the idea of a universerty

The Idea of a University

Clark Kerr

"The Idea of a University" was, perhaps, never so well expressed as by Cardinal Newman when engaged in founding the University of Dublin a little over a century ago. His views reflected the Oxford of his day whence he had come. A university, wrote Cardinal Newman, is "the high protecting power of all knowledge and science, of fact and principle, of inquiry and discovery, of experiment and speculation; it maps out the territory of the intellect, and sees that...there is neither encroachment nor surrender on any side." He favored "liberal knowledge," and said that "useful knowledge" was a "deal of trash".

Newman was particularly fighting the ghost of Bacon who some 250 years before had condemned "a kind of adoration of the mind...by means whereof men have withdrawn themselves too much from the comtemplation of nature, and the observations of experience, and have tumbled up and down in their own reason and conceits." Bacon believed that knowledge should be for the benefit and use of men, that it should "not be as a courtesan, for pleasure and vanity only, or as a bondwoman, to acquire and gain to her master's use; but as a spouse, for generation, fruit and comfort."

To this Newman replied that "Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it really be such, is its own reward." And in a sharp jab at Bacon he said:"The philosophy of Utility, you will say, Gentlemen, has at least done its work; and I grant it—it aimed low, but it has fulfilled its aim." Newman felt that other institutions should carry on research, for "If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have any students"—an observation sardonically echoed by today's students who often think their professors are not interested in them at all but only in research.

A University training,said, Newman, "aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspirations, at facilitating the exercie of political powers, and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at life." It prepares a man "to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility."

This beautiful words was being shattered forever even as it was being so beautifully portrayed. By 1852, when Newman wrote, the German universities were becoming the new model. The democratic and industrial and scientific revolutions were all underway in the western world. The gentleman "at home in any society" was soon to be at home in none. Science was beginning to take the place of moral philosophy, research the place of teaching.

"The idea of a Modern University," to use Flexner's pharse, was already being born. "A University," said Flexner in 1930, "is not outside, but inside the general social fabric of a given era...It is not something apart, something historic, something that yields as little as possible to forces and influences that are more or less new. It is on the contrary...an expression of the age, as well as an influence operationg upon

both present and future."

It was clear by 1930 that "Uinversities have changed profoundly —and commonly in the direction of the social evolution of which they are apart." This evolution had brought departments into universities, and still new departments; institutes and ever more institutes; created vast research libraries; turned the philosopher on his log into a researcher in his laboratory stacks; taken medicine out of the the hands of the profession and put it into the hands of the scientists; and much more. Instead of the individual students, there were the needs of society; instead of Newman's eternal "truths in the natural order," there was the specialist. The university became, in the words of Flexner,"an institution consciously devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, the solution of problems, the critical appreciation of achievement and the training of men at a really high level." No longer could a single individual "master any subject" —Newman's universal liberal man was gone forever.

But as Flexner was writing of the "Modern University," it, in turn, was ceasing to exist. The Berlin of Humboldt was being violated just as Berin had violated the soul of Oxford. The universities were becoming too many things. Flexner himself complained that they were "secondary schools, vocational schools, teacher-training schools, research centers, 'uplift' agencies, businesses—these and other things simultaneously." They engaged in "incredible absurdities," "a host of inconsequential things." They "needlessly cheapened, vulgarized and mechanized themselves." Worst of all, they became "'service stations' for the general public."

Even Harvard. "It is clear," calculated Flexner, "that of Harvard's total expenditures not more than one-eighth is devoted to the central university disciplines forced Harvard into this false path? No one. It does as it please; and this sort of thing pleases." It obviously did not please Flexner. He wanted Harvard to disown the Graduate School of Business." He would also have banished all Schools of Journalism and Home Economics, football, correspondence courses, and much else.

It was not only Harvard and other American universities, but also London. Flexner asked "in what sense the University of London is a university at all." It was only a "federation".

By 1930, American universities had moved a long way from Flexner's "Modern University" where "The heart of a university is a graduate school of arts and sciences, the solidly professional schools (mainly, in America, medicine and law) and certain research insititutes." They were becoming less and less like a "genuine universities," by which Flexner meant "an oranism, characterized by highness and definiteness of aim, unity of spirit and purpose." The "Modern University" was as nearly dead in 1930 when Flexner wrote about it as the old Oxford was in 1852 when Newman idealized it. History moves faster than the observer's pen. Neither the ancient classics and theology nor the German philosophyers and scientists could set the tone for the really modern university — the multiversity.

"The Idea of a Multiversity" has no bard to sing its song its praise; not prophet to proclaim its vision; no guardian to protect its sanctity. It has its critics, its detractors, its trangressors.It also has its barkers selling its wares to all who will listen—and many do. But it also has its reality rooted in the logic of history. It is an imperative

rather than a reasoned choice among elegant alternatives.

President Natha Pusey wrote in his latest annual report to the members of the Harvard Board of Overseers that the average date of graduation of the present Board members was 1924; and much has happened to Harvard since 1924. Half of the building are new. The faculty has grown five-fold, the budget nearly fifteen-fold. "One can find almost anywhere one lokks similar examples of the effect wrought in the curriculum and in the nature of the contemporary university by widening international awareness, advancing knowledge, and increasingly sophisticated methods of https://www.wendangku.net/doc/6b12604707.html, and Africa, radio telescopes, masers and lasers and devices for interplanetary exploration unimagined in 1924 —these and otherdevelopments have effected such enormous changes in the intellectual orientation and aspiration of the contemporary university as to have made the university we knew as students now seem a strangely underdeveloped, indeed a very simple and an almost unconcerned kind of institution. And the pace of change continues."

Not only at Harvard. The University of California last year had operating expenditures from all sources of nearly half a billion dollars, with almost another 100 million for construction; a total empolyment of over 40,000 people, more than IBM and in a far greater variety of endeavors; operations in over a hundred locations, counting campuses; experiment stations, agriculture and urban extension centers, and projects abroad involving more than fifty countries; nearly 10,000 courses in its catalogues; some form of contact with nearly every industry, nearly every level of government, nearly every person in its region. Vast amounts of expensive equipment were serviced and maintained. Over 4,000 babies were born in its hospitals. It is the world's largest purveyor of white mice. It will soon have the world's largest primate colony. It will soon also have 100,000 students —30,000 of them at the graduate level; yet much less than one third of its expenditures are directly related to teaching. It already has nearly 200,000 students in extension courses—including one out of every three lawyers and one out of every six doctors in the state. And Harvard and California are illustrative of many more.

Newman's "Idea of a University" still has its devotees—chiefly the humanists and the generalists and the undergraduates. Flexner's "Idea of a University" still has its supporters — chiefly the scientists and the specialists and the graduate students. "The Idea of a Multiversity" has its practitioners — chiefly the administrators, who now number many of the faculty among them, and the leadership groups in society at large. The controversies are still around in the faculty clubs and the students coffee houses; and the models of Oxford and Berlin and modern Harvard all animate segments of what was once a " community of masters and students" with a single vision of its nature and purpose. These several competing visions of ture purpose, each relating to a different layer of history, a different web of forces,causes much of the malaise in the university communities of today. The university is so many things to so many different people that it must, of necessity, be partially at war with itself.