THE GRADUATE COLLEGE LD OF PRINCETON E WEST If 111 1 If n„ YA 1 P 'Ay Class _aLl Book_ ^ ,¥n{ .10 COPYRIGHT DEPOSfR ^4^^ i iXj^t^r'-rs I, THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON WITH SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE HUMANIZING OF LEARNING BY ANDREW F. WEST II Dean of the Graduate School, Princeton University Reprinted With Additions and Re'vis ions from The Century Magazine Illustrations by John P. Cuyler PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON 1913 .-^^ v^%'' Copyright, 191 3, by Princeton University Press Published on the day of the Dedication of the Graduate College October 22, 1913 Oci,A3 58 4 71 THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON WITH SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE HUMANIZING OF LEARNING "To the Minnow every cranny and pebble, every quality, and accident, of its little native Creek may have become familiar: but docs the Minnow understand the Ocean Tides?" Thomas Carlyle. The Graduate College of Princeton, so long deferred, so lately discussed in public and now at last put into operation, is in spirit and substance an institution for humanizing knowl- edge in the field of the higher liberal studies. The old story in Montaigne has point to-day. One fine morning, while riding pleasantly across the plain, he met a company of gentlemen and bowed, saying, "Messieurs, good morning," and the leader of the company curtly answered, "We are not Messieurs. My friend here is a grammarian, and I am a logician." It was no place for Montaigne — merely one of the Messieurs. So he rode away in search of more humane companionship. It is not a very long look from the sixteenth to the eight- eenth century and the pages of Oliver Goldsmith. The lam- bent wit of his essay on "The Present State of Polite Learning," fit sequel to the tale of Montaigne, plays like a flame, illuminating and scorching the particularist scholars of his time, "the men who contributed to obstruct the progress of wisdom by addicting their readers to one particular sect, or some favorite science. They generally carried on a petty traffic in some little creek ; within that they busily plied about, and drove an insignificant trade; but never ventured out into the great ocean of knowledge." 3 4 THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OE PRINCETON Another forward look. We open at a venture the little book "Education et Instruction," written near the close of the nineteenth century by Brunetiere — incisive, crystal-clear as only good French can be, and lively in its attack on the nar- rowness of our "idees particulieres" when severed from the "idees generales." Not only the knowledge needed for a specialty, he contends, but the knowledge and moral qualities which underlie and connect all specialties are what make the scholar who is a man, and thereby the man who is to be the best scholar. "As for the particular ideas, our own — here is the most individual and in consequence the most eccentric thing in us. But the general ideas- — here is the truly human in us, and consequently that in us which is the most truly social." The long history of scholarship is punctuated with sharp comment like that cited above. It is not the comment of foes of knowledge, but of friends. And our present American scholarship could add many new instances as themes for the critic's pen — examples of men who are shut up in their "idees particulieres" and shut off from the general humanity of knowledge. I recall, among other cases, a Doctor of Phi- losophy in philology who had never heard of Tennyson's "In Memoriam," an archaeologist almost totally ignorant of the simplest facts of science, and a chemist who inquired sincerely for the meaning of "Empedocles," apparently not sure whether it was a plural or a mineral. The gossip of university circles would fill pages with such "modern instances," and they may be collected, like curios, at any large educational gathering. It is the break-up of knowledge into pieces, the resulting dis- severing of sympathy and de-humanizing of scholarship, the lowering of tone which comes from losing one's view of knowledge in its unified grandeur, and the literal "provincial- izing" of learning, that needs attention now — and not least in our graduate schools. At any rate, the belief that something serious is the matter is prevalent among those who may be ->;M.»^.»X,.>V^ CLEVELAND TOWER AND ENTRANCE GATE FROM NORTHWEST THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON 7 presumed to know of what they speak. "It may be doubted," writes President Lowell in his first annual report, "whether the graduate schools in American universities are conducted upon the wisest principles." And to this utterance there are many echoes. What place and use has the graduate school in a university ? What is it for? The questions cannot be answered in a sentence or a page. The mediaeval world, unjustly over- praised and dispraised in turn, gave us, among other things, the universities, — a priceless inheritance. Paris, the mother- school, developed and delivered to the future a full model, imperfect in operation but sound in theory, both on the side of the professoriate and the students. It was a four-facultied university of professors combined with residential colleges of students. The French Revolution abolished old Paris and changed its old-time university. To-day the four-facultied university survives as a system in Germany and residential colleges of students remain chiefly in England. The truth at the heart of this history is that a university is a community, and a community made up of teachers and learners, an actual respuhlica litteraria (to quote an old name for the university at Cambridge), and that in this established and continuing society lies the safety of learning as a self -perpetuating force in its own sphere and the promise of learning as a usable force in the world. In this home dwells a comradeship of knowl- edge. Here, better than elsewhere, the young scholar may at- tain to enlarged vision and power. For his high vocation, as the philosopher Fichte said in a famous address to the stu- dents of Jena, is nothing less than acquirement of "the most widely extended survey of the actual advancement of the human rnce in general, and the steadfast promotion of that advancement." The true scholar is thus to be more than a learner, more than a teacher, more than a discoverer; he is to be a guide to his fellow-men. In the four-facultied university of Arts and Sciences, Law, 8 THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON Medicine and Divinity, the central and regulative body of studies consists of the so-called liberal arts and sciences or- ganized in the Faculty of that name. This body of studies alone is the nearest approximation we have to a system of pure knowledge of universal value. It represents to us, as no other studies can, the sum of things best worth knowing by men who seek knowledge for its own sake and in order to guide their lives in accordance with the highest ends. In America the preliminary stage of this knowledge is repre- sented, in intention at least, by the undergraduate college course — the historic and proper root of every true American university. The second or higher part of liberal knowledge, the flowering of the collegiate root, belongs to the graduate school. Here, if anywhere, the standards of pure knowledge are to be maintained for their own sake and for the sake of the great good they will do to all other kinds of knowledge, whether professional, technical, commercial, political or in- dustrial, and thus most usefully serve the need of the world. To determine, inspect, certify and maintain these standards — the weights and measure of knowledge — is the highest intel- lectual duty of a university, less only than the supreme duty of subordinating all to the moral end. If the general principles thus simply outlined are sound, it becomes a question of mo- ment to ascertain whether the condition of graduate studies and the life of graduate students is in accord with these convictions. Like civil liberty, the higher liberal knowledge is always in peril and always worth fighting for. Just now it is facing the perils of deterioration and dismemberment. Among the forces that threaten it, the commercial spirit is probably the strong- est. It means the pursuit of only such knowledge as "pays," the absorption in material ends, the rating of a living as higher than a life. This spirit, not satisfied with engrossing the business life of the country and at times menacing its po- litical integrity, seeks to affect every part of our education. THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON 9 Its attack is made on the foundations. Wherever it enters side by side with purely Hberal studies in the college course, it starts to drive them out or else forces them to be taught in a utili- tarian way, practically giving them the alternative of de- terioration to escape extinction. The truth that all high-minded knowledge is in the best sense useful, is torn and twisted into the half-truth of "service," the doctrine that only the knowl- edge of obvious use is worth having. Under this notion his- torical, social and political studies come to be pursued as a kind of "contemporary topics" of "live interest," the study of literature, even of our own, is narrowed to the most recent periods — thus shutting off depth of background, philosophy descends into the nursery of "child psychology," and the great fundamental sciences are neglected except in their most prac- tical applications. Other knowledge is of "no use." Where- ever this spirit enters professional schools it tends to modify injuriously the sciences which underlie the professions, so that, for example, pure mathematics is thought in some quarters to be unsuitable for the engineer and pure biology to be unsuit- able as a foundation for medicine. "Modified" mathematics or "modified" biology is the resulting hybrid. And hybrids are sterile. No great wave of utilitarian influence has ever swept unchecked into universities without disaster to liberal studies. There is plenty of money to be had for commercial,, industrial and technical education, and it is money very well spent, so long as these valuable forms of training are well organized for their own ends and are not put into a relation destructive to liberal education. There is little danger that utilitarian studies will lack friends and money. The danger is to the other studies. Another threatening force is unenlightened specialization. It breaks the structure of higher knowledge into fragments. That the scholar should be in some important sense a specialist is true. That he should be only a specialist is a calamity to himself and others. True specialization has its indispensable lO THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON value in the exact determination of particulars and in ac- curately relating particulars to the general. But the man who is only a specialist is an intellectual fraction. He is no longer whole-minded, and whole-minded men are what our scholar- ship most needs. A preliminary sound training in liberal studies is the best guarantee we have that the intending scholar of good native capacities is likely to be whole-minded, that he will be a citizen not only of the place where his special work lies, but of the commonwealth of knowledge. What has been happening these twenty years or more? Er- ratic men of mediocre or inferior general powers have been flocking into their specialties. What liberal training they may have had is weakened by disuse. They have intensive knowl- edge of one thing, which is very well indeed, with extensive ignorance of most other things, which is not well at all. Their narrow intensity of vision along some little lane of knowledge seems to blind them to all the scenery outside. They are thus isolated from the general world of knowledge, and often from their fellows in the same department. It is not uncom- mon to find philologists who know little and care less about the parts of philology outside the enclosure of their specialty — to say nothing of their almost total neglect of knowledge out- side of philology. The same is true of specialists in mathe- matics, biology, history, psychology and almost every branch of the higher learning. Such isolation cuts men off from community of sympathy. It reduces and even annuls their power to act together for the common good. It breaks up the army of scholarship into a mob of blindly colliding subdivis- ions. It makes it difficult to rally and marshal the army for the next advance. From this evil flows another, namely, the loss of simplicity and universality in the scholar's powers of expression. Our literature of learning is to-day overloaded with tractates and books of all sorts written in a tone of formidable and solemn pedantry. The writer is caged and mastered by his restricted INTERIOR OF PROCTER HALL THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRLNCETON 13 theme. His language, or rather his dialect, becomes technical, arid and lifeless. His book has and can have few readers, even among scholars whose work is in or near his own depart- ment. This makes it hard to maintain a reciprocal reading interest which shall connect the parts of a department and, what is more important, connect the various departments with one another. Still another untoward result follows. The fractionally- minded scholar is not naturally capable, or at least is not easily capable of whole-minded judgments, which are the only ones fundamentally sound. If, as Huxley said, scientific in- sight is nothing more than ''highly trained common sense" applied to scientific questions, then highly trained common sense — just another name for sound judgment, is the one thing needful to all sensible scholarship. Good sense naturally goes with large vision. The man who has taken a sweeping view around the horizon is the one best able to discern the place and size of one or another segment of the scene, and the scholar already trained in studies of universal value is the one who can be depended on most surely to possess the wide-ranging and well-balanced view. There are three radical and unescapable problems which face every human being and are of necessary concern to every man who would be a complete scholar. One is the outer and momentous problem of nature — the world of things outside. To this problem the answer is vouchsafed him, so far as vouchsafed at all, in the teachings of Science. The second is the nearer problem of Mankind — the world of persons outside him, among whom he must move and live, and for whom his life ought to be spent. The answers to this problem are found in what, in the largest sense, we may call History. Then there is the third and most intimate problem, namely, his own self — the world within. The answers to this are written large in what we may call Literature. And the three problems are one. Ultimatelv the scholar studies nature with reference to him- 14 THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON self, and the inner miracle of his own consciousness is the answering marvel to the outer miracle of nature, and the widening horizon of Science is forever bounded by the limit of what human beings can know. He also studies his fellow- men with inevitable reference to himself. Thus his own human nature is and remains the centre of all problems af- fecting his education. The ipse mihi magna quaestio' — "a. mighty question was I to myself" — of the ancient thinker when translated into modern terms means just what Pope meant by "The proper study of mankind is Man." What next? As the three threads of his knowledge of the world, his fellowmen and himself come together in himself, they lead back into one strand that holds them all, to his first principles of thought and action, or what we call Philosophy. This is the order and summation of liberal knowledge. Any questions behind this belong to the ultimate problem of Re- ligion. But the man who has known and felt the central truths of Science, History, Literature and Philosophy, even to a slight and imperfect degree, is a whole-minded, well- educated man. Out of such men true scholars can be made, for these subjects contain preeminently what Locke called the ''teeming truths, rich in store, with which they furnish the mind, and like the lights of heaven are not only beautiful and entertaining in themselves, but give light and evidence to other things that without them could not be seen or known." Oliver Wendell Holmes used to say that there are some ideas which "stretch" the mind that once entertains them, and the idea so eloquently phrased by Locke will permanently stretch the mind of every young scholar who receives it. Why should he not have at least a gazing acquaintance with the greatest constellations in the vast firmament of knowledge ? And why should not the graduate student, no matter how closely he specializes, be given every chance for fellowship with students in all the fields of liberal study? The student we are describ- ing is to be more than a specialist and even more than a gen- DETAIL— PROCTER HALL THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON 17 eral scholar; he is to be a human being, capable to the full of the highest experiences a man may know, capable of meeting with "many men of many minds" and of getting on with them all. Against the dispersion and diffraction of knowledge we set the unity of knowledge. Against the scattering and isola- tion of scholarship we set the daily companionship of scholars. Against the broken parts we set the whole. Against indiffer- ence, estrangement, intolerance, narrowness and pedantry, which is perhaps even more intolerable than superficiality, let us set the unity of general and special excellence as the stand- ard for the scholar individually, and brotherly association with others as the standard for him socially. On the individual side, then, we need scholars who know well some part and can also see the whole. No doubt this kind of scholarship may be attained in a way by individual study alone. But is not thus attained in the best way, nor is it likely to be retained in vigor. Most young scholars need an added stimulus. The "shy recluse" of Arnold's poem or the possessor of what Milton styled "a fugitive and cloistered virtue" may succeed in being whole-minded in purpose. But he does not know how to connect himself with men. He is socially a fraction, perhaps even a zero. Let us emphasize the truth that because a scholar is a human being he is also a social being. No doubt he must generally do his best thinking by himself. Yet he cannot live to himself alone or by him- self alone and fulfil his duty either to himself or to his fellow- men. Isolation is not freedom. To do his part as a scholar he must take part as a scholar in the give-and-take of a social life. For him this life has two environments, the inner and nearer world of scholars and the larger enveloping world of men outside. The two are needed to bring out for his own good the free play of his powers and to make it sure that the benefits he can give and take will be actually given and taken. His movement in the nearer world of scholars does not mean merely that a student of American history, for example, l8 THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON should be interested in American history, as a whole or in modern history as a whole, or even in the whole of history, but that no important range of higher thought, even though it be strange to him, should be distasteful. And it means emphatic- ally that our student of history, no matter in how small a part of it, should be in friendly companionship, especially dur- ing the plastic time of his training with students in the other fields, with men of science, philosophy and letters. Here the magic influence of man on man turns thinking into living, and into living in a large and magnanimous way. It does much for the specialist by broadening his sympathies. It may do more by refreshing his energies through the recreation he can get out of the inspection of regions far different from the place where his thoughts must dwell for most of his time. It is this which enables him to bring new lights to bear on his specialty, high-lights and half-lights, in gleams and flashes from near and far, and to irradiate himself as well as his studies. Here variety becomes the cure for monotony. It is in fact the adventurous spirit, this free roving and rang- ing, the restless sweep of observation, the traveller's and ex- plorer's instinct, which is also a mark of the highest minds, both in Science and Literature. Personal intercourse with scholars, whose work lies in fields otherwise foreign, is accordingly the best prevention against errors of judgment which are sure to be made by the man who is solely a specialist. So long as the whole is greater than any part, this will remain true. Still, it is not enough, even if it were practicable, that the students of each single part of knowledge should know the students of each other separate part without knowing something more. It would amount merely to massing the particulars, to casting all the broken pieces into a confused pile. Of course, it would be "better than nothing," because it is better than nothing to realize how great is the number of the parts of knowledge. We are speaking here of scholars who have or at least desire to THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON 21 have the general unified view — the men who reahze that the final value of specialization is in relating the particular to the general. The parts of a tower or temple may be thrown down into a heap by an earthquake. All the parts are there, but the tower and temple are gone, and make a heap of ruins. So it is with the ruins of knowledge. It is the parts of the tower or temple assembled in definite unity that makes the differ- ence between the structure and its literal destruction. It is in getting this view of knowledge as an ordered whole, first from one angle and then from another and another, part to part, function to function, and all assembled in clear unity, that the scholar is forever released from specialistic constraint and brought out into the daylight of enlarged vision and whole- minded judgment. This is the release from confinement his widening acquaintance in the diversified world of scholars can and will bring to every man who has real capacity for freedom. The time of times for this comradeship is in his student days. If he misses it then, he may miss it forever. It is somewhat discouraging to think how much certain de- vices of university organization are unfavorable to the inti- mate intermingling of graduate students with professors and with each other. The departmental organization of faculties, a source of strength in many ways, is a source of weakness here, for the reason that both professor and student so often think of themselves as merely "departmental men." The ar- rangements for regulating the student's work, the slavery to routine, the absurd pressure put on men to secure the doctor's degree — as though it were the chief end of their training, the excessive mechanism for "safeguarding the degree," the ac- cumulation of "credits," the general worship of machinery and the commercializing of the degree itself, until it has almost come to be an employment badge like a "union card" — these are some of the things that are cramping and mechanizing energies that ought to be unconstrained, and are cutting off young scholars from free converse in things intellectual. 22 THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON Now among the things in this life that ought to be freest are the natural movements of the human mind in study and the interchange of sympathy among scholars. When and where is there to be a place for this if not at the graduate stage and in the studies so well named "liberal" ? And ^'liberal" they truly are, for they are the studies which su- premely enfranchise, universalize and elevate human thinking the world over. It is in the higher ranges of these that labor becomes joy to young men, and it is here the glorious saying of Aristotle finds fulfilment: "Pleasure perfects labor, as beauty crowns youth." Let all rules and mechanism that hamper this be swept away! Machine-made scholarship is generally mediocre. It is not what we need. Of one thing we may be sure, that it is only by unrestricted fellowship the highest personalities will be attracted and happily developed — the men who may be depended on later to spread the friend- ship of knowledge wherever their influence extends. There is a larger society in which our scholar ought to live and move, the general society of men, the largest world in which he can give and receive influence. The race of scholars, at its best, is still a tribe with tribal limitations. It has its "idols." To generalize the exclusively scholarly point of view, to make it less clannish, less complacent, less "cocky," less priggish, less unsocial, less pedantically solemn, the scholar needs to know the world of men his knowledge is to serve. More scholars fail in life because they do not understand their fellowmen than because they do not understand their subjects of study. The theme is too vast to dwell on here. Yet it is at least in place to say in passing that any theory of a grad- uate school which practically restricts its student membership to intending professors and teachers is a theory which is sure to lessen its usefulness. For there are other men who ought to have a chance at higher liberal studies, men who are to serve their fellows with trained intelligence outside of the professor's chair. The presence of this second body of stu- THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON 23 dents, living and intermingling with the others, is good for both classes. It mediates to the intending teacher some knowl- edge of the world of men outside; it mediates to the others some knowledge of the standards of scholarship. The two together are needed to constitute the fuller fellowship. This is the fruitful and profitable community of students in higher studies. It is the young scholar so circumstanced who is at last being put on his way to be more than a learner or a teacher or a discoverer. It is he who is being actually and wisely equipped to be a guide of men. In our American university system the presidents and trus- tees and faculties, separately and collectively, are of necessary importance, but in the very last analysis the fate of a univers- ity is not dependent on them. It depends finally and forever on the character and attitude of the students. This is the self-renewing spring, the Fountain of Perpetual Youth, from which all streams of university life are fed and without which the fields of knowledge become arid and unfertile. Without students our universities would soon become peaceful soli- tudes, slumbering in an endless "long vacation." Wild as the statement sounds, it is nevertheless true that in the long run students could get along without professors easier than pro- fessors could get along without students. This is so obviously true of undergraduate life that it is a wonder it has been for- gotten in regard to graduate students. The forgetfulness seems due to the just emphasis which is to be placed on the prime necessity of having professors, and professors of the first power. Yet so long as there are young scholars to be formed and trained, so long must the presence of a body of competent students be a prime essential, indeed in a sense the first prime essential, even if there were no other reason for it than to perpetuate the supply of great professors. And it is largely for the sake of the students the professors are necessary at all. The two "go together" — in both senses of the phrase. 24 THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON The character of the graduate student must then be a pro- foundly regulative factor in the life of the graduate school. All those and only those who show capacity and desire for high intellectual effort should be encouraged to enter. It is no place for either shallow dabbling, narrow intensity, dull mediocrity or unsocial isolation. Young men, young in spirit, rich in intellectual and moral worth, responsive to scholarly impulses, eager to seek and find, able to perceive, take and use the more valuable as distinguished from the less valuable ma- terial of knowledge, willing to do all and dare all to make themselves master-students, open-eyed to ideas in their rele- vancy, worth and beauty, pulsing with energy, inventiveness and fantasy, men companionable, magnanimous and unselfish, such are the students to be longed for and prized supremely. These are the sons of knowledge who are best fitted to live not for themselves alone nor by themselves alone, but first in the household of knowledge and then in the larger society of the world. On the basis of such convictions the Graduate College of Princeton was planned. In spirit and substance it is to be a new institution planted in the midst of the present Graduate School, to take root there and gradually transform it into something higher. It is an answer to our needs and a prophecy of our hopes. It is American in being an outgrowth of our life and catholic in its welcome to all influences consistent with its nature. It is democratic in offering equal opportunity to all who are fit to take advantage of it, but not in guaranteeing that all are of equal or sufficient fitness. No such institution as this is planned to become yet exists in our land, and very few like it are to be found in foreign lands. In some ways its model is what might be styled the Honours Colleges in English universities. Have we forgotten that in one little entry hard by the great tower of Trinity in Cambridge there were housed as students Sir Isaac Newton, Macaulay, Thack- eray and Tennyson ? Have we forgotten Christ's College, the _ .Jr2-?:TZ!i:;;:_!!!^»MJj|iijijiij|iiiji,^ |;i5 . / '^<^^^ .-- C- ««^/*^ DOORWAY IN THOMSON COLLEGE THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON 27 Student home of Milton and Darwin? Have we forgotten the work of Jowett at BalHol, or the bright earher time in Oriel immortalized in the lines of Matthew Arnold : For rigorous masters seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire, Shew'd me the high, white star of truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Let us cross the Channel and stroll on the south side of the Seine, where once stood residential colleges of the old Uni- versity of Paris. Only the Sorbonne visibly perpetuates to-day even the name of any of them. But think of the ficole Normale Superieure, not far away, the great residential grad- uate college of France, more brilliant in its record than any other. With only about one hundred students, graduating some thirty a year, it has done more than any other school to give tone to the best French thought. Here Laplace and La- grange laid the foundations of modern astronomy. Here a great chapter in the history of mathematics was written. Here Pasteur taught — enough glory in itself for any place. And as we review the roll in physics and chemistry and history and philosophy and literature, and in the public service of France, it is with a feeling akin to despair of ever being able to match such a record in any American school. And what of the great universities of Germany? While it is true there is as yet no residential college for university students there, it is with the liveliest satisfaction we read that at the centenary celebration last October the thoroughly mod- ern University of Berlin, premier school of the German-speak- ing world, received and accepted gifts for the establishment of a residential college. Thus far American universities have made little provision for the physical and social welfare of graduate students. Here and there a dormitory has been set apart for the purpose. As a rule, however, they have been left to shift for themselves. Much needs to be done. If the best results are to be had, their 28 THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON standard of social living should not be that of a boarding house, a hotel, a club or a dormitory. It should be the quiet dignity of a home of learning. If the higher teachers of the nation should be trained in a place and society worthy of their calling, why should they not dwell in a beautiful, even in a stately home? The loveliness of King's College Chapel, which appealed so deeply to Milton and Wordsworth, is part of the best endowment of Cambridge. Scenic beauty in a university is more to its students than a passing enjoyment. It becomes an unfading picture to be kept among the treasures of life- long affection. Goldwin Smith was no sentimentalist, and yet at four-score he could write these words of memory about Magdalen College : "My heart has often turned to its beauty, and often the sound of its sweet bells has come to me across the ocean." It was really to him, as he said, "a little Eden in a world where there are none too many of them." Plain living and high thinking are not harmed by good architecture nor helped by unlovely surroundings. The object of founding the Graduate College of Princeton, however, is not to erect fine buildings or to create scenery. It is to create in America a valuable institution which does not yet exist, a residential college devoted solely to the higher liberal studies — a home of science and philosophy, of literature and history. The convictions on which it is based have al- ready been outlined. A short sketch of the plan of operation may help to make its intent clearer. Three elements compose the Graduate College. First and foremost is a body of thoroughly first-rate professors, to be added to others now in the faculty — interesting men, scholars of high power, eminent in their subjects and able to waken young men. Do we need to say this is the capital A in the alphabet? If so, let it be said again and underscored — ^be- cause it would be absurd to say anything else. The second ele- ment is a company of students of high ability — not a big crowd, but a moderate number^ — living as a community in the THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRLNCETON 29 buildings of the Graduate College. The number may be a hundred or so, perhaps more — but I hope not a great many- more. Quality first, quantity afterwards. Experience will settle the working limit. The important thing is that they shall make a student community of high type, sufficient in number to develop a society where every man may know his fellows, find the variety he needs, and not be lost in a crowd. The sole test of admission is mental and moral worth. To make social eligibility a test would be unjust and silly. What is wanted is strong, interesting men with scholarly instincts. "The workman is greater than his work" — so runs the old proverb. We want the best men first ; the best work will fol- low. This is the one straight road to achieving excellence in anything. We are hunting for men first, specialists second. How are we to get them ? — for it seems as hard to get the fit students as the fit professors. But, given the right professors-, it can be done, and done surely in one way. We have already had individual cases of students of high promise who were attracted, one by one, by the preliminary experiment of a graduate house, conducted for the last seven years with scant means on a small scale. The attractiveness of the type of scholarly life proposed is the sure means of bringing them — one by one, one bringing others, as time goes on. Like will follow like. Men love to study in surroundings where knowl- edge is visibly and socially honored. There will be room for "many men of many minds." The general range of the higher liberal knowledge is to be at- tempted, so far as means permit. The scholars who are to be professors or teachers for life will probably compose the major part of the family. But there will be others. There will be room for the intending lawyer or doctor or minister or engineer or architect who can give a year or so to the liberal studies underlying his future calling. Men may be trained here for the diplomatic and civil service. Still others, we hope, may be trained as writers. Future authors, investigators and 30 THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON discoverers, the men who want to study economic, social or governmental problems, the entire range of seekers in the pure sciences, the student of historic art, the philosophic thinker, the lover of literature, the explorer of history — such as these may find a welcome here. It is much to expect, but not too much to desire. The third element is the buildings, the material home where- in this community shall find the realization of its desires. The conditions of student life in Princeton are distinctive. They are not urban or suburban or rustic, but rural. Here is the only large old college in a very small town. Its dominant college tradition is well-rooted and comparatively pure. The Graduate College is the flowering of this root. Whatever may be true of other subjects, liberal studies at least take on new charm amid old associations, and find a natural home in the peace and sylvan beauty of rural life. In order to make the buildings attractive and beautiful the so-called collegiate Gothic was chosen — not "modified" Gothic, nor hotel Gothic, but the exquisite perpendicular type, so lovely in the few remaining examples in English colleges. Why do students naturally love such buildings? I think it is because, with the scenic setting, they look inviting, domestic, poetic, and seem in some way ancestral to universities. Quad- rangles shadowing sunny lawns, towers and gateways opening into quiet retreats, ivy-grown walls looking on sheltered gar- dens, vistas through avenues of arching elms, walks that wind amid the groves of Academe — these are the places where the affections linger and where memories cling like the ivies them- selves, and these are the answers in architecture and scenic setting to the immemorial longings of academic generations back to the time when universities first began to build their homes. If you want to know what a student is, do not ask first what he knows or even what he believes, but find out what he loves. Here is the real man. Get hold of that and you get hold of him. Do the finer minds love the rigors of study ^. — • \\ i ^4 ^•V>; '11; 'V hill ,'■ "'li' ; I '"is • J' Pi 1' iT07 >'1 FIREPLACE— PROCTER HALL THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON 33 and "the joy of elevated thoughts" in an American boarding house so well as in surroundings which appeal to their imagi- nation and affections? The amenities of life are worth some- thing — even to the young scholar. The joy of surroundings that keep him buoyant means doubling and trebling his power. This community of graduate students, with here and there a resident professor living among them, and their other pro- fessors visiting freely and intimately, is to be a busy hive of industry. Intimate contact of the student with his professors and fellow-students, one by one or in small groups, is the force that will "centre" his work and quicken his life. He will be environed by a cluster of men bent on like pursuits and all co-operating to a single end under the guidance of pro- fessors who are themselves closely united for the same end. The influences are always operative. Exposure to them is inevitable and constant. Here is the contagion of knowledge. The highest exertions of young minds thus come about with a swing and rush of power which can be produced with cer- tainty in no other way. And yet I hope it will also be a place where men will find time to think — tranquilly, steadily, pro- foundly, nobly — in "thoughts that breathe and words that burn,"' — time to think without haste on themes too important to be settled in a hurry. There is a range of intellectual life outside the courses of formal study. It is the range of free casual intercourse in things of the mind. The gathering around the fireside in the Common Room after dinner is one example of it. The table- talk and after-dinner talk of cultivated men is no small part of a liberal education. In the Graduate College, at least, the art of conversation need never die. Another means of per- fecting our students will be travel. Whenever desirable, any Fellow may be sent to some university abroad for particular study. The College will again and again be visited by one and another as he returns. Expeditions may be organized here. As they return with th^ir treasures of art, science or 34 THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OE PRINCETON history, the Graduate College will be a welcome place for working out the results and preparing them for publication. That visitors of distinction will come to the College is certain. The students will thus be in the way of meeting famous men of other universities and lands — some of them, we hope, as visiting professors in residence. And where the cosmopolitan touch is once felt, provincialism vanishes. Seventeen years ago, when Princeton took her university name, the proposed Graduate College was first officially sanc- tioned. The bread has been cast upon the waters. After many days and many vicissitudes the College which started out as a paper project is returning as a fact, thanks to the devotion of its friends. Americans are often accused of being overpracti- cal. So they are. They also react the other way. Somewhere within them is a strain of imagination which only needs oc- casion to show itself as unselfish enthusiasm. It is so with those who have sustained this undertaking — and they are many and noble. Only a few can be mentioned here. The project appealed earliest to the practical benevolence of Mrs. Swann, a long-time resident of Princeton, who left to the Graduate College the greater part of her estate. I name four others. It appealed strongly to Mr. Procter, a devoted son of Princeton and a highly capable man of affairs as well. It appealed to the late Mr. Wyman, an alumnus who had never returned to his old college, and yet toward the end of a very long life, which had been keenly engrossed in acquiring wealth, found in the Graduate College the one object that attracted him irresistibly. So he left it virtually all his means. It ap- pealed to Mr. Pyne, the present chairman, and has seemed to him the worthiest consummation of the system of liberal studies in the loved university to which he has given the best of his life. It appealed to his predecessor, the first chairman, ex-President Cleveland, a man not susceptible to superficial enthusiasms, who never wavered, fair weather or foul, in his fidelity to the cause. "Speaking for myself," he wrote a year THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OF PRINCETON 35 before his death, "I want to say to you that I have never been enlisted in a cause which has given me more satisfaction or a better feehng of usefulness." Some of the helpers are gone before the college could come into existence. They will be remembered. Mrs. Swann's gift is visibly embodied in Thom- son College. Mr. Wyman's bequest will bear his memory onward for centuries, and the college stands on part of the old battlefield of Princeton, where his father, a stripling, fought under Washington. And the traveller hurrying past Princeton may now see on the western sky-line a memorial tower — solid, straight, aspiring — to remind him that this is the college to whose inception Mr. Cleveland gave the best effort of his closing years. Some think enthusiasm is "in bad form." It was the mark of the Renaissance. It is the mark of periods of revival and discovery. Enthusiasm for knowledge, for excellence, for the men who are to light the way of advance may be in "bad form," but it is in dead earnest. It is at the heart of true student-life. If, however, it should be quieted to save it from being noisy, let this be done not by suppression but by eleva- tion. And so in closing these reflections we may well pause an instant and listen intently to some quiet words of a thousand years ago, the calm words of Alcuin, teacher of Charlemagne, to his little band of students on the dignity and glory of learning : It is easy to point out to you the path of wisdom, if only ye love it for the sake of God, for knowledge, for purity of heart, for understanding the truth, yea, and for itself. Seek it not to gain the praise of men or the honor of this world, nor yet for the deceitful pleasures of riches ; for the more these things are loved the farther do they cause men who seek them to depart from the light of truth and knowledge. There is something old-fashioned, even a bit commonplace to some, in the sound of these words. Yet they are wise words, for they hold in essence the one final answer both to sordid commercialism and narrow provincialism in education. NOV 24 1913 36 THE GRADUATE COLLEGE OE PRINCETON They are not outlived yet, nor has any school even lived up to them fully. Could a school of higher studies have a higher impulse? May it energize and transfigure the new-born Graduate College! '•■it/i^.. ■ '■ ix^' INTERIOR OE QUADRANGLE LOOKING NORTHEAST