| |
| |
Caption: Book - History of the University (Powell)
This is a reduced-resolution page image for fast online browsing.
EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:
Struggle for Location 1865*1867 288 under the same guidance. The miserable sham which they propose is not worthy of the name of an university. It would be a disgrace to any people who should inaugurate i t Just look at it: More than a round hundred corporators, gathered promiscuously, by a sort of accidental drag-net, from all classes, pro* fessions, and conditions in life, without the least possible regard to their knowledge of educational interests, and set to do what T Why, simply to dole out and watch the miserable pittance of two thousand dollars a year, distributed among some twenty or more rival colleges agreed in nothing but a present want of funds. Who, thereupon, are to teach ' agriculture and mechanics, one or both; to all our youth, male and femaleV (I quote from the report itself.) 'It is so nominated in the bond.1 What troops of crinoline carpenters and farmers the state would then have 1 Outdoor labor would then be nothing but one everlasting honeymoon ; and all sorrow and tears as well as all university funds, would soonflyaway. "Of all the strange and uncouth and unlawful schemes that have anywhere been proposed for utterly wasting, and worse than wasting ,these noble state funds in the several states, I think this the worst of any one* I have seen. I hardly know which would be most disgraceful: for the state to grant, or for any college to accept of, such a miserable pittance, on any such conditions. If Massachusetts has, as reported in the papers, already utterly wasted the income of her endowments on one college, that is no reason why Illinois should worse than waste hers on twenty others. After all this, can we wonder that the people and the common schools of Illinois are becoming hostile to some of their colleges? They must have been possessed of something more than African patience not to be so. "But if this university fund was let alone, and suffered to be quietly applied to the great industrial interests for which it was intended, and as it was intended, it would never harm the colleges in their chosen proper sphere. It would only facilitate and enhance their real usefulness and prosperity. And at this point President Wallace, of Monmouth, is entirely in the right, and seems to have somo just and adequate conception of what the fund is really for. We do not propose to meddle with their time*
| |
