Academician

“ In order to enlist such support, the members of a faculty should manifest their interest in public affairs, and by books, lectures and addresses should inform the public and interest them in the progress of knowledge. 6. Publication is one of the duties of a professor. He owes it not only to his reputation but also to his science, to his colleagues, to the public, to put together and set forth, for the information and criticism of the world, the results of his inquiries, discoveries, reflections and investigations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.
They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. ”

“ The confidence of my associates has called me to this high position forty-six years after I entered this faculty as a privat docent, and after I have been active forty-three years as an ordinarius in a foreign university and here. Great changes have taken place, not only in public affairs, but also in knowledge—greater than in hundreds of years before. All the single fields of human activity have been transformed, many fundamentally, or at least subjected to the incisive attacks of criticism. ”

“ I've entirely omitted of late telling you what I am learning, but though you might not imagine it from my letters, my time is exclusively occupied with study. It's a very bewildering matter to get educated in five branches at once.
'The test of true scholarship,' says Chemistry Professor, 'is a painstaking passion for detail.'
'Be careful not to keep your eyes glued to detail,' says History
Professor. 'Stand far enough away to get a perspective of the whole.'
You can see with what nicety we have to trim our sails between chemistry and history. ”

“ By the proposed plan however a student would become a teacher; the teacher develope into a professor; and a professor might employ for a period a portion of his time in research, and thus become qualified for entire devotion to original investigation and discovery.
After a scientific teacher has acquired a thorough knowledge of his subjects, and a high position in his profession, his occupation becomes to him a species of intellectual routine, in which he is continually going through the same courses of lectures and examinations over and over again, and his personal improvement stagnates. ”

“ Devote your best energies to these objects, remembering that between the young student, however successful, and the ripe and mature scholar, there is a vast space which can only be passed over by years of patient and laborious toil. Remember also that every profession is both an Art and a Science, and that dreamy theorism and vulgar empiricism are equally to be avoided. ”

“ If, therefore, teaching or lecturing constitutes a part of the duties, a portion of the professor's time must be taken from the more important occupation of research, and the fundamental object of the institution will be frustrated. Research evolves new knowledge; teaching simply distributes it. The labours of a scientific teacher or lecturer consist essentially of a continued series of repetitions of other men's discoveries. For each single man who can discover, there exist many who can teach. ”

“ Therefore, the great business of the scientific teacher is, to imprint the fundamental, irrefragable facts of his science, not only by words upon the mind, but by sensible impressions upon the eye, and ear, and touch of the student, in so complete a manner, that every term used, or law enunciated, should afterwards call up vivid images of the particular structural, or other, facts which furnished the demonstration of the law, or the illustration of the term. ”

“ But your scholars are loaded, objectors. Though they may not be loaded with precisely the information you have been seeking from them, they are loaded with experiences,—all their short lives will hold. They are loaded with temptations and troubles and needs. They are loaded with questions and curiosity. They have information, too, any amount of it, that may be brought into suggestive connection with the lesson, if you know how to make shrewd use of their public-school history and geography and science. ”

“ We gladly recognise that such specialists are doing invaluable service, in their several lines, to the cause of knowledge; but we may also wish that the desire to be scientific was more uniformly tempered by a regard for the nature of the materials with which all scholarship has to deal. Those materials are the creations of the human intellect, whether as seen in the evolution of language, or of literature, or of art. ”

“ The advice of a skilful professor will adapt a course of reading to every mind and every situation; his authority will discover, admonish, and at last chastise the negligence of his disciples; and his vigilant inquiries will ascertain the steps of their literary progress. Whatever science he professes he may illustrate in a series of discourses, composed in the leisure of his closet, pronounced on public occasions, and finally delivered to the press. I observe with pleasure, that in the university of Oxford Dr. ”

“ Grodman, but really—"
"Bear with me, sir. The science of evidence being thus so extremely subtle, and demanding the most acute and trained observation of facts, the most comprehensive understanding of human psychology, is naturally given over to professors who have not the remotest idea that 'things are not what they seem,' and that everything is other than it appears; to professors, most of whom by their year-long devotion to the shop-counter or the desk, have acquired an intimate acquaintance with all the infinite shades and complexities of things and human nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Professors must live; to live they must occupy themselves with practice, and if they occupy themselves with practice, the pursuit of the abstract branches of science must go to the wall. All this is a plain and obvious matter of common-sense reasoning. ”

“ The best thing that can be done by one who wishes to be sure of obtaining the finest works upon any given subject in the region of scientific research, is [42] to write to a professor who teaches that subject in some good university,—a professor who has not himself written a book on the subject,—and get his judgment on the matter. ”

“ A considerable amount of reading in the literature will be expected for the systematic and exhaustive collection of evidence in a definite field. Reports of the results of work upon special problems and of reading for the collection of materials will be presented from time to time at meetings of the Seminar." So to produce scholarly workers in the various fields of learning is the function of the University—to train specialists, to make critics in the higher sense, to furnish investigators who will enter fresh fields and give the world the fruits of their researches. ”

“ University education, as such, when it is efficient, has certain characteristics which differentiate it from the training of a specialist, however high the level of the teaching in the special subject may be. ”

“ It is not surprising, therefore, although the study of science was not wholly given up, that during the last quarter of the century the academy should lose much of its fame as a center of purely scientific research. ”

“ Many of you in these days pass into another vocation—Letters, or the Press. Here too, almost everything you learn will pay you professionally. Still, I am careful not to rest the case for general education on professional grounds alone. I might show you that the highest work of all—original enquiry—needs a broad basis of liberal study; or at all events is vastly aided by that. Genius will work on even a narrow basis, but imperfect preparatory study leaves marks of imperfection in the product. ”

“ The common purpose of these different branches of knowledge has already been pointed out; viz. that by their means provision may be made for the uniform but constantly progressive development of all the faculties of man: and hence arises the true vocation of the Scholar; the most widely extended survey of the actual advancement of the human race in general, and the steadfast promotion of that advancement. ”

“ As an illustration of what I mean: the scientist, or even the college professor, who has devoted thirty years of life to study, can enter his profession from the top, while the business man and financier, for whom the accumulation of wealth is a desideratum, or the lawyer and the doctor, who must command a practice, or the minister, who needs a congregation, must, with the same period of intellectual infancy, enter it from the bottom and devote a few more years to the climbing process. ”

“ The student who repairs to them sees in the list of classes and of professors a fair picture of the world of knowledge. Whatever he needs to know there is some one ready to teach him, some one competent to discipline him in the way of learning; whatever his special bent, let him but be able and diligent, and in due time he shall find distinction and a career. Among his professors, he sees men whose names are known and revered throughout the civilized world; and their living example infects him with a noble ambition, and a love for the spirit of work. ”

“ Every year our universities reward our most advanced young scholars of philology and history, of literature and economics, of physics and chemistry, of mathematics and biology with the degree of Ph.D., that is of Doctor Philosophiae, thus symbolically expressing that all the special sciences are ultimately only branches of philosophy; but the truth of this symbol has faded away from the consciousness of the academic community. ”

“ Directed reading, conferences on knotty points, special lectures followed by the questioning of the lecturer, discussions upon matters of opinion, laboratory work when needful, fairly frequent test examinations, and a final examination for places, are the proper ingredients of a good modern College course, and in the necessity of leaving the Professor’s energies free for the direction of all this really educational work, lies another reason for that complete, explicit, well-arranged text-book upon which I am insisting. ”

“ The increasing practice by professors in our scientific schools of supplementing ordinary class work with extensive held teaching, he notes as an interesting example of the tendency toward original investigation developing among our educators. ”

“ Admirers from all across the surface of the earth produced unremitting and enthusiastic requests—nay, demands—for the wise professor to bestow upon the world his penetrating insights into human nature. As the years passed, however, even though he had been begged repeatedly for the first part, or a first volume, or even a first chapter, he had always answered that he wanted to get the whole work clearly in his head before he put it down on paper. ”

“ It is not strange, therefore, that many of the professors pursued reputable occupations during their odd hours or that they took students to board. We hear to-day of frequent illustrations of the pursuit of knowledge under difficulty, but certainly during the ages to which I have referred the ardent student, were he undergraduate or professor, put up with an amount of hardship, meagre fare, and trouble of all kinds which would stagger most of the young men of to-day. ”

“ 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. ”