University Press

“ What a pity it is that the University Press of to-day has become a trading concern, a shop for twopenny manuals and penny primers! It is scarcely proper that the University should at once organise examinations and sell the manuals which contain the answers to the questions most likely to be set. ”

“ Nobody ever complains of having too little to read, as Richard Fisher, the managing director of Cambridge University Press’s academic division, has put it at many conferences. Yet, most humanities academics feel the need to publish books for their jobs and, more importantly, simply to disseminate their findings. ”

“ It was in recognition of that duty that the first university-affiliated press was established, in 1878, at Johns Hopkins University. In the century since, our country's university presses have established an admirable tradition of literary and graphic quality. Today the standard of excellence which they have established is being applied to an ever-increasing variety of subjects. As a result, one-sixth of all American books in print today are issued by American university presses. ”

“ The Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature have already conquered a wide audience amongst cultured people. They are short studies of great subjects, and are published by the University Press at one shilling The Cambridge Press is casting its literary net widely. ”

“ The editor and business manager are given a salary and are subject to close supervision by the Board in Control of Student Publications, which has so wisely administered the affairs of the various papers that a fund of some $30,000 has been saved towards the establishment of a University Press. ”

“ Professors' lectures may be bought already printed, learned doctors may be listened to in the lyceum, and the printing-press has made it easy and cheap to get information on every subject and topic that is discussed and taught in the university. ”

“ The Authors, for the most part being Gentlemen of the University engaged with Pupils during Term-time, furnish their Copy in detail—loosely written—and frequent suspensions of MS, which necessarily occasions great delay and inconvenience.... The Gentlemen of the Press Syndicate must be aware (tho' a London Printer cannot, unless he witnessed the operation) that the Examination-Papers which of late years have abundantly increased, must from their nature have retarded all regular work in the Composing Room. ”

“ The business of the Press was defined as consisting of the printing of bibles, testaments, and prayer-books; of printing work for the university and colleges; of printing books edited for the Syndics; of book and job printing for the members of the university; of printing works published by the Parker and other learned societies; and of "such Book work, as, subject to the 'Imprimatur' of the Vice-Chancellor, may be offered by Publishers and other connexions of the Press." ”

“ It appears to me, and I trust to you, that, if our American dissertations are worth anything, if they are valuable enough to preserve, if they are real contributions to knowledge—and I believe that they are all of these—then it is worth while to secure the publication of some list which will tell librarians and specialists where to go to get copies, either from the author or from the university. ”

“ But there cannot be any justification for a University to throw away money on a magazine which makes the publication of serial stories and other kinds of light literature and commonplace popular illustrations some of its main features. ”

“ Moreover, since the overwhelming majority of Americans read only newspapers and magazines, it is by no means an unimportant task for our universities to train writers to supply the steady demand for well-written articles. The late Walter Hines Page, founder of the World's Work and former editor of the Atlantic Monthly, presented the whole situation effectively in an article on "The Writer and the University," when he wrote:
The journeymen writers write almost all that almost all Americans read. ”

“ Now it will not be disputed that if the Universities ought, in the interests of liberal culture, to provide adequately for instruction in Literature, they ought also, in the interests of science, to provide adequately for instruction in Philology. It is a branch of learning of immense importance. It is, and ought to be, the peculiar care of Universities, and nothing could be more derogatory to a University than deficiency in such a study. But it is a study in itself. As a science it has no connection with Literature. ”

“ There is first the thinking and investigatory elements that grow constantly more important in our university life, the enlarging recognition of the need of a systematic issue of university publications, books, periodicals, and of sustained and fertilizing discussion. ”

“ One can scarcely pick up a college catalogue or a magazine or a newspaper without learning how to make the university universal. One of the simplest plans, with which all are familiar, is to send to men with a reputation for learning a ruled form and a request that each will write, in the proper columns, the price, publisher, and title of the best book on his own subject—mathematics, astronomy, moral science, or whatever it may be—or, if he knows of no such book, that he will write one. ”

“ For many generations manuscripts and books have been the accepted means of transmitting knowledge, and keeping the records of our race; and so writings and printed books, with buildings, have been the chief resources of a university. ”

“ Then too literature surely, the literary line of study which this University has pursued, has its great and manifest advantages. The literature of the world represents the freedom and activity of the human spirit. ”

“ But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves! It depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us. The true University of these days is a Collection of Books. ”

“ But, in the mass of mankind, the Æsthetic faculty, like the reasoning power and the moral sense, needs to be roused, directed, and cultivated; and I know not why the development of that side of his nature, through which man has access to a perennial spring of ennobling pleasure, should be omitted from any comprehensive scheme of University education.
All Universities recognise Literature in the sense of the old Rhetoric, which is art incarnate in words. Some, to their credit, recognise Art in its narrower sense, to a certain extent, and confer degrees for proficiency in some of its branches. ”

“ Oral teaching was of supreme importance on account of the cost and rarity of manuscripts.
The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge: its professors have to be at the top of the wave of progress. Research and criticism must be the breath of their nostrils; laboratory work the main business of the scientific student; books his main helpers.
The lecture, however, in the hands of an able man will still have the utmost importance in stimulating and giving facts and principles their proper relative prominence. ”

“ A new and unsuspected world is revealed all about him. Thus it is the function of the university to reveal to the individual the mystery and the glory of life as a whole—to open all the realms of rational human enjoyment and achievement ”

“ We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active brothers—Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University building—had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjunct editors and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic—that flatterer of credulity—the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision. I went home that morning walking upon air. ”

“ The newspapers, magazines, reviews, journals, and periodicals of all kinds, the publishing trade, the libraries, museums, and academies there found, the learned and scientific societies, necessarily invest it with the functions of a University; and that atmosphere of intellect, which in a former age hung over Oxford or Bologna or Salamanca, has, with the change of times, moved away to the centre of civil government. Thither come up youths from all parts of the country, the students of law, medicine, and the fine arts, and the employés and attachés of literature. ”

“ Few or no literary societies are encouraged, few public discussions are tolerated, and the capital of the empire is without either reviews or institutions--which can bear the least comparison with our own. The library of the University is said, however, to hold fourscore thousand volumes. ”

“ And even where such studies are exceptionally practical; nay, where science and a free choice of languages and literature are left to the somewhat advanced student, we still find the shadow of the past—of the old, formal, and rapidly growing obsolete literature—overawing the more enlightened effort. Deny it as we may, the University is still a feudal institution. ”

“ No doubt a search covering sufficient time and dealing with a sufficiently large portion of the output of the University would reveal other works and other men worthy of representation in this volume. ”

“ More than 1000 letters have been received by the School of Journalism in Columbia University, since it was opened, asking advice as to the reading and study which could aid a man or woman unable to leave the newspaper office to study to improve their work. College graduates, in particular on newspapers, begin systematic study on their own account, aware of an approaching competition. Definite standards in newspaper writing and in diction begin to be recognized and practiced in the office, and slips in either meet a more severe criticism. ”

“ Every cottage has its own copy of the volume in time. Edition after edition goes out, first from the school, then from the greater, more dazzling printing presses of the University, to the scholars and artists of Europe and Asia, through their colleagues who are attending the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield. ”

“ All lecturers, Masters as well as Scholars, of the same Faculty, whenever and wherever they happen to be reading any book in regular order or course in the same Faculty, or to be discussing a question according to this or any other method of exposition, shall follow the former method of reading to the best of their ability, to wit: presenting it as though no one were writing it in their presence. It is in accordance with this method that discourses and recommendations are made in the University, and it is followed by Lecturers in the rest of the Faculties. ”

“ The modern university prides itself on the number of volumes written by its professors and makes it a special feature of its announcements to call attention to its at least supposed additions to knowledge in this mode. ”

“ When the cult of research has thus reduced itself to absurdity the time [108] will come when we shall perhaps turn to the conception of a university as a place where, by the study and discussion of problems of fundamental importance, the most intelligent young men and women are brought into contact with the best and most stimulating minds, where the balance is held true between intellect and emotion, between thought and action. ”

“ But the first office which the library discharges in a university is in providing the limitless and manifold interpretation which the ages have builded about these great books of power. Better than all other books as are the books of power when read without study, they are infinitely bettered by all study. ”

“ The very liberal manner in which the use of books is granted at this University, the admirable order and condition in which they are kept, and the conveniences for consulting them, are worthy of imitation, and will be fully appreciated by those who have had occasion to make researches at other Libraries, where quite a different regime prevails. ”

“ Coll., &c.—If this copy contain notes of Bentley, or Porson, add "cum notis Bentleii," &c.: so that such a catalogue would present, not only every volume in the Public Library, but every valuable edition of a work in the whole University. Nor is the task so Herculean as may be thought. The tutors of the respective colleges would, I am sure, be happy, as well as able, to contribute their proportionate share of labour towards the accomplishment of so desirable and invaluable a work. ”

“ Academic tradition and current common sense unite in imposing on the universities the employment of prominent scholars and scientists, in that men of note in this class have a high prestige value for purposes of publicity; and it was suggested above that a reservation of some breadth must be made on this head. Common notoriety is the due test of eminence which the competitive university must apply in the selection of its notables. ”

“ This great University forms a part of the great commonwealth of letters, and its professors should feel themselves bound to promote literary comity, and be a connecting link between fellow-workers wherever they may be. Many a retiring student labours on in ignorance of what is being done by others, and is glad of information about books or manuscripts, which it should be a professor's task to acquire and disseminate. ”

“ It is in the eyes of the unlettered, particularly the business community, that it is desirable for the university to present an imposing front; that being the feature of academic installation which they will readily appreciate. ”