THE UNIVERSITY, PAST AND PRESENT
O'Brien, Dennis
THE UNIVERSITY, PAST AND PRESENT The University in Society LAWRENCE STONE, EDIT. Princeton U. Press, $22 (Two Volumes) The university has the curious dis-tinction of being an institution whose...
...As McLachlan points out, riots are a most persistent feature of nineteenth century student life and we know Bext to nothing about their causes...
...The Commission's prophecies, com-menced in 1967, digested by Mayhew in 1973 and read in 1975 seem very distant from current university reality...
...Was Princeton really an educational institution...
...the leading personalities behind the reforms are well known to us, nothing specific can be gathered from the spare accounts we have...
...On thl other hand, it sometimes seems impossible to discover any continuity between current col legiate reality and even the recent past In 1827 the Princeton Library purchased four books...
...Because the picture of the past must be produced by such scanty and tangential evidence, it often calls our attention' to the mere...
...Tab profound thought came to one while reading concurrently the volume under review and Lewis Mayhew's The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, The latter is a digest with commentary of the massive series of studies supervised by dark Kerr which attempt to project higher education's future on to the year 2000...
...Certainly part of the emphasis on discovery, in the contemporary academy stems from the withering of belief in any received'truths...
...In the first place, we have decided that discovery can be bureaucratized up to a point- the lesson of the-natural sciences where persistent research pays off at least in bits and pieces if not in new cosmic paradigms...
...Would Prtsideht Ashbel Green ever Have thought in 1812 that the student literary societies would be the heralds of a greater Princeton...
...The library, by the way was open only five hours a week-a figure which declined to one hour by 1860...
...A search of the university past as a guide to the present or a check on prognostication, then, is not a very re-liable instrument in any immediately obvious manner...
...On the one hand, the university is one of the longest lived social institutions extant-certainly much older than most of the nation states of this world...
...traces in con-temporary life which may well be the veritable wave of the future...
...There is so much we do not know about the why and wherefores of the history of the uni-versity...
...Princeton U. Press, $22 (Two Volumes) The university has the curious dis-tinction of being an institution whose past appears to be as speculative as its future...
...is con-cerned with Oxbridge, the second takes in the rest of the world...
...Even when issues are closer to contemporary problems such as the controversy in the late eighteenth century in Germany over the role of the professor as teacher or scholar, there are differences which make comparison to our modern sense of the question difficult One cannot imagine even a junior college faculty member subscribing to the views of the distinguished Gottingen professor Michaelis 'To improve the sciences, and to make new discoveries is simply not the duty of a school whether it be high or low...
...I con-fess to sharp' mood swings in the reading of history between delight in familiarity and despair at the strangeness of it all...
...Several of the studies in the book are exercises in quanto-histqry, the study of the official records and registers wherein the inarticulate of history have left their imprint How odd that this method should be necessary in just those places where letters, thought and self-reflection have been so long fostered...
...There are analogies but analogies always show how different it all is since if it were the same we wouldn't have to analogize at all...
...In .1839 the students were so filled with the Holy Spirit that they rushed into Middlebury and burned down several buildings...
...Finally, the very strangeness of so much of the academic past is sobering for a contemporary college president, Congressman, or Carnegie Commissioner who believes he has seized the essence of the whole thing.the whole thing...
...the University and Society is a sizable piece of reading...
...for the University) ". . . the Royal Commissioners' plan for professorial dominance in the university . . . was completely ignored...
...Not so...
...Bonfires at football rallies...
...One is not surprised to learn that early Oxford must be teased out of matriculation records as Stone does brilliantly in a sweeping analysis of the size and composition of the Oxford student body from 1500 to the 1920's...
...Take a particularly interesting example: Sheldon Rothblatt sets out to discover the causes of a fundamental change in examination procedures at Oxford stemming from the Oxford Statute of 1801...
...It was claimed that if Germanic-quality biblical studies had been available at Oxford, Newman would never have strayed...
...But if anyone dreams about tempering educational futurologists by the sober lessons of the past, Stone's excellent collection quickly would illustrate the hazards of such hopes...
...Of particular interest among the articles not men-tioned above are Koniad H. Jarusch...
...It is rather the duty of a few fortunate geniuses...
...The Oxford reform, so a contemporary writer outside the University claimed, was to "check the profligacy of idle yourg men and combat atheism by improving religious instruction"- and, naturally, quell thoughts of poetical rebellion which were associated with atheism and ''metaphysical subtleties" endemic to the continent (Note that the later reform of 1854 mentioned above came as much from offense at the appalling popishness of Oxford revealed by the Tractarians as from a desire to emulate German scholarship...
...The most persistent phrase in the Commissien report is "massive federal funding" and nothing could seem more unreal in these days of financial retrenchment Even cost-saving innovations like less time-more options" (me notion that there should be greater variety of post-secondary educational opportunity, producing degrees in less time) Htm to have gone nowhere.-If anything, it is the traditionalist colleges and vntvendtie* which seem to be weathering financial distress while those innovative institutions which have heeded the calls for rational reform of this Commission (or some other) find themselves hard pressed for students and financial support Rather than being the wave of the future these college bleakly contemplate no future at all...
...It is partly because of the lack of an inner chronicle of the College (as well as its intrinsic interest) mat Stone's collection is concerned with the University and Society...
...To be sure, Michaelis was a polemicist in a debate in which the more "modern view" of a combin-ation teacher-scholar was put forward, but the entire setting of the debate is scarcely recoverable for us...
...One could turn to these studies of the past for precedent and thai the Carnegie Commission DENNIS O'BAIEN may share the fate of Lord John Russell's Royal Commission of 1850-51 for the reformation of Oxford...
...and reaction, moved with the times and shown remarkable tenaciousness in holding to values seemingly long gone...
...Unrest 1815-1848" and Robert L. Church, "Economists as Experts: The Rise <of an Academic Profession in America 1870-1917...
...Nowhere is that sense greater than in the history of the university...
...Vietnam protests...
...The Sources of German Student...
...In the second placet, Michaelis and his opponents like the Berlin academician Castillon, could at least see what it would be like to be merely a teacher of received wisdoms...
...Although the Commission report was based on attractive and reasonable (if Germanic) alternatives to the mishmash of governance and church piety (hat defined the university at the time, Arthur Engel notes that in the Oxford University Bill of 1854 (framed by Gladstone, M.P...
...For universities past and future, speculation abounds...
...the library purchased three books, one magazine and a pamphlet...
...In my own college, the high point of the year in the early 1800s was the great religious revival...
...Our sympathies extend to Richard Kagan trying to analyze Castilian universities from fragmentary registration records kept by mathematically illiterate scribes subject to pressure to inflate enrollment figures to gain state aid...
...The first volume...
...It is unlikely that everyone will be equally enamored with every article...
...Actually, it appears that the reasons were more complex and have as much or more to do with the fear of political revolution as with rising academic expectation...
...What we do not see very clearly is the inner working of this institution in either its reformist or its reactionary state...
...and, as James McLachlan notes in his very interesting article on American student societies, "1830 was something of a banner year...
...In 1801 Pitt undertook a second suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act...
...1829, one was received as a gift...
...As Max Beerbohm said of Oxford: "It is a city where nothing is ever born and nothing ever quite dies...
...Yet it is the capturing of these student urges to read which transforms the curriculum of American colleges after the Civil War...
...I admit my en-thusiasm flagged trying to keep abreast of the ups and downs which beset Salamanca, Valladolid, Baeza and Alcala de Henares in the sixteenth century...
...1828, none...
...On their own history, professors often appear as mute as Medieval mobs...
...It is easier to conceive of the tutor passing on truth rather than discovering new truth when there is some truth about to be transmitted...
...It has been agent of rebellion...
...The basic reason is, as noted above, that the university's past is almost as sketchily known as its future...
...Where is the modern, equivalent...
...Although] at Oxford...
...But in Rothblatt's case study one would certainly think that the very articulate dons of the early nineteenth century would have dropped a hint as to the purpose of the new examination system...
...If anyone would like to come to some perspicuous view of the contemporary college I would be.inclined to recommend these volumes over most of the social, psychological or metaphysical analysis of the present scene...
...Rothblatt's reconstruction is ingenious and rings true-and it also teaches caution, As he says, we are immediately tempted to read .into the reform our view of why examinations should be established-"to raise and standardize per-formance...
...a desperate military campaign was being waged in southern Europe...
...We are continually forced to speculate about change in university structure as a result of social forces beyond the walls since we lack explicit inner testimony...
...Even if one puts aside all the methodological problems About how we come to know anything at all about universities past and accept the accounts as given, the lessons for the present are hard to fully digest...
...As he notes, this change from the lackadaisical educational pattern of Georgian Oxford has long intrigued historians but "the precise origins . . . remain as obscure as ever...
...In The University and Society, Lawrence Stone has gathered together the results of a special research seminar on onharalty history held at Princeton in 1969...
Vol. 102 • October 1975 • No. 15
