Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/424

370 A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO and sinister to the men who were fighting for a university in Chicago. They had their influence on the estimate of attendance in the Graduate Schools, so much influence, indeed, that the con- tinued and rapid growth of these schools surprised the authorities. The attendance grew from the beginning. The building of great laboratories, the addition of new departments of instruction, the increase of the number of eminent scholars in the faculties, the multiplication of advanced courses of instruction drew increasing throngs of graduate students to the two schools. In 1895-96 the two hundred and seventeen of the opening year had increased to six hundred and forty-eight. In 1900-1901 the numbers had become one thousand and two six hundred and sixty-eight men, three hundred and thirty-four women. Already the Summer Quarter had become the largest of the year in graduate attendance. Five years later, 1905-6, the Graduate Schools enrolled eleven hundred and twenty students, and it began to look as though they were approaching the natural limit of their growth. But in 1910- n, the enrolment showed an attendance of fifteen hundred and forty-eight. That the authorities were not unduly impressed by this somewhat remarkable growth and did not look for its unin- terrupted continuance was made evident by statements of Dr. A. W. Small, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature, in his Reports to the President in 1908-9 and 1911-12. In the former Report he said, in referring to the steadily increasing number of graduate students: "It is not to be supposed the demand for Doctors of Philosophy or Masters of Arts is unlimited." He called attention to the "fact that the number of institutions offering, or professing to offer, instruction of the graduate type has been steadily increasing Without question too, other universities have strengthened their graduate faculties in quality as well as in numbers." The fair inference from these facts was that the increase in the University's Graduate Schools' attendance was likely to suffer a serious check. In the Report for 1911-12 Dean Small said: The available evidence indicates that the number of graduate students is not likely in the near future to vary largely from the present level. No reason appears for fear that the number of our own graduate students will diminish, but nothing is in sight to warrant predictions of a larger attendance.