SHIPS, SHOES, SEALING WAX

While members of the country's moneyed classes ponder sadly over the safety of financial investments, there seems to be no fear as to the advisability of investment in academical institutions. Columbia University has just announced the receipt of over a million dollars from various gifts and bequests.

That such a large sum of money has been accumulated in such a short time, a matter of a few weeks, reflects the range of interests in which the modern university is dealing. In the case of the Columbia bequests, this tendency towards diversification is brought out in bold relief. There is a gift from the Carnegie Foundation for a School of Library Service, a gift for the study of political prognostication, a bequest for research in food nutrition, for research in sub-tropical medicine, and others of equally diversified nature.

The tendency towards such diversification in the fields of college research, while in keeping with the advance of modern science, is fast breaking up what is left of the homogeneity of the university of today. Moreover, it does not seem as if the problem of modern research was being administered in as efficient way as possible. In the welter of new chairs of various sciences which are being founded in the universities of the country, there are bound to be many duplications. Among graduate schools specializing in certain fields there are many whose aims and methods of teaching are the same, yet they are scattered throughout the country. In many cases research in any particular field is carried on at the college in which a donor may be interested, regardless of that institution's particular aptitude for handling problems in that field.

The concentration of the facilities for work in any special field into one institution, which would confine its efforts to research in that particular field, would enable such research to be carried out systematically by the ablest body of men which could be assembled. It would obviate the parallelism which exists in the graduate schools and research laboratories of the country's colleges, and would enable science to pool its resources. Perhaps even most important it would simplify the administration of the modern college, which of recent years has become a monster on unwieldy proportions.