Progress.
Issued Monthly by the University Association in the Interests of University and World's Congress Extension.
1895--1898? Monthly
Chicago, IL.
Editor: Edmund Buckley, Ph.D., editor in chief; W. Edgar Taylor, A.M., M.S., assistant editor for Universal History; Elizabeth A. Reed, A.M., assistant editor for Universal Literature, Edmund Buckley, Ph.D., Docent of Comparative Religion, University of Chicago, assistant editor for Universal Religion.
1/1, 1895.
$3.75 a year, 72-100 pp.

This was a strange, well-intentioned, optimistic and somewhat pompous creation of the belief in progress and universal advancement through education that had emerged from the the Columbian Exposition and World's Parliament of Religions in 1893. A "University Association" of educators worldwide had been formed to further these goals through extension courses, with this journal as its vehicle. A five-year course of subjects was chosen as necessary: Year 1: Universal History; year 2: Universal Literature; year 3: Civics and Political Economy; year 4: Astronomy; and year 5: Geology, and in addition there were Special Courses, like Universal Religon. Each month's issue gave an exposition of a subset of that year's subject, presenting the student over the year with almost 1,000 pages of organized material to master. The Special Course on Universal Religion, for example, presented articles by everyone who was anyone in the field: F. Max Muller, C. Staniland Wake (on the religion of Australian Aborigines); W.M. Flinders Petrie; George S. Goodspeed; Henry S. Olcott (on Hinayana Buddhism, editing a "Native Writer"); Chantepie de la Saussaye; Count Goblet D'Alviella; B.D. Eeerdmans, et al. On completing the year's subject, the student received a Certificate of Membership duly signed by the officers of the University Association. On passing a satisfactory examination at the close of the Course, members would "be entitled to a Diploma, setting forth with work accomplished." The scheme is an echo or forerunner of the vast wave of diploma mills, like Helmuth P. Holler's Oriental University, on which see the notes under Oriental University Bulletin, that swamped the New Thought/Self-Improvement world a few years later, differing only in the minuscule fee charged, the reputations of the teachers chosen, and the vast volume of the material presented.

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