“ T E A C H I N G AT A U N I V E R S I T Y O F A C E R TA I N S O R T ”
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members of a research institute, but a large part of them expect to go into more or less advanced teaching. Preparation for this latter cannot adequately be provided by merely research courses, even if the student body offering itself in the graduate school were of a sufficiently even preparation and equality of capacity to assume that they are sufficiently informed on the general aspects of their specialty to permit them to spend all their time in research proper.”10 Faculty seem to have had considerable freedom to decide what courses they wished to teach, even younger faculty. Robert Herrick reported in 1896, “Each instructor has a wide liberty in conducting his courses, and I believe that no other college in America leaves her instructors so free to grow in the prosecution of their special studies. The maximum number of students in each class is fixed by regulation at thirty, and the day will never come when the herding of students into courses of three or four hundred members will be tolerated. An instructor, if he is any way human, gets to know his students even in the space of twelve weeks.”11 Teaching was a fundamental activity of the University from the very beginning, although Harper danced around between public statements about the superiority of research and urgent pleas that the necessary 10. Carl F. Huth to Norman Beck, August 26, 1924, Department of History Records, Box 1, folder 4. Huth was pessimistic about getting graduate students to engage in more discussion: “As far as I understand the system in our department, no lecture course is supposed to be given without perfectly free discussion. Some courses I know are carried on very largely by discussion. The amount of discussion gotten out of the course depends much more on the student than on the teacher. . . . I think you will agree with me that not a very large percentage of students is either willing or capable of participating in discussion.” 11. Robert Herrick, “The University of Chicago,” Scribner’s Magazine, 18 (1895): 410–411.