"When I wrote this last sentence I thought that it was all out of my own head, and I was proud of it; but as I laid down my pen in my satisfaction for a moment's rest, my eye fell upon this passage in the prospectus of a new university—one which is said, in the prospectus, to be not only universal, but cosmopolitan: "When a question arises which divides scholars, like the tariff, the causes and course of the Reformation, money, etc., the student will be referred to the ablest exponents of the opposing sides."
No professor can plead ignorance of the way to enter this new career of usefulness. One can scarcely pick up a college catalogue or a magazine or a newspaper without learning how to make the university universal. One of the simplest plans, with which all are familiar, is to send to men with a reputation for learning a ruled form and a request that each will write, in the proper columns, the price, publisher, and title of the best book on his own subject—mathematics, astronomy, moral science, or whatever it may be—or, if he knows of no such book, that he will write one. An accompanying circular tells how these lists are to be scattered through the innumerable homes of our land, and how diplomas are to be distributed as prizes to those who, after purchasing the books, prepare and submit the most exhaustive permutations of their tables of contents.
Learned men who do not approve this plan are offered a choice from many others: six-week courses in law, medicine, and theology; summer schools for the promotion of science and the liberal arts; questions and answers in the educational column of some journal for the home; or a national university so universal that it shall supply lunches and learning for all out of the public chest, with no doorkeeper to examine passports.
The way to extend the university in this direction is so well understood that I will turn now to another part of our subject, for some may be less familiar with our opportunity to construct a royal road to learning for those who are entitled to use it.
A recent writer on education, who says American universities impose "upon young men in the nineteenth century a curriculum devised by dead-and-gone priests for the young men of the twelfth," calls upon the teachers of America to reconstruct their curriculum on psychological principles. I myself am no psychologist, and while I fail to see how this fact concerns the public, it has recently been pointed out in print, although no one has ever charged me with lack of reverence for the psychologist. In truth, he is to me what the good old family doctor is to many, for I am convinced that it would be hard to name one among all the educational ills that flesh is heir to that he would not be able to throw on the spot, with a
