Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/256

252 a series of experiments along this line, whose results should serve to guide other institutions toward the same goal of public service.

Meanwhile, the middle west has been working out its own salvation as regards the public duties of city bred educational institutions. Ohio with its three municipal universities at Cincinnati, Toledo and Akron, leads its neighboring states in this respect.

When Akron, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, established such an institution upon the foundation of the old Buchtel College, many, good citizens shook their heads in doubt as to whether a city of this size could afford the "luxury" of higher education. Fortunately, however, the young people of the city saw in this opportunity not a luxury but a chance for practical preparation for life. In the two short years of its existence, the university is already beginning to be one of the strongest factors in the community for civic betterment.

Why can a municipal university offer more practical education than other colleges or universities? As a matter of fact, any private institution can do as much. The municipal institution has simply by force of its position, heard the call more clearly and for this reason leads the way. Its activities are divided into two general lines:

 1. The training of students. 2. Cooperation with city departments and activities.

Either one of these two is impossible without the other. Students can not be trained for practical life without contact with actual conditions. Such contact can only be secured when every department of the university is in close cooperation and contact with that part of civic life to which it is most closely related. On the other hand, such contact can only be secured by putting students directly into the activities mentioned and thus forming the connecting link between city and university.

The beginning of this contact was made at Cincinnati about eight years ago, when Dean Schneider established his courses in engineering on the cooperative plan. It is scarcely necessary here to mention the merits of this much discussed system. In brief, it means that engineering students work for alternate two-week periods in class room and in factories, under actual shop conditions. Thus a graduate from this course is not a mere theorist, but knows manufacturing and engineering from the standpoint of personal experience.

To students of economics and sociology an especially broad field is open for experience with the conditions of actual life. In my own city, a thorough housing survey has been carried on by university students under the joint direction of the department of sociology, the charity organization and the board of health. Nor has this work been mere play with no practical use. As a result of reports brought in by student inspectors, the sanitation of houses and even of whole districts has been improved through vigorous action of the building inspector. The city has been benefittedbenefited [sic] by enlisting in its service a body of capable