Bernard C. Steiner

“ I congratulate you, gentlemen, Trustees of the Johns Hopkins University, upon the noble work which is before you. A great property, an important part of the fruit of a long life devoted with energy and sagacity to the accumulation of riches, has been placed in your hands, upon conditions as magnanimous as they are wise, to be used for the public benefit in providing for coming generations the precious means of liberal culture. ”

“ University Extension knows nothing of social distinctions. It has to do with a far more important mode of 'rising' in life,—that of rising in the rank to which a man happens to belong at the moment, whether it be the rank in which he started or any other. There is a saying that all men are equal after dinner: and it is true that, while in the material wealth we seek in our working hours equality is a chimera, yet in the intellectual pursuits that belong to leisure there is no bar to the equality of all, except the difference of individual capacity and desire. ”

“ But it is not my province to detain you from the exercises which are to follow. I am happy to state that we have among us to-day one who represents the highest type of American education, and one who, from the beginning, has sympathized with, counselled and aided us. I know you anticipate me, as I announce the distinguished name, from the most distinguished seat of learning in our land—President Eliot, of Harvard University. ”

“ The true greatness of States lies not in territory, revenue, population, commerce, crops or manufactures, but in immaterial or spiritual tilings; in the purity, fortitude and uprightness of their people, in the poetry, literature, science and art which they give birth to, in the moral worth of their history and life. With nations, as with individuals, none but moral supremacy is immutable and forever beneficent. Universities, wisely directed, store up the intellectual capital of the race, and become fountains of spiritual and moral power. ”

“ In English universities the ideal is 'scholarship.' Scholarship is a good thing, and we produce it. But the system which turns out a few good scholars every year passes over the heads of the great mass of university students without having awakened them to any intellectual life; the universities are scholarship-factories producing good articles but with a terrible waste of raw material. The other main type of university enthrones 'research' as its summum bonum. Possibly research is as good a purpose as a man can set before him, but it is not the sole aim in life. ”

“ This is just the point in which education in the past has shown badly in comparison with religion or politics. When a man is touched with religious ideas he seeks to make converts, when he has views on political questions he agitates to make his views prevail: culture on the other hand has been only too often cherished as a badge of exclusiveness, instead of the very consciousness of superior education being felt as a responsibility which could only be satisfied by efforts to educate others. To infuse a missionary spirit into culture is not the least purpose of University Extension. ”

“ Therefore our whole country may well rejoice with you, that you are auspiciously founding here a worthy seat of learning and piety. Here may young feet, shunning the sordid paths of low desire and worldly ambition, walk humbly in the steps of the illustrious dead—the poets, artists, philosophers and statesmen of the past; here may fresh minds explore new fields and increase the sum of knowledge; here from time to time may great men be trained up to be leaders of the people; here may the irradiating light of genius sometimes flash out to rejoice mankind ”

“ Your cares and labor will grow heavy as time goes on; but in accordance with an admirable usage, fortunately established in this country, you will serve without other compensation than the public consideration which will justly attach to your office, and the happy sense of being useful. The actuating spirit of your Board will be a spirit of scrupulous fidelity to every trust reposed in you, and of untiring zeal in promoting the welfare of the University and the advancement of learning. ”

“ University Extension is a system of higher education, and higher education has no market value, but needs the help of endowment. But the present age is no way behind past ages in the number of generous citizens it exhibits as ready to help good causes. The millionaire who will take up University Extension will leave a greater mark on the history of his country than even the pious founder of university scholarships and chairs. And even if individuals fail us, we have the common purse of the public or the nation to fall back upon. ”

“ There was a time when religion itself was identified with a particular class, the clergy alone thinking out what the rest of the nation simply accepted; then came the series of revolutions popularly summed up as the Reformation, by which the whole adult nation claimed to think for itself in matters of religion, and the special profession of the clergy became no more than a single element in the religious life of the nation. ”

“ The truth is that the wide-reaching purpose of University Extension will seem visionary or practicable according to the conception formed of education, as to what in education is essential and what accidental. If I am asked whether I think of shop-assistants, porters, factory-hands, miners, dock or agricultural laborers, women with families and constant home duties, as classes of people who can be turned into economists, physicists, literary critics, art connoisseurs,—I admit that I have no such idea. ”

“ To return to the circular, "The four guineas a year for tuition, we are persuaded cannot be lowered, if we give the students that finished education, which we are determined they shall have. And, though our principal object is to instruct them in the doctrines, spirit, and practice of Christianity, yet we trust that our college will, in due time, send forth men that will be a blessing to their country in every laudable office and employment of life, thereby uniting the two greatest ornaments of human beings which are too often separated: deep learning and genuine piety." ”

“ Primarily, instruction is the duty of the professor in a university as it is in a college; but university students should be so mature and so well trained as to exact from their teachers the most advanced instruction, and even to quicken and inspire by their appreciative responses the new investigations which their professors undertake. Such work is costly and complex; it varies with time, place, and teacher; it is always somewhat remote from popular sympathy, and liable to be depreciated by the ignorant and thoughtless. ”

“ But it surely ought not to be necessary to explain that in proposing a universal system of education we are not meaning that what each individual draws from the system will be the same in all cases. In this as in every other public benefit that which each person draws from it must depend upon that which he brings to it. University Extension may be conceived as a stream flowing from the high ground of universities through the length and breadth of the country; from this stream each individual helps himself according to his means and his needs ”

“ The first requisite of success in any institution is a staff of eminent teachers, each of whom gives freely the best of which he is capable. The best varies with the individual; one may be an admirable lecturer or teacher; another a profound thinker; a third a keen investigator; another a skilful experimenter; the next, a man of great acquisitions; one may excel by his industry, another by his enthusiasm, another by his learning, another by his genius ”

“ It is a precious privilege that in your ordinary work you will have to do only with men of refinement and honor; it is a glad and animating sight to see successive ranks of young men pressing year by year into the battle of life, full of hope and courage, and each year better armed and equipped for the strife; it is a privilege to serve society and the country by increasing the means of culture ”

“ And when one contemplates the band of recruits added each year to the army of investigators, and the choice of ever minuter fields—not to say lanes and alleys—of research, one is led to doubt whether research is not one of the disintegrating forces of society, and whether ever increasing specialisation must not mean a perpetual narrowing of human sympathies in the intellectual leaders of mankind. ”

“ At the moment there is nothing which seems to me so important, in this region, and indeed in the entire land, as the promotion of good secondary schools, preparatory to the universities. There are old foundations in Maryland which require to be made strong, and there is room for newer enterprises, of various forms. Every large town should have an efficient academy or high school; and men of wealth can do no greater service to the public than by liberally encouraging, in their various places of abode, the advanced instruction of the young. ”

“ But if a teacher makes it his first business to stir up an interest in the matter of study, the education becomes self-continuing when teacher and pupil have parted, and the subject becomes its own educator. ”

“ The function of colleges, universities, and professional schools is largely a public function; their work is done primarily, indeed, upon individuals, but ultimately for the public good. They help powerfully to form and mould aright the public character; and that public character is the foundation of everything which is precious in the State, including even its material prosperity. In training men thoroughly for the learned professions of law and medicine, this University will be of great service to Maryland and the neighboring States. ”

“ A law which should govern the admission of pupils is this, that before they win this privilege they must have been matured by the long, preparatory discipline of superior teachers, and by the systematic, laborious, and persistent pursuit of fundamental knowledge; and a second law, which should govern the work of professors, is this, that with unselfish devotion to the discovery and advancement of truth and righteousness, they renounce all other preferment, so that, like the greatest of all teachers, they may promote the good of mankind. ”

“ In the colonial period there was no demand for it sufficient to warrant the establishment of a seat of higher learning. For this state of things there were several causes. The majority of the early settlers were planters and frontiersmen, having little need for an extended education and desiring it still less. Of the wealthier classes, some were like the fox-hunting English gentry, caring for little else than sport; and others, who did desire the advantages of a culture higher than that obtainable from a village schoolmaster or a private tutor, found it elsewhere. ”

“ And the foundation for university extension is a change, subtle but clear, that may be seen to be coming over the attitude of the public mind to higher education, varying in intensity in different localities, but capable of being encouraged where it is least perceptible,—a change by which education is ceasing to be regarded as a thing proper to particular classes of society or particular periods of life, and is coming to be recognized as one of the permanent interests of life, side by side with such universal interests as religion and politics. ”

“ Hence, it is probable that among our own countrymen, our faculty will be chiefly found.
I wrote, not long ago, to an eminent physicist, presenting this problem in social mechanics, for which I asked his solution, "We cannot have a great university without great professors; we cannot get great professors till we have a great university: help us from the dilemma." Let me tell his answer: "Your difficulty," he says, "applies only to old men who are great; these you can rarely move; but the young men of genius, talent, learning and promise, you can draw. They should be your strength." ”

“ The libraries and other collections of a university are storehouses of the knowledge already acquired by mankind, from which further invention and improvement proceed. They are great possessions for any intelligent community. The tone of society will be sensibly affected by the presence of a considerable number of highly educated men, whose quiet and simple lives are devoted to philosophy and teaching, to the exclusion of the common objects of human pursuit. ”

“ In the middle ages the whole body of those who sought a liberal education were to be found crowded into the limits of university towns, where alone were teachers to listen to and manuscripts to copy: the population of such university centres then numbered hundreds where to-day it numbers tens. The first university extension was the invention of printing, which sent the books itinerating through the country, and reduced to a fraction the actual attendance at the university, while it vastly increased the circle of the educated. ”