Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 65.djvu/33

Rh genuine attributes of the true university we may see clearly in Colorado College. For one thing, she is broad-minded. The hall we dedicate to-day stands as one evidence of this, her fair library is another, and still more cogent the wide sympathies and helpful achievements of her professors. I believe most firmly in the educative value of unlikeness in aim and thought. A man may be highly specialized, he must be if he would succeed as an investigator; but a university should be an all-around organism. The school of applied science, the school of literary expression, should not stand apart from each other. The engineering student is likely to become illiterate if he herds only with his kind. He learns many lessons from the finer side of life, from the student of Chaucer or Homer. The literary student tends to become a dreamer or a prig if he is in touch with literary matters only. From the fierce earnestness of the young engineer, whose whole career depends on the soundness of his individual work, the student cf the humanities gains most valuable lessons.

For the same reason I believe in the coeducation of men and women. They need not study the same things, though for the most part as beauty is beauty and truth is truth, so mental accuracy knows no distinction of sex. But the influence of wise and cultivated women works for manliness and refinement. The influence of hopeful and strenuous men gives women's work a seriousness and sanity which is a fair exchange for the other. Where coeducation is honestly and rationally tried, it is no experiment at all. In the natural order of things, and in the long run, the American university and every other real university will be a school for men and women, opening its doors to all who can use its advantages or who can share its ideals.

Wherever there is a real scholar—independent, self-reliant, truth-loving scholar—there we have a university. He gives the university uplift, the university inspiration, the university ideal. If he has but one student, that one is a university student. I do not know how many such there be in the faculty of Colorado College, but there are some I know; some peaks which catch the morning sun, and in the presence of these we have the essential element of the university.

In the American scheme of education, the college course is a period of intellectual broadening. It makes men, while the university makes scholars. The German university system admits of no college course. The college is not the American gymnasium. The rigid drill of the gymnasium, intense and narrow, gives way at once to the university when any subject can lie pursued in any fashion or no fashion at all. The gymnasium has cast iron walls. She takes no account of individual differences; she will drill but not create. The university is wide open, everything is at the student's hand: science, letters, art, lust or beer. The student chooses for himself, and the university, as an organism, is indifferent as to his choice.