science of famous men from whom newspaper science derives its inspiration.
While the university on its human side is interested in all that touches the life of to-day, on the scientific side it deals with the eternal verities and cares nothing for those things which are merely local or timely.
The university must conduct research to ends of power. This it has hardly begun to do in America. Half our graduate students are not ready for anything to be called investigation. They are not real students of a real university. The graduate departments of our universities are now engaged almost exclusively in training teachers. That profession may be the noblest—where noble men make it so—but it is only one of many in which success must rest on original investigation. We are proud of our crop of Doctors of Philosophy, dozens or hundreds turned out every year. But most of them are trained only to teach, and we know that half of them are predestined to failure as college teachers. We must broaden our work and widen our sympathies. We must train men in the higher effectiveness in every walk in life, men of business as well as college instructors, statesmen as well as linguists, shipbuilders as well as mathematicians, men of action as well as men of thought. This means a great deal more than annual crops of Doctors of Philosophy to scramble for the few dozen vacant instructorships open year by year.
But with all these discouragements original research is the loftiest function of the university. In its consummate excellence is found the motive for its imitation. There is but one way in which a university can discharge this function. It can not give prizes for research. It can not stimulate it by means of publication, still less by hiring men to come to its walls to pursue it. The whole system of fellowships for advanced students is on trial with most of the evidence against it. The students paid to study are not the ones who do the work. When they are such they would have done the work unpaid. The fellowship system tends to turn science into almsgiving, to make the promising youth feel that the world owes him a living.
All these plans and others have been fairly tried in America. There is but one that succeeds. Only those who do original work will train others to do it. Where the teachers are themselves original investigators devoted to truth and skilful in the search for it,—men that can not be frightened, fatigued or discouraged,—they will have students like themselves. To work under such men, students like-minded will come from the ends of the earth. It is the part of the investigators to make the university as the teachers make the college. There never was a genuine university on any other terms. It is not conceivable that there should ever be one. It is not necessary that all depart-
