W

HILE the ingredients of this article were shaping themselves together at Madison the Board of Regents of the University assembled there for their August meeting. Their proceedings, affecting immediately the policies of their own State institution, cannot fail to have a bearing upon the policies of other similar educational institutions supposedly controlled by the people through their Legislatures in other States than Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Regents adopted a resolution against the acceptance of money from the General Education Board, by which several other educational institutions in this country have been founded or are in part supported.

By GEORGE MARVIN

the adoption of the resolution the General Education Board was called by its right name "Rockefeller Money;" and with the Standard Oil millions were lumped for condemnation the tobacco millions of. Duke, for which Trinity University sold its birthright, and the steel millions of Carnegie, upon the income of which many of the Wisconsin teaching force rely for pensions. It was a close vote, 9 to 6; and the defeated minority, including President Birge, who retires after fifty years of faithful service to the University, and "Mike" Olbrich, who twice nominated Robert La Follette for the Presidency, were not by any means reconciled to the verdict. But the University of Wisconsin, by this vote of its In the stormy debate which preceded governing body, has officially gone on

record against the use of huge fortunes, representing the surplus profits of monopolistic industrial enterprises, in the public cause of education.

Whichever way you look at it, this determination by the Regents of the University, illogical, inconsistent with its own record, and regardless of consequences, is only another working out of the "Wisconsin Idea." It could only happen in Wisconsin. Usurping the proper function of the Legislature, a governing body of fifteen, charged with the welfare of the one institution which is closest to the Wisconsin heart and all but two the appointees of a Governor with progressive personal ambitions, take their opportunity to make a dramatic gesture. In Wisconsin politics money is less useful

for campaign funds than as a target for campaign brick-throwing, and among all the money butts none presents such a side-of-a-barn mark as the "Rockefeller millions of tainted loot." Governor Blaine's Regents undoubtedly gave his personal ambitions a temporary substantial boost while supposedly upholstering their own, though their repudiation of a National welfare agency may, in the event, prove a boomerang. The relatively small sum of twelve thousand dollars was immediately involved, and this had been asked for from the General Education Board by Dean Bardeen, of the Wisconsin Medical School-after a vain petitioning of the Legislature-to further research work of practical value to the State. Using this as a rangefinder, however, the Regents were very probably shooting at the donation of $600,000 tentatively set aside by the General Education Board for the increased plant and service of the new combined Wisconsin State Hospital and Medical School, just comfortably housed by the appropriated use of Wisconsin's surplus soldier bonus. Undoubtedly, the vote of the Regents had some political value and was used as political ammunition. But, as an expression of the Wisconsin Idea, it had another and a finer value not so obvious.

One of the Regents who voted for the 'Grady Resolution," "that the University accept no gifts, subsidies, or donations from the General Education Board or any institution of like character," was Miss Zona Gale, an alumna of the University she reveres. With dead and

gone Charles McCarthy, who wrote and left as his valedictory "The Wisconsin Idea," she too believes that the inspiring idea of her native commonwealth is a dream of to-morrow and that "Wisconsin has had for that dream two wings, one political and one educational." Under the shadow of these wide-spreading wings the University lives and moves and has its being. An appreciable part of Wisconsin thinks and feels as Zona Gale does when she gravely considers the whither, as well as the whence, of the enormous Lydian sums being donated by American Crosi to the cause of education. "The increasing control over education by great wealth," as the United States Industrial Relations Commission phrased the problem in 1916, is of reasonable concern to those in Wisconsin who think as well as dream of to-morrow in their own State and in these United States. These folk know that the popularizing of the subsidy system in American universities and colleges is contemporaneous with the growth of gigantic fortunes out of monopolistic industry, and they also realize, in a general way, the impressive fact that these colleges and universities graduate annually more than 75,000 young men and young women whose political and economic views, formed in the classroom, largely influence the character of their citizenship. There may well be an admirable trend of healthy idealism in this particular Wishealthy idealism in this particular Wisconsin idea of the Regents in keeping University and State mutually dependent and, together, independent of outside help with or without imputed motive.

An annual ceremonial early in September The Legislature at its last session went far towards substantiating such a theory in appropriating more than seven million dollars for a general building fund, and contributions for a "Memorial Union," solicited throughout the State from citizens at large-such as "Kohler of Kohler," Kuppenheimer of the "Kollege Klothes," and some of the stout burghers of Milwaukee who made most of their money before Volstead butted in-as well as loyal alumni, have insured a much-needed addition to the communal life of the University. The immediate generosity of the Legislature came after a long period of super-Scotch thrift on their part and was largely due to the able presentation of the University's actual needs by Theodore Kronsage, Jr., President of the Board of Regents, who went out on a deliberately planned campaign to "sell the University to the State," and "put it over" ably, aided and abetted by his brother, who is managing editor of the Milwaukee "News," the dominant Hearst paper of Wisconsin. Note well one sweet-smelling by-product of salesmanship and sensational journalism!

However arrived at, this independent, self-supporting idea of a State university is a laudable one. If the Legislature will tangibly back up Governor Blaine's Regents, and if in doing so they faithfully represent the public opinion of Wisconsin, then will this University have arrived at a practical realization of its State "Idea;" some of its dream of tomorrow may have come true to-day. As Miss Gale herself says of "the wellknown human being, wistful that life be

physically and spiritually beneficent to him and even to his kind," the Wisconsin spirit, made up of just such inarticulate human beings, "lifting through the mechanism of government and education," may be trying to say, as she says, "Your hope is the State's task."

The University richly deserves that its hope should thus be recognized by the State it so thoroughly serves. In no other State does the missionary activity of its chief educational institution so permeate the life of the entire commonwealth. In the case of Wisconsin, the last unit of the old Northwest to be partitioned and organized into Statehood, the University is coeval with the State. They began their distinct life together. The University's broad conception of its proper function has made its campus coextensive with the borders of the State. Men and books, not elaborate equipment, were the essentials of the old universities, which strove neither in conception. nor in operation for factory standards. Speed and quantity of product were no part of the ideal they aimed at. Wisconsin has added the concept of pervasive utility, of a service as nearly universal within the borders of the State as it can be made. Wisconsin did not discover the ideal of State service, but it has come nearer to realizing it than most universities; arguably nearer than any other State university in America.

A publication issued by the University Extension Division prints a series of charts of Wisconsin cross-hatched by its county demarcations and pitted in red like bad cases of smallpox. On the first of these charts the 992 spots mark as many distinct communities in which regular use was made of some service of the Division during the last two years, in which time 20,935 new individual enrollments were received. These are not merely contacts; they are active associations. In Wisconsin the University agencies for the dissemination of general or particular knowledge do not have to overcome prejudice or aversion. The market comes at least half-way to meet the freely dispensed goods. Since the Since the death of Robert M. La Follette, who made of Wisconsin a one-man political unit and used the University in his own service of the State, a leaderless community of Germanic, Scandinavian, and Irish origins has nevertheless remained united as a university constituency. The pockmarked counties of the charts show just so many electrons vibrant to the dominant note at Madison. The war left the people of Wisconsin snarling at one another over the repudiation of La Follette war doctrines by both the Faculty

of the University and the State Legislature, but the ebb of the war brought back after 1919 a flood tide of heavily increased registration in the University and of a redoubled reliance upon its helpful offices outside of Madison.

Burdened with the greater demands upon its personnel and its material resources, the University has not changed the character of its service rendered. A bigger rush for the University, partly accounted for by the addition of compulsory high school enrollment to the law of the State, has meant far bigger problems to meet with no adequate provision

until the last generous appropriation in 1924 for meeting them. The Faculty and the Regents have impliedly lifted their hands for silence and asked, "Do you want interchangeable parts, or do you want a humanized, well-occupied community?" And, evidently sensing an emphatic decision for the latter alternative, they have proceeded to work accordingly. They have persisted in accordingly. They have persisted in believing, for the present resident enrollment of nearly 12,000 students-not counting the many more thousands in the Extension Division-as well as for the fraction of that number annually registered before the war, that the proper function of this University is not that of a Ford assembling. plant. In practice they continue to do the best they can to live up to this theory.

One of the active sub-sectors of this practice is in the Medical School, where, under the command of a Quaker doctor,

some of the common sense of the Society of Friends finds expression in original methods of medical education and student health. Wisconsin has offered hitherto merely the first two years of a four-year medical curriculum and has conferred no degrees. In organizing now the work for the additional two years some new departures in medical practice will be made. Instead of confining the clinical work of the third year to outpatient departments, the Wisconsin students will be set to responsible though elementary work, under competent oversight, in the wards of the State hospitals, thus getting that element of actual experience in contact with patients which theoretical instruction lacks and avoiding the waste of out-patient work mechanically or sloppily done. During the fourth year each student will be apprenticed out to a number of established specialists in active practice over the State. Each one of the hundred vouched-for special practitioners involved in this plan becomes an extra-mural professor of the Medical School, and the wide organization helps to correct the popular and professional impression of trying to centralize medicine in the University. Instead of sitting on a bench one hundred feet away from a diagnosis or an operation, each student during his two months' apprenticeship in each of the allotted specialties is responsibly next to the job. A traveling dean will be constantly on the road checking up on the system by keeping in touch with the people as well as with the practitioners and their apprenticed students.

Regarding the physical health of the student body as much a province of University administration as the moral and mental supervision vested in the Dean's office, Wisconsin runs a Department of Student Health in the State University Hospital, on the campus grounds. All absences from class must be accounted for through this office, which thus has an opportunity of dealing with the many cases of ill-being not coming under the heads of pathological treatment. Wisconsin, through this Student Health Department, deals out much more good common sense and friendly advice than medicine. And the treatment spreads far and wide through the Madison community and into the rural counties.

A great many, possibly most, of the counties in this State subsist mainly upon dairy farming, and agriculture in the richest dairy State in the Union owes much to the University of Wisconsin. One hundred thousand silos stand up to proclaim the original idea of F. H. King,

a former head of the Agricultural Department. They are his trade-mark or, rather, his heraldic device, stamped all over the barnyards of the State, and no one in this territory would now attempt to go into dairy products without the imitation of spring succulence which silage provides. Another professor in the College of Agriculture, named Babcock, helped to pull dairying off the rocks and established dairy stock thereupon by the invention of the butter-fat test which bears his name in New Zealand and Siberia as well as in Wisconsin. The Babcock test, patented, would have brought its inventor millions. But no, said Babcock; he had been given his materials, his field, his opportunity, by the State University; let him make this becoming contribution through the University to the people of the State. One good reason why three-quarters of the Nation's peas are canned in Wisconsin is because Dean Russell, of the Agricultural College, by his bacteriological experiments found a way to keep the containers from exploding. In addition to the work of the Extension Division, the College of Agriculture maintains an extension service of its own in 71 counties of the State and in a wide territory outside Wisconsin's boundaries.

By the time this article is printed Glenn Frank, editor and publicist, will have succeeded in the Presidency of the University of Wisconsin Edward A. Birge, scientist and humanitarian, who has faithfully served the University in varied capacities for half a century. Thus the quiet influence of the older order of university executive gives place to the greater administrative ability of more bustling times. Before passing from the active duties of the presidency to the continuance of his geological work among the lakes of Wisconsin this scientistChristian left in writing and in oral utterance his understanding of the University that will regard him rather as its loyal friend than temporary administra

tor.

"It is," he wrote, "the only institution. whose clientele can be coextensive with the community at large."

And, rising to respond to the farewell dinner the Faculty gave him, without any pathos at parting, he said:

"Some years ago at a Faculty dinner held in this building I recalled to you as the motto of a State university Arnold's words, "To make righteousness and the will of God prevail.' I repeat them tonight, not so much as an exhortation as a memory of what I have learned during fifty years about the temper and aim of

"Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government, . . . schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." The Wisconsin State

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COUSIN JANE. By Harry Leon Wilson. Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, New York. $2.

Mr. Wilson, like all comedians and humorous jesters, likes to play practical jokes on his audience. He succeeds in interesting us deeply in the development of this genuine young person-Jane who grows better and better as the story moves on. Then, just at the opportune moment when the fairies are flying gayly out of the long-closed box of her future, we behold it empty again and the lid slammed down upon its vacancy! Of course we are outraged. Knowing Jane's spirit, we may rest assured that she, if any one can, will discover the kindly figure of Hope crouching in the bottom. of the chest. But life, the surprise, is, as always, too ironic.

HULINGS' QUEST. By McCready Huston. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $2.

"Hulings' Quest" is one of that innumerable caravan of first novels which it is possible to regard with respect but not with much affection. A certain languor pervades the style; none of the characters seems to come to life, with the possible exception of two members of what now passes as the younger generation, Wilda and Storey Martin. latter's father, Joab Martin, is of the tribe of Silas Lapham and seems all the more anachronistic on that account. More space is accorded to him in the story than to the ostensible hero, the architect Hulings, whose Diogenes quest for an honest client meets eventually

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erary craftsmen not at all. Many of us prefer the writing of athletes like these, preferably without a sugar-coating of fiction, to the clever but artificial figments of magazine headliners like Charles E. Van Loan and H. C. Witwer, represented here by two characteristic stories, "Mister Conley" and "Two Stones With One Bird." Ralph Henry Barbour, George Agnew Chamberlain, and Zane Grey are other well-known performers on the bill. From the "literary" point of view, Mr. Chamberlain's horse story, "Highboy Rings Down the Curtain," is easily the best. The editor should have prevented a Paddock from saying "herculanean" for "herculean," and the author of "Champions All" from representing a golf hole which cost Ted Ray a perfect drive and mashie to the green as a par three hole! Ted's three was a fine birdie.

THE TROUBLE MAKER. By E. R. Eastman. The Macmillan Company, New York. $2.

It is something of a triumph in storytelling to make an exciting novel out of a milk strike and the troubles of a Dairymen's League. Mr. Eastman does this, and provides action and fun of a homely but lively type.

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