Academia

“ You will endeavour to correct these tendencies, to lead the student to value culture for its own sake as well as for what it brings, to despise mere position in University lists in comparison with his higher interests, and to look beyond the glittering and evanescent honours of a College, career to the requirements of after-life.
When the higher education is still in its infancy, When can we look for original research. we can scarcely look among you for the highest learning or for original research. ”

“ Genius will work on even a narrow basis, but imperfect preparatory study leaves marks of imperfection in the product.
The same considerations that determine your voluntary studies determine also the university ideal. A university, in my view, stands or falls with its Arts' faculty. Without debating the details, we may say that this faculty should always be representative of the needs of our intelligence, both for the professional and for the extra-professional life; it should not be of the shop, shoppy. The university exists because the professions would stagnate without it ”

“ But under the working of the system of almost unlimited electives which has prevailed in our higher institutions of learning during the past half-generation or more, the candidate for a future professorship is almost certain to discover that he has neglected to lay the foundations of any particular subject solidly and thoroughly well. He knows no elements, as the elements of every species of science and scholarship must be known, in order to proceed safely and with joy in hard work to its ever higher stages of study, research and discovery. ”

“ Whatever expedients of decorative real-estate, spectacular pageantry, bureaucratic magnificence, elusive statistics, vocational training, genteel solemnities and sweat-shop instruction, may be imposed by the exigencies of a competitive business policy, the university is after all a seat of learning, devoted to the cult of the idle curiosity, -- otherwise called the scientific spirit. ”

“ It teaches all knowledge by teaching all branches of knowledge, and in no other way. I do but say that there will be this distinction as regards a Professor of Law, or of Medicine, or of Geology, or of Political Economy, in a University and out of it, that out of a University he is in danger of being absorbed and narrowed by his pursuit, and of giving Lectures which are the Lectures of nothing more than a lawyer, physician, geologist, or political economist ”

“ Consider the influence you may have upon the other institutions of our country, by attaching yourself to some one under the existing organization. If you take an [Pg 231] academy or a private school, constituted and organized like other similar institutions, success in your own, will give you influence over others. A successful teacher of an academy, raises the standard of academic instruction. A college professor, if he brings extraordinary talents to bear upon the regular duties of that office, throws light, universally, upon the whole science of college discipline and instruction. ”

“ By doing this, the University tends to produce a general breadth of intellectual interests and sympathies; it enables the specialist to acquire some sense of the relations between his own pursuit and other pursuits; he is helped to perceive the largeness of knowledge. But, besides bringing together students of various subjects, it is the business of a University to see that each subject shall be studied in such a manner as to afford some general discipline of the mental faculties. ”

“ The University was governed, the University was taught, by the graduates at large. Professor, Master, Doctor, were originally synonymous. Every graduate had an equal right of teaching publicly in the University the subjects competent to his faculty, and to the rank of his degree; nay, every graduate incurred the obligation of teaching publicly, for a certain period, the subjects of his faculty, for such was the condition involved in the grant of the degree itself." Sir William Hamilton, Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, etc.: Education, chapter 4. EDUCATION: Modern: European Countries. ”

“ Heroes and scholars have gone forth from their studies here, into the great field of the world, to seek their fortunes, and to conquer and be conquered. As I surveyed the exterior of the different Colleges, I could here and there see the reflection of the light from the window of some student, who was busy at his studies, or throwing away his time over some trashy novel, too many of which find their way into the trunks or carpet bags of the young men on setting out for College. ”

“ 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 narrow mind is thought to be that which contains little knowledge; and an enlarged mind, that which holds a great deal; and what seems to put the matter beyond dispute is, the [pg 130] fact of the great number of studies which are pursued in a University, by its very profession. Lectures are given on every kind of subject; examinations are held; prizes awarded. There are moral, metaphysical, physical Professors; Professors of languages, of history, of mathematics, of experimental science. ”

“ Then the trustees passed an ordinance to the effect that any professor in the university could be called upon to teach any branch, upon penalty of dismissal if he refused. We were determined that our teachers should be men of broad general culture, and not mere narrow specialists. Of coarse, every one of them had studied a variety of branches at school or college, and surely any man ought to be able to teach any thing which he himself had ever learned. ”

“ In lieu of that, work to connect all the units sponsoring engagement to form a campus office or network that can advocate on behalf of public scholarship, new media, and the engaged arts.
3. What Comes First, the Discipline or the Community? Going local is not always respected or valued by our disciplinary structures of assessment. Faculty are trained to have a primary affiliation with and loyalty to their discipline: They see themselves as belonging to a “profession” first — as philosophers, historians, literary critics, etc. ”

“ We of the academy accordingly hold to the law of the grove; that a university ancient or modern is wholly and vitally an educational institution; that the aims for which it exists are cultural; that its methods must be shaped by its own standards; that the activities of those devoted to its welfare must be freely developed from within and suitably to the cultivation of the ends for which the university alone exists. ”

“ In the later years of the college course aPage 78 certain amount of specialization is usually allowed, both for the ends of discipline and as a provision for the work of the university proper. The university adopts methods of work along the line of original discovery, literary productivity, and the advancement of the kingdom of knowledge. The inspiring aim of the university is the discovery of truth. The student imbued with the spirit of research passes from the known to the unknown, and feels that he lives in an atmosphere of investigation, and in the center of the latest thought. ”

“ One of the chief of such evidences was the ability to go to a college or university and to take the time to learn a great deal of useless knowledge about dead languages, philosophies, and dry-as-dust sciences. While this is not true to so great an extent to-day, there is still much of the old tradition clinging about colleges and universities, and we are training men and women, not for commercial or industrial or agricultural lines, but rather, for the learned professions. ”

“ His public lectures, though delivered in a plain and unaffected manner, were always distinguished and rendered interesting by a luminous division of the subject, as well as by full, fresh and various illustration. They soon began to excite interest, and were attended no less for pleasure than instruction. The commercial community was agitated by a spirit of inquiry; the learned professor’s name rapidly spread; and young men from all parts of the country were attracted to the College with a view of profiting by them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The ordinary student he strove to interest and to instruct, and as year by year his classes increased, he had good evidence to convince him that both his subject and his method of expounding it were receiving their full share of attention among the students of the University. But he had a keen eye for merit, and young men who evinced a desire to pursue the path of original research were quickly recognised and encouraged in every way to follow the right lines. ”

“ Let us think for a few moments of the whole reading public as a College, which Truth, as Head-Master, is endeavouring to instruct and educate; and of men of Genius, discoverers, reformers, as assistant-masters, to each of whom is committed the task of teaching the subject of which he knows most. ”

“ His work is perpetuated in the universities of to-day. At the feet of great professors sit the young men learning lessons which are the outcome of centuries of research. Enter the university, the anxious students; exit, men prepared with the means of fighting with their fellows in life's battle. ”

“ Whether in course or by indirection, whether by a cramming tutor or by examiners with prizes and foundation scholarships, education according to the English notion of it is arrived at. I looked over the Examination Papers of the year 1848, for the various scholarships and fellowships, the Lusby, the Hertford, the Dean-Ireland, and the University, (copies of which were kindly given me by a Greek professor,) containing the tasks which many competitors had victoriously performed, and I believed they would prove too severe tests for the candidates for a Bachelor's degree in Yale or Harvard. ”

“ In Literature, Art, and Science, "the old order changeth, yielding place to new" with such rapid strides, that unless a man remains a zealous student throughout his life, he must be left behind in the branches of knowledge which are needful to his professional usefulness. Let me then advise you to maintain, both in the near and distant future, those habits of mental discipline which have enabled you to obtain Degrees in this University. ”

“ The highest result of a professor's labours would be the formation of a small class of those who were willing to prolong their university course, that they might study methods of research, that they might begin some work which would be capable of expansion into a worthy contribution to historical literature. ”

“ Devoted to the traditional studies—the literatures, mathematics, philosophy, history—it is still strangely reminiscent of old musty folkways of the schoolman and theologian. Every professor knows the desire of the average student to finish his college course and grapple with his professional studies. Every professor is aware of the sharp quickening of interest which comes on entrance to the professional schools. ”

“ But great changes have been made, and are still making, in the degree of previous qualification.
‘Still, it would be premature to say, that there is any one of the American universities where classical knowledge, or even science, is profoundly attained, even at the present day. Some of the professors push their studies, for a life, certainly; and you well know, after all, that little short of a life, and a long one too, will make any man a good general scholar. ”

“ The professorial theory of college life is, that the faculties are being exercised and the resources collected with which the battles of life are subsequently to be fought and its victories won. And there is, no doubt, a great deal of truth in this theory. The acquisitions of the class-room will all be found useful in future, and your only regret will be that they have not been more extensive and thorough. The gymnastic of study is suppling faculties which will be indispensable hereafter. ”

“ And then, the training of all these distinct classes will not be by Universities of general knowledge, but by distinct schools of such knowledge as shall be most useful for every class: in which, first the principles of their special business may be perfectly taught, and whatever higher learning, and cultivation of the faculties for receiving and giving pleasure, may be properly joined with that labour, taught in connection with it. ”

“ The imperfections of a university, which arise through the rivalry of external ambition, through the necessity of financial success, through the jealousy of different parties, through scholarships, &c., are finitudes which it has in common with all human institutions, and on whose account they are not all to be thrown away.—Art academies are for Art what universities are for Science. ”