Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[8] future university must be the professional schools, and that what is now called distinctively the College must shrink into a preparatory department, instead of being accepted, as now, for the full sum of a liberal education. Even the professional schools are not yet liberal enough, and their very name indicates that they are founded with a view to certain avocations, and not with a view to culture. It was a misfortune, in this respect, when the Scientific School at Cambridge abandoned its projected departments of Latin and Greek; for these might have led the way (as at New Haven) to Philology, History, and Metaphysics, and would have helped to save science from being confounded with mere technological training. On the other hand, the recent organization of an Academical Senate at Cambridge for the general government of all departments, and the introduction of University Lectures, are a great step towards giving us the larger system which the nation needs.

The error committed in our colleges of making Latin and Greek compulsory, and therefore unattractive, should not make us forget that this is, after all, an error in the direction of high culture, and one more pardonable in America than anywhere else. These languages are a perpetual protest against the strong tendency to make all American education hasty and superficial. They stand for a learning which makes no money, but helps to make men. Astronomy, metaphysics, the higher mathematics, and the critical or literary study of the modern languages, have the same advantage; but the Latin and Greek tongues represent this culture best. For they remain still synonymous with accurate linguistic training, and with the study of form in literature. Compared with these, all modern languages are undeniably loose in structure,