Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE REAL COLLEGE DEFINED Precedent is sacred in England. In America it is a convenience. A Court decision is accepted by us as binding so long as it supports our contention or until it runs contrary to our wishes and we convince a succeeding Court of its fallacy. If tradition in the New World but bore the seal of value it wears across the seas, we had never been so hopelessly lost in our attempt to find proper definitions for the names applied to our various educational institutions. In the British Isles, and on the Continent, the use of the word "college" is so universally accepted as meaning but one thing that it is at once clearly differentiated from the university, which every one understands to be an institution of another class. In this country we use college, academy, seminary, and university as satisfactory synonyms with such profane disregard for the customs of the centuries that, after an institution has been given its name, several explanatory sentences inevitably follow to make plain the field of intellectual endeavor it is supposed to cover. In every State of the Union we have had institutions with but one little building, a half-dozen teachers, a half-hundred students, a diminutive library, and a paucity of apparatus, each wearing the name of university as its proud corporate right. On the other hand there are numerous institutions bearing unpretentiously the name of college, which, in consideration of the scope and variety of work covered, belong, by right, to the university class. It would be unfair to condemn too strongly those founders of institutions who have taken this liberty with terms of established meaning. Our country is new, and, coincident with the beginnings of the State, came the founding of educational institutions. We are a people of large expe...