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institution as well as those of an individual may be mixt. To seek the reflex glory of a great name is only natural. It is well known, too, that weak and struggling colleges and universities have yielded to the temptation of granting degrees consciously in return for favors received or anticipated and are likely to do so for many years to come. In conferring honorary degrees, moreover, a university subjects itself to criticism. One unfortunate case of mistaken judgment becomes a troublesome precedent, and the question will be asked that if honors are conferred upon A, why not also upon B? Two presidents in recent reports imply that they would welcome the abandonment of the custom of granting honorary degrees if the leading institutions would agree to discontinue it.

There is, however, a good deal to be said on the other side. Thru a well-considered and high-minded policy in granting honorary degrees, universities may set standards in a concrete way by exalting ideals of personality and conduct. The practise also stimulates devotion to research, scholarship and public life. Such degrees, discriminatingly conferred may be counted among the resources of our society for rewarding well doing. It is true also that the conferring of degrees at commencement upon worthy recipients gives to the occasion a distinction and prestige which have their effect upon the graduates, the alumni and the whole community. There is a value, too, in the granting of honorary degrees as a test not only of an institution's ideals, but of its character and courage.

There are hardly sufficient grounds for a crusade against the granting of honorary degrees. If the members of the Association were to abandon the practise very likely many other colleges and universities would follow their example. There would doubtless, however, be a good deal of opposition to such a self-denying ordinance among the graduates, faculties, and trustees of the older, if not of all the institutions which now confer such degrees, and it is likely that the custom will be continued.

The author of the paper concluded that it would doubt

less be a wise policy to limit the number of honorary degrees which may be granted in any one year, and in such case the limit should lean toward austerity.

It is doubtful whether a university can afford to grant honoris causa degrees which it or other reputable institutions also confer upon examination. If this principle is sound, the M.A., the M.S., and the M.D. should be withdrawn from the list of honorary degrees. It is difficult to discover any justification whatever for an honorary B.A. or B.S. It would follow from such a principle that whenever a degree is put upon an examination basis, it will no longer be employed as an honorary distinction.

Another logical limitation would confine an institution to the granting of honorary degrees in those fields in which it possesses an organized faculty. The absurdity of permitting a college which has no theological faculty to grant the degree of D.D. is palpable. A good deal of the scandal which still clings to this degree would be removed if this rule were generally recognized and enforced by enlightened opinion.

The most important safe-guard, however, is to be found in placing fully and without reservation the responsibility for recommending candidates for the honorary degree, as well as all others, upon the faculties. Their decisions in the long run would protect their universities, redound to the benefit of the community, and deepen their own sense of institutional loyalty.

The second session of the Conference was devoted to a consideration in two papers of the publication activities of American universities. Mr. Day's paper on The function and organization of university presses considered in detail the uses of a press as a university function and the various ways in which the universities of the country have met the problem of organization in actual practise.

It is hardly necessary to defend the usefulness of a university press as a direct means of publication of the work of the particular institution concerned as it is represented by the literary or scientific productions of its scholars.

The university press conserves, in this way, to the university its own especial products of scholarship and learning, and focuses them in a way otherwise impossible as a justification of the claims of the institution to be not only a teacher of its own immediate clientage, but also a contributor to the knowledge of the world. It depends, naturally, upon the circumstances of opportunity and organization whether a university press can perform this function well or ill. To carry out the full measure of its usefulness it should be able to make possible the publication of scholarly works that the commercial publisher can not ordinarily undertake on account of the cost of publication and the narrow range of sale. In many cases such works would not find their way into print, at all, to the loss of this particular work to the world and the discouragement of further production on the part of the scholar.

The paper explained in detail the several forms of organization of university presses, which in some cases are directly related to the institution as a department under the general conditions of departmental administration; in others are under university administration, but with an independent budget; in others are independent corporations whose board of direction are university officers. In the conduct of their business as manufacturers of books, some presses have their own printing plant, while others print where it is most desirable to place their particular books. The serious problem of the university press is the problem of marketing its output. It is relatively easy to make a book; it is sometimes extremely difficult to sell it, and particularly when it is the esoteric product of special research that many of these university publications must always be. A constructive recommendation of the author of the paper was the desirability of arranging with the collaboration of all university presses a central selling and publicity place for their publications. The paper on State agencies of university publication, prepared by Professor John C. Merriam of the University of California and presented by Dean Leuschner, traversed the whole field of state publica

tion with the resultant lights and shadows that fall thereby upon the state university.

The discussion on Economy of Time in Education was opened by President Lowell, who referred at the beginning of his remarks to the report of the Committee of the National Council of Education on this subject. Everybody, he asserted, agrees that there is waste all along the educational line; that we begin our professional education too late; and that the amount of time that should be saved is two years. From the report referred to and elsewhere the impression is conveyed that students are to come to college at about the same age as now, that they are to receive the same education, and that they are to get out two years sooner. It is probably not absolutely intended to leave out of consideration the elementary and secondary schools and only to take two years out of the college, but certain it is that in every proposition that is made with regard to the saving of time in education it is the college course that suffers to the extent of two years.

The speaker started with the supposition that one year can be saved at the time of entrance to college, and that it should be possible for boys who now enter at eighteen to enter, with the same preparation, at seventeen. In every discussion of time wasted in education it ought also to be assumed that some way may be devised in the schools whereby the boy can proceed with his education with at least an approximation of the speed of which he is capable, and not at the average speed of all. In any improvement that is hereafter made in secondary education some such method should be worked out whereby the brighter boys would be permitted and encouraged to travel at the rate that nature has intended. Again, we have not brought to bear on the students of our colleges, as we ought, the moral influence to take proper advantage of their opportunities.

There are two points particularly to be considered. First, the point that is made in the report of the National Council that we should adopt in this country either the English or the German type of university, but not, as is at

present often the case, the one piled on top of the other. The speaker contended that it is not necessary, however, absolutely to follow either one to the exclusion of the other. It is not at all necessary to assume that, because the university gives professional training, we should exclude from the university the idea, which is the English idea, of a certain amount of general training, and confine the university to purely professional teaching. University work is not, as is so frequently assumed, necessarily purely professional work, either in the English or the German university, and the idea should be abandoned that the university only represents professional study and the college only a general education.

It is impossible in America to draw the line between college and university. Many colleges are doing a large amount of what may be called university work and many universities are doing college work. The speaker protested against making the college something apart from the university, and of consequently reducing the college to a school type and of giving everything above it a purely professional character.

The second point made was that there should be greater diversity in our universities; that the tendency to standardize in age and work above the grade of the secondary schools and even there is a principle false and misleading. For the great mass of men who are going into professional work the combined degree of two years of college work, that is not professional, followed by two years of professional study is doubtless the most desirable arrangement to be had. To tell the lawyers, doctors and engineers that they must all spend four years in college before they can begin their professional work would mean that these professions would not be filled. This is a desirable scheme to follow, but it should, nevertheless, not be set up as a fixt standard for everybody to follow. Boys should get their training in the secondary school at different ages and should then cut off at different ages to learn their professions. The more such a boy can get, however, before he studies his profession the better will he be in his profession afterward.

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