Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/413

SOME IMPORTANT DEPARTMENTS 359 and fifty. The change which restricted the attendance to boys temporarily decreased the enrolment. Gradually the loss was made up, and for two or three years there was a prospect that the hopes entertained at the founding of the school might be realized. But the prospect proved illusory. The attendance never reached two hundred in any quarter, and soon began to decline. Mean- time very considerable sums of money had been expended in buildings and equipment. Two excellent dormitories had been built at an expense of about eighty thousand dollars. A gym- nasium had been provided costing about twenty thousand dollars. Grounds had been purchased at considerable expense. The current expenses had been from the beginning largely in excess of the receipts from students, and the excess of expenditures over receipts tended to increase rather than diminish. It finally became appar- ent that the only possibility of making the school self-supporting lay in the expenditure of. a very large sum in improving the equip- ment and at the same time greatly increasing the charges to students. It was felt that this would be a doubtful experiment and would transform the Academy into an expensive school for rich men's sons. Such a change was not attractive to the Founder from whom the money would have to come, nor, indeed, to the President and Trustees. The current expenses of the Academy had been a serious burden on the University treasury, exceeding the income by more than twenty thousand dollars annually. A study of the situation in 1906 revealed the interesting fact that there had been such a multiplication of high schools throughout the entire region from which the Academy drew its students that it was no longer necessary for boys to go to distant schools to pre- pare for college. The preparatory school was at their doors. Under these circumstances the Trustees decided to discontinue the Academy. In his Annual Report for 1906-7 President Judson spoke of the Academy as follows: At the end of the year 1906-7 the University Academy at Morgan Park was closed. The Academy has had an interesting history since the foundation of the University and has done valuable work. At the same time the great increase in the number of high schools has made the need of the Academy less pressing than seemed to be the case at the outset, and the very considerable expense involved hardly seemed to warrant continuing the institution. It was