Report of the Director of the University Libraries

The President of the University has the honor to submit to the Board of Trustees the following Report for the year 1908-1909. The Report covers the period from September 30th, 1908, to September 30th, 1909.

STATE SUPPORT AND CONTROL OF UNIVERSITY

The increasing appropriations made by the State of New York for the Agricultural College and the Veterinary College have raised the question whether in view of its large participation in the maintenance of the University the State should not also participate more largely and actively in its control. The vital dependence of these colleges upon the other departments of the University, the relation of Cornell University to the State, and the reasons for a considerable measure of State control in the government of the University were lucidly described by Dr. Andrew S. Draper, State Commissioner of Education, in an address given before the joint meeting of the Associated Academic Principals and the

State Teachers' Association, in Syracuse, December 29, 1908. Here are a few extracts from that address:

"I do not often find myself in the attitude of a critic of the Empire State, but it must be said that New York is far from the front in developing policies and establishing instrumentalities to aid either the mechanical or the agricultural industries. With the prestige and the advantage of being an old state, it would be strange if we did not suffer some of the disadvantages of it. Let me point out what the educational disadvantages concerning agriculture are, and why they are, and let us believe that we may cure them if we will.

"Forty-six years ago the general government provided a gift of thirty thousand acres of land to each state for each senator and representative in Congress, upon condition that the state would use the proceeds for the propagation of a university which, without ignoring other branches of liberal learning, would lay particular emphasis upon those bearing upon agriculture and the mechanic arts. The act was passed after a long struggle.

"The newer states had the larger part in procuring its passage, and they were the quickest and the keenest to claim their rights under it. They had the freer democracy. They were in the pioneer stage. They lacked nothing in assertiveness. They wanted all that the older states had, and much more. Universal education became speedily a universal passion. Their institutions were yet in the liquid state. The federal grant would aid their already existent state universities, or support others. They had the system which could seize the opportunity. Every one of them managed to comply with the terms and lay hold upon the grants. For the twentyfive years following the war, they often had a hard time complying with the requirements, but they held on. Then the country had filled up. More acres were put under the plow, and all the acres were made more productive. Wealth grew. In the eighties, and still more in the nineties, land grant institutions had developed more highly educated constituencies, and, quite as important, they began to show the people who were engaged in the commercial, manufacturing, transportation, and agricultural industries, how to make more money. That settled it. Nothing succeeds like success. They went after more money and now each gets $50,000 per year beyond the proceeds of the land grants. And now, again, every one of the newer states puts into its state university or land grant college more than it gets from the federal grants, and some of them twenty times as much. They are not fools: they are more intent than ever on having all of the education that any state has, with some to spare; the roads are filled with the coming and going of students. Nebraska and Wisconsin each has a larger proportion of college students than either New York or Massachusetts. There are graduates, and therefore trained agents, of the universities in every village and upon almost every farm; and all the people stand ready to make further investments where they will pay. They are not

doing it for mere love. They see that there is money in it. Added to the natural educational enthusiasm, that concludes matters.

The older states did practically nothing. They are only now opening their eyes. Their ignorance of patent facts is as monumental as it is stupid. Of course, the old order is in the way. It is the habit of the old order to question the academic quality of the new order of institutions. One college president laments that the people put their hands into the people's treasury to promote higher education. Another challenges the applicability of liberal learning to the industries. Still another says, as bluntly as it can be said in classical phrase, that it is all wrong to educate people out of their environment. And yet another looks through spectacles that are befogged with the literary and philosophical training of the ages, and stoutly denies that what actually is, can be. It is not strange. Neither men nor institutions can be made over in a minute, after they are fifty years of age. The old order is the persistent expression of social, political, and educational aristocracy. The new order is the advance agent of educational and industrial democracy. The new order is as sure to persist as the Republic is to endure, for it is only the logical outworking of the democracy of the nation. It is sure to go in every state, for the nation will never endure half slave and half free educationally, any more than politically.

In New York we are as yet in the old order. We are not quite so hidebound as some who live in the still more educationally effete East. Some men and some facts have helped us. But we are a long way from being out in the clear sunlight. We almost lost the advantage of the federal grants to higher learning for the masses and the industries of the people, and would have done so absolutely but for Andrew D. White and Ezra Cornell, both senators of this State; one a scholar and educational organizer, who had been a professor in the State University of Michigan, and the other an inventor and industrial organizer, a millionaire, and withal a philanthropist. Between them, with these qualities, and being in the Senate, they got up the best scheme that was practicable under the circumstances, rescued the grant to New York from utter failure by providing an endowment and creating an institution which could take it and try to meet the State's obligations concerning it. The State did nothing. It merely stood by and benevolently let the thing be done. The result was Cornell University."

Commissioner Draper adds that Cornell University does not sustain the same relation to the State of New York as the western state universities sustain to their respective states:

"It [Cornell University] does not, and it can not, because it is not under popular control, and can not be responsive to the natural impulses of our unfolding political and industrial democracy, nor can its practical ministrations be accepted by the people as they would be if there were the sense of public proprietorship in it. It is not the fault of a board of

trustees, a president, a dean, or a professor. The trouble is beyond either. It will never be cured unless the university becomes the real instrument of the State."

The sentiments expressed by Commissioner Draper regarding the government of Cornell University were voiced in the legislature of the State of New York, and a bill was last year passed and signed by the Governor which gave the State an enlarged share in the government and control of the University and cannot fail to develop in the people a new "sense of public proprietorship in it." Hitherto, the State has been represented on the Board of Trustees by the Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, the Speaker of the Assembly, Commissioner of Education, and the Commissioner of Agriculture, ex-officio. But the elective Trustees, thirty in number, have been chosen, two-thirds by the Board itself and one-third by the alumni, for a term of five years, so that of the six new Trustees annually selected for a term of five years four were chosen by the Board and two by the alumni. The amendment to the charter, passed last winter, provides that of the four Trustees hitherto annually elected by the Board for a term of five years, one shall be appointed annually by the Governor of the State with the advice and consent of the Senate. Beginning with June last, therefore, the elective Trustees of Cornell University consist of thirty members, of whom five have been appointed by the Governor of the State, ten elected by the alumni of the University, and fifteen elected by the Board itself. Along with the Governor and other State officers who are ex-officio Trustees, the State will henceforth have ten members on the Board as The alumni also have, and when it is recalled that the Board of Trustees itself elects the rest of the elective Trustees, it will be seen that the State of New York now has equal voice with the alumni of the University in the government of Cornell. If with the increase of State appropriations in the future it seems desirable that the State should have a larger

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