Stanford University - Quad Yearbook (Palo Alto, CA)

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JKanforb (Juab 1902 Tile new school can treat its students as men and not as Children. In dealing with undergraduates in college work the methods of the university will always be more effective than the methods of the nursery. The nursery should cease where the university begins, and the university student should not do his work in the child's fear of the rod behind the mirror.” The new university can. in some measure, free itself from the shackles of the examination system. There is room, also, for reform in the matter of entrance requirements. What the university really wants is to have students trained to see and to think ; practical ” life requires the same, and when this demand is really met, the university work and the work of life will each rest on a sound foundation. The new university can at once recognize itself as a servant of the people, not as an organism existing for its own sake, or for the sake of any class or faction. The rest of the discussion is summed up in these words: The new university in America can discard the worn-out part of the educational methods and machinery of past ages, and of other lands, and can address itself directly to the life and work of the people of a great republic, and of the coming twentieth century.” The Stanford of today is no longer a new institution. It has made a record of its own. it has scored successes and failures. By its record it must be judged. This judgment it is not for me to give, but Stanford University may decide whether it has departed from its ideals, and whether those it has discarded are exchanged for those of higher value. Simplicity of mechanism is certainly a trait of the Stanford of today. No professor or student wise enough to act or speak for himself has found any check to his speech or action. No professor or student has l een asked to refrain from any line of investigation or to proclaim any kind of doctrine as the truth. That freedom of s| eech which is the badge of immaturity the University has not encouraged. It is part of its duty to distinguish journalism from scholarship. In no institution do students and teachers come nearer together than at Stanford. That is what the Quadrangle is for. In the field of investigation Stanford has taken its full part. This their lengthening line of publications shows. And these researches are a natural growth. There is no prize to the instructor who can show the greatest output of printed pages. The curriculum of Stanford has been and will continue to be one for each man or woman who comes here. Those who have the minds of men are not treated as children. There is no candy after the medicine and no “rod behind the mirror.” The University freely exercises its self-preserving faculty of letting go those who belong somewhere else. The examination system and the entrance requirements still hamper us more or less as necessary evils That the University belongs to all it can help and that every interest in the community may be helped by it, we think that the experience of Stanford has clearly proved. California is a l etter State to live in than it was ten years ago. Today, the pressure of Higher Kducation is greater to the square mile in California than in anywhere else in the world. Nowhere else is the path from the farmhouse to the college so well trodden. It requires no prophet to forecast the intellectual preeminence of California, and in this the new University, the two new Universities, for the growth of the one means the development of the other, has taken its full part. David Starr Jordan. 12

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AFTER TEN Ten years ago, when Stanford was a glowing possibility, but nothing more. Mr. Walter M. Page, then editor of the Forum, asked me to set forth some of its ideals and purposes. The question to be answered was this: ' What advantage can a new university have over an old one in America?” In what way can freedom and newness make up for the lack of history and traditions ? It may be interesting for a moment to glance at the theoretical answer to these questions, in the light of our own actual experience. It seemed to me, in the first place, that it was not necessary that a school should be ancient in order to gain the wisdom of age. Each generation is heir to all previous experiences. In the new university the period of infancy and growth may be materially shortened. Among the |x»sitive advantages of the new school was, first, the simplicity of its mechanism. A hard and fast organization, or any code of regulations beyond those necessary to secure order, is a burden on teacher and student. In all things,” says James Watt. but proverbially in mechanism, the supreme excellence is simplicity.” Tlie essential function of the university is the “ emancipation of thought.” This was the original impulse which in the Dark Ages gave rise to the first universities. To this end the simplest |x ssible organization is the one which serves the purpose best. The essential of method in the university must be instruction by investigation. It is only by direct contact with the problems of life and nature that thought can be made free. The new university, it seemed to me, should cut itself loose from the timeworn English College curriculum and its much-patched American equivalent, with its system of favored studies and false incentives. It can give to each line of work the time and freedom it needs, thus leaving all questions of the relative value of studies to be settled by each student for himself. It can free itself from traditional methods of teaching, because no teacher of a mechanical sort, left over from former conditions, can have any claim on a new school for pension or sup| ort. A new school need fill its ranks with none but growing men. And just as important as growth is soundness. The mushroom may grow rapidly, but it does not make good wood. Jftonforb §uab 1902 11

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JHanforb Quab 1902 The First Decade of the University HE hard-pressed History Major of the year 2501. set to write a thesis on “ The First Decade of the University, will doubtless complain of the paucity of material, of the difficulty of making anything out of that inchoate period. (Tins, on the assumption that the big scrapbooks in the Secretary s office, the private memoirs of Bristow Adams, and this particular volume of the Quad shall all alike have succumbed to the gnawing tooth of time.) Still, if the aforesaid H. M. does credit to his department, he will doubtless be able to dig up 1 1 'm • many an odd bit. which, fused by the historical imagination, will naturally take shape under the following heads: I. The Pre-Natal Period. II. The Golden Age. III. In the Breakers. IV. The Renaissance. I. The Pre-Natal Period.— Not much out of this period can hope to survive to the twenty-sixth century. Already the point of inception has faded into that misty past when the present Freshman class were babes in arms. Six years it was from Charter to Opening Day. A brief enough span, as looked at from the year 2501, but from the stand| oint of a nineteenth century enterprise a very’ long preparation. Thus candidates in plenty for four times all the possible positions in the Faculty were lined up before a single building was sha| ed. Would-be students were hardly less impatient. Will II. M. catch any impression of the seemingly slow movement of the founders, of the long conferences, the hesitations, the tentative planning and replanning? What grist it all was for the newspapers! Will the magnificence of their heralding, the splendid, roseate vistas of the real estate agent enliven a bit an otherwise prosy introduction ? Will the advice so diligently sought, so lavishly, overwhelmingly inured out, add its spice and piquancy to the tale? Finally the hurrying of the private car across country to n