Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/96

92 undue advantage, thereby limiting the work that should be accomplished by the whole institution. The primary ideal of a state university should be service to the state. As a great modern teacher has said, our "State universities should be training schools for servants of the common weal." But as institutions universities tend to take upon themselves conventional ways and to become ends in themselves; or to set up ends of their own, which are to some degree unrelated to the purposes which underlie their original foundation in the civic life. Even a state university may come to feel that it has its own sufficient standards and its own complete internal tests as to what should be considered the constituents of its own success.

The university ideal has always been an aristocratic rather than a democratic ideal, and it is with difficulty that the state university accommodates itself completely to the democratic ideal of service to the whole state. That old aristocratic ideal has held that culture is a possession of the exceptional individual and an adornment of living, rather than a great social goal and the preparation of all individuals for real service in the common good.

How can these two ideals—the one of public service, the other of personal culture—be harmonized in a state university? The real problem that faces any such an institution at any time is this: how can we keep the university ideal of a great institution of learning, and at the same time keep the state's ideal of service to the welfare of the whole people? It is easy to become purely formal, on the one hand, and to insist that learning is its own excuse for being; that the idea of use degrades culture; and that the state can well afford to support an institution devoted to the purposes of learning, whether that learning have any actual relationship to the life and problems of the state or not. On the other hand, it is almost as easy to take a purely utilitarian view of such an institution and to assert that any sort of activity that can call itself service to the people is worth doing, and that any sort of development of learning in the abstract is a waste of the state's resources.

Neither of these two tendencies must be permitted to become dominant. Each is an extreme from which the institution must be saved. Formal culture is not a democratic ideal; neither is a purely utilitarian "service to the state" taken by itself. The former becomes aristocratic and unsocial; the latter becomes inane, futile, useless. How can the state university maintain both these ideals, the one, of learning, the other, of service, at the same time? How can it make sure that these two ideals shall mutually nourish, criticize and develop each other?

In the first place there should be a board of control, made up of representatives of the people, who have a real interest in the development of such a completely democratic institution. This board should be inclusive of the whole social life of the state—industrial, professional,