Tag: Burgess

Columbia. Trustee behind the establishment of the School of Political Science. Ruggles, 1880

Post author By Irwin Collier
Post date 2023-09-18

Today’s post introduces us to someone who was critical in creating the institutional infrastructure that promoted the development of economics at Columbia University. Samuel Bulkley Ruggles wanted political economy and public policy to be taught and as a trustee of Columbia College worked to have John W. Burgess hired in the first place and then supported Burgess’s plan to form a faculty of political science to fit between the School of Arts and the School of Law. There in the School of Political Science founded in 1880 would be the origins of the department of economics (sociology, mathematical statistics, public law, international institutes etc, etc).

Note: As far as the curator of Economics in the Rear-view Mirror can determine, there is no relation between Samuel Bulkley Ruggles and the Ruggles dynasty of modern economics.

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Biography of Columbia Trustee,
Samuel Bulkley Ruggles

RUGGLES, Samuel Bulkley, lawyer, b. in New Milford, Conn., 11 April, 1800; d. on Fire island, N. Y., 28 Aug., 1881. He removed at an early age to Poughkeepsie, was graduated at Yale in 1814, studied law in the office of his father, Philo, who was surrogate and district attorney at Poughkeepsie, and was admitted to the bar in 1821. He was elected a member of the assembly of 1888, and, as chairman of the committee on ways and means, presented a “Report upon the Finances and Internal Improvements of the State of New York,” which led the state to enter upon a new policy in its commercial development. This report proposed to borrow sums of money sufficient to enlarge the Erie canal within five years, and not, as had been at first decided, to rely upon part of the tolls to pay for the enlargement while waiting twenty years. The enlargement was not made at once, but Mr. Ruggles’s views, which were much assailed, were amply vindicated by the event. He was a commissioner to determine the route of the Erie railroad, and a director in 1833-’9, a director and promoter of the Bank of commerce in 1839, commissioner of the Croton aqueduct in 1842, delegate from the United States to the International statistical congresses at Berlin in 1863 and the Hague in 1869, U. S. commissioner to the Paris exposition of 1867, and delegate to the International monetary conference that was held there. He laid out Gramercy park, in the city of New York, in 1831, gave it its name, and presented it to the surrounding property-owners. He also had a considerable influence upon shaping Union square, where he resided, and he selected the name of Lexington avenue. He was for a long term of years a trustee of the Astor library, and he held the same office in Columbia college from 1836 till the end of his life. He was also a member of the Chamber of commerce of the state of New York, and of the General convention of the Protestant Episcopal church.

Mr. Ruggles’s claim to distinction rests chiefly upon his canal policy, and the steadfast attention that he continued to give to the Erie canal, both as a private citizen during his life and as canal commissioner, in which office he served from 1840 till 1842, and again in the year 1858. Yale gave him the degree of LL.D. in 1859. Among his numerous printed papers are “Report upon Finances and Internal Improvements” (1838); “Vindication of Canal Policy” (1849); “Defence of Improvement of Navigable Waters by the General Government” (1852); “Law of Burial” (1858); “Report on State of Canals in 1858” (1859); reports on the Statistical congress at Berlin (1863), the Monetary conference at Paris (1867), and the Statistical congress at the Hague (1871); “Report to the Chairman of the Committee on Canals” (1875); and a “Consolidated Table of National Progress in Cheapening Food” (1880).

Source: Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, edited by James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, Vol. 5, Pickering-Sumter (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1888), pp. 343-344.

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Research tip

Ruggles of New York: A Life of Samuel B. Ruggles by Daniel Garrison Brinton Thompson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946). Includes a bibliography primary and secondary sources regarding Samuel Bulkeley Ruggles.

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Excerpt from Joseph Dorfman’s 1955 History of the Economics Department of Columbia

…In 1876, four years after [Francis] Lieber’s death, John W. Burgess was called from Amherst to revive Lieber’s work in the College as well as in the School of Law; it was expected that he would teach political economy. The subject was especially important in the eyes of Samuel B. Ruggles, the Trustee who led this movement for the revival of Lieber’s chair and who was well aware of the developments at Yale, Harvard, and abroad. A lawyer by profession, with extensive business interests, Ruggles was genuinely interested in the advancement of learning in general and political economy in particular. He had a reputation as a statistician, especially in monetary matters. He had served as American Commissioner to a number of international statistical and monetary conferences, had taken an active interest in the enactment of the Coinage Act of 1873, and was one of the leaders in the subsequent controversy over bimetallism.

To Ruggles, Burgess looked like the right person to teach political economy, for Burgess had taught the subject at Knox College from 1869 to 1871 as Professor of English Literature and Political Economy and had subsequently studied at Leipzig under Wilhelm Roscher, the foremost figure in the German historical school of economics. Burgess felt, however, that he could not do justice to the field because of his already heavy program, and he proposed that an assistant be secured especially for instruction in economics. A report presented by Ruggles, for the Trustees’ Committee appointed to inquire into the matter, marked the first definite, explicit recognition by a leading institution of the “historical school.” The report, submitted on October 1, 1877, declared that since [Charles Murray] Nairne had not specialized in political economy, he taught it

“…in a rather peremptory way in conformity with the methods of the old text books, in which certain general principles are first assumed to be true, and are subsequently followed out to their natural conclusions by applying to them the processes of logic. That the results thus reached have failed to command general acceptance not merely among the uneducated, but also with many who have made questions of Political Economy the principal study of their lives, is made evident by the widely discordant opinions which continue to be maintained by writers of ability in regard to matters which concern the very fountain springs of national prosperity. Either the truth of the assumed general principles of the theoretic writers is denied, or it is claimed that these principles are only true with so many qualifications and limitations as to render them practically useless. During the past half century, however, there has arisen a school of political economists, principally on the continent of Europe, who have endeavored to apply to this branch of science the same methods which have long been recognized as the only sure methods in physics and natural history, viz., the methods of induction from ascertained facts. These investigators have, with great labor, brought together and classified the immense amount of varied information in regard to the industrial condition of different countries under different systems of legislation gathered by the statistical bureaus of the several governments, and from these have sought to infer, not what on abstract principles ought to be, but what actually is, the system most favorable to industrial development, to growth in national wealth and to the fairest and most equal distribution of the rewards of labor. It was in the hope that these later views of a subject of so vast importance to the future of the world, and especially of our own country, in which questions of public economy must soon absorb the attention of our lawgivers to the exclusion of almost every other, might be introduced into our course of instruction that the Committee of this Board on the course, when, in 1876, it was proposed to appoint a professor of History and Political Science, gave their assent to such appointment on the condition that the professor so appointed should be charged with the duty of giving instruction on Political Economy.”

The report agreed with Burgess’s view that his value lay in the other branches in which he had specialized. Consequently, he should have an assistant to handle political economy. The report went on to point out that there was available for this post a former student of Burgess’s, a man who had for the “past two years been pursuing a course of instruction in Political Economy under the ablest teachers of this Science in Germany.” Accordingly, Richmond Mayo-Smith was, at the same Trustees’ meeting, appointed as an instructor to assist the Professor of History and Political Science. This was the first time in the College’s history that an appointment depended primarily on the candidate’s qualifications in political economy. Two years later he was promoted to Adjunct Professor of History, Political Science and International Law, and in 1883, at the age of twenty-seven, he obtained a full professorship. It is interesting that among the grounds given for his promotion was the fact that he had spent “three entire summers, in recent years, in study with his old instructors at Heidelberg and Berlin.” At first, half his teaching time was devoted to English constitutional history, which he taught until 1890. From the very beginning, however, he tripled the time allotted to the instruction in political economy. To the two-hour, one-semester course required of all juniors he added an elective, two-hour, one-year course for seniors. He gave the juniors “systematic work” with the aid of the familiar elementary textbooks of Fawcett or Rogers and the use of quizzes. For the seniors, however, he used the more sophisticated and advanced Principles of Political Economy of John Stuart Mill, the great codifier of classical economics.* Mayo-Smith supplemented it with lectures on “practical economics” and with “statistical and documentary works” that reflected the controversies over the tariff, bimetallism, greenbacks, the stir over Irish land reform, and Henry George’s single tax. His lecture topics included land tenure in Europe, monetary systems of Europe and America, and the financial history of the United States.

*The term “political economy” was then generally used in official records, but “economics” was often used, certainly as early as 1878. The printed form of the student’s periodical report card sent to the parent, lists “economics.” (See the report entry November 27, 1878, on E.R.A. Seligman, in Seligman Papers.)

Source: Joseph Dorfman, Chapter 9, “The Department of Economics” in A History of the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), pp. 169-172.

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Burgess Recounts Ruggles’ Role in the Establishment of the School of Political Science

In the early autumn of 1875 I received from Professor Theodore W. Dwight, warden of Columbia Law School in New York City, a communication to the effect that the trustees of Columbia College had voted to invite me to deliver a course of lectures on political science to the students of the Law School during the following winter and had authorized him to transmit the invitation to me and to request from me an early reply. This was the second or third time that they had made this offer to me. I had declined it on account of lack of time to prepare the course, but now that I was to have no graduate students in the year 1875-76, I accepted the call and occupied all of my surplus time and energy during the autumn of 1875 in constructing the desired lectures. The month of January, 1876, was employed in the delivery of the same. The audiences were very large, consisting of the trustees of the college, members of the faculty, and the students of the Law School.

It was on the occasion of the first lecture that I made the acquaintance of Mr. Samuel B. Ruggles, the chairman of the committee of the trustees on the Law School, one of the most extraordinary men whom it has ever been my privilege to know. Mr. Hamilton Fish once said to me: “Ruggles can throw off more brilliant and pregnant ideas in a given moment than any man I ever saw.” He was then already seventy-five years of age and I but thirty-one, but from the first moment of our meeting we flew together like steel and magnet. He came to every lecture, and at the end of the course he said to me, “You are the man we have been looking for ever since Lieber’s death. You must come to Columbia.”…

… The months of February, March, April, and May of the year 1876 were among the most distressing of my life. Mr. Ruggles was continually writing and urging me to give my consent to his bringing my name before the trustees of Columbia College for election to a chair in that institution. Professor Dwight and President Barnard were doing likewise, and I was inventing all sorts of subterfuges for delay. At last, on the first Monday of May, 1876, the trustees, on recommendation of the committee of which Mr. Ruggles was chairman, backed by the approval of Professor Dwight and President Barnard, unanimously elected me professor of history, political science, and international law, without my having given any assurance of accepting the office. The action of the trustees was so cordial and complimentary that I cannot refrain from transcribing the resolution in the language of their own records. It ran as follows:

At a meeting of the Trustees of Columbia College of the City of New York on Monday, May 1st, 1876, it was

RESOLVED, that during the pleasure of the Trustees the salary of the Professor of History, Political Science and International Law shall be. . . . The Board then proceeded to an election for Professor and on counting the ballots Professor John W. Burgess was found to be unanimously elected.

Whereupon it was

RESOLVED, that Professor John W. Burgess be appointed Professor of History, Political Science and International Law to hold his office during the pleasure of the Trustees.

Notwithstanding this unanimous and hearty invitation, I still hesitated. Towards the end of the month of May I received a letter from Mr. Ruggles and also one from President Barnard urging me to send my answer before the meeting of the trustees on the first Monday of June following. At the last moment, with a heavy heart and many misgivings, I accepted the call….

…With the assistance of Mayo-Smith alone, I had worked on thus through the four years from 1876 to 1880, both in the School of Arts and in the School of Law, with some moderate measure of success, and had learned the obstacles to greater success and had felt the way towards it. My first plan was to have a third year added to the curriculum of the School of Law and expand the courses in political science and public law in the law curriculum. But Professor Dwight was distinctly opposed to this as impairing the practical nature of the law instruction according to his view. The peculiar relation of the Law School to the college at that time, which I have already stated, made his opposition to any project for change therein fatal to the undertaking. In the School of Arts all the time had been assigned to the courses in history and political economy which could be afforded in the stiff, required program of studies then obtaining in this school. No relief could be found there.

There was only one other way out of the cramping, unbearable situation, and that was to found a new faculty and a new school for the study, teaching, and development of the historical, political, economic, and social sciences. This was so progressive an idea that I did not dare to broach it for a long time to anybody. I had learned from experience with the vanity of man, to say nothing of that of woman, that the way to succeed in realizing any idea when it must be done through the will of another or others is to make the person or persons in the controlling position think that the idea emanates from him or them. This is not always an easy thing to do. It requires a good deal of skill in psychology to construct approaches through suggestion to the customary obstinacy and obstructiveness of American character. I felt almost instinctively that the man to whom I should turn was Mr. Ruggles. On the evening of the fifth of April, 1880, I went by appointment to his house, then 24 Union Square, for an interview with him. I found two other men with him, his nephew Mr. Robert N. Toppan and Mr. Toppan’s bosom friend John Durand, the American translator of the works of the French author Taine. At first I thought that their presence would prevent me from saying anything to Mr. Ruggles on the subject which I had been for months revolving in mind. But to my surprise and delight I found that Mr. Ruggles had asked them to come in for the purpose of talking with me on points nearly related to my intended proposition. Toppan had taken great interest in my work in the Law School from the beginning and had founded and endowed an annual prize for the best work in public law and political science, and Durand had just returned from Paris and had been telling Toppan about a project in which some of their French friends were participants. Mr. Ruggles immediately opened the conversation and asked me how things were going in my department. I told him and his visitors very frankly of the obstacles in the way of developing these studies in manner and degree as I thought required in a great republic like ours.

They all listened with great attention and evident interest, and when I finally paused in my account of the situation, Mr. Ruggles spoke up quickly and, as was his habit, with apparent impatience, and said: “Well, I do not see but we shall have to found a school for the political sciences separate from both the School of Arts and the School of Law.” At this my heart leaped with gladness into my throat, and it was with a great effort that I restrained myself from saying, “That is the idea I have been for some time entertaining.” I was happily, however, able to modify this into the reply that this would presumably solve the question, but that I knew of no precedent, except perhaps the faculty of “Cameralwissenschaften,” as it was called, of the German Imperial University at Strasbourg very recently founded. At this Mr. Durand said that he had just returned from Paris and while there had by his friend Taine been introduced to one Émile Boutmy, who, with such publicists as Casimir-Périer and Ribot and several others had just founded in Paris the École libre des sciences politiques and had already put it into successful operation. Mr. Ruggles suggested that I draw up a plan for a separate faculty and school of political science in Columbia College and put it into his hands and go myself immediately to Paris, enter the École libre as a student and study carefully its scheme and methods. This suggestion was seconded by both Mr. Toppan and Mr. Durand.

To me it promised the fulfillment of the hope which had been my life’s guide for more than fifteen years. So soon as proper courtesy would allow, I took my leave and hastened home to begin the draft of the proposed new development and to prepare for my journey to Paris. I did not sleep any that night. I did not even retire to rest, but spent the entire night in my study formulating my project. The next morning I summoned Richmond Mayo-Smith to my house and related to him the results of the conference at Mr. Ruggles’s house on the evening before. He, also, was overjoyed at the turn things had so suddenly taken. We talked over the general outline of the plan which I had drawn up and made a few modifications in it, and he agreed to join me in Paris so soon as his duties at the college would allow. I handed the plan to Mr. Ruggles after a few days of reflection upon it, and he assumed the burden of laying it before the trustees and of securing leave of absence for both Professor Mayo-Smith and myself in order that we might have as full an opportunity as possible to investigate the organization and operation of the École libre in Paris….

…At the meeting of the trustees of the college on the first Monday in May, 1880, Mr. Ruggles secured leave of absence for me to go immediately to Paris for the purpose above mentioned, and for Professor Mayo-Smith to go at the end of the month, and laid the plan for the new faculty and School of Political Science before them. This plan was in outline as follows:

A faculty of Political Science should be created, composed of all professors and adjunct and associate professors already giving instruction in history, economics, public law, and political science to the senior class in the School of Arts and the classes of the School of Law and of such other officers of these grades as might be called to chairs in the new faculty.

The plan provided a program of studies in history, economics, public law, and political philosophy, extending over a period of three years, and for a degree of Ph.B. or A.B. to be conferred upon students completing successfully the curriculum of the first year and of Ph.D. to be conferred upon students completing successfully the curricula of the three years and presenting an approved thesis.

The plan provided, further, that members of the senior class of the School of Arts of Columbia College might elect the curriculum of the first year in the School of Political Science and have it take the place of the senior curriculum in the School of Arts and that members of the School of Law who had advanced successfully to the end of the junior year in any college of equal standing with Columbia might enter the School of Political Science as fully qualified candidates for the degrees conferred by recommendation of the faculty of that school.

It provided, finally, that all “persons, of the male sex, having successfully completed the curricula of the first three years of any American college having the same standing as the School of Arts of Columbia College, were qualified to enter the proposed School as candidates for the degrees conferred upon recommendation by the Faculty of the School.”

Such was, in brief, an outline of the project which Mr. Ruggles laid before the trustees of the college at their regular meeting on the first Monday of May, 1880. The trustees referred the proposition to a committee for examination, report, and recommendation at their meeting to be held on the first Monday of the following June, and also granted leave of absence to Professor Mayo-Smith and myself to go to Paris…

…[In Paris] on Tuesday morning after the first Monday of June, I was awakened by a loud knock on the door of my sleeping room about five o’clock. On going to the door, an American cablegram was handed me. It read: “Thank God, the university is born. Go ahead.” It was signed “Samuel B. Ruggles.” This meant that the trustees of Columbia College had, on the day before, adopted the plan for founding the School of Political Science in the college and had authorized me to invite Edmund Munroe Smith, then student in Berlin, and Clifford R. Bateman, then student in Heidelberg, to join Mayo-Smith and myself in forming the new faculty and putting the new school into operation at the beginning of the academic year 1880-81, in the following October.

Source: John W. Burgess, Reminiscences of an American Scholar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), pp. 150-153; 187-192; 194-195.

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Resolution of the Columbia College Trustees to Establish a School of Political Science

§. 4. SCHOOL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE.

June 7th, 1880.

Resolved, That there be established to go into operation at the opening of the academic year next ensuing, a school designed to prepare young men for the duties of public life to be entitled a School of Political Science, having a definitely prescribed curriculum of study extending over a period of three years and embracing the History of Philosophy, the History of the Literature of Political Sciences, the General Constitutional History of Europe, the Special Constitutional History of England and the United States, the Roman Law and the jurisprudence of existing codes derived therefrom, the Comparative Constitutional Law of European States and of the United States, the Comparative Constitutional Law of the different States of the American Union, the History of Diplomacy, International Law, Systems of Administrations, State and National, of the United States, Comparison of American, and European Systems of Administration, Political Economy and Statistics.

Resolved, That the qualifications required of the candidate for admission to this School, shall be that he shall have successfully pursued a course of undergraduate study in this College or in some other, maintaining an equivalent curriculum to the close of the Junior year.

Resolved, That the students of the School, who shall satisfactorily complete the studies of the first year, shall be entitled on examination and the recommendation of the Faculty to receive the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy, and those who complete the entire course of three years, shall on similar examination and recommendation, be entitled to receive the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Resolved, That the annual tuition fee required of students of this School shall be one hundred and fifty dollars ($150).

Resolved, That Edmund Munroe Smith be appointed Lecturer on Roman Law in the School of Political Science, to enter upon his duties on the first day of October next, and to hold office for one year, or during the pleasure of the Board, at a compensation of fifteen hundred dollars ($1,500) per annum.

Resolved, That Clifford Rush Bateman be appointed Lecturer on Administrative Law and Government in the School of Political Science, to enter upon duty on the first day of October, 1881, and to serve for the term of one year, or during the pleasure of the Board, at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars ($1,500) per annum.

Source: Columbia College. Resolutions of the Trustees, Volume VIII, 1880-85, pp. 140-141.

Image Source: Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, edited by James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, Vol. 5, Pickering-Sumter (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1888), p. 344.

Tags Burgess, Lieber, Mayo-Smith, Nairne, RugglesSB

Columbia Economics Programs Economists Germany

Columbia. Munroe Smith’s history of the faculty of political science as told by A.S. Johnson, 1952.

Post author By Irwin Collier
Post date 2023-07-17

The following paragraphs come from Alvin S. Johnson’s 1952 autobiography that is filled with many such nuggets of fact and context that are relevant for the work of Economics in the Rear-View Mirror. The institutional histories from which departments of economics have emerged provide some of the initial conditions for the evolution of organized economics education. Like Johns Hopkins and unlike Harvard and Chicago, Columbia University economics was to a large part made in Germany.

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[p. 164] …Munroe Smith gave me detail after detail of the history of the faculty. Dean Burgess, as a cavalry officer in the Civil War, had had much time for reflection on the stupendous folly of a war in which citizens laid waste other citizens’ country and slaughtered each other without ill will. All the issues, Burgess believed, could have been compromised if the lawyers who controlled Congress and the state legislatures had been trained in history, political science, and public law. As soon as he was discharged from the army, after Appomattox, he set out for Germany to study the political sciences. He spent several years at different universities, forming friendships with the most famous professors and imbuing himself thoroughly with the spirit of German scholarship. On his return he accepted an appointment in history at Columbia College, then a pleasant young gentlemen’s finishing school. He was permitted to offer courses in public law. Although these could not be counted for credit toward the A.B., many of the ablest students were drawn to his lectures.

From among his students he picked out four and enlisted them in a project for transforming Columbia College into a university. The four were Nicholas Murray Butler, E. R. A. Seligman, Frank Goodnow, and Munroe Smith. They were to proceed to Germany to get their doctorates. Butler was to study philosophy and education; Seligman, economics; Goodnow, administration; Munroe Smith, Roman law. The young men executed Burgess’s command like good soldiers and in due time returned to offer non-credit courses at Columbia College.

Burgess’s next move was to turn his group into a graduate faculty. Such a faculty had been set up at Johns Hopkins, the first in America, and commanded nationwide interest among educators. Burgess argued with President Frederick Barnard on the need of a graduate school in the greatest city of the country. After some years the Board of Trustees authorized in 1886 the setting up of a graduate School of Political Science, manned by Burgess and his disciples, now advanced to professorial rank.

Butler early stepped aside to develop courses he later organized into Teachers College. Burgess and his three younger colleagues watched for opportunities to enlist additional abilities: William A. Dunning in political theory, Herbert L. Osgood in American history, John Bassett Moore in international law, John Bates Clark in [p. 165] economics Franklin Giddings in sociology. This process of expansion was going on energetically while I was on the faculty; Henry R. Seager and Henry L. Moore were enlisted for the economics department, Edward T. Devine and Samuel McCune Lindsay for sociology, James Harvey Robinson and later Charles A. Beard for history. In the meantime other graduate courses were springing up throughout the institution. The towering structure of Columbia University had risen up out of Burgess’s small bottle.

Still in my time the controlling nucleus of our faculty consisted of Burgess, Seligman, Goodnow, and Munroe Smith. They all knew American colonial history well and had followed the step-by-step evolution of Massachusetts Bay from a settlement governed by a chartered company in England to a free self-governing community, germ of American liberty. Step by step Burgess and his lieutenants built up the liberties of the School of Political Science. They got the Board of Trustees to accept the principle of the absolute freedom of the scholar to pursue the truth as he sees it, whatever the consequences; the principle of absolute equality of the faculty members; the principle that no scholar might be added to the faculty without the unanimous consent of the faculty. The principle was established that the president and trustees could intervene in the affairs of the faculty only through the power of the purse.

President Seth Low, regarding himself justly as a recognized authority on administration, sought admission to the meetings of the faculty. He was turned down. A university president could not conduct himself as an equal among equals. When Nicholas Murray Butler became president he thought it would be a good idea for him to sit in with the faculty. After all, he had been one of Burgess’s first panel. We voted the proposition down, unanimously.

Since my time the faculty has grown in numbers and its relations with other departments of the university have become closer. But the spirit of liberty and equality, established by Burgess and his lieutenants, still lives on at Columbia and has overflowed into the universities of America. From time to time a board of trustees steps outside its moral sphere and undertakes to purge and discipline the faculty. But established liberties stricken down are bound to rise again.

Source: Alvin Saunders Johnson. A Pioneer’s Progress. New York: Viking Press, 1952.

Image Source: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Columbia College, Madison Ave., New York, N.Y” [Architect: C. C. Haight] The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1886-09-04. Image of the Mid-town Campus from The American Architect and Building News, September 4, 1886. (cf. https://www.wikicu.com/Midtown_campus)

Tags BeardCA, Burgess, Butler, ClarkJB, DevineET, Dunning, Giddings, Goodnow, LindsaySM, Moore, MooreJB, Osgood, RobinsonJH, Seager, Seligman, SmithMunroe

Columbia Economists

Columbia. Alvin S. Johnson’s impressions of Dean John W. Burgess, October 1898

Post author By Irwin Collier
Post date 2023-07-14

Alvin Saunders Johnson’s 1952 autobiography, A Pioneer’s Progress, provides us a treasure chest of granular detail regarding his academic and life experiences. This co-founder of the New School for Social Research in New York City went on to live another 19 years after publishing his autobiography to reach the age of 96. In his New York Times obituary that starts on page one of the June 9, 1972 edition one reads:

“When he retired from the New School, Dr. Johnson did not leave the academic world. He came to the school each morning, and served as its elder statesman.”

What a way to go!

Economics in the Rear-View Mirror will clip personal and departmental remembrances of Johnson’s own economics training and teaching days. This post includes his first encounter with the founder of the Columbia School of Political Sciences, John W. Burgess, together with a tiny capsule of Burgessian Weltanschauung.

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Earlier Posts dealing with
John W. Burgess

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From Alvin S. Johnson’s Autobiography

[p. 120] … So here was I [in October 1898], a provincial, bound to Columbia for life by the calm magnificence of the Seth Low Library.

Entering, I met a janitor who directed me to the dean’s office on the third floor. The dean, John W. Burgess, looked classic too, with the classicism of highbred British stock, or rather, of the cavalier stock that first settled in Virginia. Though he had enlisted in the Northern cavalry from Tennessee, he was Virginian in his melodiously fluent speech. He treated even the rawest student or a janitor’s assistant with high courtesy and consideration….

I exhibited my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees [from the University of Nebraska] — the latter won without examination by the patriotic action of the state legislature, which voted the appropriate degrees for all volunteers who were approaching the conclusion of their requirements. He glanced at the diplomas and asked me what I wanted to study.

International relations, I said, political science, economics.

Then, he said, it would be best for me to major in economics, the strongest department. I’d need to make sociology one of my minors, according to the rules of the faculty. I could later decide what other minor I might like to take. He’d advise me to browse around freely the first year. Everybody ought to have some philosophy, and there was a famous course given by Professor Nicholas Murray Butler. Also, a course in literature might be useful.

He gave me some blanks to fill out, accepted them, and sent me to the bursar, who collected my semester’s tuition and minor fees for privileges I didn’t need.
So I was a registered graduate student in the School of Political Science. No question had been raised as to my antecedent scholarly preparation. Of course, I thought, the faculty would discover soon enough my ignorance of the field. They never did. I must have hidden it well…

[p. 122] …The Columbia School of Political Science, under which I was to work for three years, was manned by professors too distinguished to be called anywhere, except to university presidencies or high administrative office. Naturally I could not work under all of them in my first year, but I could visit all their classes and judge for myself what men of top distinction were like.

Foremost stood the dean, John W. Burgess, gentleman and scholar, reputed first authority on American constitutional history and constitutional law. He was an imperialist. At the time the problems of war and peace occupied my mind, and I classified men’s positions accordingly. Burgess had a grandiose idea of a permanent coalition among the three vital nations, America, England, and Germany, to rule the world. The decadent Latin nations were to be thrust into the role of charming museum pieces; the colored peoples and the half-Tartar Slavs were to be ruled with the firmness and justice of British rule in India…

Source: Alvin Saunders Johnson. A Pioneer’s Progress. New York: Viking Press, 1952.

Image Source: John W. Burgess in Universities and their Sons, Vol. 2. Boston: R. Herndon Company, 1899, p. 481. Colorized by Economics in the Rear-view Mirror.

Tags Burgess, JohnsonAS

Columbia Curriculum Economics Programs Harvard Yale

Columbia. Plans for Graduate Classes and Creation of a School for Civil Service Preparation. Burgess, 1880

Post author By Irwin Collier
Post date 2022-02-13

In the beginning was the pitch. On June 7, 1880 the Board of Trustees of Columbia College passed resolutions to establish the School of Political Science (within which the field of political economy was embedded). The School of Political Science would open for students beginning with the 1880-1881 academic year. The pitch and plan for a “School of Preparation for the Civil Service” of February 1880 by the School of Political Science founder John W. Burgess is transcribed below.

From this document is clear that in Burgess’ initial vision the principal mission of the future Faculty of Political Science would be to “prepare young men for the duties of public life”. So one can think of the ancestor faculty from which today’s department of economics at Columbia University descended was actually a School of Public Policy in which History, Law, and Philosophy constituted the supporting disciplinary pillars.

__________________________

OUTLINE OF A PLAN
FOR THE
INSTRUCTION of GRADUATE CLASSES
FOR THE
EXTENSION OF THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM OF STUDY
IN THE
UNDERGRADUATE DEPARTMENT.
AND FOR THE CREATION OF
A SCHOOL OF PREPARATION
FOR THE
CIVIL SERVICE

Macgowan & Slipper, Printers, 30 Beekman Street, New York.

__________________________

COLUMBIA COLLEGE

GRADUATE INSTRUCTION, AND THE EXTENSION OF
THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

To the Committee of Trustees of Columbia College on the Course and Statutes:

GENTLEMEN: The circumstances of the College are at length such as to make it possible to provide for giving instruction of a more advanced character than is required in the undergraduate classes. This is an object which many members of the Board of Trustees have long esteemed to be desirable, and of which the accomplishment has been regarded as only a question of time. Educational institutions of a nominally superior order are numerous enough in our country, but those which possess any just claim to be considered fountains of really high learning are as yet comparatively few. The country has, nevertheless, need of such institutions, as is made evident by the yearly increasing numbers of American youth who resort for the completion of their education to the Universities of the Old World. Such institutions will accordingly be erected, but it is hardly to be expected that they will be built from the ground up, on new and independent foundations. They will rather be developed out of existing institutions already well established, well endowed, and possessed of instrumentalities in actual operation, adequate, with some modification of the mode of their application, to accomplish the new and higher work proposed, without interfering with their present usefulness, or materially increasing the burden of their maintenance. The number of educational institutions in our country capable of such development is not at present great, nor is it important that it should be. It is far from being desirable, in the interest of the higher education itself, that universities (employing the term in the commonly accepted sense) should be numerous relatively either to the population or to the schools of lower grade. It is, on the other hand, vastly preferable that they should be few, strong, and largely attended, rather than many and, as an almost necessary consequence, ill-supported and feeble.

Circumstances already very distinctly indicate certain of the educational institutions of our country as destined inevitably to occupy this higher grade. There are others, doubtless, which will yet be added to the number, whose destiny is at present less clearly manifest; but as to these few there can be no possibility of mistake. Among the conditions which will aid in determining the future of these institutions is, of course, the present possession of adequate financial strength; but another, which is of nearly equal importance, is geographical position. Many reasons conspire to make the city of New York the fittest place on this continent for the growth of an educational institution of the highest order. It is not merely because of its superior population or its superior wealth that it possesses this advantage. It is because here are gradually concentrating themselves, in the most marked degree, all the most important accessories to mental cultures, all that most strikingly illustrates the triumphs of the human intellect in science, in letters, and in the arts of civilized life. And it is because in the ebb and flow of the vast human ocean which overspreads the continent, this city is the point toward which the currents of the population are continually tending, or from which they are retiring; and this is therefore, the point in which knowledge may be most conveniently sought, and from which it may be most easily diffused.

Columbia College occupies this very favorable position. It has already an honorable and well-earned reputation. It has around it a large body of Alumni interested in its prosperity, zealous for the promotion of its usefulness, and occupying, many of them, positions of influence in the social and political world. It has gathered together the most important of the instrumentalities necessary to the efficiency of instruction, or to the aid of literary research or scientific investigation. It has built up professional schools which, in there several specialties, take easily precedence of all others of their class in the United States. Its several faculties embrace men accomplished as scholars, thoroughly versed in the various departments of science, and profoundly learned in history, philosophy, and the law. What it needs to give it the character of a true university is to open its doors to aspirants for knowledge, who are seeking, not, as at present in the undergraduate department, knowledge in its mere rudiments, nor, as in the professional schools, knowledge for its immediately useful applications, but knowledge in the largest sense—knowledge pursued for its own sake, or to qualify the learner to contribute on his own part to the intellectual progress of the race.

To aspirants of this class opportunities may be offered for instruction in a great variety of subjects, without any addition, not demanded in the interest of the undergraduate department alone, to the present educational staff. To this end it is only necessary to adopt the simple expedient of distribution the hours of instruction over a larger portion of the day than they now occupy. According to the existing arrangement, all instruction is given within the limited space of three hours daily, and these are filled up with the exercises of the undergraduate classes. It is true, that within this limit it frequently happens that officers have unemployed hours; but these are not so distributed as to permit the arrangement of a working system of graduate instruction. To make such a system practicable, it is necessary that the subjects which a student may desire to combine should be taught at different hours. And this condition cannot be fulfilled without scattering the exercises over the greater part of the day. This is what is done in the School of Mines, in which all the hours from nine or ten o’clock in the morning till four or five in the afternoon are made available in one form or another for purposes of instruction.

But this expedient, while it provides that instruction shall be going on at every hour in one department or another, involves to the individual student the consequence that, between the hours in which he is engaged in class, there will occur other hours when he is without any scholastic exercise to employ him. During these hours it is proper that he should be occupied in study; and so he might be presumed to be were his residence in every instance within easy distance from the College. The institutions which provide lodgings for their students upon their own grounds find no difficulty in this matter. At Harvard University, for instance, exercises occur at every hour from nine till five; but the students, when not under instruction, are expected to study in their rooms. Since students with us have no private rooms, and are, in general, too distant from their homes to study there, the distribution of time proposed would hardly be judicious or just unless provision should be at the same time made for usefully employing the hours intervening between class duties. In the School of Mines abundant occupation for these hours is found in drawing, laboratory work, or practice in the use of tools and instruments. For the undergraduates it would be necessary to provide study rooms, to be used by students in common, by setting apart for the purpose some portion of the buildings not as yet otherwise assigned. The upper floor of the recently-erected building is entirely suitable to this object, and is quite sufficient. It is not needed for any present college uses, nor for any likely to arise so long as the old building continues to stand; and it is very evident that that building cannot be demolished until another shall have been erected somewhere else. Its demolition would necessitate the provision of other accommodations for the great variety of operations now going on in it; and though such might be found for the physical department in the new building, yet, for the Herbarium, for the classes in French, German, Mechanical Engineering, and Descriptive Geometry, for the operations of air and water analysis, for the library overflow, the gymnasium, etc., etc., no adequate space could be found there disposable. The future wants of the institution, for which the remaining floor of the new building is presumably held in reserve, will, therefore, undoubtedly be provided for in some manner not likely to interfere with any present disposition which may be made of that floor; and hence the devotion of that now unoccupied space to the uses of a study room cannot on that account be regarded as objectionable.

Supposing this arrangement to be adopted, it is easy, without adding to the number of our instructors, to plan a system of instruction for graduates which shall embrace reading or lecture courses in the Classics, English Literature, Anglo-Saxon, Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, Physiological Psychology, Political Science, Public Economy, History, the Higher Mathematics, Mechanics, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Geology, and certain branches of Natural History, to occupy, on an average, not less than two hours weekly each. There can be no doubt that, when this system shall have been fully inaugurated, the number of students attracted by it will so far add to the revenues of the College as to justify the appointment of additional instructors on subjects not included in the above enumeration, such as Foreign Literature, Hebrew, Oriental Literature, Comparative Philology, Ethnology, Archæology, Natural History in its various ramifications, Animal and Vegetable Physiology, Methods of Research in Physics and Chemistry, Physical Astronomy, Architecture and the Fine Arts, and any others which may be necessary to make the institution a school of universal knowledge.

For the purpose of illustrating the practicability of carrying the proposed plan into effect without interfering with the undergraduate course already in operation, an ideal scheme of attendance is annexed to this communication, showing a distribution of the subjects of instruction to the hours of each day throughout the week, by means of which the convenience of instructors, as well of students, both graduate and undergraduate, may be satisfactorily provided for.

ENLARGEMENT OF THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM FOR UNDERGRADUATES.

An advantage incidental to the distribution of the hours of instruction over the entire day will be the opportunity it affords for giving to the students of the undergraduate department a greater liberty of option than they at present enjoy in the selection of their studies. It appears to the undersigned that the collegiate course for the student of our day cannot properly he made so severely a course of mere mental discipline as it was judicious to make it in the last century, or even during the earlier years of the present. The average age of our graduates is that of fully grown men. The age of the applicant for admission, a century ago, ranged from ten to fourteen years. The four years of college life embraced at that time the period of gradual mental as well as of physical development and growth; and it was eminently proper that the studies enforced upon the learner should be adapted rather to train the faculties than to inform the mind. At present this period is spent mainly in the preparatory schools, and it is in them that this work of mental gymnastics should be chiefly carried on. The end of college instruction is not merely to discipline, but also to inform; and since men differ no less in their mental than in their personal characteristics, it follows that different individuals do not acquire the same kind of knowledge with equal facility, nor are they equally profited by it. This provision of nature is one of great and beneficial importance to the progress of the race; for inasmuch as it is impossible that any one shall be proficient in all departments of human knowledge, the fact that each seeks spontaneously some special field insures the certainty that every such field will be energetically explored.

It seems, therefore, to be proper that at that period of comparative maturity at which young men begin to be conscious of their fitness for some particular pursuit or vocation, and desirous to acquire the knowledge most likely to be advantageous in following it, they should be allowed, to a pretty large extent, to select their subjects of study from among those which are in harmony with their tastes and aspirations. That public opinion in the social and the educational world recognizes this propriety is manifest in the flourishing condition of the institutions in which the elective system of study has been largely developed, and in the rapidity with which those institutions have grown in popular favor. In our own College the introduction of this system on an extended scale has been hitherto impracticable, for the same reasons which have made it impossible to provide for the instruction of graduates; yet the results of the limited trial of it which we have made have been altogether favorable.

The introduction of the elective system, however, in its largest latitude, does not by any means imply the necessity of discarding the system which at present exists. If there should be any who prefer still to cling to traditions, they may enter themselves from the beginning for the course of study prescribed for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in our statutes as they stand, and follow the same undeviatingly to the end. Degrees in Arts may be reserved to be conferred on such only; while those who prefer the optional course may be graduated as Bachelors of Letters or Bachelors of Science, according to the character of the studies which they chiefly pursue.

The adoption of a scheme of study largely elective would not necessarily require an increase in the number of instructors employed. As it is true, however, that, in such a system, the modern languages ought pretty fully to enter, it would be advisable to add to our present corps, a tutor in Italian and a tutor in Spanish. As to the French, arrangements could probably be made by which the instructor in that language in the School of Mines would teach also in the College; and for the German, we have already a professor who has hitherto given instruction in his proper department only under circumstances of serious embarrassment, and who would find the proposed change advantageous to his usefulness.

An ideal scheme of attendance accompanying this communication shows in what manner the exercises may be arranged so that students pursuing elective courses may attend along with candidates for degrees in Arts, so far as the subjects of study of these two classes of students are identical. Another appended paper shows the variety of particular courses of study which may be offered in the several departments indicated only by general titles in the scheme of attendance. In this latter paper are embraced some titles which do not fall within the special province of any of our present instructors; such as Hebrew Sanskrit, the Evidences of Religion, Anatomy, Physiology, and the principles of the Common Law.

In regard to the Evidences, there is no doubt that, under the voluntary system, the Trustees would think it advisable to reestablish the course; since with the abandonment of the principle of compulsion would disappear the reasons which have led to its discontinuance heretofore.

As to Anatomy and Physiology, arrangements could be made not involving any considerable expense, with Professors of the Medical School, to give annual courses adapted to the wants of the general learner, of great interest and value, though not extending to more than ten or twelve lectures each. A brief course of similar extent, upon the principles of the Common Law, could be given by our principal Law professor, embracing information highly important to educated men, but not now easily obtain able except in professional schools. Such a course used to be given to the Seniors at Yale College during the lifetime of the late Judge Daggett, which was always fully attended, though attendance was merely voluntary.

As to Sanskrit, a language occupying every year more and more the attention of scholars everywhere, there would be very little difficulty. Some of our own recent Alumni have already honorably distinguished themselves in this interesting study. One of our Fellows in Letters of the Class of 1878, now pursuing his studies at the University at Leipzig, had made himself by his own private and independent efforts a proficient in Sanskrit literature before his graduation, and since entering upon the course at Leipzig has received signal marks of approval and consideration from the professor in that department there. Another, of the Class of 1875, after completing his course of study abroad, has returned to this country bringing flattering testimonials to his attainments in general scholarship, and especially as to his proficiency in this particular branch. This young man, or some other similarly qualified, could be appointed to fill one of the new tutorships which it will presently become necessary to create in Greek or Latin in our College, and could be engaged at the same time to take charge of the instruction of any class which might be formed in Sanskrit. Considering that the condition of things is such in College at present as to make it impossible any longer to defer increasing the number of subordinate officers, it may be regarded as a happy concurrence of circumstances which enables us by the same act to provide a competent instructor in a subject in which as yet in this country the proficients are few.

All the subjects, however, for which instructors cannot be found among the members of our present Faculties, unless the modern languages be excepted, may be omitted, if necessary, from our scheme, till the success of the measure shall permit them to be provided for without adding to the burdens of the treasury.

PREPARATION OF YOUNG MEN FOR THE CIVIL SERVICE.

Since the passage of the resolution in regard to graduate classes, now before the Committee, a plan has been proposed for establishing, in addition to the special schools connected with the College already in existence, a new one of an original character, designed to meet what is believed to be a want of the present time, by preparing young men to engage intelligently in the service of the government. Though as yet in our country the civil and consular service has not been securely placed beyond the control of influences purely political, the popular sentiment manifests itself more and more strongly every year in favor of such a separation, and enough has been already accomplished to make it evident that, at least in the lower ranks of this service, proper qualification and the personal merit of the aspirant are likely hereafter to carry with them more weight in the competition for office than political favor. Even, moreover, should the so-called Civil Service reform receive a check, the course of instruction which it is proposed to give in the new school would still prove attractive to young men who desire to fit themselves to deal with questions of public interest, whether in professional life, or as politicians, or as managers of public journals. A school of a character similar to this has for several years been in successful operation in Paris, and counts among its teachers some of the most eminent publicists of France.

The proposition referred to proceeds from our Professor of Political Science, and is set forth in its details in a letter addressed by him to the undersigned, which is given below. As the proposed school involves the question of both graduate and undergraduate instruction, its consideration falls within the scope of the resolution referred to the Committee. An ideal scheme of attendance hereto appended shows in what manner the exercises of this course may be combined with those of the graduate and undergraduate classes, so that each may be accessible, if desired, to the students of the others.

In order that this project may be carried into effect, it would be necessary to appoint, within the next two years, two additional instructors, at salaries of $2,500 each. Within the same period the number of students entering for the course might reasonably be computed at not less than fifty, and would probably be greater. It would conduce very much to the success of the undertaking that the Law School should be removed from its present situation and united with the other departments upon the same ground, though that need not be regarded as in dispensable.

Following the letter of Professor Burgess below, will be found, marked A, a succinct résumé of the essential features of the plan herein recommended, and also of that of the proposed School of Preparation for the Civil Service, marked B. Also, marked C, an estimate of the probable effect upon revenue and expenditure of the adoption of these projects; and finally, an enumeration, marked D, of the subjects of the several courses of instruction which the proposed plan will embrace. The hypothetical schemes of daily attendance referred to above are presented separately.

All which is respectfully submitted,

F. A. P. BARNARD, President.

COLUMBIA COLLEGE, February 25, 1880.

__________________________

LETTER OF PROFESSOR BURGESS TO THE PRESIDENT.

323 West 57^th St., Feb. 20^th, 1880.

My Dear Dr. Barnard:

It seems to me evident that the time has now fairly arrived, both in the history of this nation and of this University, when a decisive step forward in the development of the political sciences is positively and specially demanded.

In the history of the nation it is so, not only because the Republic has now reached those mighty proportions demanding the finest training, as well as the finest talent, for the successful management of its affairs, but because the Government itself has recognized this fact, and in its Civil Service reforms, which, I think, are now fairly planted and destined, under the proper influences, to a noble growth, has opened the way for an honorable career to the young men of the nation in the governmental service, which may be successfully pursued by the best intelligence, skill, and fidelity, offering itself without any reference to political influence or patronage.

In the history of the University it is so, not only because it is the bounden duty of a university, worthy the name, to teach all that has been gathered by the world’s experience in this as well as all other departments of superior knowledge, and to add continually thereto, but because, also, of its metropolitan situation, which fits it better than any other in the nation, both to place its students in immediate connection with the Civil Service examinations, so far as they now exist, and to exert its influence with greatest efficacy for the extension of the same throughout every branch of that service, as the indispensable condition of appointment to governmental office, and because I think I may assert that the foundation is now already fairly laid in our University for the development which I now propose.

The elements of the plan which I would suggest are, in outline, as follows:

I

The course of study shall extend over a period of three years, and comprise the following subjects:

FIRST YEAR.— The History of Philosophy; The History of the Literature of the Political Sciences; The General Constitutional History of Europe; The Special Constitutional History of England and of the United States.

SECOND YEAR.— The Roman Law—the general principles of the jurisprudence of the existing codes derived therefrom; The Comparative Constitutional Law of the Principal European States and of the United States; The Comparative Constitutional Law of the Different Commonwealths of the American Union.

THIRD YEAR.— History of Diplomacy; International Law; Systems of Administration, both of the Nation and the Commonwealths in the American Union; The Comparison of the Administrative System of the United States with those of the principal European States; Political Economy in all its Branches, and Statistics.

II.

The requirements for admission to this department shall be:

FIRST.— The completion, successfully, of the Junior Year in any regular college of the United States; or—

SECOND.—The passing of a successful examination upon all the studies of the first three years of the Academic Department of this University; and—

THIRDLY. — Including therein, in either case, a fair reading knowledge of the French and German languages.

III.

The degree conferred, upon the completion of all the courses and after successful examination therein, shall be that of A.M., Ph.D.; and if, in addition to the courses in this department, the student shall have received the degree of LL.B., either from the Law School of this University or from any other School of Municipal Law in good standing, the degree shall be that of D.C.L. For the students of a single year’s standing the degree will be that of A.B.

IV.

The fee for instruction in this department shall be the same in amount as is paid by undergraduates. But members of the Senior Class in the Academic Department of the University may attend the courses of the first year, and members of the School of Law may attend any or all of the courses free.

Finally, my dear Doctor, I would add that, in my opinion, this plan can be now realized without much, if any, additional expense to the Treasury of the University. When in complete running order it will require the appointment of two assistants to the Professor now in charge of the department — one for the courses in Roman Law and its branches, the other for the courses upon the administrative systems of Europe and the United States. I am confident that two fit persons, both graduates of the Law Department of this University, and now about finishing their courses of special study upon these topics in European universities — the one at Berlin and the other at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris–can be secured at salaries of $2,500 each per annum; and if one of these should be appointed, his office and salary to take effect from October 1st, 1881, and the other from October 1st, 1882, I fully believe that the receipts from the fees of students in the department would be sufficient to cover one, if not both, of these salaries, and in five years from this time would be a source of revenue to the Treasury. I am informed that in the city of New York alone fifty or more vacancies occur every year in the Civil Service of the United States, from death, resignation, or inability to serve; and that, through the present method of Civil Service examinations, fifty or more appointments are therefore annually made to offices having salaries of from $1,200 to $5,000; and I feel assured that the institution of learning which shall first seize the opportunity for establishing among its departments a school of training for the Civil Service of the National Government, will not only increase its own prestige and be a national benefactor, but will also reap no mean financial reward therefrom.

Trusting that these suggestions may meet your favor and support,

I am, as ever, your most obedient servant,

JOHN W. BURGESS.

President F. A. P. BARNARD, LL.D.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(A.)

PLAN FOR THE INSTRUCTION OF GRADUATE CLASSES, AND FOR THE EXTENSION OR THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM IN THE UNDERGRADUATE DEPARTMENT.

1.—Scholastic exercises to be distributed over all the hours of the day from 9½ A.M. till 4 P.M. from Monday to Friday inclusive, and from 9½ till 11 on Saturday.

2.—Every student to be under instruction in class for three hours each day till Saturday, and for two hours on Saturday.

3.—Students, when not under class instruction, to be occupied in study in rooms set apart for the purpose.

4.—A recess of half an hour to be allowed at mid-day for lunch.

DEGREES.

1.—If no modification of the course of instruction or no enlargement of its scope be made, the only degree conferred at the close of the four years’ course to be the degree of Bachelor of Arts.

2.—Should the course be enlarged and liberty of option be increased, the degrees of Bachelor of Letters and Bachelor of Science to be also given.

3.—The course leading to the degree in Arts to remain unchanged, consisting as at present of a prescribed curriculum up to the close of the Junior year, and of a partially elective course during the Senior.

4.—For degrees in Letters and Science, the course to be identical with the course in Arts during the Freshman year, and to embrace as obligatory during the subsequent years all the subjects of that course in the departments of English Literature, History, and Political Science, occupying six hours in the Sophomore year per week; five hours in the Junior, and four hours in the Senior. The remaining hours up to seventeen per week to be occupied by elective studies. The degree in Letters to be conferred on those who choose as electives the Languages, Ancient or Modern, Literature, Psychology, and Philosophy; and the degree in Science on those who choose principally the Mathematics, Physics, Mechanics, Astronomy, and Chemistry. Specific regulations in regard to this subject to be made by the Faculty, with the approval of the Trustees.

INSTRUCTION TO GRADUATES

1.—Instruction to be given to graduates of this and of other Colleges who desire to fit themselves for literary or scientific work not professional; as for authorship, historical or philological research, scientific investigation, etc.

2.—Special courses of instruction adapted to the wants of such graduates to be arranged in the departments of Greek, Latin, Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Philosophy, Political Science, Natural History, and the Modern Languages. Only such courses to be attempted at present as can be conducted without materially increasing the staff of instructors.

3.—Notice to be publicly given before the close of the present academic year of the purpose to institute courses for graduates, with specification of such as may be commenced in October, 1880.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(B.)

SCHOOL OF PREPARATION FOR THE CIVIL SERVICE, DIPLOMACY, AND THE EDITORIAL PROFESSION.

1.—A School to be instituted with a definitely prescribed curriculum of instruction, designed to prepare young men for public life, whether in the Civil Service at home or abroad, or in

the legislatures of the States or of the nation; and also to fit young men for the duties and responsibilities of public journalists.

2.—Students of our own College, or of other Colleges in good standing, who have completed with credit the undergraduate course up to the close of the Junior year, to be allowed to enter themselves as students in this School.

3.—The course of instruction to extend over three years.

4.—At the close of the first year, the student, on passing an approved examination, to be entitled to the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy.

5.—At the end of the course, the student who passes all his examinations with approval, to be recommended to the Trustees for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

6.—Students of this School to be permitted to attend such exercises of the Graduate or Undergraduate department as their time will allow, the approval of the Professors in the School being first obtained.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(C.)

PROBABLE EFFECT ON REVENUE AND EXPENDITURE OF THE ADOPTION OF THE PROPOSED SCHEME.

I.—EXPENDITURE.

It must, in the first place, be considered that the exigencies of the College will require, whether this plan be adopted or not, the appointment, in anticipation of the opening of the ensuing academic year, of an additional tutor in Greek, of one in Latin, and of one also in Mathematics. This will involve an increase of annual expenditure not to be charged to the present project, of $3.600.

For the supervision of students in their study rooms it will be expedient to appoint two Proctors at salaries of one thousand dollars each per annum. It is probable that this amount might be reduced by arranging that Tutors may act as Proctors.

The department of Modern Languages, in regard to which our College is now deplorably deficient, would require the appointment of an instructor in Italian, and an instructor in Spanish, who might probably be engaged for about $1,300 per annum each. The instructor in French of the School of Mines would probably be willing, for a slight increase of compensation, to take charge of the French classes in College also.

These comprise all the additions to our annual outlay which it seems to be necessary at present to make. Summed up they are as follows:

Two Superintendents of study rooms	$2,000
Two Instructors in Modern Languages	$3,000
Increase of salary of Instructor in French	$500
Total	$5,500

II.—REVENUE.

The tuition fee now charged in the Undergraduate Department is less by fifty dollars per annum than that which is charged at Harvard College or at the University of Pennsylvania. It seems fitting that, in so largely increasing the advantages offered to students here, we should make our charges equal at least to what they are elsewhere. To increase the fee from $100 to $150 per annum would not diminish the number of our undergraduate students, and hence, even should the new attractions fail to add to our numbers, the effect of this measure would be to add $10,000 to our annual revenue.

It may, however, be safely estimated that, before two years shall have passed under the new system, we shall have at least twenty graduate students, and that the number of undergraduates will be more than equally increased. The following, then, are the items of the probable increase of revenue, viz.:

From increase of tuition fee	$10,000
From graduate students (say 20)	$3,000
From increased number of undergraduates (say 20 also)	$3,000
Total	$16,000

The probability, therefore, is that the adoption of the plan, if accompanied as it should be with a simultaneous increase of the tuition fee, will tend to enlarge rather than diminish the annual balance in the treasury.

If, now, we consider the further effect of the establishment of the proposed new school of preparation for the Civil Service, we shall have to add to the annual outlay the amount of the salaries of two Instructors or Adjunct Professors, one in Roman Law and one in Administrative Law, each of $2,500. On the other hand, we may safely count on attracting to this school, in the course of the next two or three years, at least fifty students—a number likely afterward largely and rapidly to increase. We may assume, then, at the end of the second year, something like the following, viz.:

I.—EXPENDITURE.

Total as above	$5,500
Salaries of two instructors	$5,000
Total	$10,500

II. REVENUE.

Total as above	$16,000
Fees of fifty students	$7,500
Total	$23,500

Leaving a probable balance in favor of the treasury of $13,000 per annum.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(D.)

COURSES OF STUDY.

The subjects or authors herein enumerated as for undergraduates, are in general those taught during the academic year 1878-9. In the classical departments these are liable to be changed from year to year. Should the proposed plan be adopted, every course not marked as obligatory will be open for election to all undergraduates above the Freshman grade, without regard to year.

DEPARTMENT OF GREEK.

1.— Iliad or Odyssey, one term	3 hours per week Freshmen, Obligatory.
2.— Herodotus, one term	3 hours per week Freshmen, Obligatory.
3.—The Odyssey	2 hours per week, Freshmen, Voluntary.
4.—Aristophanes and minor poets	2 hours, Sophomores, Voluntary.
5.—Euripides, one term	3 hours per week, Sophomores, Elective.
6.—The Memorabilia, one term	3 hours per week, Sophomores, Elective.
7.—Sophocles, one term	3 hours per week, Juniors, Elective
8.—Plato, one term	3 hours per week, Juniors, Elective
9.—Æschylus, one term	3 hours per week, Seniors, Elective
10.—Demosthenes, one term	3 hours per week, Seniors, Elective
11.—(To be announced annually in advance)	2 hours per week, Graduates.
12.—(To be announced annually in advance)	1 hour per week, Graduates.

DEPARTMENT OF LATIN.

1.—Pliny	3 hours per week, Freshmen, Obligatory.
2.—Horace, one term	3 hours per week, Sophomores, Elective.
3.—Livy, one term	3 hours per week, Sophomores, Elective.
4.—Juvenal, one term	3 hours per week, Juniors, Elective
5.—Cicero De Officiis, one term	3 hours per week, Juniors, Elective
6.—Terence, one term	2 hours per week, Seniors, Elective
7.—Catullus, one term	2 hours per week, Seniors, Elective
8.—(To be announced annually in advance)	2 hours per week, Graduates, Elective.
9.—(To be announced annually in advance)	1 hour per week, Graduates, Elective.

DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS.

1.—Geometry, one term	5 hours per week, Freshmen, Obligatory.
2.—Algebra, one term	5 hours per week, Freshmen, Obligatory.
3.—Curves of Second Order, one term	3 hours per week, Sophomores, Elective.
4.—Trigonometry, Mensuration and Surveying, one term	3 hours per week, Sophomores, Elective.
5.—Differential and Integral Calculus	2 hours per week, Seniors, Elective
6.—Calculus of Variations	2 hours per week, Graduates.
7.—Quaternions	2 hours per week, Graduates.

DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICS AND ASTRONOMY.

1—Analytical Geometry, one term	3 hours per week, Juniors, Elective.
2.—Mechanics, one term	3 hours per week, Juniors, Elective.
3.—Astronomy	3 hours per week, Seniors, Elective.
4.—Practical Astronomy	2 hours per week, Graduates.
5.—Spherical Astronomy	2 hours per week, Graduates.
6.—Analytic Mechanics	2 hours per week, Graduates.
7.—Physical Astronomy	2 hours per week, Graduates.

DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS.

1.—Elementary Physics	2 hours per week, Freshmen, Obligatory.
2.—Heat and Electricity	2 hours per week, Juniors, Elective.
3.—Optics and Acoustics	3 hours per week, Seniors, Elective.
4.—Mathematical Physics	2 hours per week, Graduates.
5.—Methods of Physical Research	2 hours per week, Graduates.

DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY.

1.—Elementary Chemistry	1 hour per week, Freshmen, Obligatory.
2.—Theoretic Chemistry	2 hours per week, Sophomores or Seniors, Elective.
3.—Applied Chemistry	2 hours per week, Juniors, Elective.
4.—Organic Chemistry	2 hours per week, Graduates.
5.—Methods of Chemical Research	2 hours per week, Graduates.

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY.

1.—Logic	2 hours per week, Juniors, Obligatory.
2.—Psychology	2 hours per week, Seniors, Obligatory.
3.—Philosophy	3 hours per week, Seniors, Elective.
4.—Physiological Psychology	1 hour per week, Graduates.
5.—History of Philosophy	2 hours per week, Graduates.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

1.—Rhetoric	3 hours per week, Freshmen, Obligatory.
2.—History of Literature	2 hours per week, Sophomores, Obligatory.
3.—English Classics	1 hour per week, Sophomores, Obligatory.
4.—Logic	2 hours per week, Juniors, Obligatory.
5.—English Classics	1 hour per week, Juniors, Obligatory.
6.—The Early English Authors	2 hours per week, Graduates.

DEPARTMENT OF THE MODERN LANGUAGES.

1a.— French, Elementary Course	3 hours per week each, Undergraduates.
1b.—Course of French Literature	3 hours per week each, Undergraduates.
2a.— German, Elementary Course	3 hours per week each, Undergraduates.
2b.— Course of German Literature	3 hours per week each, Undergraduates.
3a.— Italian, Elementary Course	3 hours per week each, Undergraduates.
3b.— Italian Literature	1 hour per week each, Graduates or Undergraduates.
4a.— Spanish, Elementary Course	3 hours per week each, Undergraduates.
4b.— Spanish Literature	1 hour per week each, Graduates or Undergraduates.

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE.

1.—Outlines of General History	3 hours per week, Sophomores, Obligatory.
2.—History of England and the United States, one term	3 hours per week, Juniors, Obligatory.
—Political Economy, one term	3 hours per week, Juniors, Obligatory.
3.—Political Economy and Statistics	3 hours per week, Seniors, Obligatory,and School of Civil Service.
4.—British and American Constitutional history	2 hours per week, Seniors, Obligatory.
5.—General Constitutional History	3 hours per week, School of Civil Service.
6.—Literature of Political Science	1 hours per week, 3 hours per week, School of Civil Service.
—Comparison of Constitutional law of Europe and the United States
7.—Systems of Administration	3 hours per week, 2 hours per week, School of Civil Service.
—Comparison of Constitutional Differences of the American States
8.—Comparison of Systems of Administration	5 hours per week, School of Civil Service.

ROMAN AND INTERNATIONAL LAW.

1.—Roman Law

3 hours per week,
School of Civil Service.

2.—International Law

3 hours per week,

School of Civil Service.

DEPARTMENT OF GEOLOGY.

1.— General Geology	1 hour per week, Seniors, Elective.
2.— Palæontology	1 hour per week, Seniors, Elective.
3.— Lithological Geology, first term	3 hours per week, with School of Mines.
4.— Cosmical and Historical Geology, second term	3 hours per week, with School of Mines.
5.— Economical Geology	2 hours per week, through the year with School of Mines.

NATURAL HISTORY.

Botany, first term	2 hours per week, with School of Mines.
Zoology	1 hour per week, throughout the year with School of Mines.
Vegetable Physiology, Animal Physiology, Anatomy—Human and Comparative	To be provided for.
Mineraology and Crystallography	2 hours per week, with School of Mines.

LAW.

1.— Outlines of British Common Law

Ten lectures.

SEMITIC AND ORIENTAL LANGUAGES.

Hebrew	2 hours per week, To be provided for.
Sanskrit	2 hours per week, To be provided for.

Source: Columbia University Archives. Historical Subject Files, Series I: Academics and Research/Series VIII: Events/I. Box 289. Folder 1 “Political Science, Faculty of, 1920s-1930s”.

Image Source: John W. Burgess, from the Columbia University, Department of History webpage: A Short History of the Department of History.

Tags Burgess

Columbia Economic History Race

Columbia. John W. Burgess charged with “anti-Negro thought” by W.E.B. Du Bois, 1935

Post author By Irwin Collier
Post date 2018-10-22

Preparing for class tomorrow, I was reading the concluding chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois‘s book, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, that includes the following unflattering portrait of the founder of Columbia University’s School of Political Science, John W. Burgess. Since Burgess’s School of Political Science was the home of graduate economics education at Columbia University and the boundaries between the disciplines of law, history, political science, economics, and sociology were much less well-defined then than today, I think it is worth including W.E.B. Du Bois’s observations here at Economics in the Rear-view Mirror.

Image Source: W.E.B. Du Bois (ca. 1919 by C. M. Battey) in Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

_____________________

Excerpt from
Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880
by W.E.B. Du Bois.

The real frontal attack on Reconstruction, as interpreted by the leaders of national thought in 1870 and for some time thereafter, came from the universities and particularly from Columbia and Johns Hopkins.

The movement began with Columbia University and with the advent of John W. Burgess of Tennessee and William A. Dunning of New Jersey as professors of political science and history.

Burgess was an ex-Confederate soldier who started to a little Southern college with a box of books, a box of tallow candles and a Negro boy; and his attitude toward the Negro race in after years was subtly colored by this early conception of Negroes as essentially property like books and candles. Dunning was a kindly and impressive professor who was deeply influenced by a growing group of young Southern students and began with them to re-write the history of the nation from 1860 to 1880, in more or less conscious opposition to the classic interpretations of New England.

Burgess was frank and determined in his anti-Negro thought. He expounded his theory of Nordic supremacy which colored all his political theories:

“The claim that there is nothing in the color of the skin from the point of view of political ethics is a great sophism. A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind. To put such a race of men in possession of a ‘state’ government in a system of federal government is to trust them with the development of political and legal civilization upon the most important subjects of human life, and to do this in communities with a large white population is simply to establish barbarism in power over civilization.” [Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution, p.133 ]

Burgess is a Tory and open apostle of reaction. He tells us that the nation now believes “that it is the white man’s mission, his duty and his right, to hold the reins of political power in his own hands for the civilization of the world and the welfare of mankind.”⁴

⁴Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution, pp. viii, ix.

For this reason America is following “the European idea of the duty of civilized races to impose their political sovereignty upon civilized, or half civilized, or not fully civilized, races anywhere and everywhere in the world.”⁵

⁵Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution, p. 218.

He complacently believes that “There is something natural in the subordination of an inferior race to a superior race, even to the point of the enslavement of the inferior race, but there is nothing natural in the opposite.”⁶He therefore denominates Reconstruction as the rule “of the uncivilized Negroes over the whites of the South.”⁷This has been the teaching of one of our greatest universities for nearly fifty years.

⁶Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution, pp. 244-245.
⁷Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution, p. 218.

Dunning was less dogmatic as a writer, and his own statements are often judicious. But even Dunning can declare that “all the forces [in the South] that made for civilization were dominated by a mass of barbarous freedmen”; and that “the antithesis and antipathy of race and color were crucial and ineradicable.”^7aThe work of most of the students whom he taught and encouraged has been one-sided and partisan to the last degree. Johns Hopkins University has issued a series of studies similar to Columbia’s; Southern teachers have been welcomed to many Northern universities, where often Negro students have been systematically discouraged, and thus a nation-wide university attitude has arisen by which propaganda against the Negro has been carried on unquestioned.

^7aDunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, pp. 212, 213.

The Columbia school of historians and social investigators have issued between 1895 and the present time sixteen studies of Reconstruction in the Southern States, all based on the same thesis and all done according to the same method: first, endless sympathy with the white South; second, ridicule, contempt or silence for the Negro; third, a judicial attitude towards the North, which concludes that the North under great misapprehension did a grievous wrong, but eventually saw its mistake and retreated.

These studies vary, of course, in their methods. Dunning’s own work is usually silent so far as the Negro is concerned. Burgess is more than fair in law but reactionary in matters of race and property, regarding the treatment of a Negro as a man as nothing less than a crime, and admitting that “the mainstay of property is the courts.”

In the books on Reconstruction written by graduates of these universities and others, the studies of Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia and Louisiana are thoroughly bad, giving no complete picture of what happened during Reconstruction, written for the most part by men and women without broad historical or social background, and all designed not to seek the truth but to prove a thesis. Hamilton reaches the climax of this school when he characterizes the black codes, which even Burgess condemned, as “not only … on the whole reasonable, temperate and kindly, but, in the main, necessary.”⁸

⁸Hamilton, “Southern Legislation in Respect to Freedmen” in Studies in Southern History and Politics, p. 156.

Source: W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction. An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, pp. 718-720.

Image Source: John W. Burgess in Universities and their Sons, Vol. 2. Boston: R. Herndon Company, 1899, p. 481.

Tags Burgess, DuBois, Dunning

Columbia Economists Harvard

Harvard. Career of A.M. in economics alumnus, Arthur Morgan Day (1867-1942)

Post author By Irwin Collier
Post date 2018-07-26

This post began as a simple transcription of two typed pages that Alvin S. Johnson sent to Joseph Dorfman, who at the time was collecting material on the history of economics at Columbia University. The Columbia economics instructor who was the subject of Johnson’s letter, Arthur Morgan Day, was new to me, and I presume something of an unknown even to Joseph Dorfman. My curiosity sparked a chase through a variety of genealogical sources accessible at Ancestry.com, then a search through yearbooks of Barnard College and Columbia University catalogues at archive.org, and eventually a discovery of the reports of the Harvard Class of 1892 (available at hathitrust.org) that taken together provide us a fairly good account of Day’s life and career through age 55.

I have located only a single source that gives the year of his death: “Arthur Morgan Day (1867-1942)” in the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Vol. 31. New York: James T. White & Co., 1944.

_______________

Alvin Johnson’s recollection of Arthur Morgan Day at Columbia College

THE NEW SCHOOL
66 West 12^thSt. New York 11
[Tel.] Oregon 5-2700

July 17, 1951

Dear Joe Dorfman:

This is the best I can do on Day. If you don’t like it, throw it into the waste-basket.

Sincerely,
[signed]
Alvin Johnson

encl.

Dr. Joseph Dorfman
Faculty of Political Science
Columbia University
New York 27, N.Y.

[Handwritten addition by Johnson]

I’m trying to write
something on the
Faculty
AJ

* * * * *

Alvin Johnson’s attachment to his letter to Joseph Dorfman of July 17, 1951

When I presented myself to Dean Burgess for registration in November 1898 and announced that I wished to study economics, the Dean advised me to register for the Marshall course by Mayo-Smith, the course on History of Economics by E. R. A. Seligman, the course on theory by John Bates Clark. I confessed that my training had been in classics; that I had never attended a course, nor even a single lecture in economics. I asked whether I ought not to take the course in elementary economics, under an instructor, Arthur Morgan Day. No, said Dean Burgess, that course was only for undergraduate cubs, who had no desire to know economics. The Committee on College Requirements had seen fit to make a required course out of it; but a mature man would be wasting his time under Day.

I did not register for Day’s course. I’m sorry I did not. For Day was a true representative of the old, solid economics of Adam Smith and Malthus and Ricardo, of Senior and Cairnes and John Stuart Mill. He made shift to comprehend the marginal utilitarianism of Marshall, but it gave him no inspiration. He saw no advance in Clark’s theory and he regarded Seligman’s Historismus as merely a change of venue in economic reasoning.

Day detested me, for my ardent devotion to J. B. Clark, for my eager acceptance of Seligman’s wide explorations in all literatures. He pitied me for my destiny of going forth into the world equipped only with fluff and froth, with no sense of the grand old economists who looked facts in the face and wrote in language that the most unlicked cub of a business man could understand. When I was awarded a fellowship Day proposed that I should have the privilege of reading and grading all his examination papers, a privilege I was too immature to appreciate. The President of the University vetoed the proposal. I had my year of complete freedom, to follow my teachers, Clark and Seligman, with uncrippled ardor.

Yet I came to realize that Day was a better economist than we then assumed. It was not possible for him to follow the marginal utility calculus into a field of abstractions divorced from the comprehension of the ordinary citizen. Any man, however sodden in business thinking, could follow John Stuart Mill, agreeing, or most likely disagreeing. Only the intellectual elite could follow Menger and Wieser and Böhm[-]Bawerk, Marshall and Clark, Fisher and Fetter.

If Day were living he would find justification for his repugnance to the marginal utility theories. Keynes, an adept in marginal theory, shifted the emphasis from value to price.

Said Chesterfield, “In mixed company I always talk bawdy, for that is something in which all men can join.” Keynes always talked price. Day, prematurely, talked price, believed in talking price. There was no place for him in the marginal utility universe of talk, of those days. But I surmise, Day was a good deal of a man.

[signed]
Alvin Johnson

Source: Columbia University Libraries, Manuscript Collections. Joseph Dorfman Collection, Box 13, Folder “C.U. Dept.^alhistory”.

_______________

From the Columbia College Catalogue, 1898-99

Economics A—Outlines of Economics—Recitations, lectures, and essays. 3 hours, second half-year. Professor Mayo-Smith and Mr. Day. [Economics A was required of juniors in the College, and open to sophomores who have taken economics I.]

Economics 1—Economic history of England America—Selected textbooks, recitations, essays, and lectures. 3 hours, first half-year. Professor Seligman and Mr. Day. [Economics I was open to juniors and qualified sophomores in the College.]

[Note: p. 11 under officers of instruction, Assistants. Address given as 128 West 103d Street.]

Source: Columbia University in the City of New York. Catalogue 1898-99, p. 74.

_______________

1900 U.S. Census

Name: Arthur M Day
Age:    33
Birth Date:     Apr 1867
Birthplace:      Connecticut
Home in 1900:           Danbury, Fairfield, Connecticut
Ward of City: 2
Street: Westoria Avenue
House Number:          28
Race:   White
Gender:           Male
Relation to Head of House:   Son
Marital Status:           Single
Father’s name:            Josiah L Day
Father’s Birthplace:    New York
Mother’s name:          Ellen L Day
Mother’s Birthplace: Connecticut
Occupation:    College Instructor
Months not employed:         0
Can Read:       Yes
Can Write:      Yes
Can Speak English:    Yes
Household Members:

Josiah L Day 60
Ellen L Day 58
Arthur M Day 33

_______________

From Mortarboard 1902
[Barnard College Yearbook]

Leisure Hours of Great Men
or
Intimate Glimpses of the World’s Workers at Play

Arthur Morgan Day

It is certainly pathetic
How he smothers the aesthetic
Under money, banking, trusts and corporations,
But he soothes his longing heart,
Studying dramatic art,
And high tragedy completes his aspirations.

Source: 1902 Mortarboard , p. 71.

_______________

From the Columbia Daily Spectator, 1902

Mr. Day Resigns

Mr. A. M. Day, Instructor in Economics, has resigned his position at Columbia to take a position on the new Tenement House Commission of New York City. He is to serve as one of two men to take charge of registration and compilation of statistics of tenement houses in the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Mr. Henry Raymond Mussey, Fellow in the Department, has taken Mr. Day’s position as instructor in Economics for the time being. Mr. Mussey has already acquired much popularity and confidence among the students in his classes.

* * * * *

Congratulations for Mr. Day.

The members of the Course Economics I have sent the following message of congratulation to their instructor, upon his appointment as chief of the Bureau of Statistics of the New York City Tenement House Commission. “We the undersigned members of the course, Economics I, of the current University year, having heard with pleasure of the great honor which has been conferred upon our former instructor Mr. Arthur Morgan Day, desire to extend to him our sincere congratulations and to assure him of our best wishes for a successful career in his new office.

Source: Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume XLV, Number 42, 21 March 1902, page 1.

_______________

From Harvard College Class of 1892 Reports

Arthur Morgan Day (1892)

[Joined the Harvard Class of 1892 in the junior year, received A.B. together with the degree of A.M.]
Honorable Mention: English Composition; Political Economy; History.

Source: Secretary’s Report Harvard College Class of 1892, Number I, (1893), pp. 6, 27, 29.

* * * * *

Arthur Morgan Day (1896)

“1892-93, graduate student in History and Economics, H.U.; 1893-94, graduate student in History and Economics and assistant in History, H.U.; 1894-95, assistant in Economics, School of Political Science, Columbia College; 1895-96, assistant and lecturer in Economics, School of Political Science, Columbia College, and lecturer in Economics, Barnard College.”

Published “Syllabus of six lectures on ‘Money’ for Extension Department of Rutgers College, 1895.”

Delivered “six lectures on ‘Money,’ Univ. Ex. course, New Brunswick, N.J., December-January, 1894-95; two lectures on ‘Monetary Literature in U.S.’ in course of ‘Free Lectures to the People,’ under direction of Board of Education, N.Y.”

Source: Secretary’s Report Harvard College Class of 1892, Number II, (1896), pp. 30-31.

* * * * *

Arthur Morgan Day (1902)

From 1892 to 1894 was graduate student in History and Economics at Harvard; 1893-4, was assistant in History at Harvard; 1894-1902, was successively assistant lecturer, and instructor in Economics at Columbia and Barnard Colleges, and also assistant editor of “Political Science Quarterly” and “Columbia University Quarterly “; in March, 1902, resigned from Columbia to become Registrar of the Tenement House Department of New York City for Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond.

Has given numerous courses of lectures for the New York Board of Education; has lectured also in extension department of Rutgers College and in the Educational Alliance. Has published syllabi of lectures on “Money” and “Economic History”, signed reviews in the “Political Science Quarterly” and elsewhere, and editorials in a New York daily. Assisted in the preparation of Seligman’s “Essays in Taxation” and “Incidence of Taxation”, Giddings’ “Democracy and Empire “, Clark’s “Distribution of Wealth,” and the second edition (rewritten) of White’s “Money and Banking.”

Source: Harvard College, Record of the Class of 1892. Secretary’s Report No. III for the Tenth Anniversary (1902), pp. 46-47.

* * * * *

Arthur Morgan Day (1907)

Son of Josiah Lyon Day and Ellen Louisa (Baldwin) Day. Born at Danbury, Connecticut, April 12, 1867. Prepared for college at the Danbury High School.

Received A.M. in 1892. From 1892 to 1894 was a graduate student in History and Economics at Harvard; 1893-94, was Assistant in History at Harvard; 1894-1902, was successively Assistant, Lecturer, and Instructor in Economics at Columbia and Barnard Colleges; also Assistant Editor of Political Science Quarterly and Columbia University Quarterly; in March, 1902, resigned from Columbia to become Registrar of the Tenement House Department of New York City for Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond. In May, 1902, resigned Registrarship to become Assistant to President of Manhattan Trust Co.; in July, 1903, was made Secretary and Treasurer of Casualty Company of America; in January, 1905, entered publicity business. Has published syllabi of lectures on “Money” and “Economic History,” signed reviews in the Political Science Quarterly and elsewhere, and editorials in a New York daily. Assisted in the preparation of Seligman’s “Essays in Taxation” and ” Incidence of Taxation,” Giddings’ “Democracy and Empire,” Clark’s “Distribution of Wealth,” and the second edition (rewritten) of White’s “Money and Banking.” Belongs to Harvard Club of New York.

Source: Secretary’s Report for the Fifteenth Anniversary. Harvard College Class of 1892, Number IV, (1907), p.48.

* * * * *

Arthur Morgan Day (1912)

Son of Josiah Lyon Day and Ellen Louisa (Baldwin) Day. Born at Danbury, Connecticut, April 12, 1867. Prepared for college at the Danbury High School.

Attended Harvard 1888-92, A.B. and A.M.; Graduate School 1892-94.

1892 to 1894, graduate student in history and economics at Harvard; 1893-94, assistant in history at Harvard; 1894-1902, successively assistant, lecturer, and instructor in economics at Columbia and Barnard colleges; also assistant editor of Political Science Quarterly and Columbia University Quarterly; in March, 1902, resigned from Columbia to become registrar of the Tenement House Department of New York City for Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond. In May, 1902, resigned registrarship to become assistant to president of Manhattan Trust Company; in July, 1903, was made secretary and treasurer of Casualty Company of America; in January, 1905, entered publicity business; in June, 1906, employed by United Gas Improvement Company of Philadelphia; in August, 1906, serious attack of typhoid caused long absence from business; in June, 1908, with Blair & Co., bankers, New York; in April, 1910, began independent work as financial agent for various clients; in January, 1912, entered bond department of Prudential Insurance Company at Newark. Has published syllabi of lectures on “Money” and “Economic History,” signed reviews in the Political Science Quarterly and elsewhere, and editorials in a New York daily. Assisted in the preparation of Seligman’s “Essays in Taxation” and “Incidence of Taxation,” Giddings’ “Democracy and Empire,” Clark’s “Distribution of Wealth,” and the second edition (rewritten) of White’s “Money and Banking.” Belongs to Harvard Club of New York.

Source: Secretary’s Report for the Twentieth Anniversary. Harvard College Class of 1892, [Number V, (1912)], p.54.

* * * * *

Arthur Morgan Day (1917)

Born at Danbury, Conn., April 12, 1867. Son of Josiah Lyon and Ellen Louisa (Baldwin) Day. Prepared for College at Danbury High School, Danbury, Conn.

Attended Harvard: 1888-92; Graduate School, 1892-94.

Degrees: A.B. and A.M. 1892.

Occupation: Investments.

Address: (home) 28 Westville Ave., Danbury, Conn.; (business) 37 Wall St., New York, N.Y

FROM 1892 to 1894 I was a graduate student in history and economics at Harvard, and during 1893-94 I was assistant in history at Harvard. From 1894 to 1902 I was successively assistant, lecturer, and instructor in economics at Columbia and Barnard colleges; also assistant editor of the Political Science Quarterly and the Columbia University Quarterly. In March, 1902, I resigned from Columbia to become registrar of the Tenement House Department of New York City for Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond. I held this position until May, 1903, when I resigned to become assistant to the president of the Manhattan Trust Company. In July, 1903, I was made secretary and treasurer of the Casualty Company of America; and in January, 1905, I entered publicity business. I was employed by the United Gas Improvement Company of Philadelphia in June, 1906, but a serious attack of typhoid fever in August of that year caused a long absence from business. In June, 1908, I was with Blair & Co., bankers, in New York, and in April, 1910, I began independent work as financial agent for various clients. In January, 1912, I entered the bond department of the Prudential Insurance Company at Newark, and since December 1, 1915, I have been with Wood, Struthers & Co., bankers, 37 Wall St., N. Y.

Publications: Syllabi of lectures on “Money” and “Economic History,” signed reviews in the Political Science Quarterly and elsewhere, and editorials in a New York daily. Assisted in the preparation of Seligman’s “Essays in Taxation” and “Incidence of Taxation,” Giddings’ “Democracy and Empire,” Clark’s “Distribution of Wealth,” and the second edition (rewritten) of White’s “Money and Banking.”

Clubs and Societies: Harvard Club of New York.

Source: Secretary’s Report for the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary. Harvard College Class of 1892, Number VI, (1917), pp. 68-69. Includes Graduation picture.

* * * * *

Arthur Morgan Day (1922)

Born at Danbury, Conn., April 12, 1867. Son of Josiah Lyon and Ellen Louisa (Baldwin) Day. Prepared for College at Danbury High School, Danbury, Conn.

Attended Harvard: 1888-92; Graduate School, 1892-94.
Degrees: A.B. and A.M. 1892.

Occupation: Investments.
Address: (home) 152 Deer Hill Ave., Danbury, Conn.; (business) 5 Nassau St., New York, N.Y.

Since December 1, 1915, I have been with Wood, Struthers & Co., bankers, 5 Nassau Street, New York.

Clubs and Societies: Harvard Club of New York.

Source: Harvard College Class of 1892, Thirtieth Anniversary Report, Number VIII, (1922), p. 70.
[note: Number IX, June 19-22, 1922 is the Supplementary Report of the Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration]

_______________

From the State of Connecticut, Military Census of 1917

State of Connecticut

By direction of an act of the Legislature of Connecticut, approved February 7^th, 1917, I am required to procure certain information relative to the resources of the state. I therefore call upon you to answer the following questions.

MARCUS H. HOLCOMB, Governor.

TOWN or CITY: Danbury
DATE: March 4, 1917
POST OFFICE ADDRESS: 28 Westville Ave.

What is your present Trade, Occupation or Profession ? Banking and Brokerage
Have you experience in any other Trade, Occupation or Profession? College Professor
What is your Age? 49
Height? 5 ft 8 in
Weight? 165
Are your Married? Single? or Widower? Single
How many persons are dependent on you for support? None wholly
Are you a citizen of the United States? Yes
If not a citizen of the United States have you taken out your first papers? [not applicable]
If not a citizen of the United States, what is your nationality? [not applicable]
Have you ever done any Military or Naval Service in this or any other Country? No
Where? [not applicable]
How Long? [not applicable]
What Branch? [not applicable]
Rank? [not applicable]
Have you any serious physical disability? Yes
If so, name it. Near sighted
Can you do any of the following:
Ride a horse? [No]
Handle a team? [No]
Drive an automobile? [No]
Ride a motorcycle? [No]
Understand telegraphy? [No]
Operate a wireless? [No]
Any experience with a steam engine? [No]
Any experience with electrical machinery? [No]
Handle a boat, power or sail? [No]
Any experience in simple coastwise navigation? [No]
Any experience with High Speed Marine Gasoline Engines? ? [No]
Are you a good swimmer? [Yes]

I hereby certify that I have personally interviewed the above mentioned person and that the answers to the questions enumerated are as he gave them to me.

[signed]
Chas A Stallock[?]
Military Census Agent

Source: Connecticut Military Census of 1917. Hartford, Connecticut: Connecticut State Library. [available as database on-line at Ancestry.com]

Image Source: Class portrait and current portrait (ca 1917) of Arthur Morgan Day from Secretary’s Report for the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary. Harvard College Class of 1892, Number VI, (1917), pp. 68-69.

Tags Burgess, ClarkJB, DorfmanJ, JohnsonA, Mayo-Smith, Seligman

Columbia Curriculum

Columbia. School of Political Science. Faculty and Curriculum, 1890-91

Post author By Irwin Collier
Post date 2017-01-27

I have included everything in this Circular that describes the graduate program offered by the School of Political Science at Columbia except for a list of the trustees and a time-slots by day-of-the-week schedule matrix of courses for the three year program. This shows how political economy was embedded within a broad public policy framework at Columbia. Because of the length of the circular, I have provided visitors with a linked table of contents.

Information for the School of Poltical Science for 1882-83 is available in a previous post.

___________________________

Columbia College
School of Political Science
Circular of Information 1890-91

Officers of Instruction and Government

General Statement

Purposes of the School
Admission
Matriculation and Tuition Fees

Course of Instruction General Scheme

Undergraduate Courses

Graduate First Year

First Session
Second Session

Graduate Second Year

First Session
Second Session

Graduate Third Year

First Session
Second Session

Course of Instruction in Detail

I. Constitutional History

II. Constitutional and Administrative Law

III. Political Economy and Social Science

IV. History of European Law and Comparative Jurisprudence

V. Diplomacy and International Law

VI. History of Political Theories

Prizes

Preparation for the Civil Service

Admission to Other Courses

Library

Examinations and Degrees

Examination Fees
Commencement

Academy of Political Science

Prize Lectureships

Calendar

OFFICERS OF INSTRUCTION AND GOVERNMENT.

Seth Low, President of Columbia College.

John W. Burgess, Ph.D., LL.D.,

Professor of Constitutional and International History and Law.

Richmond Mayo Smith, A.M.,

Professor of Political Economy and Social Science.

Edmund Munroe Smith, A.M., J.U.D.,

Adjunct Professor of History and Lecturer on Roman Law and Comparative Jurisprudence.

Frank J. Goodnow, A.M., LL.B.,

Adjunct Professor of Administrative Law. Secretary of the Faculty.

Edwin R. A. Seligman, LL.B., Ph.D.,

Adjunct Professor of Political Economy.

Frederick W. Whitridge, A.M., LL.B.,

Lecturer on the Political History of the State of New York.

William A. Dunning, Ph.D.,

Lecturer on Political Theories.

A. C. Bernheim, LL.B., Ph.D.,

Prize Lecturer, 1888-91, on New York State and City Politics.

Frederic Bancroft, Ph.D.,

Prize Lecturer, 1889-92, on Diplomatic History of the United States.

_____________

Prize Lecturer, 1890-93.

William B. Nye,

Registrar.

GENERAL STATEMENT.

PURPOSES OF THE SCHOOL.

The School of Political Science was opened on Monday the fourth day of October, 1880.

The purpose of the school is to give a complete general view of all the subjects, both of internal and external public polity, from the threefold standpoint of history, law, and philosophy. Its prime aim is therefore the development of all the branches of the political sciences. Its secondary and practical objects are:

a. To fit young men for all the political branches of the public service.

b. To give an adequate economic and legal training to those who intend to make journalism their profession.

c. To supplement, by courses in public law and comparative jurisprudence, the instruction in private municipal law offered by the School of Law.

d. To educate teachers of political science.

To these ends the school offers a course of study of sufficient duration to enable the student not only to attend the lectures and recitations with the professors, but also to consult the most approved treatises upon the political sciences and to study the sources of the same.

ADMISSION.

Any person may attend any or all of the courses of the School of Political Science by entering his name with the registrar and paying the proper fee.

Students proposing to enter the school are desired to present themselves for matriculation on the Friday next before the first Monday in October.

The names of students intending to become members of the school may be entered at the room of the president on the Monday immediately preceding commencement day in June, or on the day appointed as above for matriculation.

Students desiring the degree of Ph.B. or A.B. must matriculate in the first year of the school, and follow faithfully the studies of that year, or part of the studies of that year, together with studies in the senior year of the School of Arts. For the courses in the senior year of the School of Arts, see infra, ” Admission to Undergraduate Courses.” Any combination desired by the student is allowed, provided that he takes not less than fifteen hours per week.

Students desiring the degree of A.M. must matriculate in the second year of the school, and follow faithfully all the studies of the second year. But students who are at the same time students in the School of Law, or students in the graduate department of philosophy, philology, and letters, taking courses which offer at least six hours per week, shall not be required to take more than nine hours per week in the School of Political Science. Any combination desired by the student is allowed.

Students desiring the degree of Ph.D. must matriculate in the third year of the school, and follow faithfully all the studies of the third year. But students who are at the same time students in the School of Law, or students in the graduate departments of philosophy, philology, and letters, taking courses which offer at least six hours per week, shall not be required to take more than nine hours per week in the School of Political Science. Any combination desired by the student is allowed, but he must pass a satisfactory examination on all the subjects he has chosen, and must present an acceptable thesis on some subject previously approved by the faculty.

Students not candidates for any degree may, after matriculating, attend any of the courses of the school.

MATRICULATION AND TUITION FEES.

Matriculation fee. — A fee of five dollars is required for matriculation at the beginning of each scholastic year.

Tuition fee. — The annual tuition fee of each student of the school taking the full course is one hundred and fifty dollars, payable in two equal instalments of seventy-five dollars each, the first at matriculation, and the second on the first Monday of February of each year. For single courses of lectures the fee regulates itself according to the number of lectures per week; during the first year the annual fee for a one-hour course being ten dollars; for a two-hour course, twenty dollars; for a three-hour course, thirty dollars; for a four-hour course, forty dollars; and during the second and third years, the annual fee for a two-hour course, thirty; for a three-hour course, forty-five; for a five-hour course, seventy-five; for a six-hour course, ninety dollars. In every case the fee covers the specified number of hours throughout the year — no student being received for a less period than one year. Such fees, when not more than one hundred dollars, are payable in advance; otherwise, in half-yearly instalments at the same time as regular fees.

COURSE OF INSTRUCTION GENERAL SCHEME.*

[*For details of each course and schemes of lectures — infra, “Course of Instruction in Detail.”]

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES.
(Hours per week per half year)

Outline of Mediaeval History (2 hours).
Outline of Modern History (2 hours).
Outline of European History since 1815 (2 hours).
Elements of Political Economy (2 hours).

[GRADUATE] FIRST YEAR

FIRST SESSION.

Physical and political geography; Ethnography; General political and constitutional history of Europe (4 hours).
Political and constitutional history of England to 1688 (2 hours)
Political economy: historical and practical (3 hours)
Seminarium in political economy (2 hours)
History of political theories (3 hours)
Historical and political geography (1 hour)
Political history of the State of New York (1 hour)
The relations of England and Ireland (1 hour)

SECOND SESSION.

Political and constitutional history of the United States (4 hours)
Political and constitutional history of England since 1688 (2 hours)
Political economy: taxation and finance (3 hours)
Seminarium in political economy (2 hours)
History of political theories (3 hours)
Historical and political geography (1 hour)
Political history of the State of New York (1 hour)

[GRADUATE] SECOND YEAR.

FIRST SESSION.

Comparative constitutional law of the principal European states and of the United States (3 hours)
History of European law (3 hours)
Comparative administrative law of the principal European states and of the United States (3 hours)
Social science: communistic and socialistic theories (2 hours)
History of political economy (2 hours)
Financial history of the United States (2 hours)
Seminarium in political economy (1 hour)

SECOND SESSION.

Comparative constitutional law of the several commonwealths of the American union (3 hours)
History of European law (3 hours)
Comparative administrative law of the principal European states and of the United States — Financial administration and administration of internal affairs (3 hours)
Social science: communistic and socialistic theories (2 hours)
History of political economy (2 hours)
Financial history of the United States (1 hour)
Tariff history of the United States (1 hour)
Seminarium in political economy (1 hour)

[GRADUATE] THIRD YEAR.

FIRST SESSION.

General history of diplomacy (2 hours)
International private law (1 hour)
Comparative jurisprudence (2 hours)
Local government (2 hours)
Social science: statistics, methods, and results (2 hours)
Seminarium in political economy (1 hour)
Ethnology and social institutions (1 hour)
New York city politics (1 hour)

SECOND SESSION.

Public international law (2 hours)
International private law (1 hour)
Comparative jurisprudence (2 hours)
Municipal government (2 hours)
Social science: statistics, methods, and results (2 hours)
Railroad problems (1889-90) (3 hours)
Seminarium in political economy (1 hour)
Ethnology and social institutions (1 hour)
Diplomatic history of the United States (1 hour)

COURSE OF INSTRUCTION IN DETAIL.

I.—CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY.

The student is supposed to be familiar with the outlines of European history, ancient and modern. Students who are not thus prepared are recommended to take the undergraduate courses in mediaeval and modern history. The courses of lectures held in the school are as follows:

General political and constitutional history, comprehending in detail: a view of the political civilization of imperial Rome; the history of the development of the government of the Christian church into the form of papal monarchy; the overthrow of the Roman imperial system and the establishment of German kingdoms throughout middle, western, and southern Europe; the character and constitution of these kingdoms; the conversion of the Germans to the Christian church, and the relations which the Christian church assumed towards the Germanic states; consolidation of the German kingdoms into the European empire of Charlemagne: character and constitution of the Carolingian state; its disruption through the development of the feudal system and the independent hierarchic church, and division into the kingdoms of Germany, France, and Italy; character and history of the feudal system as a state form; reestablishment of the imperial authority by the re-connection of Germany with Italy; conflict of the middle ages between church and state; the political disorganization and papal despotism resulting from the same: the development of the absolute monarchy and the reformation; the limitation of absolute kingly power and the development of constitutionalism — first in England, then in the United States, thirdly in France, and fourthly in Germany; lastly, the realization of the constitutional idea of the nineteenth century. [Professor Burgess]

Political and constitutional history of England. — This course supplements the general course above outlined, giving a fuller view of the constitutional development of England from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. [Professor R. M. Smith]

Political and constitutional history of the United States. — This course of lectures covers the history of the colonies and of the revolutionary war; the formation and dissolution of the confederate constitution; the formation of the constitution of 1787, and its application down to the civil war; the changes wrought in the constitution by the civil war, and the resulting transformation of the public law of the United States. [Professor Burgess]

The political and constitutional history of Rome is contained in the general history of Roman law. The topics to which especial attention is paid are: the probable origin of the city and its relation to the Latin confederacy; the character and mutual relation of the gentes and the kingship; the Servian constitution and the aristocratic reaction; the establishment of the aristocratic republic; the struggle between the orders and the modification of the constitution; the conquest of Italy and the relations established between Rome and the conquered states; the increase of the powers of the Roman senate; the conquest of the Mediterranean basin and the organization and government of the provinces; the social and economic effects of the conquest upon the Roman people; the struggle between the senatorial clique and the party of reform; the social and civil wars and the establishment of the principate; the development, in the third century after Christ, of the absolute empire; the alliance of the empire with the Christian church; the conquest of Italy by the Germans. [Professor Munroe Smith]

Political history of the State of New York. — The purpose of this course is to give a knowledge of the constitutional development and political history of the State of New York, beginning with the foundation of the colony by the Dutch and extending to the present time. It gives a brief account of the condition of the colony of New York, and the constitution of its government; then of the constitution made in 1777, and of each of the constitutions of 1821 and 1846, the amendments of 1875, together with the conventions in which each of these constitutions was made; also the history of political parties in the State of New York, showing their particular relation to these constitutions, and showing finally the methods of procedure of those parties and the influence exercised by them upon the legislation and procedure, or “practical politics,” of other states and of the great national political parties. [Mr. Whitridge]

Historical and Political Geography. — The purpose of this course is to give a description of the physical geography of Europe; to point out the various sections into which it is divided; to trace the territorial growth of modern European states; to describe the various geographical changes that have been made in the history of Europe; and to point out the ethnic conditions of the present states of the continent. [Professor Goodnow]

The relations of England and Ireland. — In a general way the Irish question has been the question of imposing upon the last and most persistent remnant of the old Celtic race the Teutonic ideas and institutions that have been developed in England. Three phases of the process are clearly distinguishable in history — the political, the religious, and the economical. It is designed in the lectures to follow out in some detail the modifications in the relations of the two islands affected by the varying prominence of these different phases. The long struggle for English political supremacy over all Ireland, from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, the religious wars, and the ruthless suppression of the Catholic population during the two succeeding centuries, and the origin and development of the land question out of the circumstances of both these periods, are described with special reference to their influence on the modern state of Irish affairs. Incidentally to these leading topics, the questions of governmental organization that have been prominent from time to time since the conquest are discussed, and the history of the Irish parliament is followed out in such a way as to illustrate the nature and importance of the agitation for home rule. [Dr. Dunning]

New York City politics. — This course treats of the relations of the city to the state, showing the growth of municipal independence. The early charters conferred but few rights on the city, the selection of the most important city officials being made at Albany. Tammany Hall has been the most important and powerful party organization. A brief history of the Tammany organization, its rulers, and its method of nominating public officers will be given. The “Tweed Ring” and the efforts of purifying city politics since its downfall will be described, including the reform charter of 1873, the amendments of 1884, the report of the Tilden Committee in 1875, and of the Roosevelt and Gibbs investigating committees. [Dr. Bernheim]

II.— CONSTITUTIONAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE LAW.

Comparative constitutional law of the principal European states and of the United States; comprehending a comparison of the provisions of the constitutions of England, United States, France, and Germany, the interpretation of the same by the legislative enactments and judicial decisions of these states, and the generalization from them of the fundamental principles of public law, common to them all. [Professor Burgess]

Comparative constitutional law of the several commonwealths of the American Union. — In this course of lectures comparison is made in the same manner of the constitutions of the thirty-eight states of the Union.

Comparative administrative law of the principal European states and of the United States. — The purpose of this course of lectures is to give a description of the methods of administration in the United States, France, Germany, and England. Special attention will be given to the laws both of Congress and of the different state legislatures, while the laws of foreign countries will be referred to for the purpose of instruction and comparison. The following list of topics will give a general idea of the subject, for which the name of administrative law has been chosen, because both in France and Germany, where this special part of the public law has been selected as the object of a thorough course of instruction, a similar name has been made use of.

General Part.

The separation of powers; the executive power; administrative councils; heads of departments; their tenure of office, their powers and duties; the general system of local government; officers, their appointment or election, their duties, their rights, removal from office; the administration in action; the control over the administration. This control is threefold in its character. I. — Administrative control. This is exercised by the superior over the inferior administrative officers by means of the power of removal and the power (given in many cases) to annul or amend administrative acts. II. — Judicial control. This is exercised by the courts, to which recourse is often granted against the action of the administration. Here the new courts will be examined, which have been established in France and Germany during this century, and to which the name of administrative courts has been given. III. — Legislative control. This is exercised by the legislature by means of its power to inform itself of the acts of the administration, and, if need be, to impeach administrative officers. [Professor Goodnow]

Special Part.

This part of the lectures will treat of the relations of the administrative authorities, both general and local, with the citizens. BOOK I. Financial administration. The management of public property, taxation, and public accounts, considered from the administrative rather than from the financial standpoint.— BOOK II. Internal administration. The legal provisions which aim at the prevention of evil, and which are sometimes designated as police measures — measures tending to prevent public disorder, public immorality, and disease. Further, provisions of a more positive character, whose purpose is to promote the public welfare; thus measures taken to provide means of public communication; to further the interests of trade, commerce, and industry; to ensure the control of the state over enterprises of a quasi-public character, such as railway companies and institutions of credit; to assist the poor, and educate the ignorant.

Each topic which will come under consideration will be treated historically, and with reference to the positive existing law: and for matters of special interest the comparison of systems of legislation will be extended to other countries than the four mentioned, when it is thought that this may be done with profit. In general, however, the comparison will be limited to the United States, France, Germany, and England.

— Local government. — This course will be devoted to the consideration of the various important systems of local government in the rural districts. The organization of the town and county and their corresponding divisions in other countries will be treated; and special attention will be directed to the historical development of existing systems, and to the question of administrative centralization. [Professor Goodnow]
— Municipal administration.— -The subjects to which special attention will be directed in these lectures are: the growth and importance of cities; the independence of cities from state control; the city as a public organ, and as a juristic person— a corporation; city organization and municipal elections; municipal civil service; city property and local taxation. In these lectures special attention is given to American cities and the City of New York; but the experience of foreign cities will be appealed to whenever it is thought that any thing may be learned therefrom. [Professor Goodnow]
— Seminarium in constitutional and administrative law.

III.— POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE.

It is presumed that students possess a knowledge of the general principles of political economy as laid down in the ordinary manuals by Walker or Mill, before entering the school. Students who are not thus prepared are recommended to take the undergraduate course on the elements of political economy.

The courses of lectures held in the school are as follows:

Historical and practical political economy.— This course is intended to give the student a knowledge of the economic development of the world, in order that he may understand present economic institutions and solve present economic problems. The principal topics are: Introduction, concerning the study of political economy and its relation to political science; general sketch of the economic development of the world; the institutions of private property, bequest, and inheritance, and the principle of personal liberty as affecting the economic condition of the world; the problems of production, such as land tenure, population, capital, different forms of productive enterprise, statistics of production, particularly the natural resources of the United States; problems of exchange, such as free trade and protection, railroads money, bimetallism, paper-money, banking, commercial crises, etc.; problems of distribution, such as wages, trades-unions, co-operation, poor relief, factory laws, profit and interest, rent, progress and poverty; and finally a consideration of the function of the state in economic affairs. [Professor R. M. Smith]

Science of finance.— This course is also historical as well as comparative and critical. It treats of the expenditure of the state, and the methods of meeting the same among different civilized nations. It describes the different kinds of state revenues, especially taxes, and discusses the principles of taxation. It considers also public debt, methods of borrowing money, redemption, refunding, repudiation, etc. Finally it describes the financial organization of the state, by which the revenue is collected and expended. Students are furnished with the current public documents of the United States treasury, and expected to understand all the facts in regard to public debt, banking, and coinage therein contained. [Professor Seligman]

Financial history of the United States. — This course endeavors to present a complete survey of American legislation on currency, finance, and taxation, as well as its connection with the state of industry and commerce. Attention is called in especial to the financial history of the colonies, (colonial currency and taxation); to the financial methods of the revolution and the confederation; to the financial policy of the Federalists and the Republicans up to the war of 1812, including the refunding and payment of the debt, the internal revenue, and the banking and currency problems; to the financial history of the war with England; to the changes in the methods of taxation, and the crises of 1819, 1825, 1837; to the distribution of the surplus and the United States bank; to the currency problems up to the civil war; to the financial management of the war; to the methods of resumption, payment of the debt, national banks, currency questions, and problems of taxation; and finally to the recent development in national, state, and municipal finance and taxation. [Professor Seligman]

Industrial and tariff history of the United States. — The arguments of extreme free-traders as of extreme protectionists are often so one-sided that an impartial judgment can be formed only through a knowledge of the actual effects of the tariffs. It is the object of this course to give a detailed history of each customs tariff of the United States from the very beginning, to describe the arguments of its advocates and of its opponents in each case; to trace as far as possible the position of each of the leading industries before and after the passage of the chief tariff acts, and thus to determine how far the legislation of the United States has developed or hampered the progress of industry and the prosperity of the whole country. Attention is called in especial to the industrial history of the colonies; to the genesis of the protective idea and to Hamilton’s report; to the tariffs from 1789 to 1808; to the restriction and the war with England; to the tariffs of 1816, 1824, and the “tariff of abominations” of 1828; to the infant-industry argument; to the compromise and its effect on manufactures; to the era of moderate free trade; to the tariff of 1857, to the war tariffs; to their continuance, and to the pauper-labor argument; to the changes up to the present time. [Probably Professor Seligman]

History and criticism of economic theories. — This course comprises two parts. In the first the various systems are discussed, attention being directed to the connection between the theories and the organization of industrial society. In the second, the separate doctrines — e. g, of capital, rent, wages, etc. — are treated in their historical development. [Professor Seligman]

The first part is subdivided as follows:

I. Antiquity: Orient, Greece, and Rome.
II. Middle ages: Aquinas, Glossators, writers on money, etc.
III. Mercantilists: Stafford, Mun, Petty, North, Locke; Bodin, Vauban, Forbonnais; Serra, Galiani, Justi, etc.
IV. Physiocrats: Quesnay, Gournay, Turgot, etc.
V. Adam Smith and precursors: Tucker, Hume, Cantillon, Stewart.
VI. English school: Malthus, Ricardo, Senior, McCulloch, Chalmers, Jones, Mill, etc.
VII. The continent: Say, Sismondi, Hermann, List, Bastiat, etc.
VIII. German school: Roscher, Knies, Hildebrand.
IX. Recent development: Rogers, Jevons, Cairnes, Bagehot, Leslie, Toynbee; Wagner, Schmoller, Held, Brentano; Cherbuliez, Leroy-Beaulieu, De Laveleye; Cossa, Nazzani, Loria; Carey, George, Walker.

Communistic and socialistic theories: — The present organization of society is attacked by socialistic writers, who demand many changes, especially in the institution of private property and the system of free competition. It is the object of this course to describe what these attacks are, what changes are proposed, and how far these changes seem desirable or possible. At the same time an account is given of actual socialistic movements, such as the international, social democracy, etc. Advantage is taken of these discussions to make the course really one on social science, by describing modern social institutions, such as private property, in their historical origin and development, and their present justification. [Prof. R. M. Smith]

Statistical science; methods and results.— This course is intended to furnish a basis for a social science by supplementing the historical, legal, and economic knowledge already gained by such a knowledge of social phenomena as can be gained only by statistical observation. Under the head of statistics of population are considered: race and ethnological distinctions, nationality, density, city, and country, sex, age, occupation, religion, education, births, deaths, marriages, mortality tables, emigration, etc. Under economic statistics: land, production of food, raw material, labor, wages, capital, means of transportation, shipping, prices, etc. Under the head of moral statistics are considered: statistics of suicide, vice, crime of all kinds, causes of crime, condition of criminals, repression of crime, penalties and effect of penalties, etc. Finally is considered the method of statistical observations, the value of the results obtained, the doctrine of free will, and the possibility of discovering social laws. [Prof. R. M. Smith]Railroad problems; economical, social, and legal. — These lectures treat of railroads in the fourfold aspect of their relation to the investors, the employees, the public, and the state respectively. A history of railways and railway policy in America and Europe forms the preliminary part of the course. All the problems of railway management, in so^ far as they are of economic importance, come up for discussion. Among the subjects treated are: financial methods, railway construction, speculation, profits, failures, accounts and reports, expenses, tariffs, principles of rates, classification and discrimination, competition and pooling, accidents, employers’ liability, etc. Especial attention is paid to the methods of regulation and legislation in the United States as compared with European methods, and the course closes with a general discussion of state versus private management. [Professor Seligman]

Ethnology and social institutions of the people of the United States — This course is an analysis of the ethnic elements in the population of this country, of the influences affecting the character of the people, and deals with pertain social institutions that are neither purely economic, nor political, nor legal. It treats particularly of the effects of immigration in the past and at the present time. [Prof. R. M. Smith]

An outline of the course is as follows:

I. The original ethnic elements in the population; the process of colonization; influence of climate and geographical position; influence of slavery; present distribution of population, by areas, by altitude, rain-fall, temperature, etc.
II. The elements added by immigration; history of immigration; political economic and social effects of immigration; legislation restricting immigration, etc.
III. Social institutions and customs; marriage and divorce; poor relief and pauperism; charitable institutions, public and private; penology, prisons, convict labor; religious associations; social classes.

Seminarium in political economy. — Outside of the regular instruction in political economy and social science, it is the intention to furnish the students of the school an opportunity for special investigation of economic and social questions under the direction of the professor. This is done by means of original papers prepared by such students as choose to engage in this work. The papers are read before the professor and the students, and are then criticised and discussed. The number of meetings and the topics to be discussed are determined each year. During the coming year it is proposed to investigate various aspects of the labor problem.

IV— HISTORY OF EUROPEAN LAW AND COMPARATIVE JURISPRUDENCE.

History of European law.

BOOK I. Primitive law. The following topics are discussed from the comparative standpoint: evolution of the primitive state; the sanction of law, the redress of wrongs in primitive society, and the evolution of criminal and civil jurisdiction and procedure; early family and property law. — BOOK II. Roman law: the national system. (Royal and republican period.) The struggle between the orders and the development of a common law (XII Tables). The leading principles and juristic technique of the national system (jus civile). — BOOK III. Roman law: the universal system. Chapter I. Later republican period. The conquest of the entire civilized world, and the social, economic, and legal changes produced by the conquest. Reform of criminal law and procedure. The development of a universal commercial law by means of the praetorian edicts. The praetorian formulae of action. Chapter II. Early imperial period. The empire under republican forms. Development of criminal and civil procedure extra ordinem. The classical jurisprudence. Chapter III. Later imperial period. Social, economic, and legal decadence. Codification of the law by Justinian.— BOOK IV. Mediaeval law. Chapter I. German law. Character of early German law; the reforms of Charles the Great; maintenance of Carolingian institutions in Normandy, and further development of these institutions in Norman England; general disappearance of the Carolingian institutions on the continent, and arrest of the legal development. Chapter II. Roman law. Survival of the Roman law (i) in the Byzantine empire; (2) in the new German kingdoms, as personal law of the conquered Romans; (3) in the Christian church. Establishment and extent of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction; the development and the codification of the Canon Law; influence exercised by this law upon the subsequent development of Europe. Revival of the study of the Justinian or Civil Law in Italy; influx of foreign students. The theory of imperium continuum. Reception of the Justinian law in the German empire; partial reception in France and Spain; failure of the Roman law to gain footing in England. Influence of the Roman law in other countries: the ”scientific” as distinguished from the “practical” reception.— BOOK V. Modern law. The reaction against the Roman law (1) among the people; (2) among the jurists; (3) in modern legislation. The great national codes of the 18th and 19th centuries. Relation of these codes to the Roman and German law. [Professor Munroe Smith]

Comparative jurisprudence. — This course of lectures presents succinctly the leading principles of modern private law. The order of treatment is as follows: BOOK I. Law in general: conception, establishment, and extinction, interpretation and application. BOOK II. Private legal relations in general: nature of private rights; holders of rights (physical and juristic persons); establishment, modification, and extinction of rights (legal acts, illegal acts or torts, operation of time); enforcement of rights. BOOK III. Legal relations concerning things. BOOK IV. Legal relations arising from executory contracts. BOOK V. Family relations and guardianship. BOOK VI. Relations mortis causâ (inheritance). [Professor Munroe Smith]

International private law. — In this course the theories of the foreign authorities are noticed, and the practice of the foreign courts in the so-called conflicts of private law is compared with the solution given to these questions by our own courts. [Professor Munroe Smith]

Seminarium for studies in comparative legislation. — The courses above described lay the basis for the comprehension of foreign legislations. The object of the seminarium is to train the student in the practical use of these legislations. Participation in the seminarium is optional. The work is to be done by the students themselves, under the direction and with the assistance of the professor in this department. It is intended that they shall devote themselves to the study of questions of practical interest de lege ferenda, and that they shall collate and compare the solutions given to these questions in our own and in foreign countries.

V.— DIPLOMACY AND INTERNATIONAL LAW.

The history of diplomacy from the peace of Westphalia to the treaty of Berlin. — The object of this course is to present, in their historical connection, the international treaties and conventions framed between these two periods, and to trace through them the development of the principles of international law. [Professor Burgess]

International law. — In this course the principles attained through usage, treaty, and convention are arranged in systematic form. [Professor Burgess]

Diplomatic history of the United States. — The purpose of this course is to treat primarily of the diplomatic history of Lincoln’s and Johnson’s administration. An outline and characterization of the policies of Marcy, Cass, and Black will also be given. [Professor Burgess]

VI.— HISTORY OF POLITICAL THEORIES.

Every people known to history has possessed some form, however vague and primitive, of political government. Every people which has attained a degree of enlightenment above the very lowest has been permeated by some ideas, more or less systematic, as to the origin, nature and limitations of governmental authority. It is the purpose of this course to trace historically the development of these ideas, from the primitive notions of primitive people to the complex and elaborate philosophical theories that have characterized the ages of highest intellectual refinement. [Dr. Dunning]

BOOK I., after a short survey of the theocratical system of the Brahmans and the rationalistic doctrine of Confucius, treats mainly of the political philosophy of Greece and Rome, with especially attention to the profound speculations of Plato and Aristotle.

BOOK II. discusses the political doctrines of early Christianity and the Christian church, with the controversy of Papacy and Empire, and the elaborate systems of St. Thomas Aquinas and his adversaries.

BOOK III. treats of that age of renaissance and reformation in which Machiavelli and Bodin, Suarez and Bellarmino, Luther and Calvin worked out their various solutions of the great problem, how to reconcile the conflicting doctrines of theology, ethics, and politics.

BOOK IV. covers the period of modern times, as full of great names in political philosophy, as of great events in political history. Here are examined the doctrine of natural law, as developed by Grotius and Puffendorf, the doctrine of divine right of kings with its corollary of passive obedience, as in Filmer and Bossuet, the theory of the constitutionalists, Locke and Montesquieu, the idea of social contract, made most famous by Rousseau, and the various additions to and modifications of these doctrines down to the present day.

PRIZES.

PRIZE FELLOWSHIPS.

In 1886 Mr. Jesse Seligman founded four fellowships of the annual value of two hundred and fifty dollars each. These fellowships are awarded at the discretion of the faculty to students of the third year in the School of Political Science, under the sole condition that the recipient of the fellowship be a candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy.

PRIZE IN POLITICAL ECONOMY.

An annual prize of one hundred and fifty dollars for the best essay on some subject in political economy has been established by Mr. Edwin R. A. Seligman, of the class of 1879. Competition for the prize is open to all members of the School of Political Science. The topic selected must be approved by the faculty, and the essay itself must not be less than twenty thousand words in length.

PREPARATION FOR THE CIVIL SERVICE.

Young men who wish to obtain positions in the United States Civil Service—especially in those positions in the Department of State for which special examinations are held — will find it advantageous to follow many of the courses in the School of Political Science. Some of the subjects upon which applicants for these positions are examined are treated very fully in the curriculum of the school. Thus, extended courses of lectures are given on political geography and history, diplomatic history and international law, government and administration.

Full opportunity is given in the School of Arts for the study of the principal modern languages, and all the courses in that school are open to the students of the School of Political Science.

ADMISSION TO OTHER COURSES.

ADMISSION TO UNDERGRADUATE COURSES.

Any student of the School of Political Science may attend any or all of the courses of the School of Arts, with the permission of the instructors concerned, without the payment of any further tuition fee than that due to the School of Political Science.

ADMISSION TO GRADUATE COURSES.

The trustees have provided that courses of instruction shall be given in the college to graduates of this and other colleges in a large variety of subjects. Students of the School of Political Science, who may be bachelors of arts, of letters, or of science at entrance, or who, after having completed their first year in the School of Political Science, shall have received their first degree, may be admitted without additional tuition fee to the graduate classes, in such subjects as they may desire to pursue.

Among the cognate courses which may be taken without conflict of hours are:

History of Philosophy, two hours a week. Ethics, two hours a week. Readings in Gaius and Ulpian, one hour a week. Courses in the various modern languages, and others.

Students who are candidates for the degrees of Ph.B., A.B., A.M., and Ph.D., and who take senior and graduate studies in the School of Arts to the amount of six hours per week, are not required to take more than nine hours a week in the School of Political Science.

Information in regard to the undergraduate courses and a list of the subjects embraced in the scheme of graduate instruction for the ensuing year will be furnished on application to the registrar of Columbia College, Madison avenue and 49th street, New York City.

ADMISSION TO THE COURSES OF THE SCHOOL OF LAW.

Those students who intend to make law their profession may combine the ordinary course of study required for admission to the bar with the course in political science. The hours of lectures in the two schools are so arranged as to make this combination feasible; and experience has shown that the satisfactory completion of both courses within three years is not beyond the powers of an industrious student of fair ability.

The instruction offered in the School of Political Science upon constitutional, administrative, and international law, and upon Roman law and comparative jurisprudence, furnishes the natural and necessary complement to the studies of the School of Law. Law is, with us, the chief avenue into politics; and for this, if for no other reason, a complete legal education should include the science of politics. But the importance to the lawyer or the subjects above mentioned does not depend simply on the prospect of a political career. To become a thorough practitioner, the student must acquire a thorough knowledge of public law; and if he wishes to be any thing more than an expert practitioner, if he wishes to know law as a science, some knowledge of other systems than our own becomes imperative. From this point of view the Roman law is of paramount importance, not merely by reason of its scientific structure, but because it is the basis of all modern systems except the English. Elsewhere than in our own country these facts are uniformly recognized, not in the schemes of legal instruction only, but in the state examinations for admission to the bar.

In order to encourage, by the combination of the two courses, the acquisition of a well-rounded juristic training, the trustees have provided that any student of the School of Political Science may attend any or all of the courses of the School of Law, without the payment of any further tuition fee than that due to the School of Political Science; and, conversely, that any student of the School of Law may attend any or all of the lectures in the School of Political Science, without payment of any further tuition fee than that due to the School of Law; and that the student registered in both schools may be a candidate for degrees in both schools at the same time.

Students in the School of Law are required to take only nine hours per week in the School of Political Science. For further information see law school circular.

LIBRARY.

The special library of political science was begun in 1877, and it was intended to include the most recent and most valuable European and American works in this department. Particular attention was, and is, given to providing the material needed for original investigation.

The total number of volumes in the department of history and political science is at present (1890) more than 18,000. In the department of law the total number of volumes is about 10,000. The original material requisite for the study of foreign law has been largely increased during the last two years.

The students of the School of Political Science are entitled to the use, subject to the rules established by the library committee, of the entire university library. The library is open from 8½ A.M. to 10 P.M. Information concerning the sources and literature of the political sciences is given in the various courses of lectures held in the schools. The students can obtain supplementary information and general guidance and assistance in their investigations, from the librarian in special charge of law, history, and political science.

EXAMINATIONS AND DEGREES.

No student of the school can be a candidate for any degree unless he have successfully pursued a course of undergraduate study in this college, or in some other maintaining an equivalent curriculum, to the close of the junior year.

Students thus qualified, who shall satisfactorily complete the studies of the first year or their equivalent in the senior year in the School of Arts, shall be entitled, on examination and recommendation of the faculty, to receive the degree of bachelor of philosophy or the degree of bachelor of arts. The latter degree requires the concurrence of the Faculty of Arts, and is not conferred unless the student has taken courses, in the first year of the School of Political Science, or courses in that year and in the senior year of the School of Arts, amounting to fifteen hours a week.

Students of the school who have obtained the degree of bachelor of arts at this or at any other college maintaining an equivalent curriculum, and who are at the same time students in the School of Law, or who have pursued studies in the graduate department of philosophy, philology, and letters, to the amount of six hours per week, will, after passing satisfactorily through courses in the school, amounting to nine hours per week, be recommended by the faculty of the school for the degree of master of arts. The purpose of this provision is to allow students to pursue a course either mainly in law or mainly in economics. These courses may be continued through the third year, so that students who have obtained the degree of bachelor of arts are offered a two years’ course in either law or economics. (See supra, “Course of Instruction in General and in Detail.”) Students in the School of Political Science alone are required to pursue all of the studies of the second year, and to pass a satisfactory examination in them, in order to obtain the degree of master of arts.

Students in the School of Political Science who are at the same time students in the School of Law, or who are taking at least six hours a week in the graduate departments of philosophy, philology, and letters, who elect and satisfactorily complete courses in the third year of the School of Political Science embracing nine lectures per week, shall be entitled, on recommendation of the faculty of the school, to receive the degree of doctor of philosophy. Students who are in the School of Political Science only must take the entire work of the third year of the school.

To obtain recommendation for the last degree, the candidate will be required:

1. To prepare an original dissertation, not less than 20,000 words in length, upon a subject approved by the faculty.
2. To defend such dissertation before the faculty.
3. To pass collateral examinations (reading at sight) upon Latin and either French or German.
4.Candidates who have obtained the degree of bachelor of arts or bachelor of philosophy in this school, or bachelor of arts in this or any other college maintaining an equivalent curriculum, will be required to pass, further, an oral examination on their work in the last two years of the school; candida tes who have obtained the degree of master of arts from this school will be required to pass an oral examination on their work in the last year of the school. Candidates who have none of these degrees will be required to pass an oral examination on the entire work of the school.

The candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy may present himself for examination at any time when the college is in session, excepting the month of June. The subject chosen by the candidate for his dissertation, which may be presented to the faculty before or after the examination on the work in the school, should be made known to the faculty at least four months before the proposed time of examination thereupon. A printed (or type-written) copy of the dissertation must be submitted to each member of the faculty at least one month before the day of such examination. The title-page must contain the name of the candidate and the words “Submitted as one of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy in the School of Political Science, Columbia College.”

The successful candidate must present a copy of his dissertation to the college library.

All degrees awarded will be publicly conferred at commencement.

EXAMINATION FEES.

Examination fees are as follows: For the degree of bachelor of arts, fifteen dollars; for the degree of bachelor of philosophy, twenty-five dollars; for the degree of master of arts, twenty-five dollars; for the degree of doctor of philosophy, thirty-five dollars. The examination fee must in each case be paid before the candidate presents himself for examination for the degree.

COMMENCEMENT.

The commencement exercises of the college take place annually on the second Wednesday of June.

ACADEMY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE.

This institution is devoted to the cultivation and advancement of the political sciences. It is composed mainly of graduates of the Schools of Law and Political Science of Columbia College, but any person whose previous studies have fitted him to participate in the work of the academy is eligible to membership.

Meetings of the academy are held on the first and third Mondays of each month. At these meetings papers are read by members presenting the results of original investigation by the writers in some department of political science.

PRIZE LECTURESHIPS.

The trustees have established in the School of Political Science three prize lectureships of the annual value of five hundred dollars each, tenable for three years. The power of appointment is vested in the faculty. One of these three lectureships becomes vacant at the close of each academic year. The previous holder may be reappointed. The conditions of competition are as follows:

1. The candidate must be a graduate of the School of Political Science or of the Law School of Columbia College. In the latter case he must have pursued the curriculum of the School of Political Science for at least two years.
2. He must be an active member of the Academy of Political Science.
3. He must have read at least one paper before the Academy of Political Science during the year next preceding the appointment.

The duty of the lecturer is to deliver annually, before the students of the School of Political Science, a series of at least twenty lectures, the result of original investigation.

[3 pages of hour by weekday tables of course schedules for six semesters over three years]

CALENDAR.

1890 —

. — Examinations for admission begin, Monday.
Oct. . — Matriculation, Saturday.
Oct. 6. — Lectures begin, Monday.
Nov. 4. — Election day, holiday.
Nov. . — Thanksgiving day, holiday.
Dec. 22. — Christmas recess begins, Monday.

1891 —

Jan. 3. — Christmas recess ends, Saturday.
Feb. 4. — First session ends, Wednesday.
Feb. 5. — Second session begins, Thursday.
Feb. 11. — Ash-Wednesday, holiday.
Feb. 22. — Washington’s birthday, holiday.
Mar. 27. — Good-Friday, holiday.
May 18. — Examinations begin, Monday.
June 10. — Commencement, Wednesday.

Source: Columbia College. School of Political Science. Circular of Information 1890-91.

Image Source: Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Columbia College, Madison Ave., New York, N.Y.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed January 27, 2017. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-cc61-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Tags Burgess, Mayo-Smith, Seligman

Columbia Economists

Columbia. History of Economics Department. Luncheon Talk by Arthur R. Burns, 1954

Post author By Irwin Collier
Post date 2016-07-17

The main entry of this posting is a transcription of the historical overview of economics at Columbia provided by Professor Arthur R. Burns at a reunion luncheon for Columbia economics Ph.D. graduates [Note: Arthur Robert Burns was the “other” Arthur Burns of the Columbia University economics department, as opposed to Arthur F. Burns, who was the mentor/friend of Milton Friedman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, chairman of the Board of Governors of the Fed, etc.]. He acknowledges his reliance on the definitive research of his colleague, Joseph Dorfman, that was published in the following year:

Joseph Dorfman, “The Department of Economics”, Chapt IX in R. Gordon Hoxie et al., A History of the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955.

The cost of the luncheon was $2.15 per person. 36 members of the economics faculty attended, who paid for themselves, and some 144 attending guests (includes about one hundred Columbia economics Ph.D.’s) had their lunches paid for by the university.

_____________________________

[LUNCHEON INVITATION LETTER]

Columbia University
in the City of New York
[New York 27, N.Y.]
FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

March 25, 1954

Dear Doctor _________________

On behalf of the Department of Economics, I am writing to invite you to attend a Homecoming Luncheon of Columbia Ph.D.’s in Economics. This will be held on Saturday, May 29, at 12:30 sharp, in the Men’s Faculty Club, Morningside Drive and West 117^th Street.

This Luncheon is planned as a part of Columbia University’s Bicentennial Celebration, of which, as you know, the theme is “Man’s Right to Knowledge and the free Use Thereof”. The date of May 29 is chosen in relation to the Bicentennial Conference on “National Policy for Economic Welfare at Home and Abroad” in which distinguished scholars and men of affairs from the United States and other countries will take part. The final session of this Conference, to be held at three p.m. on May 29 in McMillin Academic Theater, will have as its principal speaker our own Professor John Maurice Clark. The guests at the Luncheon are cordially invited to attend the afternoon meeting.

The Luncheon itself and brief after-luncheon speeches will be devoted to reunion, reminiscence and reacquaintance with the continuing work of the Department. At the close President Grayson Kirk will present medals on behalf of the University to the principal participants in the Bicentennial Conference.

We shall be happy to welcome to the Luncheon as guests of the University all of our Ph.D.’s, wherever their homes may be, who can arrange to be in New York on May 29. We very much hope you can be with us on that day. Please reply on the form below.

Cordially yours,

[signed]
Carter Goodrich
Chairman of the Committee

* * * * * *

Professor Carter Goodrich
Box #22, Fayerweather Hall
Columbia University
New York 27, New York

I shall be glad…
I shall be unable… to attend the Homecoming Luncheon on May 29.

(signed) ___________

Note: Please reply promptly, not later than April 20 in the case of Ph.D.’s residing in the United States, and not later than May 5 in the case of others.

_____________________________

[INVITATION TO SESSION FOLLOWING LUNCHEON]

Columbia University
in the City of New York
[New York 27, N.Y.]
FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

May 6, 1954

TO: Departments of History, Math. Stat., Public and Sociology
FROM: Helen Harwell, secretary, Graduate Department of Economics

Will you please bring the following notice to the attention of the students in your Department:

A feature of Columbia’s Bicentennial celebration will be a Conference on National Policy for Economic Welfare at Home and Abroad, to be held May 27, 28 and 29.

The final session of the Conference will take place in McMillin Theatre at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 29. The session topic is “Economic Welfare in a Free Society”. The program is:

Session paper.

John M. Clark, John Bates Clark Professor. Emeritus of Economics, Columbia University.

Discussants:

Frank H. Knight, Professor of Economics, University of Chicago
David E. Lilienthal, Industrial Consultant and Executive
Wilhelm Roepke, Professor of International Economics, Graduate Institute of International Studies, University of Geneva

Students in the Faculty of Political Science are cordially invited to attend this session and to bring their wives or husbands and friends who may be interested.

Tickets can be secured from Miss Helen Harwell, 505 Fayer.

_____________________________

[REMARKS BY PROFESSOR ARTHUR ROBERT BURNS]

Department of Economics Bicentennial Luncheon
May 29^th, 1954

President Kirk, Ladies and Gentlemen: On behalf of the Department of Economics I welcome you all to celebrate Columbia’s completion of its first two hundred years as one of the great universities. We are gratified that so many distinguished guests have come, some from afar, to participate in the Conference on National Policy for Economic Welfare at Home and Abroad. We accept their presence as testimony of their esteem for the place of Columbia in the world of scholarship. Also, we welcome among us again many of the intellectual offspring of the department. We like to believe that the department is among their warmer memories. We also greet most pleasurably some past members of the department, namely Professors Vladimir G. Simkhovitch, Eugene Agger, Eveline M. Burns and Rexford Tugwell. Finally, but not least, we are pleased to have with us the administrative staff of the department who are ceaselessly ground between the oddity and irascibility of the faculty and the personal and academic tribulations of the students. Gertrude D. Stewart who is here is evidence that this burden can be graciously carried for thirty-five years without loss of charm or cheer.

We are today concerned with the place of economics within the larger scope of Columbia University. When the bell tolls the passing of so long a period of intellectual endeavor one casts an appraising eye over the past, and I am impelled to say a few retrospective words about the faculty and the students. I have been greatly assisted in this direction by the researches of our colleague, Professor Dorfman, who has been probing into our past.

On the side of the faculty, there have been many changes, but there are also many continuities. First let me note some of the changes. As in Europe, economics made its way into the university through moral philosophy, and our College students were reading the works of Frances Hutcheson in 1763. But at the end of the 18^th century, there seems to have been an atmosphere of unhurried certainty and comprehensiveness of view that has now passed away. For instance, it is difficult to imagine a colleague of today launching a work entitled “Natural Principles of Rectitude for the Conduct of Man in All States and Situations in Life Demonstrated and Explained in a Systematic Treatise on Moral Philosophy”. But one of early predecessors, Professor Gross, published such a work in 1795.

The field of professorial vision has also change. The professor Gross whom I have just mentioned occupied no narrow chair but what might better be called a sofa—that of “Moral Philosophy, German Language and Geography”. Professor McVickar, early in the nineteenth century, reclined on the even more generous sofa of “Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, Rhetoric, Belles Lettres and Political Economy”. By now, however, political economy at least existed officially and, in 1821, the College gave its undergraduates a parting touch of materialist sophistication in some twenty lectures on political economy during the last two months of their senior year.

But by the middle of the century, integration was giving way to specialization. McVickar’s sofa was cut into three parts, one of which was a still spacious chair of “History and Political Science”, into which Francis Lieber sank for a brief uneasy period. His successor, John W. Burgess, pushed specialization further. He asked for an assistant to take over the work in political economy. Moreover, his request was granted and Richmond Mayo Smith, then appointed, later became Professor of Political Economy, which, however, included Economics, Anthropology and Sociology. The staff of the department was doubled in 1885 by the appointment of E. R. A. Seligman to a three-year lectureship, and by 1891 he had become a professor of Political Economy and Finance. Subsequent fission has separated Sociology and Anthropology and now we are professors of economics, and the days when political economy was covered in twenty lectures seem long ago.

Other changes stand out in our history. The speed of promotion of the faculty has markedly slowed down. Richmond Mayo Smith started as an instructor in 1877 but was a professor after seven years of teaching at the age of 27. E. R. A. Seligman even speeded matters a little and became a professor after six years of teaching. But the University has since turned from this headlong progression to a more stately gait. One last change I mention for the benefit of President Kirk, although without expectation of warm appreciation from him. President Low paid J. B. Clark’s salary out of his own pocket for the first three years of the appointment.

I turn now to some of the continuities in the history of the department. Professor McVickar displayed a concern for public affairs that has continued since his time early in the nineteenth century. He was interested in the tariff and banking but, notably, also in what he called “economic convulsions”, a term aptly suggesting an economy afflicted with the “falling sickness”. Somewhat less than a century later the subject had been rechristened “business cycles” to remove some of the nastiness of the earlier name, and professor Wesley Mitchell was focusing attention on this same subject.

The Columbia department has also shown a persistent interest in economic measurement. Professor Lieber campaigned for a government statistical bureau in the middle of the 19^th century and Richmond Mayo Smith continued this interest in statistics and in the Census. Henry L. Moore, who came to the department in 1902, promoted with great devotion Mathematical Economics and Statistics with particular reference to the statistical verification of theory. This interest in quantification remains vigorous among us.

There is also a long continuity in the department’s interest in the historical and institutional setting of economic problems and in their public policy aspect. E. R. A. Seligman did not introduce, but he emphasized this approach. He began teaching the History of Theory and proceeded to Railroad Problems and the Financial and Tariff History of the United States, and of course, Public Finance. John Bates Clark, who joined the department in 1895 to provide advanced training in economics to women who were excluded from the faculty of Political Science, became keenly interested in government policy towards monopolies and in the problem of war. Henry R. Seager, in 1902, brought his warm and genial personality to add to the empirical work in the department in labor and trust problems. Vladimir G. Simkhovitch began to teach economic history in 1905 at the same time pursuing many and varied other interests, and we greet him here today. And our lately deceased colleague, Robert Murray Haig, continued the work in Public Finance both as teacher and advisor to governments.

Lastly, among these continuities is an interest in theory. E. R. A. Seligman focused attention on the history of theory. John Bates Clark was an outstanding figure in the field too well known to all of us for it to be necessary to particularize as to his work. Wesley C. Mitchell developed his course on “Current Types of Economic Theory” after 1913 and continued to give it almost continuously until 1945. The Clark dynasty was continued when John Maurice Clark joined the department as research professor in 1926. He became emeritus in 1952, but fortunately he still teaches, and neither students nor faculty are denied the stimulation of his gentle inquiring mind. He was the first appointee to the John Bates Clark professorship in 1952 and succeeded Wesley Mitchell as the second recipient of the Francis A. Walker medal of the American Economic Association in the same year.

Much of this development of the department was guided by that gracious patriarch E. R. A. Seligman who was Executive Officer of the Department for about 30 years from 1901. With benign affection and pride he smiled upon his growing academic family creating a high standard of leadership for his successors. But the period of his tenure set too high a standard and executive Officers now come and go like fireflies emitting as many gleams of light as they can in but three years of service. Seligman and J. B. Clark actively participated in the formation of the American Economic Association in which J. B. Clark hoped to include “younger men who do not believe implicitly in laisser faire doctrines nor the use of the deductive method exclusively”.

Among other members of the department I must mention Eugene Agger, Edward Van Dyke Robinson, William E. Weld, and Rexford Tugwell, who were active in College teaching, and Alvin Johnson, Benjamin Anderson and Joseph Schumpeter, who were with the department for short periods. Discretion dictates that I list none of my contemporaries, but I leave them for such mention as subsequent speakers may care to make.

When one turns to the students who are responsible for so much of the history of the department, one is faced by an embarrassment of riches. Alexander Hamilton is one of the most distinguished political economists among the alumni of the College. Richard T. Ely was the first to achieve academic reputation. In the 1880’s, he was giving economics a more humane and historical flavor. Walter F. Wilcox, a student of Mayo Smith, obtained his Ph.D. in 1891 and contributed notably to statistical measurement after he became Chief Statistician of the Census in 1891, and we extend a special welcome to him here today. Herman Hollerith (Ph.D. 1890) contributed in another way to statistics by his development of tabulating machinery. Alvin Johnson was a student as well as teacher. It is recorded that he opened his paper on rent at J. B. Clark’s seminar with the characteristically wry comment that all the things worth saying about rent had been said by J. B. Clark and his own paper was concerned with “some of the other things”. Among other past students are W. Z. Ripley, B. M. Anderson, Willard Thorp, John Maurice Clark, Senator Paul Douglas, Henry Schultz and Simon Kuznets. The last of these we greet as the present President of the American Economic Association. But the list grows too long. It should include many more of those here present as well as many who are absent, but I am going to invite two past students and one present student to fill some of the gaps in my story of the department.

I have heard that a notorious American educator some years ago told the students at Commencement that he hoped he would never see them again. They were going out into the world with the clear minds and lofty ideals which were the gift of university life. Thenceforward they would be distorted by economic interest, political pressure, and family concerns and would never again be the same pellucid and beautiful beings as at that time. I confess that the thought is troubling. But in inviting our students back we have overcome our doubts and we now confidently call upon a few of them. The first of these is George W. Stocking who, after successfully defending a dissertation on “The Oil Industry and the Competitive System” in 1925, has continued to pursue his interest in competition and monopoly as you all know. He is now at Vanderbilt University.

The second of our offspring whom I will call upon is Paul Strayer. He is one of the best pre-war vintages—full bodied, if I may borrow from the jargon of the vintner without offense to our speaker. Or I might say fruity, but again not without danger of misunderstanding. Perhaps I had better leave him to speak for himself. Paul Strayer, now of Princeton University, graduated in 1939, having completed a dissertation on the painful topic of “The Taxation of Small Incomes”.

The third speaker is Rodney H. Mills, a contemporary student and past president of the Graduate Economics Students Association. He has not yet decided on his future presidencies, but we shall watch his career with warm interest. He has a past, not a pluperfect, but certainly a future. Just now, however, no distance lends enchantment to his view of the department. And I now call upon him to share his view with us.

So far we have been egocentric and appropriately so. But many other centres of economic learning are represented here, and among them the London School of Economics of which I am proud as my own Alma Mater. I now call upon Professor Lionel Robbins of Polecon (as it used sometimes to be known) to respond briefly on behalf of our guests at the Conference. His nature and significance are or shall I say, is, too well known to you to need elaboration.

[in pencil]
A.R. Burns

Source: Columbia University Libraries, Manuscript Collections, Columbiana. Department of Economics Collection, Box 9, Folder “Bicentennial Celebration”.

_____________________________

[BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION FOR ARTHUR ROBERT BURNS]

BURNS, Arthur Robert, Columbia Univ., New York 27, N.Y. (1938) Columbia Univ., prof. of econ., teach., res.; b. 1895; B.Sc. (Econ.), 1920, Ph.D. (Econ.), 1926, London Sch. of Econ. Fields 5a, 3bc, 12b. Doc. dis. Money and monetary policy in early times (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., London, 1926). Pub. Decline of competition (McGraw-Hill 1936); Comparative economic organization (Prentice-Hall, 1955); Electric power and government policy (dir. of res.) (Twentieth Century Fund, 1948) . Res. General studies in economic development. Dir. Amer. Men of Sci., III, Dir. of Amer. Schol.

Source: Handbook of the American Economic Association, American Economic Review, Vol. 47, No. 4 (July, 1957), p. 40.

Obituary: “Arthur Robert Burns dies at 85; economics teacher at Columbia“, New York Times, January 22, 1981.

Image: Arthur Robert Burns. Detail from a departmental photo dated “early 1930’s” in Columbia University Libraries, Manuscript Collections, Columbiana. Department of Economics Collection, Box 9, Folder “Photos”.

Tags Agger, Anderson, Burgess, BurnsAF, BurnsAR, BurnsEM, ClarkJB, ClarkJM, DorfmanJ, Douglas, Ely, Goodrich, GrossJD, Haig, Hollerith, JohnsonA, Knight, Kuznets, Lieber, Mayo-Smith, McVickar, Mills, Mitchell, Moore, Ripley, RobinsonEVD, Roepke, SchultzH, Schumpeter, Seager, Seligman, Simkhovitch, Stocking, Strayer, Thorp, Tugwell, Weld, Wilcox

Columbia Regulations

Columbia. Memo from the Dean on Registration-Books, 1909

Post author By Irwin Collier
Post date 2016-03-31

While Economics in the Rear-View Mirror is focussed on the content of graduate education in economics (including both the transmission of the tools and norms of economic science and scholarship), from time to time I’ll be adding artifacts related to the certification function of degree-granting institutions that have established rules to regulate the “paper-chase” of their graduate students. Examples: degree rules at Harvard for 1911-12, Chicago for 1903, Columbia University for 1908-10.

Today’s posting is a 1909 memo written by the founding Dean of Columbia’s Faculty of Political Science, John W. Burgess. Instead of having instructors filing grade reports to a central registrar’s office that performed the bookkeeping of course credits, Deans relied on student registration-books in which instructor signatures were collected, analogous to the German system in which students individually collected their Seminar Scheine (certificates) issued professor by professor, course by course as proof of their academic work. In Wolfgang Stolper’s papers at Duke University one sees that he carefully kept his Scheine from his course work at the University of Bonn before he went to Harvard.

_______________________

If you find this posting interesting, here is the complete list of “artifacts” from the history of economics I have assembled thus far. You can subscribe to Economics in the Rear-View Mirror below. There is also an opportunity for comment following each posting…

________________________

[Registration books]

Course Records. It should be noted that the student is expected to keep his own record of courses attended. In the registration-book which is furnished him for this purpose, he enters at the beginning of each half-year the courses which he proposes to attend. At the beginning and end of each course the professor in charge certiﬁes the student’s attendance by his signature. Before presenting himself for examination for any degree, the student must submit his registration-book to the Dean of the Faculty in which his major subject lies in order that the Dean may satisfy himself that the required minimum number of courses has been attended. Lost registration-books may be replaced if the professors are able from their own records or recollection to certify attendance; but if they are unable to do this, the candidate may lose credit for attendance.

Source: Course Regulations, 1908-10. Columbia University.

________________________

Columbia University
in the City New York

FACULTIES OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND PURE SCIENCE

Office of the Dean

September 23, 1909

My dear Professor:

The Dean’s attention has recently been called to the fact that there is some misunderstanding, or at least some difference of understanding, among the officers of instruction of the Graduate Faculties in regard to the signification of their signatures to the courses in the registration-books. Inasmuch as these books are the only evidence which the Dean has of the attendance of students upon the courses of instruction for which they are registered, and of the fulfillment of the requirements in regard to attendance whereby they become qualified to attain a higher degrees, the Dean deems it his duty to make known to the officers of instruction the interpretation placed in his office upon their signatures. The Dean understands that they certify that, to the best knowledge and belief of the officers signing, the student has generally attended the course in person, and that no substitution of work done or said to be done in absentia from the lecture room or conference room of the officer has been allowed for the certified attendance upon the courses of instruction. The Dean’s office will adhere to this interpretation of the requirement of attendance, until otherwise instructed by the Council of the University; or, of course, by the Trustees.

Very truly yours,

John W. Burgess

Dean

Source: Columbia University Archives. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Central Files, 1890- (UA#001), Box 318, Folder “1.1.14 5/8; Burgess, John William; 1/1909-6/1910”.

Image Source: Universities and their Sons, Vol. 2. Boston: R. Herndon Company, 1899, p. 481.

Tags Burgess, Stolper

Columbia Exam Questions Syllabus Uncategorized

Columbia. Junior Year Political Economy. Mayo-Smith, 1880

Post author By Irwin Collier
Post date 2016-02-12

Yesterday while trawling through the Hathitrust digital library, I came across a collection published in 1882, Examination Papers Used During the Years 1877-1882 in Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Amherst and Williams Colleges. (The link takes you to the download page at archive.org)

Hoping for some political economic gold, I paged through the collection that appeared mostly focused on entrance examinations for Latin, Greek, mathematics etc., but eventually I stumbled upon a single examination in political economy for a junior year course (1880) at Columbia College.

The last question of that exam explicitly quotes from the course textbook so I went over to Google Books and searched the phrase “to secure a delusive benefit to individuals”. Sure enough, I could identify the textbook in question as the Manual of Political Economy for Schools and Colleges (3^rd ed. 1876) by James Edwin Thorold Rogers.

Now drunk on Google Books power, I text-searched Rogers’ Manual to locate the pages for answers to all the questions on the 1880 exam. You will find the corresponding page numbers in square brackets following the questions transcribed below…You’re welcome.

The course was taught by Richmond Mayo-Smith as seen in the Columbia College Handbook of Information 1880. I have included descriptive information about the junior and senior classes in history and political economy found there.

________________________________

[From the Columbia College Handbook of Information 1880]

SCHOOL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE.

PROFESSORS

John W. Burgess, A. M., Constitutional and International History and Law	Richmond M. Smith, A.M., Political Economy and Social Science (Adjunct).
	Archibald Alexander, A.M., Ph.D., Philosophy (Adjunct).

OTHER OFFICERS

E. Munroe Smith, LL.B., J.U.D:,
Lecturer on the Roman Law

Clifford R. Bateman, LL.B.,
Lecturer on Administrative Law.

[…]

HISTORY, POLITICAL SCIENCE, AND INTERNATIONAL LAW.

SOPHOMORE CLASS.

1ST TERM. —German History.
2D TERM.—French History.

JUNIOR CLASS.

1ST TERM—English History.
2D TERM—Political Economy.

SENIOR CLASS.

1ST TERM—Constitutional History of the United States.
2D TERM—Constitutional Law of the United States.
ELECTIVE BOTH TERMS—Political Economy

History.—During Sophomore and the ﬁrst half of Junior year the course in history occupies two hours per week. Some text-book is used, usually those of Freeman’s Historical course for German and French history, and Green’s Short History of the English People for English history.

The instruction to the Senior Class occupies also two hours per week throughout the year, and embraces the following subjects :

I. Character and Constitution of the Colonial Governments in North America; their relation to the English Crown and Parliament; and their history to the Declaration of Independence;

II. Character and Constitution of the Continental Congress as a Revolutionary Government; its relation to the State governments and to the people of the States as a central government ; and the history of its supersedure by the Confederate form.

III. Character and Constitution of the Confederacy as a central authority ; its relation to State governments and to the individual; the historical consequence of its defects and weaknesses, and its ﬁnal supersedure by the Federal form.

IV. History of the Formation and Adoption of the Federal Constitution; nature and powers of the government which it established; its relation to the State governments and the individual citizen.

V. Interpretation of the Provisions of the Federal Constitution.

VI. History of the Development of the Federal Constitution from its adoption to the present time.

The text and reference books used in connection with this course are: Hildreth, History of the United States; Bancroft, History of the United States; Curtis, History of the Constitution; The Federalist; Story, Constitutional Law; Pomeroy, Constitutional Law; Von Holst, Constitution and Democracy in the United States; Benton, Thirty Years’ View; Jennings, Eighty Years of Republican Government in the United States; Fisher, Trial of the Constitution; Decisions of the United States Supreme Court upon all constitutional questions.

Political Economy—There are two courses in Political Economy. During the second term of Junior year it is required from all students of that class. A systematic outline of the science is given, generally with the use of a text-book, either Fawcett’s or Rogers’s Manual of Political Economy.

[Fawcett, Henry. Manual of Political Economy. 1^st ed., 1863; 2^nd ed., 1865; 3^rd ed., 1869; 4^th ed., revised and enlarged 1874; 5^th ed., revised and enlarged 1876; 6^th ed., 1883; 7^th ed., 1888; 8^th ed., 1907.

Rogers, James Edwin Thorold. A Manual of Political Economy for Schools and Colleges. First Edition, 1868; Second edition, revised, 1869; Third edition revised, 1876.]

Political Economy may be elected by the students of the Senior Class, two hours per week throughout the year. Instruction is given by lectures on the following topics:

Systems of Land Tenure, past and present, in different countries, and their economic and social effects; Science of Finance, including a consideration of Money, Paper Money, Banking, and Taxation; Financial History and present situation of England, Germany, France, and the United States. All these topics are treated historically as well as critically; and with reference to the economic development in the History of Civilization.

Three or four theses on topics assigned by the professor are required from students of this class, To furnish these students with facilities for such work, besides the books in the college library, a special library of works in the department of Political Economy has been purchased and is for the exclusive use of the students of this class.

Source: Columbia College. Handbook of Information as to the Course of Instruction, etc., etc. New York: 1880, pp. x, 41-43.

________________________________

[Examination Questions in Political Economy 1880]

COLUMBIA COLLEGE
POLITICAL ECONOMY

JUNIOR CLASS, 1880.

[Page references to Rogers’ Manual of Political Economy, 3^rd ed. 1876]

Give a history of the English Poor Laws. [p. 121 ff.]
What do you mean by Co-operation? What are the supposed advantages to the laborer? Explain the system of the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers [pp. 135-137] and of the Schultze-Delitsch Credit-Banks [p. 106-109].
What determines the rate of wages of labor, and what effect does the customary food of laborers have on their wages? [p. 65]
Explain the following sentence: “It will be clear that the machinery of a Trade’s Union cannot increase wages by depressing the profits of capital.” [p. 90]
Explain and illustrate the following: “Banks of issue find it possible to circulate a far larger amount of paper than the gold on which the paper is based.” What effect does the abstraction of gold have in such a case? [pp. 43 ff.]
What is meant by an income tax; on what part of the income should it be levied and why? [pp. 278-281]
Explain the origin of the Irish cottier system of land tenure, its evils and the proposed remedy. [pp. 175 ff.]
Explain the following sentences from the text book:
“It (Protection) inflicts actual suffering or inconvenience on the public in order to secure a delusive benefit to individuals.” “It will be clear also that the Protection cannot stimulate general industry.” “In fact, whenever it (the state) protects particular kinds of labor it diminishes capital.” “Every country enjoys a natural protection to its manufactures.” [pp. 234-235]

Source: Harry Thurston Peck (ed.), Examination Papers Used During the Years 1877-1882 in Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Amherst and Williams Colleges. New York: Gilliss Brothers, 1882, p. 57-58.

Image Source: University and their Sons. History, Influence and Characteristics of American Universities with Biographical Sketches and Portraits of Alumni and Recipients of Honorary Degrees. Editor-in-chief, General Joshua L. Chamberlain, LL.D. Boston: R. Herdon Company. Vol. 2, 1899, pp. 582.

Tags Burgess, Mayo-Smith

Biography of Columbia Trustee, Samuel Bulkley Ruggles

Research tip

Excerpt from Joseph Dorfman’s 1955 History of the Economics Department of Columbia

Burgess Recounts Ruggles’ Role in the Establishment of the School of Political Science

Resolution of the Columbia College Trustees to Establish a School of Political Science

§. 4. SCHOOL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE.

Earlier Posts dealing with John W. Burgess

From Alvin S. Johnson’s Autobiography

OUTLINE OF A PLAN FOR THE INSTRUCTION of GRADUATE CLASSES FOR THE EXTENSION OF THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM OF STUDY IN THE UNDERGRADUATE DEPARTMENT. AND FOR THE CREATION OF A SCHOOL OF PREPARATION FOR THE CIVIL SERVICE

COLUMBIA COLLEGE

GRADUATE INSTRUCTION, AND THE EXTENSION OF THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

ENLARGEMENT OF THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM FOR UNDERGRADUATES.

PREPARATION OF YOUNG MEN FOR THE CIVIL SERVICE.

LETTER OF PROFESSOR BURGESS TO THE PRESIDENT.

I

II.

III.

IV.

(A.)

PLAN FOR THE INSTRUCTION OF GRADUATE CLASSES, AND FOR THE EXTENSION OR THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM IN THE UNDERGRADUATE DEPARTMENT.

DEGREES.

INSTRUCTION TO GRADUATES

(B.)

SCHOOL OF PREPARATION FOR THE CIVIL SERVICE, DIPLOMACY, AND THE EDITORIAL PROFESSION.

(C.)

PROBABLE EFFECT ON REVENUE AND EXPENDITURE OF THE ADOPTION OF THE PROPOSED SCHEME.

I.—EXPENDITURE.

II.—REVENUE.

I.—EXPENDITURE.

II. REVENUE.

(D.)

COURSES OF STUDY.

DEPARTMENT OF GREEK.

DEPARTMENT OF LATIN.

DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS.

DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICS AND ASTRONOMY.

DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS.

DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY.

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

DEPARTMENT OF THE MODERN LANGUAGES.

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE.

ROMAN AND INTERNATIONAL LAW.

DEPARTMENT OF GEOLOGY.

NATURAL HISTORY.

LAW.

SEMITIC AND ORIENTAL LANGUAGES.

Excerpt from Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois.

Alvin Johnson’s recollection of Arthur Morgan Day at Columbia College

Alvin Johnson’s attachment to his letter to Joseph Dorfman of July 17, 1951

From the Columbia College Catalogue, 1898-99

From Mortarboard 1902 [Barnard College Yearbook]

Leisure Hours of Great Men or Intimate Glimpses of the World’s Workers at Play

From the Columbia Daily Spectator, 1902

Mr. Day Resigns

Congratulations for Mr. Day.

From Harvard College Class of 1892 Reports

Arthur Morgan Day (1892)

Arthur Morgan Day (1896)

Arthur Morgan Day (1902)

Arthur Morgan Day (1907)

Arthur Morgan Day (1912)

Arthur Morgan Day (1917)

Arthur Morgan Day (1922)

From the State of Connecticut, Military Census of 1917

State of Connecticut

Columbia College School of Political Science Circular of Information 1890-91

OFFICERS OF INSTRUCTION AND GOVERNMENT.

GENERAL STATEMENT.

PURPOSES OF THE SCHOOL.

ADMISSION.

MATRICULATION AND TUITION FEES.

COURSE OF INSTRUCTION GENERAL SCHEME.*

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES. (Hours per week per half year)

[GRADUATE] FIRST YEAR

FIRST SESSION.

SECOND SESSION.

[GRADUATE] SECOND YEAR.

FIRST SESSION.

SECOND SESSION.

Biography of Columbia Trustee,
Samuel Bulkley Ruggles

Earlier Posts dealing with
John W. Burgess

OUTLINE OF A PLAN
FOR THE
INSTRUCTION of GRADUATE CLASSES
FOR THE
EXTENSION OF THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM OF STUDY
IN THE
UNDERGRADUATE DEPARTMENT.
AND FOR THE CREATION OF
A SCHOOL OF PREPARATION
FOR THE
CIVIL SERVICE

GRADUATE INSTRUCTION, AND THE EXTENSION OF
THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM

Excerpt from
Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880
by W.E.B. Du Bois.

From Mortarboard 1902
[Barnard College Yearbook]

Leisure Hours of Great Men
or
Intimate Glimpses of the World’s Workers at Play

Columbia College
School of Political Science
Circular of Information 1890-91

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES.
(Hours per week per half year)