Law School Still at Top.

The past year has been one of notable interest for the professional schools, The Law School maintains its well recognized position; and in spite, or in consequence, of increasing severity in eliminating students who do not reach a satisfactory standard, the number of the entering class has grown. Nor is the School satisfied with having created a method of instruction that has been adopted by all the leading schools of law in the country. The establishment of the fourth year, with the collection of a great library on all kinds of law, signifies an increased attention to the production of jurists as well as practitioners; and the report of Dean Thayer tells of an important change worked out by the Faculty in the traditional classification of the different branches of law for the purposes of teaching the first-year class.

In the Medical School the year has been marked by the opening of the Children's and Infants' Hospitals, which, with the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and the Cancer Hospital, complete the group of clinics upon the land originally purchased for the School. It is expected that within a few years more hospitals will be built nearby, and this ought to be done without impairing the close connection with the other great hospitals of Boston. The clinical resources in the city are unsurpassed, and if wisely used will present very extensive opportunities for teaching and observation. A note-worthy addition to the clinics, which although remote is highly important, has come from the appointment by the United Fruit Company of Dr. Strong as Director of its hospitals in the West Indies and Central America; for Tropical Medicine offers a rich field for the study of diseases caused by protozoa.

Among the immediate problems of internal organization before the School are the perfecting of the system of general examinations, and above all a closer cooperation between the various departments. No man today can be wholly master of all branches of medical science, yet every branch overlaps others, and can neither be taught nor investigated in isolation. It is peculiarly important, therefore, that each department should be in touch with all the rest. The staff is well aware of this and working toward that end. There is also the ever-present financial problem for medical education is necessarily and increasingly expensive, and the School needs endowment in several respects. This is even more true of the Dental School, which has for years been unable to pay salaries to its clinical professors,--a condition unworthy of the University, and incompatible with the most efficient work. The practitioners in any branch of medicine cannot be properly trained unless the schools are adequately endowed; and of late years there has been a marked growth in public opinion about the relation of dentistry to public health. People have begun to understand that the care of the teeth is not a craft exercised for the comfort of the rich, but an important branch of preventive medicine.

Improvement in Business School.

The creation of a separate Faculty for the School of Business Administration has proved a great gain for the President; if for no one else, for it has enabled him to keep in far closer touch with the work, and the instructing staff, of the School. But it would seem to have been a gain also in giving the School a more distinctly professional character and reputation. The experimental period of the School has wholly passed. Its usefulness is recognized in the community: by industrial concerns which have adopted its methods of accounting and welcomed its instructors and students to inspect their plants; by other educational institutions which have followed its example and its name; and by students who have come to it this year in greater numbers than ever before. As yet only a part of them appreciate the value of remaining the second year and completing the course; but this is natural in a school of a novel kind which prepares for an occupation hardly regarded as a distinct profession, and not fully animated by a professional consciousness. This, however, will soon cure itself. The procedure of the Faculty is notable for the attention devoted by its members, not only individually but collectively, to the deficiency of each student, and for the rigor with which men whose work is not satisfactory are eliminated at all periods of the year.

The Dean of the Divinity School speaks in his report of the agreement with the Episcopal Theological School. The text of this is printed in the Appendix here to and it is even more important than the bare terms would imply. It is not a new departure, for it is in line with the earlier step taken by the arrangement with Andover Theological Seminary; yet it carries the policy then inaugurated a long way forward. The barriers between the different churches in this country have softened, but they have by no means disappeared, and it is still a far cry to the time when preparation for the ministry can be wholly conducted by universities on a purely undenominational basis. Although no little progress has been made by the non-sectarian divinity schools, like our own, the various churches will long maintain their separate schools for training recruits for their pulpits; nor are they likely to give them up while the ministry of each church is essentially a career by itself. Nevertheless, there are in a theological education many subjects of a purely scholarly nature into which the differing views and practice of the churches do not enter at all, or enter too little to be significant; and with the progress of knowledge this class of subjects tends to enlarge. In the case of such subjects an alliance between schools of theology renders possible a greater variety of instruction, and a saving of needless duplication of instructors. There are also many fields not of a professional nature, and not commonly taught in a divinity school, with which many men preparing themselves for the ministry want to be familiar. Such, for example, are philosophy, psychology, and, to an increasing extent at the present day, social ethics and economics. It is a distinct advantage for a theological school to be so connected with a university that courses of this kind are open to its students freely and without additional fees; while, on the other hand, there is a benefit to a university that maintains, like Harvard, a non-sectarian divinity school but does not expect to supplant denominational schools, in being the centre for a group of schools of this kind, with which it is closely connected in harmonious plans of work.

These aims are promoted by the agreement with the Episcopal Theological School. Each of the three schools will train young men for the ministry, having the resources of all three, and of the whole University, at its command. The Divinity School has no intention of diminishing this part of its work, and in the appointment of Rev. Henry W. Foote as Assistant Professor of Preaching and Parish Administration and Secretary of the School, that object was kept in view; but it undertakes also, with the aid of the professors in the other two schools, the duty of administering for all three the higher degrees in theology newly established by the University. These degrees do not certify the professional qualification to engage in the work of the ministry, and have no denominational character. They are degrees of an essentially scholarly character, and as such are appropriately administered and conferred by the University.

Both parties to the agreement feel that they have profited thereby, the Theological School because its students now take freely courses for which they formerly paid a fee, the Divinity School because its sphere of action has been enlarged. The change benefits the whole body of students in both Schools; and in fact, any other profit to either School is of secondary moment. An institution of learning is a trustee, and no trustee should make for himself a profit from a bargain. Any profit should be made, and in this case is made, by the cestuique trust, for the cestuis are the students and the public.

More About Tech. Agreement.

In the last annual report the agreement, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was described and discussed at some length. The text of the agreement itself was set forth in an appendix, and is printed again in the report of Dean Sabine published herewith. According to its terms it does not go into effect until the new buildings of the Institute, now in the progress of construction in Cambridge, shall be ready for use; but in the meanwhile the two institutions are cooperating so far as possible for instruction in the subjects covered by the plan, and members of the various departments concerned are working together cordially. They realize fully the benefits that will accrue, and that the practical problems involved can readily be solved. Some friends of the University, however, have grave doubts whether the agreement is in accord with the provisions of Gordon McKay's will. It is needless to say that, great as the gain to the public may be, neither the Corporation nor the Board of Overseers would have made the agreement if they had not believed, and been advised by their counsel, that they had full authority to do so. But, in view of the questions that have been raised, the Corporation is determined to seek the opinion of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth in order to set all doubts at rest. Under these conditions it would be unbecoming to argue here the necessity, propriety and legality of combinations between educational institutions, or the nature of the particular provisions in the will of Gordon McKay.

People have asked what will be the relation of the undergraduate in Harvard College to the new combination. For some years technical courses in engineering and mining have not been open to undergraduates in the College. The Graduate School of Applied Science has been in reality a graduate school, and the non-technical courses denominated engineering have dealt almost entirely with mathematics, physics, mechanics, chemistry, drawing, and other subjects that lie at the foundation of engineering or mining, but are believed to be valuable to any man as a proper part of a general education. These courses remain in Harvard College, open to all undergraduates competent to pursue them. It may be observed, however, that the first two years in the Institute of Technology are devoted almost wholly to courses of this nature, together with others of a still more general character, such as English, history, and modern languages. Scientific courses of the same kind are offered in most colleges today, so that a graduate of any good, college who has taken them there, can enter the Institute with advanced standing, and, if he has sufficient capacity, complete the work for his degree in two years. When the new combination goes fully into effect, therefore, a man aiming at the Harvard and Technology degrees in engineering or mining can follow any one of three paths. He can enter the Institute at once and take these degrees in four years. He can enter Harvard College, spend a couple of years taking the preliminary sciences there, then leave the College and take up the technical work at the Institute, having the status of a professional student in the Institute and the University; and, if he has ability enough, obtain the degree in two more years. Or, lastly, he can continue in Harvard College, taking his degree there in three or four years, and then do the technical engineering work at the Institute in two years more. This last is the only way in which a student has been able of late to obtain an engineering degree at Harvard, the only difference being that hitherto his technical studies after leaving college have been pursued at the Graduate School of Applied Science, whereas by the new agreement they will be pursued at the Institute under the combined instruction. It will be observed that the position of the undergraduate in Harvard College is not directly affected by the combination, save that he is enabled to obtain an engineering degree from the University without completing his college course, if he so desires. This statement seems needed to correct misapprehensions that have arisen.

Changes in Applied Science.

The changes in the work of Applied Science due to co-operation with the Institute have involved a reorganization of those branches that are not included in the agreement. Among them are Architecture and Landscape Architecture, which, although retaining their distinct councils and their titles as separate schools, have been brought together in a single Faculty of Architecture, with Professor Herbert Langford Warren as Dean. It is a logical as well as a convenient arrangement, because these professions stand in a position by themselves, related to engineering, no doubt, on one side, but also touching the fine arts at least as closely on the other. The tendency at Harvard in the last few years has been in the direction of creating new faculties; and, like everything devised by man, this has both merits and defects. An attempt to split learning into blocks, sharply separated from one another, is futile, for it has been truly said that the object of every fresh thinker is to cut a new diagonal through the field of knowledge. Professors, therefore, cannot be arbitrarily confined, or their studies limited, by the boundaries of faculties; and, indeed, such an idea should be discouraged. But the existence of distinct professions does circumscribe and specialize instruction in a way that is conveniently expressed by separate faculties. These bodies are formed not because the subject-matter with which their members deal is the same, but because they are working for a common object. Hebrew syntax, for example, has little intellectual connection with the Nicene Creed or the practice of elocution, and if the first were studied as a branch of general philology, and the last with a view to argument before a law court, there would be no obvious reason for including them in one faculty; but if, on the other hand, all three are offered as parts of a curriculum for divinity students, there is clearly an advantage in having the persons who teach them meet together to discuss the conduct of the school in which they are all essential parts. The recent tendency at Harvard, therefore, to create a separate faculty for each school that trains men for a distinct profession, would seem to be a rational adaptation of means to ends. It ought not to imply any isolation of the several teaching staffs. On the contrary, a close personal intercourse among all the professors of a university is of vital importance, and for that reason the presence of the same professor in more than one faculty is often an advantage.

The danger to be apprehended is not the existence of too many faculties, but too little intercourse between the members of the different faculties, and still more a lack of cohesion within the faculties themselves. In American universities today there is a tendency for the collective action of the larger faculties to diminish, and for their authority to be transferred to the various departments, of which they are composed. To some extent this is unavoidable and salutary, but it can easily be carried too far and foster a habit of thinking about the interest of the department rather than that of the institution as a whole; about the teaching of a particular subject to the neglect of the full development of the student as a complex human being. Such a tendency should be carefully watched by the governing boards as well as by the instructing staff itself, and for that reason there should be in a large faculty,--alongside of an organization by departments,--a number of standing committees on matters of general concern, composed of members of different departments and reporting to the faculty at frequent intervals.