WE

A NEW UNIVERSITY.

7E in America possess a well-earned reputation for ability to do everything with lightning rapidity; and as we have built up railroads and cities, so also we have built up educational institutions. Comparatively a few years ago our place of highest instruction was called a College, and must have corresponded in most respects to an English fitting-school; its studies elementary and uninteresting task-work, mechanically performed under the menacing rod of a minutely punctilious discipline. Fines and other penalties were exacted on all occasions, and the students did their best to retaliate. "When I became a tutor at Yale," an alumnus of the fifties told me, 'my predecessor, showing me the room I was to occupy, opened a cabinet and displayed several unshapely rows of brick-bats and cobble-stones. Those sir,' he said in the most impressive manner, 'those, sir, were thrown into my window!'"

Between then and now we have become a University; buildings, faculty, students, have increased at a wonderful ratio; the old narrowness has somewhat broadened, and

the rulers and the ruled enjoy at least a cessation of hostilities. A wide range of electives, taught by competent specialists, offers men a considerable opportunity to follow the natural bent of their genius. The development of the post-graduate and other departments has given us a range and many-sidedness wholly beyond the scope of the simple undergraduate college of the past.

And yet we are not entirely satisfied. We are a University, and still we cannot feel, with the European examples before us, that we are a University in the fullest or highest sense of the word. Of course such things cannot be made in a day; we must have time to grow; and we are growing. But there immediately arises the important. question, are we growing in the right direction? Are we growing more and more into the rounded manly mould of a perfectly developed University, or are we simply shooting up into an overgrown college? And this question, I think, we will have to leave the future to answer. Certainly there are many things about our present University which may be taken to point either way; but whichever way they point, they point to change. Our curriculum, for instance, with its long lists of electives and its competent specialists in each department--what could be more satisfactory, what way of study could be more interesting? But to render possible this wide range of studies, the student can devote to each particular course only a very limited amount of time-two recitation hours on the average—a week. This process has a tendency to produce a widely scattered superficial smattering of information, to the extinction of enthusiasm and of all the interest that would be awakened by continuity of work. Add to this that the several divisions of the large classes require, on the professor's part, frequent and wearisome repetition of his work bit by bit-and one scarcely sees how the study can be other than trifling and fragmentary or the instruction avoid verging on monotony.

So much for the problem; the solution is not so easy, and must, I suppose, be left mainly with time. But we may watch as well as wait; and as what promises to be the most notable attempt at solution yet made in America

upon a system purely American, will be put in practice before long at Chicago-under the management of one of the most brilliant and open-minded members of our own faculty-it would surely seem wise in us to turn our eyes in that direction. The prospective University of Chicago will have, indeed, every opportunity to give its novel method a fair trial. It will be on the start heavily endowed; it will be entirely new and therefore unhampered, if unhelped, by any traditions; it will be under the direction of men practically experienced as well as scholastically learned; established in a central position, which is now almost unoccupied, it will be able to draw students from every direction.

And it intends to strike at the root of the difficulty-to begin from the foundation. The first Official Bulletin, published in January, which has lately been attracting much attention, shows a method of management in a high degree original and yet consonant with our ideal of a university. The points of difference are mainly as follows: The University will be open during the whole year, which will be divided into four equal quarters; fewer studies will be taken at a time (two instead of seven or eight), and they will be changed oftener; in the last two years the studies will be purely optional, and in the first two, when more professors than one teach the same subject, choice will be allowed between them. The first of these will provide against the institution's lying idle for three months in the year; will make it possible both for instructors and students to take vacation at whatever time best suits each-three-quarters being counted a year's work; and will furnish school teachers, clergymen, etc., who desire further education, and who can leave their charges only in summer, an opportunity to obtain the best. instruction, and, by additional non-residence work, to earn a degree. The second will secure the much desired concentration of effort, and yet, as each study lasts only six weeks, and as the two may be totally unlike each other, will avoid monotony. The third will render a wide range of choice admissible, and will supply a criterion by which the usefulness of each instructor may be tested. The