Daniel Coit Gilman Author:Johns Hopkins University 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: ARTICLE IN "THE NATION," OCTOBER 22, 1908 DR. FABIAN FRANKLIN The great achievement with which the name of President Gilman will always be chiefly associated... more » is that of having naturalized in America the idea of a true university. It would be difficult, if not impossibje, to point to any other instance in which a fundamental advance in the aims of the higher education in a great nation has been so clearly identified with the work of one man. To say this is not to claim for Mr. Gilman any great originality of conception, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, any monopoly in the work of shaping the methods by which the ideas underlying the creation of the Johns Hopkins University were brought into definite and concrete form. It is perfectly true that the time was ripe for the great forward step that was taken in Baltimore in 1876; vague aspirations in that direction existed in a number of places, and fragmentary efforts toward higher university work were made here and there, by some exceptionally gifted or exceptionally equipped professor in one or another of our leading institutions of learning. But there is no telling how long a time the actual ripening might have required if it had been left to the gradual increase of these sporadic efforts, which had no systematic support, and which were not even recognized, by any but the merest handful of men, as pointing toward any broad or significant result. The first great merit of President Gilman was that, from the moment that he was called to Baltimore, the object which he pet before himself was that of making the institution which was to arise there under his guidance a means of 1K supplying to the nation intellectual training of a higher order than could be obtained at existing colleges and uni- versities, and thus distinctly ...« less