Cornell, intended by its generous founder to be a sort of cheap
glorified technical institute, has grown into a great seat of
culture. The quadrangles and lawns of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
almost recall Oxford and Cambridge; their lecture-rooms,
laboratories, and post-graduate studies hint of Germany, where
nearly all American teachers of the present generation have been
educated."
Some authorities, however, deplore the Germanising of American
education. A Professor of Greek, himself trained in Germany, and
recognised as one of the foremost of American scholars, confessed to me
his deep dissatisfaction with the results achieved in his own teaching.
His students did good work on the scientific and philological side, but
their relation to Greek literature as literature was not at all what he
could desire. This bears out the remark which I heard another authority
make, to the effect that American scholarship was entirely absorbed in
the counting of accents, and the like mechanical details; while it seems
to run counter to the above suggestion that the university system tends
to raise the level of culture while lowering the standard of erudition.
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