University training; but they also grant diplomas for proficiency in certain special branches of knowledge. Cambridge, for instance, gives a diploma in the Science and Practice of Agriculture; and the examinations for the diploma are open to persons who are not members of the University.
But the University training, whatever its subject, ought to give something which the purely specialist training does not give. What do we understand by a University education? What are its distinctive characteristics? The word Universitas, as you know, is merely a general term for a corporation, specially applied in the middle ages to a body of persons associated for purposes of study, who, by becoming a corporation, acquired certain immunities and privileges. Though a particular University might be strongest in a particular faculty, as Bologna was in Law and Paris in Theology, yet it is a traditional attribute of such a body that several different branches of higher study shall be represented in it. It is among the distinctive advantages of a University, that it brings together in one place students—by whom I mean teachers as well as learners—of various subjects. By doing this, the University tends to produce a general breadth of intellectual interests and sympathies; it enables the specialist to acquire some sense of the relations between his own pursuit and other pursuits; he is helped to perceive the largeness of knowledge. But, besides bringing together students of various subjects, it is the business of a University to see that each
