An Ideal of University Education

...If a man is a lawyer, his education should have been of such a kind that he has a keen interest in the history of law and legal institutions, jurisprudence, legal philosophy, legal methodology, the administration of justice, and the relations between law and society...

...Today, with a life-expectancy of 70 years at birth, with a short work day, with a five-day week, with paid vacations, and with the reasonable expectation of retirement before one is totally exhausted or disabled, a new problem has come to the fore: what to do with one's leisure time or years...

...He quotes from a letter by Robert Louis Stevenson in which Stevenson wrote that he loved his wife, and that few men love their wives more...

...There were no coffee-breaks then, no paid vacations, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions and retirement plans...

...This, it seems to me, is the true reason for a university, where professional schools and a college of arts and sciences are brought together—¦ brought together not so that they may be separate, each pursuing its own ends—but brought together so that each may, in some almost miraculous way, transcend itself and become united with the other, so that it might be difficult to tell where professional studies end and humanistic and social studies begin...

...But if thought, contemplation, knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge are, as it were, built into his work, then leisure does not begin where work leaves off, but both are inextricably united in every living moment of a man's years, and each week-day is also a Sabbath, and each moment is a moment of both creation and rest, work and thought, and combines both matter and spirit, the profane and the sacred, the particular and the universal, the temporal and the timeless...

...The choice of an occupation or profession—of a life-work—may be, therefore, even for one who is not a Stevenson or a Gauguin, a matter of spiritual life or death...

...A man's work, in our culture and in our day, occupies him for eight hours a day for five days a week...

...Without my art, life would be unthinkable...

...For this purpose he will need an education in the humanities and the social sciences, both as an undergraduate and as a professional student...

...But," he went on to say, "I could conceive of life without her...

...The problem of leisure (except for aristocrats) is new to us...

...Were Sherman and Stevenson right, as a matter of fact...

...In a word, today one needs to choose and prepare for not only an occupation or profession...

...On the other hand, we know how Edward VIII, after creating a dramatic constitutional crisis for Great Britain and the Commonwealth nations, abdicated his throne in order to be free to marry the woman he loved...

...A person with such interests and concerns will always feel compelled to continue throughout his life his studies of history, literature, philosophy, the classics and the social sciences...

...For example, if a man is an engineer or a scientist, his education should have been of such an order that he has a persistent and intense interest in the history of science and technology, the philosophy of science, the methodology of science, and a lively concern with the social, political and economic effects of his work and profession...

...Similarly, we know that men have sacrificed their careers and loves and lives for the sake of their political or social beliefs...

...In this way, his professional competence will be greater and his entire life will be richer, for at all times, in his office or in his home, in his car or on his walks, he will be living fully: He will be a man in his work, and a worker as a man...

...Milton R. Konvitz, professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University, is the author of The Constitution and Civil Rights...

...Is a man's work more important to him than his love...

...One also needs to choose and prepare for a style of life, a way or mode of life —a Lebensivei-se—that will integrate work and leisure in such a way that it may be difficult to separate one from the other, a style of life in which a man cannot honestly tell when his work ends and when his leisure begins...

...Shedding blood and killing time may be equally (though not in the legal sense, of course) murder of another human being or of oneself...

...And work was harder then...

...We know how Paul Gauguin left Mette and their five children in Copenhagen and fled to the South Seas, where he spent the rest of his life, passionately given over to painting...

...Suffice it to say that a man's work, whether it be his life (as in the case of Stevenson or Gauguin) or merely his livelihood, is of basic importance to him...

...We touch here on the problem of men's ultimate loyalties...

...The pages of history have recorded the names of many men who chose to be martyrs for the sake of conscience, men who freely gave up their jobs and even their lives in order to bear witness to God and their religious beliefs...

...But this is an ideal that we have hardly begun to achieve or even to articulate...

...If, as the Bible says, the life is the blood, so one may also say, the life is the time...

...An Ideal of University Education By Milton R. Konvitz In his essay on "Shaping Men and Women," Stuart Sherman said that a man's job, what he does "day in and day out, year in and year out," may be "the only thing in his life that has a first-class chance to use him and consume him adequately...

...Everything he reads or studies or does will seem related to a center, to a centripetal force that will attract around and to itself every bit of human experience...

...but we cannot explore the question here...

...As we begin to see this problem of leisure more and more, and as we concentrate more and more on the potentially dehumanizing aspects of work in a technological society, we shall see more clearly the challenge to education—we shall see that the root idea of a solution must be in new concepts, new ideals and new methods of university education...

...for he will be aware of relations and inter-relations between his specialty and almost every other branch of knowledge and learning...

...The sharp separation of work and leisure can only tend to impoverish man by mechanizing his work and by emptying his leisure of any fruitful values, so that in the end both his work and leisure are only aspects of boredom...

...production depended heavily on human muscle power and concentration, so that a day's work left the worker physically and mentally exhausted...

...or one may combine the two concepts and say that time is the life-blood of man...

...A hundred years ago this was even more the case than it is today, for then a normal work week took 70 instead of 40 hours—a man worked almost 12 hours a day for six days in the week...

...Mankind has always known the problem of work...