Professorship

“ One of the greatest and best lessons, and for which there should be a professorship established in every college in the country, is the lesson of self-command. Make it at the commencement of your life a speciality, and it will serve you in after years as a guardian of your honor, and sometimes of your life itself. ”

“ They are, however, of opinion that such an arrangement cannot be made at the present time, and that the exigencies of the case may be best met by founding a new professorship which shall terminate with the tenure of office of the Professor first elected. The services of a man of the highest attainments in science, devoting his life to public teaching as such Professor, and engaged in original research, would be of incalculable benefit to the University. ”

“ In addition to normal schools (for training teachers,) an able writer in the Edinburgh Review (to which8 I owe the particulars of the Prussian, German, and French school systems) suggests, in my opinion very judiciously, the attaching of a Professorship to Colleges, for lecturing upon the art of instruction; to be called the professorship of Didactics. Such a chair, ably filled, would be invaluable for multiplying enlightened teachers, and for enhancing the dignity of that under-estimated pursuit. ”

“ The endowment of a professorship is rather, as we take it, to enable the holder of it to give up his time to the particular science to which he is devoted; and it is by no means necessary, especially in these days, when words are so easily winged by the printer's devil, that the results of his labours should be given forth by oral lectures. ”

“ Here comes not only the opportunity but the obligation of those whose vocation is in research institutions. The university teacher may generally be considered to have done his share when in addition to his research work he has instructed his regular classes. Those, on the other hand, whose lots are cast in institutions of research, being relieved of the round of duties incident to the university professorship, would seem to be marked as the ones to use such instruments of general education as are most suitable for reaching the great public outside the schools and colleges. ”

“ As the practice of teaching is requisite, in order to be able to explain the difficulties of any science, and render the communication of its precepts familiar to others, it is necessary that persons should devote their time very much to it. This can only be done to good purpose, so that students may reap ample advantages therefrom, by means of instituting public professorships.
The business of a Professor is to place before students in a full light, at their first entrance upon any study, the true object of that study, and to ascertain their proper pursuit. ”

“ The real teaching or coaching or cramming for examination is left to the tutors and Fellows of each college, and the examinations also are chiefly in their hands. Many undergraduates never see a professor, and, as far as the teaching work of the University is concerned, the professorships might safely be abolished. And yet, as I could honestly assure my foreign friends, the best men who take honour degrees at Oxford are quite the equals of the best men at Paris or Berlin. ”

“ It is a very wise procedure that is more and more being followed at the present time, in American universities, of recognizing such differences and making provision for research professorships that include no teaching duties whatever. ”

“ I need not inform your excellency, how contrary such a practice is to that of all the universities in Europe. Your excellency well knows how many learned men, of the two last ages, have been invited by princes to be professors in some art or science for which they were renowned; and that the like rule has been followed in Oxford and Cambridge. I hope your excellency will show no regard to so narrow and partial an opinion, which can only tend to mend fellowships, and spoil professorships ”

“ Professors have been known to begin their own studies in the line of their professorships after they had been elected; and some years ago the trustees of one college passed a rule to the effect that any member of the faculty could be called upon to teach any subject, under penalty of dismissal if he refused. ”

“ This was to take into our confidence the leading professors in the more important institutions of learning, and to secure from them, not the ordinary, conventional paper testimonials, but confidential information as to their young men likely to do the best work in various fields, to call these young men to our resident professorships, and then to call the most eminent men we could obtain for non-resident professorships or lectureships. ”

“ I agree with yours of the 22d, that a professorship of Theology [390] should have no place in our institution. But we cannot always do what is absolutely best. Those with whom we act, entertaining different views, have the power and the right of carrying them into practice. Truth advances, and error recedes step by step only; and to do to our fellow-men the most good in our power, we must lead where we can, follow where we can not, and still go with them, watching always the favorable moment for helping them to another step. ”

“ The smaller colleges, however, are not the only ones to blame in this matter of professorships. They are perforce compelled to employ smatterers, because of their inability to pay the proper number of specialists. ”

“ Such professorships would be a graceful offering to the universities, who may have been a little suspicious of the movement of a commission; and we feel sure, that nothing could be more promotive of the fine arts, the real taste of the country, or more beneficial, as leading the educated to pursuits of a high and noble nature. ”

“ The said Faculty shall at present consist of the following Professorships, reserving to the Trustees the power to combine or subdivide the Professorships as may hereafter be found expedient, provided no such alteration take place during a course of lectures:—
“1. A Professorship of Botany. ”

“ University philosophy is, as a rule, mere juggling. Its real aim is to impart to the students, in the deepest ground of their thought, that tendency of mind which the ministry that appoints to the professorships regards as consistent with its views. ”

“ A suggestion had been made to me looking toward a professorship in some Western college, but after due consideration, I declined to consider the matter. ”

“ In our colleges the professors are paid for teaching and for teaching only, while in a foreign university the teaching is wholly secondary, and the professor is expected to announce in his lectures the results of his own study, and not the thoughts of other men. Until the whole status of the professors in our chief universities can be changed, very little original thought or investigation can be expected, and these institutions cannot become what they should be, the soul of the higher life of the nation. ”

“ These University professors of science should be men specially devoted to their subject; they should be men not engaged in many different occupations, but there should be in them, in order that they may attain perfection in their own pursuit, that specialization of labour, that devotion to single subjects of study which it would be impossible for any one engaged in an ordinary profession, or in any ordinary business to have. The professor of a particular subject, as of Chemistry in an University, must give himself up to that one subject. ”

“ I said. “We have professors, but they are not divided into faculties, and they certainly do not form the Senatus Academicus, or the highest authority in the University.”
It seems very strange, but it is nevertheless a fact, that as soon as a good tutor is made a professor, he is considered of no good for the real teaching work of the colleges. His lectures are generally deserted; and I could quote the names of certain professors who afterwards rose to great eminence, but who at Oxford were simply ignored and their lecture-rooms deserted. ”

“ That type has not disappeared; but the college professor of the last three decades has had, for the most part, special preparation for his work; teaching is, for him, the noblest of professions; except in a few departments, he is a man of the world, not enclosed in a world of his own creation. With wider opportunities, he understands his fellows and can keep in touch with younger men. ”

“ If you take an 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 general 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, and thus aids in infusing a continually renewed life and vigor into those venerable seats of learning that might otherwise sink into decrepitude and decay. ”

“ I know that the doors of the University are being opened to all the newer studies, and that many a student spends most of his time in acquiring the useful knowledge that is to equip him for his profession and for the direct purpose of that profession; knowledge which is to fit him to become lawyer, doctor, minister, engineer, or teacher; yet an Oxford Professor may always maintain the pursuit of Learning for its own sake and keep this purpose before his students even in their most technical work. ”

“ It is within the power of the college professor to help enlighten the understanding, strengthen and guide the intuitions and reasoning faculties, and to awaken within the student a consciousness of his new powers and capacities, and incite him to mental activity. The highest scholastic training demands that the professor studiously avoid all those methods of instruction which tend to mechanical habits of thought, and which check the mind's spontaneity of growth and repress the individuality so essential to true scholarship. ”

“ The position and work of a professor is by no means easy to define. It is his first duty to represent his subject, to urge its claims on attention, to do what he can to promote its study. But the method by which this result is best to be attained must depend on the relations of that subject to the examinations of the university, and on the relation of the professor to other teachers in the same subject. Ecclesiastical history is recognised in the examinations for the theological and the historical triposes. ”

“ The college professor's function includes not only the increase of knowledge in the individual and the elevation of the intellectual standard in the world at large, but the actual advancement of learning. College and professor alike are not for their own campus alone, but for society in general. ”

“ There are three grades of professors, called ordinary professors, extraordinary professors and privats-docent. The ordinary professors are the highest class, and are elected by the government from candidates chosen by the faculty, and give lectures on the subject which they are selected to teach. The extraordinary professors have smaller salaries, and can lecture on any subject they please, as may also the privat-docent. The student attends any lectures he chooses, but cannot practice any profession without a certain course of university study. ”

“ How a professor can go through an assorted collection of brain stufferies, get so many college degrees that his name looks like Halley's Comet with an alphabet tail, and then teach college students for forty years without even taking one of them apart to find out what he is made of, beats my time! That's a college professor for you, right through. He thinks of a college student only as something to teach—whereas, of all the nineteen hundred and eighty-seven things a college student is, that is about the least important to his notion. ”

“ College professors must be specialists—scholars in the full sense of the term; but college students do not for their part commonly intend or care to specialize in the same sense. To study one field with greater thoroughness than others; to gain from it a disinterested enthusiasm for learning; to approach in one direction the limits of achieved knowledge; to taste the joy of constructive intellectual effort; these are essential elements in a college student's curriculum. ”

“ Or—
"That is Professor ——," a fellow academician would say to a stranger on the campus as the erect, lithe-limbed young man veered round a corner. "A pillar, sir, a pillar of the institution. The making of a great man, a great man, sir."
But all this was long before the advent of the old professor, long before the day when people ceased to seek him out, to fawn before his talent, and to cherish in memory the brilliant phrases that he was so apt in making. ”

“ Even to become an academic professor need not be an unattainable aim of your ambition. And if, in spite of all that, I should still continue, in my heart, to look upon you as a born dilettante, you could smile down upon me graciously, and heap coals of fire upon my head by proposing me as an honorary member of your academy. Ah! my dear boy, I tell you, if you should make a close examination of many of our most famous great men, you would bring to light little else than a disguised and beautiful dilettantism, made up of humbug, elegant trappings, and perhaps a few so-called ideas. ”

“ In most universities, except those of England, the professors are the body on whom devolves the whole duty and burthen of teaching; they compose the sole fountains of instruction; and if these fountains fail, the fair inference is, that the one great purpose of the institution is defeated. ”