Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/444

 390 A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO Shatter Mathews, Rollin D. Salisbury, George S. Goodspeed. Floyd R. Mechem, George H. Mead, Henry G. Gale, Gordon J. Laing, James H. Tufts, and James P. Hall. In 1916 the Club made an arrangement in accordance with which its property was to pass into the possession of the University which was to build for the Club a larger and finer club house on the south- east corner of Fifty-seventh Street and University Avenue. In this arrangement there was every assurance that the Quadrangle Club, with greatly improved facilities, would occupy a place of increasing usefulness and power in the developing life of the University. The next important event, not hitherto considered, was the establishing of the Summer Quarter. This quarter was so essen- tially related to the educational plan and became so essential a part of the University's life that it is difficult to realize that it was not a part of that life from the beginning. It took many years to get fairly before the country information as to what the Summer Quarter of the University of Chicago was. There came to be summer schools of a few weeks' duration, in other universities, giving instruction in some departments, and it was more or less widely supposed that they were of the same character as that in Chicago. They were doubtless good schools of their kind. But they were not in any way the kind of school the Summer Quarter at Chicago was. In the nature of the case they could not be. They were attachments, irregular and temporary addi- tions, to the regular work of universities organized on the tra- ditional nine-months or two-semester system. They were not and could not be co-ordinated with the regular work of the insti- tutions that established them. There was only one Summer Quarter, that of the University of Chicago. That was a regular quarter of the University, in which the regular University work was carried on just as in the autumn or winter. The University year consisted of four quarters, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring, of eleven or twelve weeks each. Thus the Summer Quarter was not a summer school, but a University Quarter, during which the Uni- versity was in regular session, with a full corps of instructors in all departments, and with students doing their regular work, from