The Spirit of America

by Henry Van Dyke

That is a characteristic modern opinion, coming, mark you, not from an American, but from an Englishman. It reminds me of the advice which an old judge gave to a young friend who had just been raised to the judicial bench. “Never give reasons,” said he, “for your decisions. The decision may often be right, but the reasons will probably be wrong.”

A thoughtful critic would say that the union of “the fine arts and the anvil” was not a sufficient ground for awarding the primacy to a university. Its standing must be measured in its own sphere,—the realm of knowledge and wisdom. It exists for the disinterested pursuit of truth, for the development of the intellectual life, and for the rounded development of character. Its primary aim is not to fit men for any specific industry, but to give them those things which are everywhere essential to intelligent living. Its attention must be fixed not on the work, but on the man. In him, as a person, it must seek to develop four powers—the power to see clearly, the power to imagine vividly, the power to think independently, and the power to will wisely and nobly. This is the university ideal which a conservative critic would maintain against the utilitarian theory. He might admire the University of Wisconsin greatly, but it would be for other reasons than those which the Englishman gave.

“After all,” this conservative would say, “the older American universities are still the most important factors in the higher education of the country. They have the traditions. They set the standard. You cannot understand education in England without going to Oxford and Cambridge, nor in America without going to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia.”

Perhaps the conservative would be right. At all events, I wish that I could help the friendly foreign observer to understand just what these older institutions of learning, and some others like them, have meant and still mean to Americans. They are the monuments of the devotion of our fathers to ideal aims. They are the landmarks of the intellectual life of the young republic. Time has changed them, but it has not removed them. They still define a region within which the making of a reasonable man is the main interest, and truth is sought and served for her own sake.

Originally, these older universities were almost identical in form. They were called colleges and based upon the idea of a uniform four years’ course consisting mainly of Latin, Greek, and mathematics, with an addition of history, philosophy, and natural science in the last two years, and leading to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. This was supposed to be the way to make a reasonable man.

But in the course of time the desire to seek truth in other regions, by other paths, led to a gradual enlargement and finally to an immense expansion of the curriculum. The department of letters was opened to receive English and other modern languages. The department of philosophy branched out into economics and civics and experimental psychology. History took notice of the fact that much has happened since the fall of the Roman Empire. Science threw wide its doors to receive the new methods and discoveries of the nineteenth century. The elective system of study came in like a flood from Germany. The old-fashioned curriculum was submerged and dissolved. The four senior colleges came out as universities and began to differentiate themselves.

Harvard, under the bold leadership of President Eliot, went first and farthest in the development of the elective system. One of its own graduates, Mr. John Corbin, has recently written of it as “a Germanized university.” It offers to its students free choice among a multitude of courses so great that it is said that one man could hardly take them all in two hundred years. There is only one course which every undergraduate is required to take,—English composition in the Freshman year: 551 distinct courses are presented by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In the whole university there are 556 officers of instruction and 4000 students. There is no other institution in America which provides such a rich, varied, and free chance for the individual to develop his intellectual life.

Princeton, so far as the elective system is concerned, represents the other extreme. President McCosh introduced it with Scotch caution and reserve, in 1875. It hardly went beyond the liberalizing of the last two years of study. Other enlargements followed. But at heart Princeton remained conservative. It liked regularity, uniformity, system, more than it liked freedom and variety. In recent years it has rearranged the electives in groups, which compel a certain amount of unity in the main direction of a student’s effort. It has introduced a system of preceptors or tutors who take personal charge of each student in his reading and extra class-room work. The picked men of the classes, who have won prizes, or scholarships, or fellowships, go on with higher university work in the graduate school. The divinity school is academically independent, though closely allied. There are no other professional schools. Thus Princeton is distinctly “a collegiate university,” with a very definite idea of what a liberal education ought to include, and a fixed purpose of developing the individual by leading him through a regulated intellectual discipline.

Yale, the second in age of the American universities, occupies a middle ground, and fills it with immense vigour. Very slow in yielding to the elective system, Yale theoretically adopted it four years ago in its extreme form. But in practice the “Yale Spirit” preserves the unity of each class from entrance to graduation; the “average man” is much more of a controlling factor than he is at Harvard, and the solid body of students in the Department of Arts and Sciences gives tone to the whole university. Yale is typically American in its love of liberty and its faculty of self-organization. It draws its support from a wider range of country than either Harvard or Princeton. It has not been a leader in the production of advanced ideas or educational methods. Originality is not its mark. Efficiency is. No other American university has done more in giving men of light and leading to industrial, professional, and public life in the United States.

Columbia, by its location in the largest of the American cities, and by the direction which its last three presidents have given to its policy, has become much stronger in its professional schools and its advanced graduate work, than in its undergraduate college. Its schools of mines and law and medicine are famous. In its graduate courses it has as many students enrolled as Harvard, Yale, and Michigan put together. It has a library of 450,000 volumes, and endowment for various kinds of special study, including Chinese and journalism.