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The city, not in its corporate capacity, but as a spiritual entity, will be the main support of the university, and the university in turn will be the chief servant of the city's higher life. True citizens will vie with each other in strengthening the university for scholarship and for service. In doing so they can say, with Horace, that they have builded themselves monuments more lasting than bronze and loftier than the pyramids reared by kings, monuments which neither flood nor storm nor the long flight of years can overturn or destroy. Sir John de Balliol, doing a penance fixed by the Abbot of Durham; Walter de Merton, making over his manor house and estates to secure to others the advantages which he had not himself enjoyed; John Harvard, leaving half his property and his library to the infant college by the Charles, and Elihu Yale, giving money and his books to the collegiate school in New Haven, have written their names on the roll of the immortals and have conferred untold benefits upon the human race. Who were their wealthy, powerful, and highborn contemporaries? Where are they in the grateful esteem of the generations that have come after them? What service have they made possible? What now avails their wealth, their power, their high birth? Balliol, Merton, Harvard, Yale, are names known wherever the English language is spoken and beyond. They signify high purpose, zeal for learning, opposition to philistinism and ignorance. They are closely interwoven with the social, the religious, the political, the literary history of our race. Where else are there monuments such as theirs?

Scholarship and service are the true university's ideal. The university of to-day is not the "home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties." It keeps step with the march of progress, widens its sympathies with growing knowledge, and among a democratic people seeks only to instruct, to uplift, and to serve, in order that the cause of religion and learning, and of human freedom and opportunity, may be continually advanced from century to century and from age to age.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER

II

SHALL THE STATE RESTRICT THE USE OF THE TERMS COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY?1

There is no other one word which goes so far to indicate the history and to express the purposes of a free state as the word education. There may be a wide difference between a nation and a state. One may grow naturally enough out of barbarian life without intellectual or moral self-activity, but the other must be created thru the affirmative action of the people, by the deliberate grant of the common power, thru conventions marked by intelligence and moving in the light of world progress. A state is the product of a very considerable intellectual and moral advance; its purpose is not mere security from peril, but the assurance of the just rights and the free opportunities of each individual and of the healthful onward march of the whole mass.

Then, on the face of things, it would seem obvious enough that a state may do even more; that it is bound to do anything which it thinks will promote the purposes for which it exists. In all bodies of people there are some who have to be controlled, restrained, and punished. Standards must differ widely in different peoples. Where the ideals are the highest the policies must be the most aggressive. It seems difficult to say why a state, which exists for moral right and for mental progress, is not bound to stop any wrongful or inconsiderate action which deceives its people and thwarts its purposes, quite as much as a tribe or a nation, which exists for security alone, is bound to stop crimes against person and property.

Colleges and universities are the instruments of free states. They are complicated and costly instruments. Their faculties are constituted of specialists of liberal training and large ex

An address delivered before the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, at Cleveland, O., March 29, 1902.

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perience; their equipments are extensive and expensive; their history, their traditions, and the work of their graduates give them character and renown. They are ordinarily continuing and permanent institutions. Their commendations are of recognized value. The very name college or university conveys meanings which are significant of importance and well understood among intelligent people. And this is the very reason why they have been so much employed by miscellaneous institutions which exist for commercial gain alone. The question is whether such unwarranted use should be prohibited.

Probably this question could not arise in governments which are strongly centralized, for no one would think of employing these names except by the express approval and leave of those governments. Is the free appropriation of sacred things to commercial pursuits one of the privileges which specially inhere in a democracy?

So far as I know, there has been but one attempt by an American legislature to limit the use of the terms college or university. That attempt is, therefore, noteworthy. In the State of New York the Legislature of 1892 passed a new university law, and carefully tucked away in the inner recesses of a statute drafted by Melvil Dewey,-an educational artist who never hesitated at an undertaking because its character was unique or its propositions were heroic, was this rather drastic and aggressive section:

33 Prohibitions. No individual, association or corporation not holding university or college degree-conferring powers by special charter from the legislature of this state or from the regents, shall confer any degrees, nor after January 1, 1893, shall transact business under, or in any way assume the name university or college, till it shall have received from the regents under their seal written permission to use such name, and no such permission shall be granted by the regents, except on favorable report after personal inspection of the institution by an officer of the University. No person shall buy, sell or fraudulently or illegally make or alter, give, issue or obtain any diploma, certificate, or other instrument purporting to confer any literary, scientific, professional or other degree, or to constitute any license, or to certify to the completion in whole or in part of any course of study in any university, college, academy or other educational institution. Nor shall any person with intent to deceive, falsely represent himself to have received any such degree or credential. Counterfeiting or falsely or without authority making or altering in a material respect any such cre

dential issued under seal shall be a felony, and any other violation of this section shall be a misdemeanor; and any person who aids or abets another, or advertises or offers himself to violate the provisions of this section, shall be liable to the same penalties.

Altho, apparently, there has been no other attempt to restrict the use of the terms college and university there has been much discussion, and some little progress, toward the state control of institutions which assume to confer scholastic degrees. In several other States there have been movements against the conferring of degrees except under the authorization of the state, and attempts to fix the minimum limit of endowment, faculty, entrance requirements, and course of study precedent to the grant of authority. But it must be said that legislation in this direction has not so far met with ready or general favor. It has been opposed by interests which either feared its effect upon themselves, or misapprehended its purpose, and were able to make legislators conclude too quickly that it was aristocratic in its tendency and a needless limitation upon democratic freedom.

As between the two propositions that the degree-conferring power must come from and be regulated by the state, and that the use of terms by which institutions are designated may be restricted by the state, there is probably no difference in principle, and if they are to be enacted into law elsewhere they may very well go together, as they do in the New York statute.

As I understand it, this kind of legislation is intended to remedy two evils which have resulted from our growth in population and in wealth and are the offspring of the educational advance and of rampant commercialism. One is the naked fraud, but poorly disguised, of selling spurious degrees for cash; the other deludes the young or the inexperienced by pretending to do what it is incapable of doing. Men who are responsible for the first are moral criminals, and statutes should make them legal criminals and punish them for it. The degrees of culpability for the second are endless, and the shades of responsibility are infinite. Men sometimes deceive themselves. Some do not know, and some do not care. Some mean well and do ill. They do not see the line between genuine

ness and pretense, between the real and the spurious. It is said that this misleads the crowd; that it discredits the worthy; that society must protect its members and promote the common welfare by determining by whom and how works of public interest shall be carried on, and by limiting terms of wellsettled interpretation to the use intended by the very common sentiment.

There are concerns, some of them incorporated under the forms of law, which have no building, no campus, and no teaching staff, and yet which are assuming to confer literary, scientific, and professional degrees for cash; and their transactions are not few in number. They need not take our time; there is no room for a question about them, for the fraudulent intent is clear, and society is bound to outlaw and to punish educational as other frauds.

But what should the state do as to institutions with more or less genuineness of purpose, and more or less ignorance, which are pretending the impossible as a means of livelihood? There are institutions advertising themselves as colleges and universities and assuming to confer degrees, which lack the means to do the work that any intelligent community can accept as the foundation for the academic degrees. What about them? There are concerns with signs which are absurd and amusing. Hard by the deep shadow of one of the most prominent universities of the country I saw recently the glaring insignia which proclaimed two institutions of learning within. taught blacksmiths and was a "Blacksmithing university," and the other trained barbers and was a " Shaving college." What about such as these and others of the same species, but with less unconscious humor about them?

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If it is difficult to make the crowd see the wrong which these things work to some and the demoralization which they bring upon the solid educational work of the country, it will not be necessary to urge that phase of the subject here. We turn at once to the discussion of what course should be taken, and ask whether these matters come within the scope of the lawful action of a democratic state, and if so what is expedient in the premises.

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