The commissioner of education does not feel himself at liberty to
discriminate among the colleges chartered by the different states, but
it is well known that in most states the name of college, or
preferably that of university, and the power to confer degrees are
granted to any institution whatsoever without regard to endowment,
scientific equipment, scholarly qualifications of the faculty or
adequate preparation of the students. The majority of the so-called
colleges and universities of the south and west are really secondary
schools. In most of them not only are the greater part of the students
really pupils in the preparatory or high school department, but most
of the students in the collegiate departments are at graduation barely
able to enter upon the sophomore or second year work of the best
eastern colleges. Throughout this monograph I have used the word
college in speaking of institutions for undergraduate education,
except when quoting their official titles, and this whether the
college in question is, or is not, included in a larger institution
providing also three years of graduate instruction. The terms college
and university are used in America without any definite understanding,
even among colleges and universities themselves, as to how they shall
be differentiated. Probably the most commonly accepted usage is to
call an institution a university if it has attached to it various
departments, or schools, without regard to the standing of these
departments, the preparation of the students entering them, or the
work done in them. In this sense all the state universities of the
west are called universities because, although many of them are really
high schools, they have attached to them schools of pharmacy,
veterinary science, agriculture, and sometimes medicine or law. It is
in this sense that many institutions for negroes are called
universities, because they include various departments of industrial
art as well as a high school department. Until very recently the
requirements for admission to the departments of law, medicine,
dentistry, etc., have been so low that it has been a positive
disadvantage to have such schools attached to the college department,
and when lately the graduates of Harvard college decided not to allow
the graduates of its affiliated schools to vote with them for
representatives on the board of trustees, they claimed with justice
that the illiberal education of the majority of these graduates would
tend to lower the standard of Harvard college. The use of the word
university should be strictly limited to institutions offering at
least three years of graduate instruction in one or more schools.
Footnote 11:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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