Now it seems to me that in the process of striving to raise our standards we are a little apt to slavishly copy what other people are doing without clearly recognizing why we are copying them and what we are striving to attain. One college opens a new department in some sphere of activity; another thinks it is bound to do the same thing, although the local conditions may be totally different. If one school of engineering establishes a new course another is sure to follow with a similar course. We need a measuring rod to determine whether our level is above or below our competitors. How are we to reach a real standard of efficiency? How are we to know whether our institution is better or worse than some other institution? Of course various standards have been suggested. The great objection to most of them is that they are too mechanical. The best part of any educational institution is a spiritual thing and a spiritual thing must be spiritually discerned.
Now one of the institutions in this country which is doing its best to carry out a leveling process and trying to raise the institutions of the country is the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Its course is so brief that none here can have missed the opportunity of following it. Founded only a few years ago by Mr. Carnegie for the avowed purpose of pensioning professors who had long served their country as teachers and investigators, it is being put by those who have managed it to a quite different purpose and that purpose is to standardize our institutions.
I am not going to discuss what the foundation has done or is doing, but I should like to refer to a report, the advance sheets of which the Carnegie Foundation has just issued, under the title "A Comparison of Academic and Business Efficiency." The fundamental idea that suggested the drawing up of the report is one that must attract us all. It was to obtain a report on the efficiency of different educational institutions looked at from the view-point of a business man. To this end the foundation employed the services of an accomplished engineer, Mr. Cooke, and asked him to report on a number of educational institutions in this country. He was instructed to employ the same methods in his investigation that he would if he were reporting on the efficiency of a cotton mill or an automobile factory. To simplify the problem he was to confine his attention to eight institutions; to further simplify it he was to deal with a single department in each of these instituions; that department happened to be the department of physics. The report is a lengthy one—those of you who are interested will doubtless read it for yourselves—but I may just sketch with extreme brevity the fundamental guiding principle.
Mr. Cooke begins with the truism that if you are to test the efficiency of a factory from a business point of view you want to know the cost of the working of the machinery. He therefore proceeds to
