025
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Title
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025
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Transcription
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ADMISSION AND CURRICULA 'The way to begin is to begin.' This doubtless means that what one does to set about a beginning often breaks inertia and becomes peculiarly and vitally the beginning itself. It is hesitancy over the first step that has kept many a chapter of potential history unwritten. When a college is opened in a community where there are no students asking or waiting to be admitted, there are evidently other forces than evolutional in control. The great universities were severally the result of need, and not an effort to create it. In 1871 the University of Nebraska was emphatically the seeker and not the sought. Some of its first alumni came to be students through the advice, and indeed, in a sense, the solicitation, of its head. Thus was the higher education precipitated in Nebraska. There being no secondary education to serve for preparation, the University was forced to administer it to itself. For years in consequence its chief enrollment was in its Latin School. Until the middle eighties the University of Nebraska was spoken of in legislative debates as the Lincoln High School. There was little knowledge of it in the State at large until Chancellor Canfield, in 1891-1895, carried the evangel of opportunity to every considerable town and village. College classes were now filled to repletion, and preparatory courses were discontinued. Amusing stories of the period thus closed indicate that some of the early students were but feebly 'fitted.' Professor Woodberry, acting as examiner, is said to have astonished applicant by asking merely, 'Can you read,' and by reporting to him, after proof of that accomplishment, 'You pass.' This admission was, of course, to the Latin School. There is evidence that Professor Woodberry found little fault with the quality of the students that reached him eventually in the college. Nowhere was greater promise discovered or developed than under his exacting standards.
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Rights
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