HOW A UNIVERSITY WAS FOUNDED
THE story of the foundation and rise of Temple University is an extraordinary story;it is not only extraordinary, but inspiring; it is not only inspiring, but full of romance.
For the university came out of nothing!--nothing but the need of a young man and the fact that he told the need to one who, throughout his life, has felt the impulse to help any one in need and has always obeyed the impulse.
I asked Dr. Conwell, up at his home in the Berkshires, to tell me himself just how the university began, and he said that it began because it was needed and succeeded because of the loyal work of the teachers. And when I asked for details he was silent for a while, looking off into the brooding twilight as it lay over the waters and the trees and the hills, and then he said:
``It was all so ******; it all came about so naturally. One evening, after a service, a young man of the congregation came to me and I saw that he was disturbed about something. I had him sit down by me, and I knew that in a few moments he would tell me what was troubling him.
`` `Dr. Conwell,' he said, abruptly, `I earn but little money, and I see no immediate chance of earning more. I have to support not only myself, but my mother. It leaves nothing at all. Yet my longing is to be a minister. It is the one ambition of my life. Is there anything that I can do?'
`` `Any man,' I said to him, `with the proper determination and ambition can study sufficiently at night to win his desire.'
`` `I have tried to think so,' said he, `but Ihave not been able to see anything clearly. Iwant to study, and am ready to give every spare minute to it, but I don't know how to get at it.'
``I thought a few minutes, as I looked at him.
He was strong in his desire and in his ambition to fulfil it--strong enough, physically and mentally, for work of the body and of the mind--and he needed something more than generalizations of sympathy.
`` `Come to me one evening a week and I will begin teaching you myself,' I said, `and at least you will in that way make a beginning'; and Inamed the evening.
``His face brightened and he eagerly said that he would come, and left me; but in a little while he came hurrying back again. `May I bring a friend with me?' he said.
``I told him to bring as many as he wanted to, for more than one would be an advantage, and when the evening came there were six friends with him. And that first evening I began to teach them the foundations of Latin.''
He stopped as if the story was over. He was looking out thoughtfully into the waning light, and I knew that his mind was busy with those days of the beginning of the institution he so loves, and whose continued success means so much to him. In a little while he went on:
``That was the beginning of it, and there is little more to tell. By the third evening the number of pupils had increased to forty; others joined in helping me, and a room was hired; then a little house, then a second house. From a few students and teachers we became a college. After a while our buildings went up on Broad Street alongside the Temple Church, and after another while we became a university. From the first our aim''--(I noticed how quickly it had become ``our'' instead of ``my'')--``our aim was to give education to those who were unable to get it through the usual channels. And so that was really all there was to it.''
That was typical of Russell Conwell--to tell with brevity of what he has done, to point out the beginnings of something, and quite omit to elaborate as to the results. And that, when you come to know him, is precisely what he means you to understand--that it is the beginning of anything that is important, and that if a thing is but earnestly begun and set going in the right way it may just as easily develop big results as little results.
But his story was very far indeed from being ``all there was to it,'' for he had quite omitted to state the extraordinary fact that, beginning with those seven pupils, coming to his library on an evening in 1884, the Temple University has numbered, up to Commencement-time in 1915, 88,821 students! Nearly one hundred thousand students, and in the lifetime of the founder!
Really, the magnitude of such a work cannot be exaggerated, nor the vast importance of it when it is considered that most of these eighty-eight thousand students would not have received their education had it not been for Temple University.
And it all came from the instant response of Russell Conwell to the immediate need presented by a young man without money!
``And there is something else I want to say,''
said Dr. Conwell, unexpectedly. ``I want to say, more fully than a mere casual word, how nobly the work was taken up by volunteer helpers;professors from the University of Pennsylvania and teachers from the public schools and other local institutions gave freely of what time they could until the new venture was firmly on its way. I honor those who came so devotedly to help. And it should be remembered that in those early days the need was even greater than it would now appear, for there were then no night schools or manual-training schools. Since then the city of Philadelphia has gone into such work, and as fast as it has taken up certain branches the Temple University has put its energy into the branches just higher. And there seems no lessening of the need of it,'' he added, ponderingly.
No; there is certainly no lessening of the need of it! The figures of the annual catalogue would alone show that.
As early as 1887, just three years after the beginning, the Temple College, as it was by that time called, issued its first catalogue, which set forth with stirring words that the intent of its founding was to:
``Provide such instruction as shall be best adapted to the higher education of those who are compelled to labor at their trade while engaged in study.
``Cultivate a taste for the higher and most useful branches of learning.
``Awaken in the character of young laboring men and women a determined ambition to be useful to their fellow-men.''
