German professor

“ If it be any consolation to these mourning American professors, I can assure them that they do not mourn alone. I live not far from Oxford, and enjoy the advantage of occasionally listening to the jeremiads of English University professors. More than once a German professor has done me the honour to employ me as an object on which to sharpen his English. He also has mourned similar lack of ideals at Heidelberg, at Bonn. Youth is youth all the world over; it has its own ideals; they are not those of the University professor. ”

“ Not that there is less work done at Oxford than at Leipzig, but that the work is done in a different spirit. It is free in Germany; it has now become almost compulsory in England. Though an old professor myself, I like to attend, when I can, some of the professorial lectures in Germany; for it is a real pleasure to see hundreds of young faces listening to a teacher on the history of art, on modern history, on the science of language, or on philosophy, without any view to examinations, simply from love of the subject or of the teacher. ”

“ Referring to Cambridge, Bristed remarks: "The private tutor at an English university corresponds, as has been already observed, in many respects, to the professor at a German. The German professor is not necessarily attached to any specific chair; he receives no fixed stipend, and has not public lecture-rooms; he teaches at his own house, and the number of his pupils depends on his reputation. ”

“ He was far advanced in Sanskrit and Zend, and in Arabic and Persian he had probably read more, though in his own way, than many a learned professor. Such an honest student as Rückert was could do more good to his pupils in one hour than others by a whole semester of lecturing. And this is the secret of the success of German professors. They take their pupils into their work-shops, they do not keep them standing and gaping at the show-window. ”

“ He has the German professor’s minute knowledge of concrete facts, and his doctrinaire love of abstract principles, but he is not a mere scholar and teacher. He always remains the man of the world, and he brings to the consideration of historical problems the practical experience which he gained as a journalist and as a member of the Reichstag. He does not apply any conventional standards to his judgments of men and events. He looks at everything from his own angle. There is a delightful freshness about everything he writes. He believes that the first duty of an historian is to be partial. ”

“ The weak point in the German university system is that, unless an undergraduate is personally known to a professor, he receives very little guidance. He generally arrives from school, where he has been under very strict guidance, without any choice as to what he really wishes to learn. ”

“ Though the German professors are somewhat hampered by the fact that they are servants of the state, and their opinions therefore on theological, political, and economic matters restricted to the state’s views, they are free as no other teachers in the world to exploit their intellectual prowess for the benefit of their purses. Each student pays each professor whose lectures he attends, and as a result there are certain professors in Germany whose incomes are as high as $50,000 a year. ”

“ We turn with hearty satisfaction from the tissue of false subtleties which the German professor lays before his youth, to the careful and modest analysis of mental phenomena by which a professor in our northern universities at once enlightens and fortifies the mind. ”

“ An astronomer cannot expect large classes, while a celebrated professor of Law or Medicine addresses crowds. I have found it difficult to make my English friends believe that there are professors now in Berlin earning as much as £2500 a year. The English idea of the German professor is rudely disturbed by such a fact, for his poverty and simplicity of life have played as large a part in our tradition of him as his learning. The Germans seem to recognise that a scholar cannot want as much money as a man of affairs ”

“ Most German students, when they leave school, have not only a natural curiosity, but a real thirst for learning. They have also a feeling of great reverence for the professors, particularly for the most famous professors in each university. They often select their university in order to hear the lectures of a certain professor, and if he is moved to another university they migrate with him. In the strictly professional faculties of medicine, law, and theology, there is no doubt a certain routine, and students know by a kind of tradition what lectures they should attend in each semester. ”

“ In other words, a German professor is a man who has devoted himself to special and original research—to "science" as Von Sybel uses the term—and whose discoveries and works give strength and increase of dignity to the university with which he is connected. He is appointed upon his merits as a discoverer or an author. The further consideration—namely, whether he is what we Americans style a "good teacher"—was not so much as an afterthought in the minds of those who gave him his call. ”

“ The great wheel of the mechanism of a German university is, next to the payment for the lectures, the division of the teachers into ordinary and extraordinary professors, and private teachers. Through the income appointed by the government, the professor is not dependent on his hearers, and is not tempted to care more for his income than for science. The first duty of a professor is towards science ”

“ German Professors are altered men since those joyous days when we drank chopines and swang the schlaeger in the thirsty and venerable University of Saxesaufenberg. We remember them studious bookworms, uneasy when removed from library and lecture-room, their meerschaum their only passion, knowledge their sole ambition, beholding the external world through "the loopholes of retreat,"—the said embrasures being considerably obscured by tobacco-smoke and misty philosophy. ”

“ Our excuse is that no one can afford to revel in such depths of ignorance as a “professor”—he has his background, and can go to it for information, and there is always some colleague alongside of him to extricate him from a mistake. The ignorance of the German past, for instance, with which most of those for whom I modestly speak are afflicted, would, I am sure, if it could be revealed to the gentlemen who have just addressed us, appear almost inconceivable in its profundity. We are not Teutomaniacs, not archaeologists, not Kunsthistoriker, not even artistic in our tastes. ”

“ If a professor of history in a German university expressed any opinion in his academic lectures unfavourable to modern Germany, he would be immediately denunziert to the State authorities by his own students. ”

“ It was also useful, for not only had we to write essays and discuss them with the other members, generally teachers, and with the professor, but we could also get some useful advice from the professor for our private studies. In that respect the German universities do very little for the students, unless one has the good fortune to belong to one of these societies. The young men are let loose, and they can choose whatever lectures they want. I still have my Collegien-Buch, in which every professor has to attest what lectures one has attended. ”

“ The practical value of the scientific training is perhaps most fully recognized in Germany. There the importance of the investigator, the apparently abstract scholar, is thoroughly understood, and to his work the great industrial advance of Germany is largely attributable. In chemical and electrical industries this is particularly true, and their growth can be directly traced to the influence of the universities. The German professor is a man trained to research, and from among his students many of the best investigators are chosen for service in the factories. ”

“ The first time my eyes rested on this figure I wished the Black Sea would rise and swallow him and his pedantry. But now when the brilliantly colored pictures of the Orient had somewhat faded from my memory, I must confess that in those days I cherished a sort of hatred for all of that Western Europe from which the German professor came.
My German professor was, to the honor of truth be it said, a man in the best years of life. He was shapely. He had thick blond hair and a blond{81} beard and noble features. ”

“ That a man has spent years on Plato and Proclus, does not afford a presumption that he holds heroic opinions, or under-values the fashions of his town. But the German nation have the most ridiculous good faith on these subjects: the student, out of the lecture-room, still broods on the lessons; and the professor can not divest himself of the fancy that the truths of philosophy have some application to Berlin and Munich. This earnestness enables them to outsee men of much more talent. ”

“ Its dismalness is largely a delusion, due to the fact that its chief ornaments, at least in our own day, are university professors. The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness; his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity—in brief, to stagger sophomores and other professors. The notion that German is a gnarled and unintelligible language arises out of the circumstance that it is so much written by professors. ”

“ Gottsched and his followers at Leipzig defended the French, Bodmer and his friends in Switzerland the English style of literature. The former insisted on classical form and traditional rules; the latter on natural sentiment and spontaneous expression. The question was, whether poets should imitate the works of the classics, or imitate the classics who had become classics by imitating nobody. A German professor wields an immense power by means of his journals. He is the editor; he writes in them himself, and allows others to write; he praises his friends, who are to laud him in turn ”

“ But the students who went earlier to Germany had a greater effect on our educational system, as witnessed in the development of Harvard College and the establishment of the Johns Hopkins University. The movement has now become widespread, and we have some thirty universities and 5,000 students carrying on graduate work on the model of the German university. There are now a few European students attracted to our universities and at least one professor in an American institution has been offered a chair in Germany. ”

“ Viewed from the English, or even the American point, some of these universities might be pronounced poor, not to say starvelings. The buildings are old and out of repair, the professors are scantily paid, the students are needy, there is a general atmosphere of want and discomfort. But the work they do is noble, and its nobility consists in its freedom, its heartiness, its strict devotion to truth.
We are not concerned in this place with the study of the growth of the German school system that prepares the German student. We have to do with the professor. ”

“ The teachers at a German university consist of ordinary professors, extraordinary professors, and Privatdocenten—men who are not professors yet, but hope to be some day. An Englishman in his ignorance might think that an extraordinary professor ought to rank higher than an ordinary one ”

“ I am told that the great historical works of the great foreign professors have been accomplished by men who have done much elementary lecturing and much informal instruction. That is true, but it is to be remembered that the great German professors have the power and the right to direct the studies of their pupils, classes and individuals, to the specialised and differentiated details of their own subject, not merely to general class examinations in which all the candidates are expected to show the same sort of knowledge derived from the same sort of books. ”

“ The Professors Ordinary and Extraordinary, together with the Privat-Docents, form the active force of the German university. In Tübingen are Repetenten, who lecture or comment on classical and Biblical writers and form classes in the ancient or modern languages. Those teaching the modern languages exclusively are styled Lectors. The title, Professor Honorarius, as of Gervinus in Heidelberg, is conferred merely as a mark of honor, the bearer lecturing only when he pleases. ”

“ However pleasant it might be to go into the details of the professional position and character in Germany, it will be more profitable, and certainly more practical, to compare this fundamental German idea, as already given, with the salient features of professional life in America. The American professor, then, is a teacher. Unless he is the fortunate occupant of an exceptionally favored chair, his chief, and even his sole, function [pg 195] in the college body is to teach, in the strictest sense of the term. ”

“ As soon as it became known that at some German university a certain professor might open his lecture-room to a few women, they knocked at his door and were admitted. They studied law and history at Heidelberg, and mathematics at Berlin; at Zürich more than a hundred girls and women worked at the University and the Polytechnicum. There they won something more valuable than the degree of Doctor of Medicine; they won the esteem of the most learned professors, who expressed it publicly several times. ”

“ For the final honor examination the student might choose from a dozen or more honor groups, in any one of which he would receive scientific culture of the most advanced type, while at the same time, by means of private reading under his tutor, he might fill in very pleasantly the outlines of his subject. It is probable that such a system would even facilitate the efforts of those who are endeavoring to transplant German standards. According to Professor Münsterberg, the student who specializes in the German university is a good two years or more in advance of the American freshman. ”