy for any side that may enlist them. there is not a public abuse for which some harvard advocate may not be found.
in the successful sense, then, in the worldly sense, in the club sense, to be a college man, even a harvard man, affords no sure guarantee for anything but a more educated cleverness in the service of popular idols and vulgar ends. is there no inner harvard within the outer harvard which means definitively more than this — for which the outside men who come here in such numbers, come? they come from the remotest outskirts of our country, without introductions, without school affiliations; special students, scientific students, graduate students, poor students of the college, who make their living as they go. they seldom or never darken the doors of the pudding or the porcellian; they hover in the background on days when the crimson color is most in evidence, but they nevertheless are intoxicated and exultant with the nourishment they find here; and their loyalty is deeper and subtler and more a matter of the inmost soul than the gregarious loyalty of the clubhouse pattern often is.
indeed, there is such an inner spiritual harvard; and the men i speak of, and for whom i speak today, are its true missionaries and carry its gospel into infidel parts. when they come to harvard, it is not primarily because she is a club. it is because they have heard of her persistently atomistic constitution, of her tolerance of exceptionality and eccentricity, of her devotion to the principles of individual vocation and choice. it is because you cannot make single one-ideaed regiments of her classes. it is because she cherishes so many vital ideals, yet makes a scale of value among them; so that even her apparently incurable second-rateness (or only occasional first-rateness) in intercollegiate athletics comes from her seeing so well that sport is but sport, that victory over yale is not the whole of the law and the prophets, and that a popgun is not the crack of doom.
the true church was always the invisible church. the true harvard is the invisible harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and independent and often very solitary sons. thoughts are the precious seeds of which our universities should be the botanical gardens. beware when god lets loose a thinker on the world — either carlyle or emerson said that — for all things then have to rearrange themselves. but the thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. “alone the great sun rises and alone spring the great streams.” the university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed. on an occasion like this it would be poor taste to draw comparisons between the colleges, and in their mere clubhouse quality they cannot differ widely:— all must be worthy of the loyalties and affections they arouse. but as a nursery for independent and lonely thinkers i do believe that harvard still is in the van. here they find the climate so propitious that they can be happy in their very solitude. the day when harvard shall stamp a single hard and fast type of character upon her children, will be that of her downfall. our undisciplinables are our proudest product. let us agree together in hoping that the output of them will never cease.
24 speech at the harvard commencement dinner, june 24, 1903, after receiving an ll.d. degree. printed in the graduates’ magazine for september, 1903.
iii. stanford’s ideal destiny25
foreigners, commenting on our civilization, have with great unanimity remarked the privileged position that institutions of learning occupy in america as receivers of benefactions. our typical men of wealth, if they do not found a college, will at least single out some college or university on which to lavish legacies or gifts. all the more so, perhaps, if they are not college-bred men themselves. johns hopkins university, the university of chicago, clark university, are splendid examples of this rule. steadily, year by year, my own university, harvard, receives from one to two and a half millions.
there is something almost pathetic in the way in which our successful business men seem to idealize the higher learning and to believe in its efficacy for salvation. never having shared in its blessings, they do their utmost to make the youth of coming generations more fortunate. usually there is little originality of thought in their generous foundations. the donors follow the beaten track. their good will has to be vague, for they lack the inside knowledge. what they usually think of is a new college like all the older colleges; or they give new buildings to a university or help to make it larger, without any definite idea as to the improvement of its inner form. improvements in the character of our institutions always come from the genius of the various presidents and faculties. the donors furnish means of propulsion, the experts within the pale lay out the course and steer the vessel. you all think of the names of eliot, gilman, hall and harper as i utter these words — i mention no name nearer home.
this is founders’ day here at stanford — the day set apart each year to quicken and reanimate in all of us the consciousness of the deeper significance of this little university to which we permanently or temporarily belong. i am asked to use my voice to contribute to this effect. how can i do so better than by uttering quite simply and directly the impressions that i personally receive? i am one among our innumerable american teachers, reared on the atlantic coast but admitted for this year to be one of the family at stanford. i see things not wholly from without, as the casual visitor does, but partly from within. i am probably a typical observer. as my impressions are, so will be the impressions of others. and those impressions, taken together, will probably be the verdict of history on the institution which leland and jane stanford founded.
“where there is no vision, the people perish.” mr. and mrs. stanford evidently had a vision of the most prophetic sort. they saw the opportunity for an absolutely unique creation, they seized upon it with the boldness of great minds; and the passionate energy with which mrs. stanford after her husband’s death, drove the original plans through in the face of every dismaying obstacle, forms a chapter in the biography of heroism. heroic also the loyalty with which in those dark years the president and faculty made the university’s cause, their cause, and shared the uncertainties and privations.
and what is the result today? to-day the key-note is triumphantly struck. the first step is made beyond recall. the character of the material foundation is assured for all time as something unique and unparalleled. it logically calls for an equally unique and unparalleled spiritual superstructure.
certainly the chief impression which the existing university must make on every visitor is of something unique and unparalleled. its attributes are almost too familiar to you to bear recapitulation. the classic scenery of its site, reminding one of greece, greek too in its atmosphere of opalescent fire, as if the hills that close us in were bathed in ether, milk and sunshine; the great city, near enough for convenience, too far ever to become invasive; the climate, so friendly to work that every morning wakes one fresh for new amounts of work; the noble architecture, so generously planned that there room and to spare for every requirement; the democracy of the life, no one superfluously rich, yet all sharing, so far as their higher needs go, in the common endowment — where could a genius devoted to the search for truth, and unworldly as most geniuses are, find on the earth’s whole round a place more advantageous to come and work in? die luft der freiheit weht! all the traditions are individualistic. red tape and organization are at their minimum. interruptions and perturbing distractions hardly exist. eastern institutions look all dark and huddled and confused in comparison with this purity and serenity. shall it not be auspicious? surely the one destiny to which this happy beginning seems to call stanford is that it should become something intense and original, not necessarily in point of wealth or extent, but in point of spiritual quality. the founders have, as i said, triumphantly struck the keynote, and laid the basis: the quality of what they have already given is unique in character.
it rests with the officials of the present and future stanford, it rests with the devotion and sympathetic insight of the growing body of graduates, to prolong the vision where the founders’ vision terminated, and to insure that all the succeeding steps, like the first steps, shall single out this university more and more as the university of quality peculiarly.
and what makes essential quality in a university? years ago in new england it was said that a log by the roadside with a student sitting on one end of it, and mark hopkins sitting on the other end, was a university. it is the quality of its men that makes the quality of a university. you may have your buildings, you may create your committees and boards and regulations, you may pile up your machinery of discipline and perfect your methods of instruction, you may spend money till no one can approach you; yet you will add nothing but one more trivial specimen to the common herd of american colleges, unless you send into all this organization some breath of life, by inoculating it with a few men, at least, who are real geniuses. and if you once have the geniuses, you can easily dispense with most of the organization. like a contagious disease, almost, spiritual life passes from man to man by contact. education in the long run is an affair that works itself out between the individual student and his opportunities. methods of which we talk so much, play but a minor part. offer the opportunities, leave the student to his natural reaction on them, and he will work out his personal destiny, be it a high one or a low one. above all things, offer the opportunity of higher personal contacts. a university provides these anyhow within the student body, for it attracts the more aspiring of the youth of the country, and they befriend and elevate one another. but we are only beginning in this country, with our extraordinary american reliance on organization, to see that the alpha and omega in a university is the tone of it, and that this tone is set by human personalities exclusively. the world, in fact, is only beginning to see that the wealth of a nation consists more than in anything else in the number of superior men that it harbors. in the practical realm it has always recognized this, and known that no price is too high to pay for a great statesman or great captain of industry. but it is equally so in the religious and moral sphere, in the poetic and artistic sphere and in the philosophic and scientific sphere. geniuses are ferments; and when they come together as they have done in certain lands at certain times, the whole population seems to share in the higher energy which they awaken. the effects are incalculable and often not easy to trace in detail, but they are pervasive and momentous. who can measure the effects on the national german soul of the splendid series of german poets and german men of learning, most of them academic personages?
from the bare economic point of view the importance of geniuses is only beginning to be appreciated. how can we measure the cash-value to france of a pasteur, to england of a kelvin, to germany of an ostwald, to us here of a burbank? one main care of every country in the future ought to be to find out who its first-rate thinkers are and to help them. cost here becomes something entirely irrelevant, the returns are sure to be so incommensurable. this is what wise men the world over are perceiving. and as the universities are already a sort of agency providentially provided for the detection and encouragement of mental superiority, it would seem as if that one among them that followed this line most successfully would quickest rise to a position of paramountcy and distinction.
why should not stanford immediately adopt this as her vital policy? her position is one of unprecedented freedom. not trammelled by the service of the state as other universities on this coast are trammelled, independent of students’ fees and consequently of numbers, utopian in the material respects i have enumerated, she only needs a boldness like that shown by her founders to become the seat of a glowing intellectual life, sure to be admired and envied the world over. let her claim her place; let her espouse her destiny. let her call great investigators from whatever lands they live in, from england, france, germany, japan, as well as from america. she can do this without presumption, for the advantages of this place for steady mental work are so unparalleled. let these men, following the happy traditions of the place, make the university. the original foundation had something eccentric in it; let stanford not fear to be eccentric to the end, if need be. let her not imitate; let her lead, not follow. especially let her not be bound by vulgar traditions as to the cheapness or dearness of professorial service. the day is certainly about to dawn when some american university will break all precedents in the matter of instructors’ salaries, and will thereby immediately take the lead, and reach the winning post for quality. i like to think of stanford being that university. geniuses are sensitive plants, in some respects like prima donnas. they have to be treated tenderly. they don’t need to live in superfluity; but they need freedom from harassing care; they need books and instruments; they are always overworking, so they need generous vacations; and above all things they need occasionally to travel far and wide in the interests of their souls’ development. where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever be the price one has to pay for it.
considering all the conditions, the quality of stanford has from the first been astonishingly good both in the faculty and in the student body. can we not, as we sit here today, frame a vision of what it may be a century hence, with the honors of the intervening years all rolled up in its traditions? not vast, but intense; less a place for teaching youths and maidens than for training scholars; devoted to truth; radiating influence; setting standards; shedding abroad the fruits of learning; mediating between america and asia, and helping the more intellectual men of both continents to understand each other better.
what a history! and how can stanford ever fail to enter upon it?
