An American At Oxford Part 10

II

THE ADMINISTRATIVE PROBLEM

The administrative evil of the American university, as typified in Harvard, Mr. Bolles described even more vividly than the social evil.

The bare fact of the problem he stated as follows: "In 1840 the college contained 250 students; in 1850, 300; in 1860, 450; in 1870, 600; in 1880, 800; in 1890, 1300; in 1894, 1600." He then pointed out that the only means the authorities have found for meeting this increasing demand on the administrative office is, not to divide the students into separate small bodies each under a single administrator, but to divide the duties of administration among several officers.

Thus each of the added officers is required to perform his duty toward the entire student body. It is apparently a.s.sumed that he can discharge one duty toward two or three thousand students as intelligently as in former years he could discharge two or three duties toward two or three hundred. By this arrangement the most valuable factor in administration is eliminated--personal knowledge and personal contact between the administrator and his charges. It is said that the members of the administrative board of the college--professors whose time is of extreme value to the university and to the world, and who receive no pay as administrators--sit three hours a night three nights in the week deciding the cases that come before them, not from personal knowledge of the undergraduates concerned, but from oral and doc.u.mentary reports. "It is only by a fiction that the Recorder [or the Dean, or the member of the administrative board] can be a.s.sumed to have any personal knowledge of even a half of the men whose absences he counts, whose pet.i.tions he acts upon, and against whose delinquencies he remonstrates; yet the fiction is maintained while its absurdity keeps on growing.... If the rate of growth and our present administrative system are maintained, the Dean and Recorder of Harvard College will [in 1950] be personally caring for 6500 individuals, with all of whom they will be presumed to have an intelligent acquaintance."

Mr. Bolles lived through the period in which a brilliant band of German-trained American professors, having made over our educational system as far as possible on German lines, were endeavoring to subst.i.tute German discipline, or lack of it, for the traditional system of collegiate residence which aims to make the college a well-regulated social community. At one time these reformers rejoiced in the fact that Harvard students attended the ice carnival at Montreal or basked in the Bermudan sun while the faculty had no means of knowing where they were and no responsibility for the success of their college work. The Overseers, however, were not in sympathy with the Teutonized faculty, and soon put an end to this; but the reformers were, and perhaps still are, only waiting the opportunity to establish again the Teutonic license. "It is sometimes said," Mr. Bolles continues, "that Harvard may eventually free itself from all its remaining parental responsibility and leave students' habits, health, and morals to their individual care, confining itself to teaching, research, and the granting of degrees. Before it can do this, it must be freed from dormitories. As long as fifteen hundred of its students live in monastic quarters provided or approved by the university, so long must the university be held responsible by the city, by parents, and by society at large, for the sanitary and moral condition of such quarters. The dormitory system implies and necessitates oversight of health and morals. The trouble to-day is that the administrative machinery in use is not capable of doing all that is and ought to be expected of it.... If it be determined openly that the health and morals of Harvard undergraduates are not to occupy the attention of the Dean and Board of the college, then the present system may be perpetuated, but if this determination is not reached, then either the system must be changed or the present attempt to accomplish the impossible will go on until something snaps."

Since Mr. Bolles's day there has been much earnest effort to solve the administrative problem; but the difficulties have increased rather than diminished. The duties of the Dean are still much the same as when the freshman cla.s.s numbered one hundred instead of five. Only the Dean has been improved. He is at least five times as human and five times as earnest as any other Dean; but the freshman cla.s.s keeps on growing, and when he has satisfied his very exacting conscience and retires (or, not having satisfied his conscience, perishes), no man knows where his better is to be found. Of the Secretary and the Recorder and his a.s.sistants Mr. Bolles has spoken. A Regent has among other duties a general charge of the rooms the fellows live in, and usually makes each room and its occupant a yearly visit--which the occupant, in the perversity of undergraduate nature, regards as a visitation. Then there is the physician. So large a proportion of the undergraduates were found to be isolated and unhappy in their circ.u.mstances, and remote from the knowledge of the authorities, that it became necessary to appoint some one to whom they might appeal in need. Thus the details as to each undergraduate's residence are in the hands of seven different officials, each of whom, in order to attain the best results, requires a personal acquaintance with the thousands of undergraduates. Furthermore the entire body of undergraduates changes every four years. If every administrator had the commodity of lives commonly attributed to the cat, the duties of their offices would still be infinitely beyond them.

Mr. Bolles suggested a solution of the administrative problem: "If the college is too large for its dean and administrative board to manage in the way most certain to benefit its students, it should be divided, using as a divisor the number ... which experts may agree in thinking is the number of young men whom one dean and board should be expected to know and govern effectively."

When Mr. Bolles wrote, one cla.s.s of administrative officer and one only was limited in his duties to a single small community: in each building in which students lived, a proctor resided who was supposed to see that the Regent's orders were enforced. Since then another step has been taken in the same direction; a board of advisers has been established, each member of which is supposed to have a helpful care of twenty-five freshmen. These two officials, it will be seen, divide the administrative duties of an English tutor. That they represent a step toward Mr. Bolles's solution of the administrative difficulty has probably never occurred to the authorities; and as yet it must be admitted the step is mainly theoretical. The position of both, as I know from sad personal experience, is such that their duties, like those of all other administrators, resolve into a mere matter of police regulation. The men are apt to resist all friendly advances. In the end, a proctor's activities usually consist in preventing them of a Sunday from shouting too loud over games of indoor football, and at other times from blowing holes through the cornice with shotguns. The case of the freshman adviser is much the same. His first duty is to expound to his charges the mysteries of the elective system, and to help each student choose his courses.

According to the original intention, he was to exert as far as possible a beneficial personal influence on newcomers; but the result seldom follows the intention. Beyond the visit which each freshman is obliged to make to his adviser in order to have his list of electives duly signed, there is nothing except misdemeanor to bring the two within the same horizon. When the adviser takes pains to proffer hospitality, the freshman's first thought is that he is to be disciplined. When, as often happens, a proctor is also a freshman adviser, he unites the two administrative duties of an English tutor; but his position is much less favorable in that his duties are performed toward two distinct bodies of men. With time, tact, and labor, he might conceivably force himself into personal relations.h.i.+p with his fifty-odd charges; but the inevitable ground of meeting, such as the English tutor finds in his teaching, is lacking. An attempt to become acquainted is very apt to appear gratuitous. In point of fact, such acquaintance is scarcely expected by the university, and is certainly not paid for. What little an administrator earns is apt to be so much an hour (and not so very much) for teaching. A gratuitous office is so difficult that one hesitates to perform it gratuitously.

If the young instructor is bent on making himself unnecessary trouble, there is plenty of opportunity in connection with his teaching; and here, of course, owing to the characteristic lack of organic coordination, he has to deal with a body of men who, except by rare accident, are quite distinct both from those whom he advises and those whom he proctorizes. The system at Harvard may be different in detail from that at other American universities; but wherever a large body of undergraduates are living under a single administrative system, it can scarcely be different in kind.

Enough has been said to show that the only office which an administrator can perform is a police office. Where the college and the university are identical, the element of personal influence is necessarily eliminated. But if the college were divided into separate administrative units, the situation would be very different. The seven general and two special offices I have indicated might be discharged, as regards each undergraduate, by a dean and a few proctor-advisers; and as the students and their officers would be living in the same building, personal knowledge and influence might become the controlling force. The solution of the administrative problem is identical with the solution of the social and athletic problem, and in both cases a movement toward it is begun. If the student body is eventually divided into residential halls of the early mediaeval type, much good will result, and probably nothing but good, even if the tutorial function proper is absent. As to the addition of the tutorial function, that is a question of extreme complexity and uncertainty, in order to grasp which it is necessary to review the peculiar educational inst.i.tutions of American universities.

III

THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM

As regards the American teaching system, the fact that the college so long remained identical with the university has caused little else than good. At Oxford and Cambridge, when a demand arose for instruction in new fields, the university could not meet it because it had little or no wealth and had surrendered its teaching function; and the score of richly endowed colleges, by force of their inertia, collectively resisted the demand. The enlargement in the scope of instruction has been of the slowest. In America, each new demand instantly created its supply. The moment the students in theology required more than a single professor, their tuition fees as well as other funds could be applied to the creation of a divinity school; and the professors.h.i.+ps in law, medicine, and the technical professions were likewise organized into schools, each fully equipped under a separate faculty for the pursuit of its special aim. Thus the ancient college was developed by segregation into a fully organized modern university. American inst.i.tutions are composed of a reduplication, not of similar colleges, but of distinct schools, each with its special subject to teach. This fact makes possible a far higher standard of instruction. The virtue of the administrative and social organization in the English university, as has been pointed out, results from division of the university into separate communities,--distinct organs, each with its separate activity. The virtue of the American university in its teaching functions results from a precisely similar cause.

In the case of the college, one or two details have lately been the occasion of criticism. In the educational as in the social and administrative functions, the machinery is apparently overgrown. Until well into the nineteenth century, the body of instruction offered was much the same as in the English colleges of the seventeenth century, or in the pa.s.s schools of to-day,--a modified version of the mediaeval trivium and quadrivium. When a new world of intellectual life was opened, most academic leaders regarded it with abhorrence. The old studies were the only studies to develop the manners and the mind; the new studies were barbarous, and dwarfed the understanding. All learning had been contained in a pint-pot, and must continue to be so.

If the old curriculum had prevailed, the old system might have continued to serve, in spite of the enormous increase of students; but it did not. Discussions of the educational value of the new learning are still allowed to consume paper and ink; but the cause of the old pint-pot was lost decades ago. All branches are taught, and are open to all students.

The live question to-day both in England and America is not whether we shall recognize the new subjects, but how and in what proportion we shall teach them. In England, where the colleges and the university are separate, the teaching and the examining are separate. The student prepares in college for an examination by the university. It is as a result of this that the subjects of instruction have been divided and organized into honor schools; and here again the division and organization have resulted in sounder and more efficient functioning.

In America, such a division has never been made: the teaching and the degree-granting offices have remained identical. The professor in each "course" is also the examiner, and the freedom of choice of necessity goes not by groups of related studies but by small disconnected courses. As the field of recognized knowledge developed, new courses were added, and the student was granted a greater range of choice.

Whereas of old all the instruction of the college might and had to be taken in four years, the modern courses could scarcely be exhausted in a full century. This American system, earliest advocated at Harvard, is called the elective system, and has made its way, in a more or less developed form, into all American universities worthy of the name. Its primary work was that of the Oxford honor schools--the shattering of the old pint-pot. It has done this work; but it is now in train to become no less a superst.i.tion than the older system, and is thus no less a menace to the cause of education.

It is perhaps only natural, though it was scarcely to be expected, that the university which in late years has most severely criticised the elective system is that which a quarter of a century ago deliberately advocated it, and in the face of almost universal opposition justified it in the eyes of American educators. There has evidently been a miscalculation. Yet though Harvard has cautiously acknowledged its failure in the persons of no less authorities than Professor Munsterberg and Dean Briggs, the element of error has not yet been clearly stated, nor has the remedy been proposed. Many things have been said against the elective system, but they may all be summed up in one phrase: it is not elective. This is no specious paradox. It is the offer of free election that is specious.

No offer could seem fairer. The student is at liberty to choose as he will. He may specialize microscopically or scatter his attention over the universe; he may elect the most ancient subjects or the most modern, the hardest or the easiest. No offer, I repeat, could seem fairer. But experience disillusions. Some day or other a serious student wakes up to the fact that he is the victim of--shall we say a thimble-rigging game? For example, let us take the case of a serious specialist. Of all the world's knowledge the serious specialist values only one little plot. A mult.i.tude of courses is listed in the catalogue, fairly exhausting his field. Delightful! Clearly he can see which walnut-sh.e.l.l covers the pea. He chooses for his first year's study four courses--the very best possible selection, the only selection, to open up his field. One moment: on closer scrutiny he finds that two of the four courses are given at the same hour, and that, therefore, he cannot take them in the same year. Still, there are at his command other courses, not so well adapted to his purposes, but sooner or later necessary. He chooses one. Hold again! On closer inspection he finds that appended to the course is a Roman numeral, and that the same numeral is against one of his other courses. After half an hour's search in the catalogue he finds that, though the two courses are given at different hours, and indeed on different days of the week, the mid-year and final examinations in both take place on the same days. Obviously these two cannot be taken in the same year.

With dampened spirits his eye lights on a second subst.i.tute. He could easily deny himself this course; but it is vastly interesting, if not important, and he must arrange a year's work. Behold, this most interesting course was given last year, and will be given next year, but neither love nor money nor the void of a soul hungering for knowledge could induce the professor who gives it to deliver one sentence of one lecture; he is busy and more than busy with another course which will not be given next year. The specialist is at last forced to elect a course he does not really want. One entanglement as to hours of which the present deponent had knowledge forced a specialist in Elizabethan literature to elect--and, being a candidate for a degree with distinction, to get a high grade in--a course in the history of finance legislation in the United States. This was a tragic waste, for so many and so minute are the courses offered that the years at the student's disposal are all too few to cover even a comparatively narrow field. The specialist may well ruminate on the philosophy of Alice and her Wonderland jam. Yesterday he could elect anything, and to-morrow anything; but how empty is to-day!

Highly as the modern university regards the serious specialist, a more general sympathy will probably be given to the man who is seeking a liberal education. Such a man knows that in four years at his disposal he cannot gain any real scientific knowledge even of the studies of the old-fas.h.i.+oned college curriculum. As taught now, at Harvard, they would occupy, according to President Eliot's report for 1894-95, twice four years. But by choosing a single group of closely related subjects, and taking honors in it, he hopes to master a considerable plot of the field of knowledge. I will not say that he chooses the ancient cla.s.sics, for--though they are admirably taught in a general way in the great Oxford Honor School of Literae Humaniores--the American student may be held to require, even in studying the cla.s.sics, a larger element of scientific culture, which would take more time than is to be had. For the same reason I will not say that he chooses the modern languages and literatures, though such a choice might be defended. Let us say that he chooses a single modern language and literature--his own.[4] Surely this is not too large a field for four years' study. Of cla.s.sics, mathematics, science, and history he has supposedly been given a working knowledge in the preparatory school. For the rest he relies on the elective system.

Even in the beginning, like the specialist, he is unable to choose the courses he most wants, because of the conflict of the hours of instruction and examination; and this difficulty pursues him year by year, increasing as the subjects to be taken grow fewer and fewer. But let us dismiss this as an incidental annoyance. His fate is foreshadowed when he finds that the mult.i.tude of courses by which alone he could cover the entire field of English literature would fill twice the time at his disposal. Already he has discovered that the elective system is not so very elective. He sadly omits Icelandic and Gothic, and all but one half course is Anglo-Saxon. Some day he means to cover the ground by means of a history of literature and translations; but in point of fact, as the subjects are not at all necessary for his degree, and as he is overburdened with other work, he never does. He sticks to his last, and is the more willing to do so because, being wise beyond the wont of undergraduates, he knows that it will be well to fortify his knowledge of the English language and literature with a complementary knowledge of the history of the English people, and of the history and literature of the neighboring Germans and French.

Having barely time for a rapid survey of these complementary subjects, he elects only the introductory courses. In the aggregate they require many precious hours, and to take them he is obliged to omit outright English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but he knows that it is better to neglect a finial or two than the b.u.t.tresses of the edifice he is building. Again he has miscalculated. After his complementary courses are begun, and it is too late to withdraw from them, he discovers even more clearly than the specialist how very unelective the elective system can be. It is the same old question of the thimble and the pea. These introductory courses are intended to introduce him to the study of history and of literature, not to complement his studies of English. What he wanted to know in English history was the social and the political movements, the vital and picturesque aspect; what he is taught is the sources and const.i.tutions--the dry bones. In German and French he wanted to know the epochs of literature; he is taught the language, considered scientifically, or, at most, certain haphazard authors in whom he has only a casual interest. If he is studying for honors, he is obliged to waste enough time on these disappointing courses to reach a high grade in each. The system of free election is mighty, for he is a slave to it.

This difficulty is typical. Thus a student of history or of German who wants to study Elizabethan literature for its bearing on his subject is obliged to spend one full course--a quarter of a year's work--on the language of four or five plays of Shakespeare before he is permitted to take a half course on Shakespeare as a dramatist; and even then all the rest of the Elizabethan period is untouched.

Let us suppose that our student of English is wary as well as wise, preternaturally wary, and leaves all complementary subjects to private reading--for which he has no time. He is then able to devote himself to the three or four most important epochs in English literature. He has to leave out much that is of importance, so that he cannot hope to gain a synoptic view of the field as a whole; but of his few subjects he will at least be master. Here at last is the thimble that covers the pea. Not yet! In four courses out of five of those devoted to the greatest writers, the teacher's attention is directed primarily to a very special and scientific study of the language; the examination consists in explaining linguistic cruxes. Literary criticism, even of the most sober kind, is quite neglected. If the student learns only what is taught, he may attain the highest grades and the highest honors without being able in the end to distinguish accurately the spirit of Chaucer from that of Elizabethan literature.

Furthermore, not every student is sufficiently well advised to know precisely what courses he requires to attain his end. For example, to gain an understanding of the verse forms and even the spirit of Middle English and Elizabethan English, it is necessary to know the older French and Italian; but, as it happened, our student was not aware of the fact until he broke his s.h.i.+ns against it, and it was n.o.body's business to tell him of it. And even if he had been aware of it, he could not have taken those subjects without leaving great gaps in his English studies. He has graduated _summa c.u.m laude_ and with highest honors in English; but he has not even a correct outline knowledge of his subject. His education is a thing of shreds and patches.

Whatever may be the aim of the serious student, the elective system is similarly fatal to it. I must be content with a single instance more.

The signal merit of the old-fas.h.i.+oned curriculum was that its insistence on the cla.s.sics and mathematics insured a mental culture and discipline of a very high order, and of a kind that is impossible where the student elects only purely scientific courses, or courses in which he happens to be especially interested. Let us suppose that the serious student wishes to elect his courses so as to receive this discipline. His plight is indicated in "Some Old-fas.h.i.+oned Doubts about New-fas.h.i.+oned Education" which have lately been divulged[5] by the Dean of Harvard College, Professor Le B. R. Briggs. The undergraduate "may choose the old studies but not the old instruction.

Instruction under an elective system is aimed at the specialist. In elective mathematics, for example, the non-mathematical student who takes the study for self-discipline finds the instruction too high for him; indeed, he finds no encouragement for electing mathematics at all." The same is true of the cla.s.sics.

One kind of student, to be quite candid, profits vastly by the elective system, namely, the student whose artistic instinct makes him ambitious of gaining the maximum effect, an A.B., with the minimum expenditure of means. History D is a good course: the lectures do not come until eleven o'clock, and no thought of them blunts the edge of the evening before. Semitic C is another good course--only two lectures a week, and you can pa.s.s it with a few evenings of cramming.

If such a man is fortunate enough to have learned foreign languages in the nursery or in traveling abroad, he elects all the general courses in French and German. This sort of man is regarded by Dean Briggs with unwonted impatience; but he has one great claim to our admiration. Of all possible kinds of students, he alone has found the pea. For him the elective system is elective.

The men who developed the elective system, it is quite unnecessary to say, had no sinister intention. They were pioneers of educational progress who revolted against the narrowness of the old curriculum.

The nearest means of reform was suggested to them by the German plan, and they sought to naturalize this _in toto_ without regard to native needs and conditions. But the pioneer work of the elective system has been done, and the men who now uphold it in its entirety are clogging the wheels of progress no less than those who fought it at the outset.

The logic of circ.u.mstances early forced them to the theory that all knowledge is of equal importance, provided only that it is scientifically pursued, and this position in effect they still maintain. You may elect to study Shakespeare and end by studying American finance legislation; but so long as you are compelled to study scientifically, bless you, you are free.

The serenity of these men must of late have been somewhat clouded.

Professor Hugo Munsterberg, as an editorial writer in "Scribner's Magazine" lately remarked, "has been explaining, gently but firmly, ostensibly to the teachers in secondary schools, but really to his colleagues in the Harvard faculty, that they are not imitating the German method successfully." In no way is the American college man in the same case as the German undergraduate. His preparatory schooling is likely to be three years in arrears, and, in any case, what he seeks is usually culture, not science. "The new notion of scholars.h.i.+p," this writer continues, "by which the degree means so much Latin and Greek, or the equivalent of them in botany or blacksmithing, finds no favor at all in what is supposed to be the native soil of the 'elective system.'" Dr. Munsterberg's own words, guarded as they are, are not without point: "Even in the college two thirds of the elections are haphazard, controlled by accidental motives; election, of course, demands a wide view and broad knowledge of the whole field.... A helter-skelter chase of the unknown is no election." The writer in "Scribner's" concludes: "It is not desirable that a man should sell his birthright for a mess of pottage, even if he gets the pottage. If he does not get it, as Dr. Munsterberg intimates, of course his state is even worse."

Rough as the elective system is upon the student who aspires to be merely a scholar, it is rougher on the undergraduate who only wants to train his mind and to equip it for business and professional life. To him a purely scientific training is usually a positive detriment.

Scrupulous exact.i.tude and a sense of the elusiveness of all knowledge are an excellent and indispensable part of the bringing up of a scholar; but few things are more fitted, if pursued exclusively, to check the self-confidence of a normal man and to blight his will. Poor Richard had a formula for the case: "A handsaw is a very good thing, but not to shave with." Before taking a vigorous hold on the affairs of Wall Street or of Was.h.i.+ngton, our recent graduate has first to get away from most of the standards that obtain in the university, or at least to supplement them by a host of others which he should have learned there. In another pa.s.sage in the article already quoted, Dean Briggs has touched the vital spot. He is speaking of the value, to teachers especially, of the peculiar fetich of Teutonized university instruction, the thesis, and of its liability to be of fict.i.tious value. "Such theses, I suspect, have more than once been accepted for higher degrees; yet higher degrees won through them leave the winner farther from the best qualities of a teacher, remote from men and still more remote from boys. It was a relief the other day to hear a head-master say, 'I am looking for an under-teacher. I want first a man, and next a man to teach.'" What is true of teaching is even more obviously true of the great world of business and of politics. What it wants is men.

The cause of the break-down of the elective system, as at present const.i.tuted, is to be found in the machinery of instruction. The office of the teacher has become inextricably mixed up with a totally alien office--university discipline. Attendance at lectures is the only means of recording a student's presence in the university, and success in the examination in lecture courses is the only basis for judging of his diligence. At the tolling of a bell the student leaves all other affairs to report at a certain place. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, lectures were of necessity the main means of instruction. Books were rare and their prices prohibitive. The master read and the student copied. To-day, there are tens of thousands of books in every college library. Only in the higher courses are lectures necessary or profitable. But still instruction is carried on, even in the most general courses, by means of professorial lectures.

Where great periods are covered by leaps and bounds, freshness or individuality of treatment is quite impossible. The tolling of the college bell dooms hundreds of students to hear a necessarily hurried and inarticulate statement of knowledge which has been carefully handled in printed form by the most brilliant writers, and to which a tutor might refer the student in a few minutes' conference. Modify the lecture system? It is the foundation of the police regulation. The boasted freedom in elective studies simmers down to this, that it enables the student to choose in what courses he shall be made the unwilling ally of the administrative officer. The lectures waste the time of the student and exhaust the energy of the teacher; but unless the lecturers give them and the studious attend, how can the university know that the s.h.i.+ftless stay away?

It is necessary, moreover, for the administrator to judge of the student's success as well as of his diligence. Twice every year the professors hold an examination lasting for three hours in each of their several courses. Of late years an ingenious means has been devised for making the examination system an even more perfect ally of the police. In the middle of each term an examination of one hour is held to insure that the student has not only attended lectures but studied outside; and, in order to expose the procrastinator, it has become the custom for the examination to be given without warning.

Like the lecture system, the examination system throws the onus of discipline on the studious and the teachers. Two thousand students write yearly 32,000 examination books. Quite obviously the most advanced of the professors cannot spare time for the herculean task of reading and duly grading their share of these books. They give over most of them to underpaid a.s.sistants. The logical result of such a system is that the examinations tend to be regarded merely as statements of fact, and the reading of the books merely as clerical labor. If academic distinctions are disprized in America, both in college and out of it, this is amply explained by the fact that they attest a student's diligence rather than his ability. They are awarded, like a Sunday-school prize, in return for a certain number of good-conduct checks.

It is not enough that the machinery of instruction wastes the time of the student and debases the office of the examiner; it is, as I have said, the cause of the break-down of the elective system. As long as each student is required to pursue every study under the eye of the disciplinarian, the decision as to what he shall study rests not with his desires or his needs, but with an elaborate schedule of lectures and examinations. So excessive are the evils of the present system that no less a man than Professor William James has advocated the abolition of the examinations.

This remedy is perhaps extreme; but the only alternative is almost as radical. It is to enable the student, at least the more serious student, to slip the trammels of the elective system, and to study rationally, and to be rationally examined in, the subject or group of subjects which he prefers. In a word, the remedy is to divide and organize our courses of instruction for the more serious students into groups corresponding in some measure to what the English call honor schools.

It may be objected that already it is possible to read for honors. The objection will scarcely convince any one who has taken the examination. It is oral, and occupies an hour or two. The men who conduct it are leading men in the department, and are often of world-wide reputation. They are so great that they understand the nature of the farce they are playing. No candidate is expected to have covered the field of his honor subject even in the broadest outlines. When the astute student is not sure of an answer, he candidly admits the fact and receives credit for knowing that he does not know--a cardinal virtue to the scientific mind. If I may be allowed a personal instance, I went up for the examination in English literature in complete ignorance as to all but a single brief movement. When my ignorances were laid bare, the examiners most considerately confined their questions to my period. We had much pleasant conversation. Each of the examiners had imparted in his courses his latest rays of new light, and each in turn gave me the privilege of reflecting these rays to the others. For a brief but happy hour my importance was no less than that of the most eminent publication of the learned world. It need scarcely be said that such examinations are not supposed to have much weight in judging of the candidate's fitness. A more important test is a thesis studied from original sources, and the most important is good-conduct marks in a certain arbitrary number of set lecture courses. The policeman's examination is supreme.

IV

THE AMERICAN HALL

The college has shown a tendency, as I have indicated, to divide in its social life into separate organizations for the purposes of residence, dining, and athletics. In the administrative life, at least the proctors and the freshman advisers are each in charge of separate bodies of undergraduates. In the educational life, a similar tendency is noticeable. Year by year there has been an increasing disposition to supplement lectures or to subst.i.tute them by what is in effect tutorial instruction. In the history courses, for example, the lectures and examinations have for some time been supplemented by private personal conferences. If the student is proceeding properly, he is encouraged; if not, he is given the necessary guidance and a.s.sistance. I do not know what the result has been in the teaching of history; but in the teaching of English composition, where the conferences have largely supplanted lectures, it has been an almost unmixed benefit. The instructor's comments are given a directness and a personal interest impossible either in the lecture-room or by means of written correction and criticism; and the students are usually eager to discuss their work and the means for bettering it. As the lecture system proves more and more inadequate, the tutorial instruction must necessarily continue to increase, and is not unlikely to afford the basis for a more sensibly devised scheme of honor schools.

If the American college were organized into separate halls, it would be necessary and proper, as Mr. Bolles suggested, to place in each a Dean and administrative board; and the most economical plan of administration, as he pointed out, would be to give each administrator as many duties as possible toward a single set of pupils. Thus the proctor on each staircase of the hall would be the adviser of the men who roomed on it. It would be only a logical extension of the principle to give the proctor-adviser a tutorial office. All this indicates a reversion toward the golden age of the mediaeval hall.

Here is where the gain would lie: The administration of the hall would make it no longer necessary to rely on the lecture courses for police duty, and the wise guidance of a tutor would in some measure remove the necessity of the recurrent police examinations. Thus the student would be able to elect such courses only as the competent adviser might judge best for him; and if the faculty were relieved of the labor of unnecessary instruction and examination it would be possible, with less expense than the present system involves, to offer a well-considered honor examination, and to provide that the examination books should be graded not with mere clerical intelligence, but with the highest available critical appreciation. Thus and only thus can the American honor degree be given that value as an a.s.set which the English honor degree has possessed for almost a century.

It would by no means be necessary as at Oxford to make the honor examination the only basis for granting the degree. The fewer lecture courses which the student found available would be those in which the instruction is more advanced--the "university" courses properly speaking; and his examinations in these would be a criterion, such as Oxford is very much in need of, for correcting the evidence of the honor examination. Furthermore, in connection with one or more of these courses it would be easy for the student to prepare an honor thesis studied from the original sources under the constant advice of a university professor. Such an arrangement might be made to combine in any desired proportion the merits of the English honor schools with the merits of advanced instruction in America. With the introduction of the tutor, the American hall would be the complete counterpart of the mediaeval hall of the golden age, and would solve the educational as well as the social and administrative problem.

As to the details of the new system, experience would be the final teacher; but for a first experiment, the English arrangement is in its main outline suggestive. An American pa.s.s degree might be taken by electing, as all students now elect, a certain number of courses at random. For the increasing number of those who can afford only three years' study, a pa.s.s degree would probably prove of the greatest advantage. It was by making this sharp distinction between the pa.s.s degree and the honor degree that the English universities long ago solved the question, much agitated still in America, of the three years' course. For the honor men[6] two general examinations would probably suffice. For his second year honor examination (the English "Moderations") a student might select from three or four general groups. This examination would necessarily offer precisely that opportunity for mental culture the lack of which Dean Briggs laments as the worst feature of the elective system as at present conducted.

Furthermore, it would be easy to arrange the second year honor groups so as to include only such subjects as are serviceable both for the purposes of a general education and to lead up to the subjects the student is likely to elect for final honors. For the final honor examination the student might choose from a dozen or more honor groups, in any one of which he would receive scientific culture of the most advanced type, while at the same time, by means of private reading under his tutor, he might fill in very pleasantly the outlines of his subject. It is probable that such a system would even facilitate the efforts of those who are endeavoring to transplant German standards. According to Professor Munsterberg, the student who specializes in the German university is a good two years or more in advance of the American freshman. The spirit of German instruction would thus require that the period of general culture be extended at least to the middle of the undergraduate course.

Some such reorganization of our methods of teaching and examining, and I fear only this, would enable an undergraduate to choose what he wants and to pursue it with a fair chance of success. It would make the elective system elective.