Which College for the Boy Author:John Corbin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill MICHIGAN: A MIDDLE-EASTERN UNIVERSITY r llHE University of Michigan was the first, and -- is perhaps still the foremost, of the state universities cha... more »racteristic of the West; but the impression it gives, and especially when approached from the interior, is that of an eastern institution. From the point of view of the Back Bay and Fifth Avenue, western New York is on the frontier; but from the point of view of the Golden Gate, Chicago lies next the eastern seaboard. Our nomenclature needs revising. The great university of the Old Northwest really lies in the new Middle-East. When President Hadley of Yale lately addressed his western alumni at Cincinnati, exhorting them to be more diligent in recruiting freshmen, he characterized the state universities as local and provincial, in contrast with the endowed universities of the East, which, he said, were more nationally representative. Professor James R. Angell of the University of Chicago brought him to book. Few of the state universities, he said, are merely local, and he showed that his own alma mater, Michigan, was very largely national. It draws its students from the same number of states and territories as Yale, namely forty-eight, and from one more outlying dependency and one more foreign country. Though Michigan draws more students from the home state, the disparity is scarcely greater than the disparity in size between Michigan and Connecticut. Area for area, the figures are about the same. Though Yale draws more students from New York, Michigan has a compensating advantage in her own neighboring commonwealths of Ohio and Illinois. The comparison was invalidated, if at all, only by a single fact: Michigan has 4571 students, or about a thousand more than Yale — being one of the three or four universities tha...« less