If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude… See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for…The student shall, by his merits, make good claim to his scholarships; to access to still higher instruction in such departments as he prefers…Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Lecture, 1864