Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/17

Rh students' associations, home reading circles, traveling libraries, and the like, which are doing much to extend its influence and render the movement permanent. One of these features, the scheme of affiliating students to the universities, deserves special mention. What the universities have been working for all along is the promotion of serious and continued study. Where this was out of the question, they did what they could, and tried to stimulate the neighborhood to something better. The work has now progressed far enough for them to offer a systematic course of study covering four years, and having a definite end in view. The students who take eight unit courses in related subjects approved by the management, and who do the home work and pass the examinations successfully, receive the title of S. A.—affiliated student—and have the privilege at any subsequent time of remitting one year's residence at Cambridge, and so completing their studies there in two years. In the majority of cases two years would be quite as prohibitory as three, since the students are no longer young, and are already pledged to some career in life. Yet affiliation is held to be a great good, for it brings system and continuity into extension work, and makes a closer and more vital bond between the universities and the people.

If we come now across the ocean to our own country we shall find, considering the newness of the movement here, a development of the university extension idea even more surprising than in England. It is a large tribute to the catholicity of this idea that it stands transplanting so admirably. The needs of the human spirit are much the same in all countries. What is deepest in us and best is essentially cosmopolitan. The extension scheme is distinctively English in its origin, yet it has needed surprisingly little adaptation to fit it to American conditions. Perhaps the chief differences in condition are geographical. Life is more concentrated in England than with us, and the main changes will have to be in deference to our magnificent distances.

In certain quarters the importation of a British idea is resented almost as warmly as if the article were a steel rail or a durable cloth. In others, again, it is said that we have had university extension in America for many years, and we are pointed to the lyceums of New England and to Chautauqua. These institutions have undoubtedly done admirable work, but they are not university extension, and it is no discredit to them to say so. I have no particular desire to represent the movement as unique. It would be seriously misrepresented, however, if the impression were allowed to become current that university extension is simply a duplication of educational machinery already in successful operation. It is not. It is a movement with a new end, the