ABSTRACT
The main universities of the world at the beginning of the twentieth cen tury bore the imprint of the idea of the university as it had been promulgated by German thinkers about a century earlier and as it had been embodied in German universities of the nineteenth century. The German universities were at the height of their greatness in their intellectual achievement and in their reputation in Germany and the world. Oxford and Cambridge were by then fully awakened from the torpor of several centuries. All over the continent of Europe, universities were in bloom. France finally reached the point where it had real universities as legally recognized corporate academic entities, which replaced local unconnected faculties and a centralized ministerial administra tion, misleadingly called the Universite de France. In Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the universities were beginning to produce scholars who would later, mostly as professors at British universities and, then only a good bit later at their own universities, become famous for their works and their pu pils. In Russia a handful of universities, in Austria the University of Vienna, and in Austrian Poland the ancient University of Cracow, were the homes of scientists and scholars of international renown and young persons of great promise. In India a few government and missionary colleges were beginning to offer courses of undergraduate study comparable in standing to their paren tal university in the United Kingdom; in Calcutta, the great vice-chancellor Asutosh Mukherjee, was on the verge of launching a campaign to establish
postgraduate studies leading to advanced degrees on the basis of research. In Peking, the National University had been established in 1898 with the inten tion of laying, before the best of the younger generation of Chinese, courses of study concerning all of Western learning and Chinese as well. Japan was already well under way in its deliberate program of creating imperial univer sities which would teach all of modem-Western-knowledge to young Japa nese.
