The Modern University
Fitzpatrick, Edward A.
GENERAL misunderstanding exists as to what a university is, despite the fact that it is of the very warp and woof of our social economy. To some it is just an institution to educate...
...This conception ought to permeate our whole educational system...
...to others it is "my frat" or "my sorority...
...Columbia University, for example, is not that closely massed group of buildings on the top of Morningside Heights that commands a view of the Hudson even to Sleepy Hollow and looks down languidly on one of the great cities of the world...
...the whole is life in all its complexity and confusion...
...It may be an utterly mechanical procedure...
...It becomes strictly the university idea when it reaches the highest Intellectual levels of the system...
...it is the vestal virgin of society...
...Students have gone out of universities without any interest In knowledge, with no quickened sense of the obligations of citizenship, without any development of their finer qualities, without having attained through the university itself a completer moral or spiritual enfranchisement...
...In pohtics this becomes the spirit of party which Washington long ago protested against, or it becomes what is worse, a faction of a party...
...to still others it is a degree, aj badge of social distinction...
...To the man in the street, and to the short-sighted politician pleading for popular support, the university is a gigantic institution, educating the sons of the wealthy, costing millions of dollars, and serving the people of the state in no obvious way...
...that its preoccupation should be with the organization of knowledge and the pushing forward of the frontier of knowledge...
...It must serve the society which supports it and for the improvement rather than courses to be taken...
...Their regret is, "If I had had but the opportunity, how much better off I should be I" Their determination is, "My children shall not be denied the opportunities I did not have...
...which shall enable him to ring with confidence the visitors' bell at double-belled doors...
...They are alien...
...The older view is expressed in the historic antagonism between town and gown...
...or they are given public office because of their subserviency to organized economic Interests or to the manipulators of politics, or because of their respectability, or because of catch-phrases—for any or every reason except their capacity to serve and their belief in social and industrial justice...
...The university is no longer a thing apart, a law unto itself and withdrawn from the vast concourse of mankind...
...It divests itself of the adventitious, of the traditional, of the accidental, of the plausible...
...The university will accomplish its social purposes In part by becoming a radiating centre of the intellectual forces of society...
...Prejudice must give way before the university spirit...
...It may be necessary, in order to meet this situation fully, to establish other educational institutions...
...it is community-conscious...
...And perhaps, like Camelot, it is a city built to music, therefore never built at all, and therefore built forever...
...wherever thought kindles at the fire of thought, there is the university idea...
...They have failed to realize the fundamental character of the university as an educational institution...
...Surely the university is not campus...
...It exists for a great public end—social improvement...
...Among the students there is the widest possible misunderstanding of the purpose of a university...
...The university has significance from this point of view only as it performs its function in giving higher meaning, social direction and ethical purpose to the whole contemporary life...
...it is a longtime institution...
...There is to these people most of the time a very real halo about the university...
...The university is only a part, a fraction, a relation...
...This type of organization may be carried over into the instruction of the regular students, and university instruction may be radically changed to a basis of tasks or problems to be solved rather than of courses to be taken...
...Service to society does not mean subserviency to the state, the political agency of society...
...It would see truly, not darkly...
...One of the great problems immediately confronting the American university is to utilize this contact with multitudes of people besides the resident full-time students, as an agency to transmit "the wave of cumulative experience and idealist impulse" more effectively and genuinely than our present haphazard efforts do...
...To both it is an aristocratic institution...
...The University of Wisconsin Is not merely those sandstone structures set upon a hill in the city of four lakes and stretching over a hundred acres of land...
...It is like the city of Camelot, always building but never built...
...It is no longer self-sufficient, superior, esoteric, aristocratic...
...And yet, with politics in Its proper meaning, that is, with public policy, it is profoundly concerned...
...They never seek, as far as I can make out, an education good in itself...
...The establishment of various institutes of political, economic, and social research indicates a willingness of the university to undertake such work in special fields...
...There is no more malignant growth in our national life than prejudice...
...to still others it is an institution of learning, and learning is some mystic thing, they know not what...
...This motive Is not any recent development, but has been characteristic of parents for many years...
...In a very real sense, they believe the university a centre which has taken "all knowledge to be its province...
...In this conception, every office, every factory, every public utility, public service itself, is an educational opportunity for the university to utilize in training young men and women for service...
...It is servant in the sense that Christ used the term—"The greatest among you shall be servant to you all...
...The relation of the university to the community of which it is part, has changed with social evolution...
...Just as there are those who cannot see beyond the physical plant of the university, there are still others who see in it merely an agency of social advancement —or even commercial advancement...
...to others it is campus, or enrollment, or buildings...
...they have acquired the nomenclature of learning...
...But wherever spirit grows by mysterious contact with spirit, there Is the essence of the university idea...
...The conception of the university's function as merely "more education" would, to many of the administrators and professors, seem to fly in the face of all those processes of standardization and perfection of academic machinery so frequently lauded in contemporary discussion...
...even the conception of abstract rightness in training rarely seems reached by the writers...
...Any educational service that this average citizen thinks he wants for his community or his group, even though it isn't of college grade, is sought from the university...
...We find, in fact, from the very urgency of the democracies which frequently believe that the universities are aristocratic and merely intellectual instruments, the antidote to their belief...
...It is not a time-serving institu tion...
...The university must, through its own investigations and through the wide diffusion of its constructive research, influence mass opinion to make decisions in the light of the best available information and in a spirit of public service...
...Such people have failed to realize that the university is not for commercial advancement nor for "advancement in life" nor for social prestige...
...However controlled, however financed, it is a public institution...
...The university must be Independent of particular administrations, of politicians, and entirely free of "politics" as we use the word...
...Interpretations and Forecasts, by Victor Branford: The essential functions of the university is to bring together for the transmission of experience and impulse, the sages of the passing and the picked youths of the coming generations...
...It is no longer imperium in imperio...
...The university much furnish leadership, divested of all prejudice, and capable of diffusing generally the spirit of service, of merit, of disinterestedness, of investigation...
...By the extent and fulness with which they establish these social contacts and thus transmit the wave of cumulative experience and idealist impulse—the real sources of moral and intellectual progress—the universities are to be judged...
...In our present political development, to the creative spirit and constructive purpose of the university...
...And yet, both to the man in the street and to the politician, the university exercises a sway over the imagination that is coincident with bigness, greatness, and moral prestige...
...The university is not the group of students that is here today and gone tomorrow...
...it finds its inspiration in present-day life and its opportunity for service in present-day needs...
...They hold, as happens more often than we think, "whole sciences on faith...
...It would, even as Plato, follow the argument whithersoever it led...
...The juxtaposition of students and professors in what are called university classrooms does not make the university...
...it pursues the even tenor of its way...
...It becomes tied up with the racial, economic and religious blocs...
...Its research into the past is ultimately to enable us to understand the present—and to face the future...
...it is the instrument for educating the leaders of our democracy...
...It is presumed by the academic mind that the peculiar sphere and function of the university is an esoteric learning...
...Who will say that they are intellectually the strongest of their generation, or that they feel passionately the desire to serve their fellow-men unselfishly...
...Our present processes of selection result in our present graduate students...
...It cares not what is the public issue...
...Parents very frequently send their sons for some such reason...
...It is carrying on the racial inheritance...
...It has nothing to do with these...
...They shall have a university education," and then the pathetic non sequitur, "in order that they may not have to work as hard or as long or at such a dirty job as I do...
...But there are Implications of this conception that no university wholly accepts...
...They are merely highbrowing around in an ultra-respectable job...
...it is not a formalized thing—it i^ world-old and world-new...
...However, it must be and do more than that...
...this we pray for on bent knees—and this is all we pray for...
...To a surprising degree, indeed, the professors are mediocre people, with neither the love of knowledge nor the passion to make knowledge serve human ends...
...it announces the results of its Investigations without reference to expediency, political "futures," or personal fortunes...
...As thus conceived, th^ university is not a completed thing...
...This same idea may be viewed from another angle —the whole organized life of men becomes the educational institution...
...The university is not those solemn men called professors who are the more permanent inhabitants of the university buildings and upon whom the whole burden of the intellectual duties of the university seems to rest so heavily...
...Even in its elementary form, such a conception does not enter into their babbling about it...
...Yet provision must be made in every community for the conception of higher education merely as more education...
...Their professors are not "sages" and their students are not "picked youths...
...What Ruskln said so well In Sesame and Lilies Is true today...
...It cares not for false gods nor idols...
...It is not anything quantitative at all, and yet to many people these concrete facts about the university are the university...
...they have been spectators at physical, chemical, and biological experiments...
...In this sense, higher education is merely what a distinguished university president called it—"more education...
...which shall result ultimately in the establishment of a double-belled door to his own house— in a word, which shall lead to advancement in life...
...Problems of their community are confidently referred to the university, with the expectation that the return mail will have a solution...
...It seems unwise to attempt any sharp selection of the superior students on their entrance upon a college career—the process of selection should go on in the university itself...
...That fortunately is past...
...This point of view has been very well expressed in a rather remarkable book...
...But, an education "which shall keep a good coat on my son's back...
...it is democratic...
...The university is the intelligencecentre utilizing all for a better education of youth and manhood and for service to society...
...As to students, large numbers of them are pouring into the universities annually...
...Henry Adams defines politics as "the systematic organization of hatreds...
...Public men are denied the opportunity of public service because of their independence or courage...
...The abomination of the university spirit is prejudice—every prejudice, racial, religious, national, personal...
...It is this very pressure from without that has resulted in the widest possible education to multitudes of people who have never been reached before through any part of the educational system...
...To professors it is the means by which they may push forward the frontier of knowledge ever so little...
...It Is Independent of campus, buildings and enrollment, and its physical embodiment may be a log with a student at one end and Mark Hopkins at the other—even the log is not entirely necessary...
...To some it is athletics...
...The university exists that public policy may be enlightened, that its administrators may be skilled, and that the citizenship may be informed...
...So we find in our universities, through extension divisions, instructions of all levels of knowledge, from what the elementary school teaches to the most advanced courses...
...And judged by this standard, many of the universities of the country will be found wanting...
...It will in the future more and more recognize this function in industrial research...
...But in any case, the university must be a place where any student can come for periods long or short, continuous or periodic, for the use of the library for study, for the use of the laboratory equipment for experiment, and for the benefit of inspiration, guidance and criticism by university professors...
...To some it is just an institution to educate high-school graduates...
...It does its work, announces its results, is content, not in praise, but in its unfaltering devotion to its twin gods—truth and service...
...To these parents: "The education befitting such a station in life"—this is the phrase, this is the object, always...
...The university is not the buildings, not even library buildings, nor cathedral walks, nor willow drives, nor ivies planted on the campus...
...It must serve as an organization for the cooperation of the constructive Intellectual forces in the society...
...To those more closely associated with universities, it is charged with the trusteeship of culture...
...It continues the same function...
...As a teaching institution and as a part of the total educational resources of the community, the university is one with the rural schools...
...It is in its social aspects that the university becomes sharply distinguished...
...It is not 200 students nor 2,000 students nor even 10,000 students...
...and that is all...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 8
