The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866

The College once started and got under way, the fathers of the Province assumed a vigilant oversight of its orthodoxy, but discharged with a lax and grudging service the responsibility of its maintenance. They ejected the first President, the protomartyr of American learning, the man who sacrificed more to the College than any one individual in the whole course of its history, on account of certain scruples about infant baptism, of which, in the language of the time, "it was not hard to discover that they came from the Evil One," and for which poor Dunster was indicted by the grand-jury, sentenced to a public admonition, and laid under bonds for good behavior.

They starved the second President for eighteen years on a salary payable in Indian corn; and in answer to his earnest prayer for relief, alleging instant necessity, the sacrifice of personal property, and the custom of English universities, a committee of the General Court reported that "they conceive the country to have done honorably toward the petitioner, and that his parity with English colleges is not pertinent."

The third President, by their connivance and co-operation, was sacrificed to the machinations of the students, egged on, it is thought, by members of the Corporation, and died, "as was said, with a broken heart."

Meanwhile, through neglect of the Province to provide for its support, the material fortunes of the College, in the course of thirty years, had fallen into such decay that extinction was inevitable, had not the people of another Colony come to the rescue. The town of Portsmouth, in New Hampshire, hearing, says their address, "the loud groans of the sinking College,… and hoping that their example might provoke … the General Court vigorously to act for the diverting of the omen of calamity which its destruction would be to New England," pledged themselves to an annual contribution of sixty pounds for seven years. This act of chivalrous generosity fairly shamed our lagging Commonwealth into measures for the resuscitation of an institution especially committed to its care.

The most remarkable feature of this business is that the Province all this while was drawing, not only moral support, but pecuniary aid, from the College. "It is manifest," says Quincy,1 "that the treasury of the Colony, having been the recipient of many of the early donations to the College, was not a little aided by the convenience which these available funds afforded to its pecuniary necessities. Some of these funds, although received in 1647, were not paid over to the treasury of the College until 1713; then, indeed, the College received an allowance of simple interest for the delay. With regard, therefore, to the annual allowance of £100, whereby," during the first seventy years, "they enabled the President of the College simply to exist, it is proper to observe, that there was not probably one year in the whole seventy in which, by moneys collected from friends of the institution in foreign countries, by donations of its friends in this country, by moneys brought by students from other Colonies, and above all by furnishing the means of education at home, and thus preventing the outgoing of domestic wealth for education abroad, the College did not remunerate the Colony for that poor annual stipend five hundred fold."

The patronage extended to the College after the Revolution was not more cordial and not more adequate than the meagre succors of Colonial legislation. The first Governor of independent Massachusetts, from the height of his impregnable popularity, for more than twelve years defied the repeated attempts of the Corporation, backed by the Overseers, to obtain the balance of his account as former Treasurer of the College, and died its debtor in a sum exceeding a thousand pounds. The debt was finally paid by his heirs, but not without a loss of some hundreds of dollars to the College.

At the commencement of hostilities between the Colonies and the mother country, the Revolutionary authorities had taken possession of these grounds. Reversing the old order, "Cedant arma togæ," they drove out the togæ and brought in the arms. The books went one way, the boys another,—the books to Andover, the boys to Concord. The dawn of American liberty was not an "Aurora musis amica." The Muse of History alone remained with Brigadier Putnam and General Ward. The College was turned into a camp,—a measure abundantly justified by public necessity, but causing much damage to the buildings occupied as barracks by the Continentals. This damage was nominally allowed by the General Court, but was reckoned in the currency of that day, whereby the College received but a quarter of the cost.

In 1786, the State saw fit to discontinue the small pittance which till then had been annually granted toward the support of the President; and from that time to this, with the exception of the proceeds of a bank-tax, granted for ten years in 1814, and the recent large appropriation from the School Fund for the use of the Museum of Natural History, the College has received no substantial aid from the State. The State has, during the last ten years, expended two millions of dollars in a vain attempt to bore a hole through one of her hills: in the whole two hundred and thirty years of our academic history she has not expended a quarter of that sum in filling up this hole in her educational system.

I intend no disrespect to the noble Commonwealth of which no native can be insensible to the glory of his birthright. No State has done more for popular education than the State of Massachusetts. But for reasons satisfactory, no doubt, to themselves, her successive legislators have not seen fit to extend to her colleges the fostering care bestowed on her schools. And certainly, if one or the other must be neglected, we shall all agree in saying, Let the schools be cherished, and let the colleges take care of themselves. Let due provision be made for popular instruction in the rudiments of knowledge, which are also rudiments of good citizenship; let every citizen be taxed for that prime exigency, and let literature and science find patrons where they can. Literature and science will find patrons, and here in Massachusetts have always found them. If the legislators of the State have been sparing of their benefactions, the wealthy sons of the State have been prodigal of theirs. In no country has the private patronage of science been more liberal and prompt than in Massachusetts. Seldom, in the history of science, has there been a nobler instance of that patronage than this University is now experiencing, in the mission of one of her professors on an enterprise of scientific exploration, started and maintained by a private citizen of Boston. When our Agassiz shall return to us reinforced with the lore of the Andes, and replenished with the spoils of the Amazon,—tot millia squamigeræ gentis,—the discoveries he shall add to science, and the treasures he shall add to his Museum, whilst they splendidly illustrate his own qualifications for such a mission, will forever attest the liberality of a son of Massachusetts.

The rich men of the State have not been wanting to literature and science. They have not been wanting to this University. Let their names be held in everlasting remembrance. When the Memorial Hall, which your committee have in charge, shall stand complete, let its mural records present, together with the names of those who have deserved well of the country by their patriotism, the names of those who have deserved well of the College by their benefactions. Let these fautors of science, the heroes of peace, have their place side by side with the heroes of war.

Individuals have done their part, but slow is the growth of institutions which depend on individual charity for their support. As an illustration of what may be done by public patronage, when States are in earnest with their universities, and as strangely contrasting the sluggish fortunes of our own Alma, look at the State University of Michigan. Here is an institution but twenty-five years old, already numbering thirty-two professors and over twelve hundred students, having public buildings equal in extent to those which two centuries have given to Cambridge, and all the apparatus of a well-constituted, thoroughly furnished university. All this within twenty-five years! The State itself which has generated this wonderful growth had no place in the Union until after Harvard had celebrated her two hundredth birthday. In twenty-five years, in a country five hundred miles from the seaboard,—a country which fifty years ago was known only to the fur trade,—a University has sprung up, to which students flock from all parts of the land, and which offers to thousands, free of expense, the best education this continent affords. Such is the difference between public and private patronage, between individual effort and the action of a State.

A proof of the broad intent and œcumenical consciousness of this infant College appears in the fact that its Medical Department, which alone numbers ten professors and five hundred students, allows the option of one of four languages in the thesis required for the medical degree. It is the only seminary in the country whose liberal scope and cosmopolitan outlook satisfy the idea of a great university. Compared with this, our other colleges are all provincial; and unless the State of Massachusetts shall see fit to adopt us, and to foster our interest with something of the zeal and liberality which the State of Michigan bestows on her academic masterpiece, Harvard cannot hope to compete with this precocious child of the West.

Meanwhile, Alumni, the State has devolved upon us, as electors of the Board of Overseers, an important trust. This trust conveys no right of immediate jurisdiction, but it may become the channel of an influence which shall make itself felt in the conduct of this University. It invites us to take counsel concerning her wants and her weal. I therefore pursue the theme which this crisis in our history suggests.

Of existing universities the greater part are the product of an age whose intellectual fashion differed as widely from the present as it did from that of Greek and Roman antiquity. Our own must be reckoned with that majority, dating, as it does, from a period antecedent, not only to all other American colleges, but to some of the most eminent of other lands. Half of the better known and most influential of German universities are of later origin than ours. The University of Göttingen, once the most flourishing in Germany, is younger than Harvard by a hundred years. Halle is younger, and Erlangen, and Munich with its vast library, and Bonn, and Berlin, by nearly two hundred years.

When this College was founded, two of the main forces of the intellectual world of our time had scarcely come into play,—modern literature and modern science. Science knew nothing as yet of chemistry, nothing of electricity, of geology, scarce anything of botany. In astronomy, the Copernican system was just struggling into notice, and far from being universally received. Lord Bacon, I think, was the latest author of note in the library bequeathed by John Harvard; and Lord Bacon rejected the Copernican system. English literature had had its great Elizabethan age; but little of the genius of that literature had penetrated the Puritan mind. It is doubtful if a copy of Shakespeare had found its way to these shores in 1636. Milton's star was just climbing its native horizon, invisible as yet to the Western world.

The College was founded for the special and avowed purpose of training young men for the service of the Church. All its studies were arranged with reference to that object: endless expositions of Scripture, catechetical divinity, "commonplacing" of sermons,—already, one fancies, sufficiently commonplace,—Chaldee, Syriac, Hebrew without points, and other Semitic exasperations. Latin, as the language of theology, was indispensable, and within certain limits was practically better understood, perhaps, in Cambridge of the seventeenth century, than in Cambridge of the nineteenth. It was the language of official intercourse. Indeed, the use of the English was forbidden to the students within the College walls. Scholares vernacula lingua intra Collegii limites nullo prætextu utuntor, was the law,—a law which Cotton Mather complains was so neglected in his day "as to render our scholars very unfit for a conversation with strangers." But the purpose for which chiefly the study of Latin is now pursued—acquaintance with the Roman classics—was no recognized object of Puritan learning. Cicero appears to have been for a long time the only classic of whom the students were supposed to have any knowledge. The reading of Virgil was a daring innovation of the eighteenth century. The only Greek required was that of the New Testament and the Greek Catechism. The whole rich domain of ancient Greek literature, from Homer to Theokritos, was as much an unexplored territory as the Baghavad-Gita or the Mababharata. Logic and metaphysic and scholastic disputations occupied a prominent place. As late as 1726, the books most conspicuous in Tutor Flynt's official report of the College exercises, next to Cicero and Virgil, are such as convey to the modern scholar no idea but that of intense obsoleteness,—Ramus's Definitions, Burgersdicius's Logic, Heereboord's Meletemata; and for Seniors, on Saturday, Ames's Medulla. This is such a curriculum as Mephistopheles, in his character of Magister, might have recommended in irony to the student who sought his counsel.

With the multiplication of religious sects, with the progress of secular culture, with the mental emancipation which followed the great convulsions of the eighteenth century, the maintenance of the ecclesiastical type originally impressed on the College ceased to be practicable,—ceased to be desirable. The preparation of young men for the service of the Church is still a recognized part of the general scheme of University education, but is only one in the multiplicity of objects which that scheme embraces, and can never again have the prominence once assigned to it. This secularization, however it might seem to compromise the design of the founders of the College, was inevitable,—a wise and needful concession to the exigencies of the altered time. Nor is there, in a larger view, any real contravention here of the purpose of the founders. The secularization of the College is no violation of its motto, "Christo et Ecclesiæ." For, as I interpret those sacred ideas, the cause of Christ and the Church is advanced by whatever liberalizes and enriches and enlarges the mind. All study, scientifically pursued, is at bottom a study of theology; for all scientific study is the study of Law; and "of Law nothing less can be acknowledged than that her seat is in the bosom of God."

But something more than secularization of the course of study is required to satisfy the idea of a university. What is a university? Dr. Newman answers this question with the ancient designation of a Studium Generale,—a school of universal learning. "Such a university," he says, "is in its essence a place for the communication and circulation of thought by means of personal intercourse over a wide tract of country."2 Accepting this definition, can we say that Harvard College, as at present constituted, is a University? Must we not rather describe it as a place where boys are made to recite lessons from text-books, and to write compulsory exercises, and are marked according to their proficiency and fidelity in these performances, with a view to a somewhat protracted exhibition of themselves at the close of their college course, which, according to a pleasant academic fiction, is termed their "Commencement"? This description applies only, it is true, to what is called the Undergraduate Department. But that department stands for the College, constitutes the College, in the public estimation. The professional schools which have gathered about it are scarcely regarded as a part of the College. They are incidental appendages, of which, indeed, one has its seat in another city. The College proper is simply a more advanced school for boys, not differing essentially in principle and theory from the public schools in all our towns. In this, as in those, the principle is coercion. Hold your subject fast with one hand, and pour knowledge into him with the other. The professors are task-masters and police-officers, the President the chief of the College police.

Now, considering the great advance of our higher town schools, which carry their pupils as far as the College carried them fifty years ago, and which might, if necessary, have classes still more advanced of such as are destined for the university, I venture to suggest that the time has come when this whole system of coercion might, with safety and profit, be done away. Abolish, I would say, your whole system of marks, and college rank, and compulsory tasks. I anticipate an objection drawn from the real or supposed danger of abandoning to their own devices and optional employment boys of the average age of college students. In answer, I say, advance that average by fixing a limit of admissible age. Advance the qualifications for admission; make them equal to the studies of the Freshman year, and reduce the college career from four years to three; or else make the Freshman year a year of probation, and its closing examination the condition of full matriculation. Only give the young men, when once a sufficient foundation has been laid, and the rudiments acquired, the freedom of a true University,—freedom to select their own studies and their own teachers from such material, and such personnel, as the place supplies. It is to be expected that a portion will abuse this liberty, and waste their years. They do it at their peril. At the peril, among other disadvantages, of losing their degree, which should be conditioned on satisfactory proof that the student has not wholly misspent his time.

An indispensable condition of intellectual growth is liberty. That liberty the present system denies. More and more it is straitened by imposed tasks. And this I conceive to be the reason why, with increased requirements, the College turns out a decreasing proportion of first-class men. If the theory of college rank were correct, the highest marks should indicate the men who are to be hereafter most conspicuous, and leaders in the various walks of life. This is not the case,—not so much so now as in former years. Of the present chief lights of American literature and science, how many, if graduates of Harvard, took the first honors of the University here? Or, to put the question in another form, Of those who took the first honors at Harvard, within the last thirty years, how many are now conspicuous among the great lights of American literature and science?

Carlyle, in his recent talk to the students at Edinburgh, remarks that, "since the time of Bentley, you cannot name anybody that has gained a great name for scholarship among the English, or constituted a point of revolution in the pursuits of men, in that way." The reason perhaps is, that the system of the English universities, though allowing greater liberty than ours, is still a struggle for college honors, in which renown, not learning for the sake of learning, is the aim. The seeming proficiency achieved through the influence of such motives—knowledge acquired for the nonce, not assimilated—is often delusive, and is apt to vanish when the stimulus is withdrawn. The students themselves have recorded their judgment of the value of this sort of learning in the word "cramming," a phrase which originated in one of the English universities.

The rudiments of knowledge may be instilled by compulsory tasks; but to form the scholar, to really educate the man, there should intervene between the years of compulsory study and the active duties of life a season of comparative leisure. By leisure I mean, not cessation of activity, but self-determined activity,—command of one's time for voluntary study.

There are two things which unless a university can give, it fails of its legitimate end. One is opportunity, the other inspiration. But opportunity is marred, not made, and inspiration quenched, not kindled, by coercion. Few, I suspect, in recent years, have had the love of knowledge awakened by their college life at Harvard,—more often quenched by the rivalries and penalties with which learning here is associated. Give the student, first of all, opportunity; place before him the best apparatus of instruction; tempt him with the best of teachers and books; lead him to the fountains of intellectual life. His use of those fountains must depend on himself. There is a homely proverb touching the impossibility of compelling a horse to drink, which applies to human animals and intellectual draughts as well. The student has been defined by a German pedagogue as an animal that cannot be forced, but must be persuaded. If, beside opportunity, the college can furnish also the inspiration which shall make opportunity precious and fruitful, its work is accomplished. The college that fulfils these two conditions—opportunity and inspiration—will be a success, will draw to itself the frequency of youth, the patronage of wealth, the consensus of all the good. Such a university, and no other, will be a power in the land.

Nothing so fatal to inspiration as excessive legislation. It creates two parties, the governors and the governed, with efforts and interests mutually opposed; the governors seeking to establish an artificial order, the governed bent on maintaining their natural liberty. I need not ask you, Alumni, if these two parties exist at Cambridge. They have always existed within the memory of "the oldest graduate."

Professors should not be responsible for the manners of students, beyond the legitimate operation of their personal influence. Academic jurisdiction should have no criminal code, should inflict no penalty but that of expulsion, and that only in the way of self-defence against positively noxious and dangerous members. Let the civil law take care of civil offences. The American citizen should early learn to govern himself, and to re-enact the civil law by free consent. Let easy and familiar relations be established between teachers and taught, and personal influence will do more for the maintenance of order than the most elaborate code. Experience has shown that great reliance may be placed on the sense of honor in young men, when properly appealed to and fairly brought into play. Raumer, in his "History of German Universities," testifies that the Burschenschaften abolished there the last vestige of that system of hazing practised on new-comers, which seems to be an indigenous weed of the college soil. It infested the ancient universities of Athens, Berytus, Carthage,3 as well as the mediæval and the modern. Our ancestors provided a natural outlet for it when they ordained that the Freshmen should be subject to the Seniors, should take off their hats in their presence, and run of their errands. This system, under the name of "Pennalism," had developed, in the German universities, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a degree of oppression and tyrannous abuse of the new-comer unknown to American colleges, and altogether incredible were it not sufficiently vouched by contemporary writers, and by the acts of the various governments which labored to suppress it. A certain German worthy writes to his son, who is about to enter the university: "You think, perhaps, that in the universities they sup pure wisdom by spoonfuls,… but when you are arrived there, you will find that you must be made a fool of for the first year.... Consent to be a fool for this one year; let yourself be plagued and abused; and when an old veteran steps up to you and tweaks your nose, let it not appear singular; endure it, harden yourself to it. Olim meminisse juvabit."4 The universities legislated against this barbarism; all the governments of Germany conspired to crush it; but in spite of all their efforts, which were only partially successful, traces of it still lingered in the early years of this century. It was not completely abolished until, in 1818, there was formed at Jena by delegates from fourteen universities a voluntary association of students on a moral basis, known as "The General German Burschenschaft," the first principle in whose constitution was, "Unity, freedom, and equality of all students among themselves,—equality of all rights and duties,"—and whose second principle was "Christian German education of every mental and bodily faculty for the service of the Fatherland." This, according to Raumer, was the end of Pennalism in Germany. What the governments, with their stringent enactments and formidable penalties, failed to accomplish, was accomplished at last by a voluntary association of students, organizing that sense of honor which, in youth and societies of youth, if rightly touched, is never appealed to in vain.