Literature and music were thus made to do beautiful service as yokefellows. It has been my lot to enjoy in various capitals of the modern world many of the things which men who have a deep feeling for art most rejoice in, but never have I known anything more uplifting and ennobling than these simple commemorations.
From one evil which has greatly injured many American university faculties, especially in the middle and western States, we were virtually free. This evil was the prevalence of feuds between professors. Throughout a large part of the nineteenth century they were a great affliction.
Twice the State University of Michigan was nearly wrecked by them; for several years they nearly paralyzed two or three of the New York colleges; and in one of these a squabble between sundry professors and the widow of a former president was almost fatal. Another of the larger colleges in the same State lost a very eminent president from the same cause; and still another, which had done excellent work, was dragged down and for years kept down by a feud between its two foremost professors. In my day, at Yale, whenever there was a sudden influx of students, and it was asked whence they came, the answer always was, ``Another Western college has burst up''; and the ``burst up'' had resulted, almost without exception, from faculty quarrels.
In another chapter I have referred to one of these explosions which, having blown out of a Western university the president, the entire board of trustees, and all the assistant professors and instructors, convulsed the State for years. I have known gifted members of faculties, term after term, substitute for their legitimate work impassioned appeals to their religious denominations, through synods or conferences, and to the public at large through the press,--their quarrels at last entangling other professors and large numbers of students.
In my ``Plan of Organization'' I called attention to this evil, and laid down the principle that ``the presence of no professor, however gifted, is so valuable as peace and harmony.'' The trustees acquiesced in this view, and from the first it was understood that, at any cost, quarrels must be prevented. The result was that we never had any which were serious, nor had we any in the board of trustees. One of the most satisfactory of all my reflections is that I never had any ill relations with any member of either body; that there was never one of them whom I did not look upon as a friend. My simple rule for the government of my own conduct was that I had NO TIME for squabbling; that life was not long enough for quarrels; and this became, Ithink, the feeling among all of us who were engaged in the founding and building of the university.
As regards the undergraduates, I initiated a system which, so far as is known to me, was then new in American institutions of learning. At the beginning of every year, and also whenever any special occasion seemed to require it, I summoned the whole body of students and addressed them at length on the condition of the university, on their relations to it, and on their duties to it as well as to themselves; and in all these addresses endeavored to bring home to them the idea that under our system of giving to the graduates votes in the election of trustees, and to representative alumni seats in the governing board, the whole student body had become, in a new sense, part of the institution, and were to be held, to a certain extent, responsible for it. I think that all conversant with the history of the university will agree that the results of thus taking the students into the confidence of the governing board were happy. These results were shown largely among the undergraduates, and even more strongly among the alumni. In all parts of the country alumni associations were organized, and here again I found a source of strength. These associations held reunions during every winter, and at least one banquet, at which the president of the university was invited to be present. So far as possible, I attended these meetings, and made use of them to strengthen the connection of the graduates with their alma mater.
