NEW SYSTEM FOR HARVARD?

W. R. Thayer, editor of the Graduates' Magazine, Thomas Tileston Baldwin, Jr., President of the Advocate Graduate Board, and the President of the Advocate Undergraduate Board, will award a prize of $350 for the best essay, and $150 for the second best essay on the following subject:

"Can Harvard do better service to the country by reducing the price of education, by adopting the German system of compensating professors, by favoring the leadership of the intellectual student, rather than of the athletic or convivial student, or by any other change?"

Competition will be open to all members of the University.

It is suggested that the award be made to the essay that offers the best suggestion for the benefit of the University and the undergraduates. The query is, whether some new intellectual leadership, of a supreme nature, might be of service to the undergraduates? All the branches of the subject are with reference to such service. Writers for the prizes are invited to consider whether the present cost of education might well be lowered, whether inexpensive education would widen the usefulness of Harvard, and whether the introduction of a larger number of intellectual students, of the old fashioned kind, would help to the end in view? It is understood that one of Harvard's larger leaders gave New Lecture Hall to the University, and the query is whether the Lecture Hall could be of great service to the University, if some of the lecturers were men, for example, like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Joseph Choate, whose leadership would attract large numbers of hearers, and might be especially suggestive and inspiring.

To meet the objection, that the cost of compensating such lecturers would be too great, the competitors for the prize are invited to consider the German method of compensating the lecturer. That method is to pay a small, fixed sum to each lecturer, which is called a viaticum, and to give the lecturer very small lecture fees from each of his many hearers, the same to be the sole compensation of the lecturer. Thus there is very little more cost for the maintenance of a lecturer with 1000 hearers, than for the maintenance of a lecturer who had ten to twenty hearers.

While the Faculty of the present day are the most perfect instructors, it is supposed that some leadership, of a supreme order, might be of service to Harvard, and through Harvard to the country. Older graduates remember, gratefully, the good they gained from James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Asa Gray, Louis Agassiz, and other leaders of men, who were lecturers, and the regret they felt that Harvard did not employ John Fiske, J. H. Choate, J. C. Carter, George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, J. L. Motley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. H. Prescott, and others like them, as regular lecturers or professors.

Harvard has a reserve strength in its graduates, of this quality, which it has not used, and could use. Does this mean great idle capital?