Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 72.djvu/213

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AMERICA'S INTELLECTUAL PRODUCT
209

what more their sons need when provided with a college training. It is useless to make a comparison with the professional studies of law and medicine—these are frankly bread-studies, while it should be expressly understood that the pursuit of pure science has no rewards of a monetary nature. It must be carried on by those who love it and feel called to it, and are willing to make sacrifices for it, but they need not be expected to go without food and warmth, as we often find such students doing. The national government provides richly for the education of those who are to devote their lives to her defense; is there any less reason for providing for those who are to make her intellectually great? Be assured, intending benefactors, that your money will not be wasted by the devotees of science. Of wasting money there are many ways, but not this. Some time ago I stood on a hill above the campus of a large and rapidly growing university, as it is called. At my feet I counted thirteen buildings completed and in process of erection, those of the latter category representing at a crude guess over half a million of dollars, to say nothing of the vast hole into which a third of a million had been poured to make a Roman holiday, a stadium rivaling Harvard's. Meeting a professor, I fell into conversation with him, and he began to describe to me the needs and resources of the institution, and with pride informed me that the endowment was—about two thirds of the endowment of Clark University and College together. When I thought of our three plain and modest buildings I could not but feel that something was wrong, here or there, and I could not avoid the conclusion that what was spread over such a large surface must be rather thin. Knowing as I did the pitifully small salaries paid the professors in that institution and the feeling cherished by most of them toward their president, a highly successful autocrat of the genus hustler, I did not feel that I had cause to envy the university of X. There are no fellowships there, though there are laboratories, and those valiant souls among the professors who do research do so at the risk of their lives. To secure a position there one is not asked, What have you accomplished? but, What is your denomination? Is this a picture of the typical American university? I sincerely hope not. And yet I fear that the picture is not unfamiliar. Certainly it does not remind us in the least of a picture of a university in Germany or France. A friend of mine, a distinguished professor of mathematics in the University of Paris, has as his regular duties the delivery of two lectures a week for one semester, that is, during four of five months of the year. The rest of his time he has for research. The result is that he is one of the two or three of the world's greatest mathematicians. For the amount of work that I have mentioned he receives what until last year was a full professor's salary at Harvard, the largest, with two exceptions, of any in the United States. And