The Young Women at the University. BY PROF. MOSES COIT TYLER. OME of us who are, as ROGER ASCHAM says, "lookers-on in this cock-pit of learning," please ourselves with the fancy that there may be here two or three things working themselves out, of which your readers would like to have just now a brief account. We try very hard not to be deluded by too fond an estimate of our importance in the system of American colleges, or of the value which Eastern educators will be inclined to attach to our experiments at making a university. Indeed, we are often fearfully depressed in spirit by recollecting that New England and New York look to Michigan and Illinois for corn and pork rather than for ideas. We chafe and mortify ourselves, also, under the necessity, from which nothing less than a miracle or a transcontinental canal can rescue us, of being forever classed in Doctor HOLMES's dreadful category of "fresh-water colleges." Besides, the moment we try to forget this, and to speak of ourselves as though we seemed to deserve some attention at Cambridge or New Haven or New York, at once some of you people that way are pretty sure to intimate to us that your experience coincides with that of Sergeant DAVY, who said, very neatly, that "the farther he went to the West, the more was he convinced that the Wise Men came from the East." Of course, we are greatly edified by your modesty in all this; and we naturally bow our heads. But, not to stay any longer on this perilous subject of sectional comparisons, I hasten to say a few words on a subject far more agreeable, though possibly not any less perilous-the ladies. As you must be already aware, they have come. "The Ever-Feminine draweth on," said Goethe. There is a tincture of futurity in his phrase, which, so far as our university is concerned, must now give way before the heroic force of the realized present. The "Ever-Feminine" taketh up its abode among us. The most posed, since last January, to all the horrible risks of being present at lectures and recitations with women, and that, too, in studies which an old English poet took pains to describe as "unmeet for women's imbecilities." I venture to say that no revolution in affairs ever crept in so noiselessly, or ever wrought its effects with so much peace, as this has done with us. Had a great crowd of strong-brained ladies rushed in upon us the moment the doors were thrown open, it might have been different. As it was, the new regime was represented for several months by but one young lady, who most fortunately was well fitted, both by scholarship and by manners, to conciliate for the new order of things the approbation even of reluctant minds. True, she was more than a nine days' wonder here. Not even JOYCE HETH, or the Mermaid, I fancy, was ever stared at more vehemently than was our first lady Sophomore for a while. But she bore it admirably, kept quietly about her work, made capital recitations whenever called upon, and enabled the most obdurate of us in a few months to conquer our prejudices. So the battle was won for her whole sex. Accordingly, this fall, when along with a thousand young men there appeared on the ground about thirty young women, who distributed themselves among the three departments of law, medicine, and literature, the "fresh-water" of our inland college life was scarcely disturbed by a ripple. The whole affair, thus far, is a triumphant exemplification of the merits of the laisser-faire principle in the solution of a vexed and vexing educational problem. It must be confessed that our university has peculiarities which have rendered it comparatively easy for us to engraft the epicene system upon the former plan. Perhaps the foremost of these peculiarities is our freedom from the dormitories and from the types of habit and sentiment among students which that institution breeds. For some years back, this university has positively declined either to keep a boardinghouse or to take in washing, or even to have unfurnished apartments to let; and, consequently, all its members, finding their homes among the families of our citizens, are kept in constant contact with the normal life of civilized communities of men and women. Furthermore, the university is not an establishment sundered from the rest of the world by any sort of gulf, local or moral. It stands in the midst of this pretty town, on a square campus of forty acres, surrounded on all sides by private residences; and through its pleasant walks, as through a city park, ladies and gentlemen, and even children, are constantly strolling. The sight of feminine apparel, therefore, among our buildings, in the museum, in the library, and even in the lecture-rooms, has long been a familiar one. In fact, the university, by position and custom, has so perfectly blended with the general community, and is, indeed, so distinguishable from it, that the presence of ladies in the former seems quite as natural as is their presence in the latter. You do not wish me now to turn prophet, and tell you what will be the results of the new system ten years hence. Rather let me keep within the limits of what I know, and try to testify concerning the effects, whatever they may be, which are already visible after this trial of the plan of co-education for so short a time. First, concerning Conduct. In the medical department, the ladies are entirely separated from the gentlemen in lectures, at the clinical illustrations, and in the dissecting-rooms; and after repeated enquiry, both among students and professors, I learn that all is and has been quiet on that usually rather stormy Potomac. Not one uncivil or disobliging act has been committed by the male "medics" towards the dames and damsels who are studying in the same building to be their professional rivals. And let no one suppose that this abstinence on the part of our young men is owing to any particular mildness in them, or that our "medics" are not as other "medics" are. It is attributable, doubtless, to the sincere wish of the professors in that department to give the ladies a fair chance, and especially to the judicious arrangements which they made at the outset for accommodating the new-comers. In the other departments, namely, of law and literature, the ladies attend all university exercises with the gentlemen. Our young men are a loud-lunged, a hearty, and a jubilant set of fellows; and, so far as I can see, they are in no respect subdued by the presence of their fair fellow-students. They still indulge, on occasion, about as usual in cat-calls and whistling, and the rollicking horse-play so natural to a huge crowd of masculine persons free from care, in good health, with a tyrannous perception of the ludicrous, and fond of lingering on the foggy confines of big-boyishness. At the same time, in anything which directly concerns the ladies-their convenience in sitting, or in passing in and out of lectures and recitations, there is a very perceptible and never-failing chivalry; and I am sure that were a rude act to be done to any one of these gentle disciples, it would be swiftly avenged, in the most direful manner, by the whole body of the students. We bearing steadily in the direction of raising and refining the tone of manliness, without in the least weakening it. There is still among us, undoubtedly, a generous supply of boorishness; but it shows some cheering symptoms of intending to try to get up its first blush. But how about Scholarship? Still trying to be historical rather than prophetic, I have only to say at present that on all hands comes in testimony from our professors that on these grounds better recitations have never been made, and in the severest studies, than have been made by the ladies. So far are they from injuring scholarship here, that by their earnestness and fidelity they are, if anything, stimulating it; and their presence is beginning to give to all utterances in the class-room just that delicacy, that civil, chaste, and humane tone, which the recognition of women among the readers of books has been giving to English literature during the last hundred years. Upon the whole, though very few persons in our faculties desired the arrival of the girls among us in this capacity; though, in fact, most of the professors accepted the situation as they would the inevitable; yet I am unable to hear of one of them who now regrets it. We do not affirm that the experiment has yet proceeded far enough to be entirely conclusive. For ourselves, we shall still watch aad wait-but no longer with any fear. Meantime, the general opinion upon the present state of the case is very fairly conveyed in the verdict which I heard last night from the lips of one of our most thoughtful and most conservative men: "The coming of the women among us,” said he, “is not only a success, but a success to a degree wholly unexpected." Unless, therefore, some now unseen flaw shall appear in our machinery, it certainly threatens to conduct the idea of co-education to a success that will be contagious; and should this be the case, I do not see what power can avert from the generations of men the calamity hinted at in Young's most ungallant lines: "Is 't not enough plagues, wars, and famines rise I had intended in this letter to refer to several other topics. But, as you see, in trying to tell you about the ladies, I have not succeeded in being brief—thus illustrating once more the sad truth that when one gets entangled with these irrepressible members of the human family, there is no safe guess as to when one will get clear again.—The Nation. The Use of Grammar in Classical Instruction. PR. EDITOR --I have transcribed, from Essays on a Liberal Education, a portion of an essay referred to in the December number of the TEACHER. The extract is an abridgment, but is in the exact words of the author. W. H. P. "As regards the teaching of Grammar, it sometimes seems as if it would be a good thing to attempt to express distinctly the grounds upon which it is based in the minds of those who assert its importance. They seem to fall under three heads. There is the idea that Grammar is useful for the sake of teaching the language; the idea that its difficulties are useful as a moral training; and the idea that it is a desirable object of study, for its own sake. "The first of them we will meet with a direct negative. By Grammar is, of course, meant a formal analysis of usage, in respect of inflection and syntax. Can it be said that this system of teaching by means of Grammar is the most successful now? It will be recollected that the only question, for the moment, is how a language may be most quickly learnt. The problem is solved every day by grown-up men and women. There is not an Englishman in the country who, if he wanted to learn French, would begin by committing to memory a whole volume of rules and formulæ. By doing so, he would certainly succeed in the end; but he would know that it would be a waste of time and labor. What does the captain of a boat-club at the Universities do, if he wants to teach a man how to row? Does he keep him practicing, on dry land, the motions he will have to perform, and fixing in his memory the laws which are to guide him, when he enters upon work at last? Nothing of the kind. If you wish to make a man row, you will give him an oar, and show him how. You will make him feel what it is like; you will make him sit behind a good pattern of the art; will give him the advice, just as you see that he needs it. There is nothing in the whole world that is not learnt best by trying. No doubt there is necessary, for all practice, some rudimentary conception you |