Wilson.—“Compendium of United States and Contemporary History.” Boston, D. C. Heath & Co. 40 cents.
An Historical Laboratory[1]
BY PROFESSOR WILLIAM MacDONALD, BROWN UNIVERSITY.
It would seem to be a truism that the facilities which are to be regarded as indispensable to the proper study of a subject, and which ought, therefore, to be provided as a matter of course, should, like the methods of teaching, be determined by the nature of the subject, or, in other words, by the kind of material with which it has to deal; but the disparity in the equipment of the various departments of study and research commonly to be observed in even the best and richest American colleges and universities seems to indicate that, so far at least as the so-called “humanities” are concerned, little provision of appliances, save modest shelter from the weather and seats enough for the class, is generally thought absolutely necessary.
No one who knows at close range the “plant” of a typical American university will be at a loss for striking and even painful illustrations of the unequal distribution of material equipment. Broadly speaking, the departments of physical and natural science and engineering do not seriously lack the primary facilities which the nature of their work demands. Upon these departments, in the last twenty years, the wealth of the State and of individuals has been poured out like water, while more than one institution, spurred by a demand for “practicality” and “efficiency,” has gone to the length of drawing upon its capital to supply what was wanting. Our institutions of learning abound in well-contrived laboratory buildings for physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering, containing not only lecture rooms for the various instructors and laboratories for students elementary and advanced, but also private laboratories and offices for the professors, exhibition and photographic rooms, libraries, lockers, and other special apartments. The rooms themselves are commonly well supplied with apparatus and material, distributed and apportioned according to the number of students and investigators, and increased by regular appropriation, and as a matter of course, as the number of users grows. There is usually a special janitor or caretaker for the building, and often one or more skilled persons regularly employed in making or repairing apparatus, preparing or caring for specimens or stock, and the like. It has long been a matter of common observation that the cost of maintaining the scientific departments of a university, or even of a small college, is out of all proportion to the cost of the other departments of instruction, that it is met by governing boards with comparative readiness, and that it is often afforded, it must bluntly be said, at the cost of deplorable and systematic niggardliness in other directions. Other things being equal, no scientist to-day would consider for a moment a call to an institution which could not afford him all of these things, nor would the scientific world reckon the instruction of an institution not so equipped as worth while.
When, however, we turn to those other departments of study still graciously referred to as the “humanities,” departments which older graduates and commencement orators still tell us embrace the subjects of the deepest human interest, the disparity in material equipment is commonly so great as to be almost ludicrous. Who, of the thousands that yearly are driven or besought to drink deep at the wells of literature, or history, or philosophy, in our American colleges or universities, can fail to recall the desolate class-rooms, their bare and dingy walls, relieved at the most by a few old maps, or a faded photograph or two in heavy wooden frames, the floors swept once a week and washed once a term, the hand-carved chairs and benches, the chalk-dusted platform and desk, and the foul air, which, in the majority of such institutions, enshrine the daily life of academic culture? Where the teacher of science is freely accorded a lecture room for his department alone, the teacher of language, history, or economics must, as a rule, share his quarters, poor as they are, with those of his colleagues whose principal apparatus is books, and must vacate his room promptly to make way for another class at the next hour. Many a high school does better for its teachers than this; indeed, the best of our modern high schools, bearing in mind the grade of their work, offer almost infinitely superior facilities for work in these departments than does the average college or university.
Widespread and depressing as this condition is, in general, in all of the departments named, the particular illustration which I wish to use at this time is that afforded by history and the related subjects of political and social science and political economy. Applying the test that the equipment of a department should be determined by the nature of the material with which the department deals, it is obvious that we have here a subject in which printed matter of a variety of forms, manuscripts, maps and charts, pictures and casts, and actual historical objects or reproductions, form the material basis for the student’s work. Where the chemist uses books and apparatus, the historical student uses books and other material as apparatus. For the modern study of history, even of the elementary sort, one must be enabled to examine not only single books, such as may be got from a library and perused at leisure in one’s home, but also extended sets and collections of books and papers, and this under conditions which will admit of comparison and note-taking and the use of the volumes in the actual work of the class-room. For the preparation of maps and charts, facilities in the way of tables and instruments are required entirely beyond what the student can fairly be expected to have in his own room; while especially is there need of abundant space for the permanent display of wall-maps, charts, pictures, and illustrative material, like coins, casts, and models, if the active use of such aids is to be secured.
Acquaintance with a considerable number of colleges and universities, large and small, in this country fails to disclose any appreciable number in which the material equipment of the historical department has passed much beyond the stage of crude beginnings. With exceptions so few as almost to be counted on the fingers, the most generous provision, always excepting the general library of the institution, goes no further than the use, prevailingly in conjunction with other unrelated departments, of one or more lecture-rooms; a “seminary room,” furnished with a table and some chairs, and housing such odds and ends of books as the industry of the instructors or the intermittent generosity of friends has got together, reënforced by loans from the main library; and possibly an office frequently shared by all the members of the department, where students may come for consultation. If, as seems rarely to be the case, the department has any adequate supply of maps, they have often to be kept in some out-of-the-way place, and carried about from room to room as needed; and almost never are there tables and instruments for the drawing of maps and charts. Meagre as is such equipment, some of our leading institutions do not have even this. If it be true, as it seems to be, that student interest, particularly among men, in literature, history, and philosophy, has declined markedly in recent years, may not something of the cause be found, not in the inherently greater attractiveness of mixing chemicals or dissecting cats and birds, but in the utter poverty and bareness of the quarters in which students of the humanities are commonly asked to do their work? If professors of history have fallen too much into the habit of lecturing, instead of teaching, may it not be due in part to the failure of the university to give even the ablest of them facilities for doing anything else?