254 History of Universities
Thus Harvard reproduced, as early as 1642, the English
“collegiate” way of living in a society of scholars; and all
our colonial colleges followed suit. Even those like King’s
and Philadelphia that were located in the midst of a grow-
ing city, provided a suitable building with dining hall, cham-
bers, and studies, and required their students to live in col-
lege. Unfortunately, many later American institutions of
higher learning lost sight of the value of this system. Some
provided inadequate dormitory accommodations, or none,
leaving their students to shift for themselves in lodging or
boarding houses, as at the continental universities. The
result in almost every case has been that the students, grow-
ing tired of this dreary way of living, formed residential
fraternities, which for all their Greek letters have been a
shabby and barbarous substitute for the humane community
life of the colonial college. And in the nineteenth century,
the industrial era, the notion arose that any sort of building
was good enough for a student or a professor; many an
American university campus today is cluttered up with pre-
tentious barns and architectural monstrosities that date from
an era when scholars were supposed to live plain and poets
to starve in a garret.
The Rice Institute was more happy. Her founders wisely
sifted the past for good principles, and did not make the
mistake of supposing that there was nothing to be learned
from eight centuries of university history. They provided
students with the means to lead the collegiate life, in build-
ings of intrinsic and extrinsic beauty that any university of
the world may envy. But in order to restore the full col-
legiate life that our colonial colleges enjoyed, and that the
Oxford and Cambridge colleges have at all costs preserved,
it will be necessary to introduce a tutorial system of instruc-
tion, and to have the tutors live in the dormitories, among