Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/423

SOME IMPORTANT DEPARTMENTS 369 University opened, and which he did not finish, "It is proposed in this institution to make the work of investigation primary." Johns Hopkins had struck this same note fifteen years before, but it had not built up a university great in numbers. And it strikes one curiously that President Harper, while believing strongly in a university for the Middle West, was so moderate in his estimate of the number of graduate students to be expected. That estimate for the first year was one hundred. Before the end of that year the single Graduate School was reorganized into two the Graduate School of Arts and Literature and the Ogden Graduate School of Science. The attendance reached the unexpectedly large number of two hundred and seven- teen, twelve of these being non-resident. One hundred and sixty- two of these were in the Graduate School of Arts and Literature and fifty-five in the Ogden Graduate School of Science. At the July, 1893, Convocation, which marked the close of the University's first year, the President said: The facts show that the demand for graduate work was greater than could have been anticipated The history of the Graduate Schools for the year shows also that eastern men will not hesitate to come west; that antiquity after all means little. Students soon learn where good work is done. In undergraduate work it may be the institution which draws students; in graduate work, it is not the institution, but the man. It is easy to trace the connection between these remarks of the President and his experiences while considering the call to the presidency of the University. Eminent scholars had assured him that it would be impossible to attract graduate students to Chicago; that in New Haven, for example, it was not the men who happened to be in the faculty, but Yale itself that drew students; that eastern graduates would not go west; that an institution in Chicago would be provincial; that Dr. Harper would not live to see any considerable number of graduate students in Chicago, and much more to the same general effect. One distinguished scholar went so far as to say in print that to put a great graduate uni- versity "hi Chicago would be only the next thing to putting it in the Fiji Islands." All these things later became subjects of merriment, but at the time, 1888-89, they seemed tremendously important