Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/338

332 else must depend. In the long run, the greatest university will be the one that devotes the most care to its undergraduates. With the college graduation higher education in England mostly stops. With Germany here the higher education begins. Higher education has been defined as that training which demands that a man should leave home. It means a breaking of the leading strings. It means the entrance to another atmosphere. The high school and the gymnasium cannot have the academic atmosphere, however advanced their studies may be. They must reflect the spirit of the town which supports them and of which they are necessarily a part. They cannot be free in the sense in which the universities are free. A boy who lives at home in a city and goes back and forth on a train cannot be a university student. He may recite in the university classes, but there his work ends. He gets little of the spirit which moves outside of the class room. He cannot enter the university until he breathes the university atmosphere. The 'Spurstudenten' or 'railway students' those who come and go on the trains, are rightly held by their fellows in Germany to be little more than Philistines. Whatever the other excellencies of the German system, the gymnasium, or advanced high school, is an inadequate substitute for the American college.

The second function of the university is that of professional training. To the man once in the path of culture this school adds effectiveness in his chosen calling. This work the American universities have taken up slowly and grudgingly. The demand for instruction in law and medicine has been met weakly but extensively by private enterprise. The schools thus founded have been dependent on the students' fees, and on the advertising gain their teachers receive through connection with them. Such schools as these stand no comparison with the professional schools of Germany. Their foundation is precarious, they can not demand high standards, nor look beyond present necessities to the future of professional training. Only a few of these schools to-day demand high standards. Those who do not can not share the university spirit. They have no part in university development. Only in the degree that they are part and parcel of the university do they in general deserve to live. The first profession to become thus allied is that of engineering, thanks to the wisdom that directed the Morrill Act. Following this, law, medicine, theology, education in some quarters, have taken a university basis, and the few professional schools in which such a basis exists rank fairly with the best of their class in the world.

The crowning function of a university is that of original research. On this rests the advance of civilization. From the application of scientific knowledge most of the successes of the nineteenth century have arisen. It is the first era of science. Behind the application of