What an American University Should Be

ISBN: 9781332094905 出版年：2016 页码：19 James McCosh Forgotten Books

A college is fitted to do immeasurable good, though it should not rise into a university. Of the two, if we are obliged to choose between, a college well equipped and devoting itself to its work is of vastly greater use than a scattered university which spreads over a wide surface, and, professing to teach everything, teaches nothing effectively. The grand aim of our educationists, and, indeed, of all who love their country, should be to strengthen and improve the American colleges and make them fulfill their high end-that of imparting definite instruction, each to a body-of promising young men spread all over the country. Here I may state that I do not feel inclined to indulge in the disparaging language sometimes applied to the smaller colleges by our haughty Eastern professors, who forget that their colleges were babies before they became men, and were brought out of the land of Egypt, and came through the wilderness. Most of these younger colleges are serving a good purpose. They all do so, so far as they give solid, and not superficial, knowledge; so far as they teach thor oughly the fundamental and disciplinary branches of litera ture, science, and philosophy', and also impart religious instructions to give a high tone to the mind. They draw a number of young men from their vicinity who could never be allured to more distant and expensive places. If they cannot impart a wide and varied culture, they often give a substantial training. It is a happy circumstance that in almost all these colleges religion is inculcated; and they may be the means of com pelling our larger colleges not to abandon it, when they might be led to do so by the pressure of the times. I admit, as to some of them, that they seem to serve little other pur pose than to keep back young men from better colleges, where they might get stimulus and true scholarship. But these will give way, by the force of that law of our world, the struggle for existence, which demands that the weak die while the/ strong survive.