German university

“ It is the function of universities to develop and discipline originality, to cultivate the faculty of thinking out a conclusion for the first time—not for the first time in the history of the thinker, but for the first time in the history of the world.
To train men to originality in every field of production is the proper function of a true university. This has long been the accepted ideal of German universities, and because they have steadily striven for this ideal they have attained a fame which draws to them students from every other country. ”

“ It is from this realm that come the chief rewards of the scholar. The school from which no exploring parties set out has no right to the name of university. In the progress of science, and the application of its methods to subjects not formerly considered scientific, the German university has its growth and development. In like progress must arise the American university. ”

“ Half of the better known and most influential of German universities are of later origin than ours. The University of Göttingen, once the most flourishing in Germany, is younger than Harvard by a hundred years. Halle is younger, and Erlangen, and Munich with its vast library, and Bonn, and Berlin, by nearly two hundred years.
When this College was founded, two of the main forces of the intellectual world of our time had scarcely come into play,—modern literature and modern science. Science knew nothing as yet of chemistry, nothing of electricity, of geology, scarce anything of botany. ”

“ But the odd fact is, that the Briton who leaves school a man is more under control at Oxford [48] or Cambridge than the German at Heidelberg who leaves school a boy.
A German university is a teaching institution which prepares for the State examinations, and is never residential. There are no old colleges. The professors live in flats like other people, and the students live in lodgings or board with private families. There is one building or block of buildings called the Universität where there are laboratories and lecture-rooms. The State can decline a professor chosen by the university ”

“ This yearning is the mother of all mythology, all religion, and—all science. In the "brilliant failures" of the German metaphysical system-architects is dominant again the faith in man and his freedom, the protest against overstrained tradition and authority, the autocracy of the book and the master. The modern German university has remained true to the spirit animating from the days of the Reformation its lustrous career. ”

“ But these defects of the German university as educational institutions are the necessary counterparts of their excellencies as places of independent scholarship. The highest goal of intellectual achievement will always be reached only in complete freedom, and this freedom is somewhat dangerous for the weak man. There can be no doubt that the German system is indeed much more adjusted to those above the average than to those below, and the opposite is true of the American system. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every true university is something more than a distributor of knowledge; it is a producer of knowledge also; and in Germany, where the university system is most fully developed, the two functions are equally recognized. A German student, aspiring to academic honors, must do original work, and the professors' chairs are always filled from among the men who have most distinguished themselves as investigators. A chemist who had done nothing for pure science could hardly be recognized in Germany ”

“ We do not think that such an institution could or should remain permanently an exclusively German university. We desire, nevertheless, to see this grand idea carried out, as a special work of our Catholics of German origin and language, under the direction of a corps of learned German professors, and with special reference to the education of youth who are of the same descent or who wish to study the language and literature of Germany. Time and the course of nature will eventually blend all our heterogeneous elements together, but we do not believe in violent efforts to hurry on the process. ”

“ One of the advantages of modern German university education has often been acclaimed to be the fact that students are tempted to make portions of their studies in various cities, since all the courses are equalized in certain ways, so that the time spent at any one of them will be counted properly for their degrees. ”

“ If our educators can manage to combine the framework of the German university with the spirit of the English university, or of the old-fashioned American college, they will economize the time of the student without sacrificing the educational result to be achieved. They will give to the community, for whose benefit they exist, the trained experts on which the community insists ”

“ The differences between an English and a German university are of a fundamental kind, perhaps the greatest being that the German university does not aim at influencing conduct and character in the same measure as the English, but is rather for the supply of knowledge of all sorts, as a monster warehouse is for the supply of miscellaneous goods. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have now, gentlemen, taken an historical glance at the German universities, and at their foundations, so far as is necessary. They were called forth by the ruling circumstances of the times, and established themselves now in this manner and now in that. But it is especially interesting to us to have seen that the university of Heidelberg was one of the earliest, and continues one of the first; its rank no one will presume to contest. She has raised her noble head amid all the storms of time, and no state revolutions or other political epochs could make her bend. ”

“ The German university is the usual channel through which this training is acquired, whereas in America the university man is sometimes looked at askance if he utters an opinion upon a public question. In Germany, says a recent report from the German minister of education, it is the duty of the university "to give opinions of all kinds regarding scientific questions falling within their province, or for working out important problems concerning public life." ”

“ 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. ”

“ And, as for works of profound research on any subject, and, above all, in that classical lore for which the universities profess to sacrifice almost everything else, why, a third-rate, poverty-stricken German university turns out more produce of that kind in one year, than our vast and wealthy foundations elaborate in ten. ”

“ The founding of such institutions has not kept pace in Prussia with the development of the universities, and this defect, especially in our natural-science equipment, is becoming more and more noticeable as a result of the powerful forging ahead of the sciences. We need institutions which reach out beyond the limits of the universities, institutions untrammelled by aims of instruction, yet in close touch with the academy and the university, which shall serve entirely for research. ”

“ It is not less true that the German university has been one cf the most anarchic of institutions—both students and professors having had freedom greater than they have in American universities—and at the present moment Germany owes more to its universities as they have been conducted in the past than to its army as it is now organized.
A complicated machine is not useful in order to meet an emergency, but rather the scientific attitude and the scientific training which can react to the new situation. ”

“ He cannot enter the university until he breathes the university atmosphere. The 'Spurstudenten' or 'railway students' those who come and go on the trains, are rightly held by their fellows in Germany to be little more than Philistines. Whatever the other excellencies of the German system, the gymnasium, or advanced high school, is an inadequate substitute for the American college. ”

“ There is, however, much to be said in favour of its existence in the only country where it has taken root as a permanent institution; and since it is necessary to follow Greif’s history from the time when he was still a student, some explanation of a matter generally little understood may not be out of place at this point.
Every one knows that a German University has no resemblance, even in principle, with what English-speaking people generally understand by the word University. The students do not live in communities, nor in any set of buildings appropriated for their dwelling. ”

“ The close association of American students with Germany has led to the importation of German university methods and ideals into the United States. In England, too, there has been an ever-increasing tendency to approximate our standards to those of Germany. The Honours courses, at any rate at the new universities, become increasingly specialised, and more and more insistence is being laid on the necessity for original research as the crown of an academic career. ”

“ While it is still the fact that no German woman can matriculate in any university in Germany, yet the problem of the stand which the universities should take is working out its own solution in the right direction. ”

“ May she, in loyal remembrance of the time of her founding, preserve her Prussian-German character! Learning is, indeed, the common property of the whole cultural world, and her acquisitions to-day halt at no boundaries. And yet—as every nation must preserve its own manner of life if it would emphasize its independent existence and its value for the whole—may the alma mater Berolinensis remain forever conscious that she is a German university. As formerly, so may she be for all time the seat of German manners and of German art! ”

“ While not exactly comparable to our engineering schools, they approach more nearly these than they do any other of our American educational institutions.
Before the beginning of the century just closed it was apparent to some German minds more far seeing than the rest, that [86] schools of a higher than secondary rank must be inaugurated to offer training in the sciences; give opportunity to show the application of science to the arts; and prepare young men to grapple with scientific industrial problems such as were constantly springing up. Should the university attempt such work? ”

“ Another great disadvantage in France is, that in this country the different faculties of which a German university is composed, are separated from each other, scattered about, and in this isolation are as it were, lost. Here are faculties of science, in which lectures upon chemistry, physics, and natural history, are held, without a medicinal faculty at their side, which might thence derive benefit; there--faculties of law, and of theology, without history, literature, and philosophy. ”

“ If a University surrenders the right of examining those who wish to be admitted, the tutors will often have to do the work of school-masters, and the professors can never know how high or how low they should aim in their public lectures; and the result will be a lowering of the standard at the Universities, and consequently at the public schools. Some Universities, on the contrary, like over-anxious mothers, have multiplied examinations so as to make quite sure, at the end of each term or each year, that the pupils confided to them have done at least some work. ”

“ THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY. A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS. VOL. VII.—MARCH, 1861.—NO. XLI. GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. THE PROFESSORS. "Which of the German universities would be the best adapted to my purpose?" is the question of many an American student, who, having gone through the usual course in the United States, looks abroad for the completion of his scientific or liberal studies. Of Göttingen and Heidelberg he will often have read and heard; the reputation of the comparatively new university of Berlin will not be unfamiliar to him ”

“ I do not say that in an examination for a University degree a minimum of what is now called general culture should not be insisted on; but in addition to that, far more freedom ought to be given to the examiner to let each candidate produce his own individual work. This is done to a far greater extent in Continental than in English Universities, and the examinations are therefore mostly confided to the members of the Senatus Academicus, consisting of the most experienced teachers, and the most eminent representatives of the different branches of knowledge in the University. ”