The Mission Of State Universities Commencement

( Originally Published 1913 )

ADDRESS TO TILE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN AT MADISON, JUNE, 1908.

This University of Wisconsin in which we are met stands by common consent in the front rank among the State Universities of the United States. It is younger than some of them, but inferior to none in the width of its curriculum and the ability of its staff, and it is perhaps more conspicuously identified then any other with the political life of the State. This is therefore a fitting place in which one who delivers a Commencement Address may choose for his theme the various origins from which universities have sprung, the various forms in which they have organized themselves, and the peculiar features and functions which belong to the American State Universities, that "latest birth of time."

A university is, in its simplest form, nothing more than an aggregation of teachers and learners. It was in that way that the earliest universities of modern Europe began. Salerno, Bologna, Paris, were the first cities in which crowds of learners gathered round a few eminent teachers of medicine (in the first), of law (in the second), of theology and dialectics (in the third). Such too were the beginnings of Oxford and Cambridge.

In each of those trading towns situated upon rivers, then the chief avenues of commerce, a concourse of students formed itself round a few learned men, and presently grew to vast dimensions. These universities were not founded by any public authority, but founded themselves, springing up naturally out of the desire for knowledge ; and hence we in England describe our two Universities of Oxford and Cambridge as being "corporations at common law," i.e. deriving their legal quality as corporate bodies from ancient custom which antedates the time of legal memory. The same thing had happened in the Eastern World. Where Is-lam reigned, schools sprang up in the great mosques like that famous one of El Azhar in Cairo which still draws thousands of students of all ages from all parts of the Musulman world. Later on in the Middle Ages sovereigns began to establish such places of learning. The Emperor Frederick II set up one at Naples in A.D. 1225, Pope Gregory IX another at Toulouse in 1233. The first in the Germanic Empire was that of Prague, founded by Pope Clement VI and Emperor Charles the Fourth in 1347–1348 ; and others followed, such as that famous school at Heidelberg which the Elector Palatine Rupert, and Pope Urban VI at his request, set up in 1386.

Popes had also assumed the right of founding universities, and with good right, because their ecclesiastical jurisdiction embraced all Europe, and they were called upon to see that a due supply both of trained theologians and trained lawyers was always forth-coming. In Scotland the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen, for instance, were founded by papal bulls, but when after the breach between England and Rome Queen Elizabeth desired to create a university in Ireland she did it herself by a royal charter. In modern Europe, since the conception has grown up that a university is an institution entitled to grant degrees, and since degrees themselves have obtained more or less legal recognition, it is now understood that nothing less than some public authority, such as either a royal grant or a statute, can create a university. It is thus that the eight new universities recently established, and the most recent of them perhaps too hastily established, in England, viz., London, Durham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield, and Bristol, have been constituted.

Here in the United States you have allowed the widest freedom, so colleges and universities, great and small, have sprung up all over the country in a crop almost too abundant. Harvard and Yale were the foundations of private benefactors, though their States subsequently aided them. Many other colleges owe their origin to religious denominations. But the most interesting, and certainly the most peculiar and characteristically American, type has been that of the university founded and supported and governed by the State.

Before proceeding to consider how this scheme of State support and control has worked, let me try to give you a brief view of the universities of the three countries whose conditions and ideas most resemble yours in America. I mean Germany, England, and Scotland, — countries in each of which the university has played a great part and has not only illustrated the character of the nation but done much to form that character.

The universities of Germany have, during the last seventy years, led the world in the completeness of their teaching organization, in the amplitude of the provision of instruction in every branch of knowledge which they make, and in the services they render to the prosecution of research. In these respects they have set an example to the world, an example whose value is recognized in the United States, from which so many students have gone to Germany. The level of learning among the teachers, taken as a whole, is perhaps higher than anywhere else : and it is to the energy of these teachers that we must largely ascribe that completeness with which special training has been brought to bear upon every department of practical life in Germany, upon private business in production and distribution no less than upon all kinds of administrative work. A control is exercised over the universities by the government which you here and we in England might think excessive, but in practice it does not seem to be harmful, for public opinion practically secures freedom of teaching and relieves the professors from undue interference. The tradition of respect for the great seats of learning, strong in the minds of the German bureaucracy, who have all been educated there, is found to act as an efficient protection. Indeed, the whole nation cares for the universities, is proud of the universities, recognizes, as perhaps no other nation has ever done, the value for practical life of full knowledge and exact training, so that everything is done which money and organizing skill can do to maintain the institutions of learning and teaching at the highest level of efficiency. Nor must I forget to add that the universities have another claim on the affection of the German people in the fact that when, after the battle of Jena in 1806, North Germany lay for a time prostrate at the feet of a foreign conqueror, it was in the universities that the patriotic national spirit found its surest home, and it was among their professors and students that the movement began which culminated in the liberation of the German fatherland.

The universities of England — and here I speak chiefly of Oxford and Cambridge, as the oldest and by far the most characteristic educational product of English soil —belong to a different type. Although the great scientific discoveries of the last centuries are due to British more than to any other discoverers, these universities have not in recent years contributed so largely to original research either in natural science or in the human subjects as have their sisters in Germany. They are far less completely organized for the purposes of instruction. They do not educate so large a proportion of the people. They have been, since the Reformation, for the most part places of resort for the upper and middle classes, and it is only within the last thirty years that they began to be rendered easily accessible to the promising and diligent youth of the poorer sections of society. But they have had several conspicuous merits which are specially their own. Their ideal has been to give not so much an education qualifying a man to succeed in any particular walk of life as that general education which will fit him to be a worthy member of church and commonwealth. They have sought to develop men as men, to shape and polish a completely harmonious and well-rounded intellect and character, a personality in whom all faculties have been cultivated and brought as nearly as may be to a symmetrical completeness. And in aiming at this, they have thought not only of learning or of the powers of the speculative intellect, but also of the aptitudes which find their scope in practical life, and which enable a man to work usefully with other men and to exercise a wholesome influence in his community. Ox-ford and Cambridge have long been closely associated with the public life of the nation. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries nearly all of those who reached high eminence as statesmen were their alumni, and gratefully acknowledged how much they owed to the Alma Mater. That which they did owe was not always learning nor even the power of ready and finished speech, a power which must always count for much in the political life of a free country. It was perhaps rather the knowledge of human nature, the tact and judgment, the sense of honour and comradeship which daily social intercourse in the colleges of these universities tended to form. In these colleges — there are twenty-two in Oxford and nineteen in Cambridge — there is a sort of domestic life which brings the students into close touch with one another. The undergraduates dine together in the same college hall along with the graduate members of the college who are the teachers. They worship in the same college chapel. They have their sports together, each college with its cricket team and its racing boats on the river. The opportunities for forming friendships are unrivalled, and thus it comes to pass that those who remember Oxford and Cambridge say that they learnt as much from one another as they did from their professors and tutors. Moreover, the domestic arrangements of our English college life create a more easy and familiar intercourse between the teachers, especially the younger ones, and the undergraduates than exists anywhere else. The undergraduate students are the friends of their teachers, living with them on an equality which is of course tempered by the respect due to age and experience. It is a pleasant relation, good for the older and the younger alike. Thus has there been created in Oxford and Cambridge that impalpable thing which we call an Atmosphere, an intellectual and social tone which forms manners and refines taste, and strengthens characters by traditions inherited from a long and splendid past.

The four universities of Scotland are very different from the English, and rather resemble the universities of Germany. Though far less completely equipped than are the latter, for Scotland has been a comparatively poor country, they have always given a high quality of instruction, and produced a large number of remarkable men. There are no residential colleges like those of England, so the undergraduates live in lodgings, where they please, and thus there is less of social student life. But the instruction is stimulating ; and the undergraduates, being mostly poor men, and coming of a diligent and aspiring stock, are more generally studious and hard-working and self-reliant than are those of Oxford and Cambridge. Within the last twenty years women have been admitted to the classes, and that which was deemed an experiment is pronounced to be a success.

Last, I come to your own universities. Whereas the universities of Germany have been popular but not free, and those of England free but not popular, yours, like those of Scotland, are both popular and free. Their doors are open to every one, and every one enters. They are untrammeled by any religious or political prejudices, even when they are associated with a particular denomination, and they have been, with comparatively few exceptions, managed without any intrusion of political influences. Many of them allow the student a wider choice among subjects of study and leave him in other ways more free to do as he pleases than is the case in any other institutions in the English-speaking world.

Nor is it only that your universities are accessible to all classes. They have achieved what has never been achieved before, — they have led all classes of the. people to believe in the value of university education and wish to attain it. They have made it seem a necessary part of the equipment of every one who can afford the time to take it. In England, and indeed in Europe generally, such an education has been a luxury for the ordinary man, though it may have been reckoned almost a necessity for those who are entering on one of the distinctively "learned professions." But here it is deemed a natural preparation for a business life also; and the proportion of business men who have studied at some university is far larger in the United States than in any other country.

However, it was of your State universities only that I meant to speak, because they are the newest, the most peculiar, and the most interesting product of American educational zeal. They are a remarkable expression of the spirit which has latterly come to pervade this country, that the functions of government may be usefully extended to all sorts of undertakings for the public benefit which it was formerly thought better to leave to private enterprise. The provision of elementary education was indeed long ago assumed by the State, because it was deemed necessary that those who vote as citizens should possess the rudiments of knowledge. But in going on to found and support and manage institutions supplying the higher forms of education at a low or merely nominal charge, you of the American West went further than any other cominunities in the English-speaking world. The same principle has guided several of your States, and this State in particular, in so enlarging the range of university action as to bring it into direct contact with the schools and the people through systems of lectures and correspondence and through the multiform activities of the agricultural department. The greatest asset of a community is the energy and intelligence of its members. Your citizens have the energy and you feel it to be " good business" to develop their native intelligence by the completest education they can desire.

In committing yourselves to this principle you here in the West seem to have returned to that conception of the functions of the State which prevailed in the Greek republics of antiquity, where it was defined as "a partnership of men in the highest social life," and you have abandoned that laissez-faire doctrine generally held seventy years ago which regarded the governing power in a community as established mainly for the purpose of maintaining civil order within and providing for defence against external foes, and held that to go further than this was to weaken or to trammel individual initiative and to interfere with the generally beneficent working of the natural forces that guide social progress. Whether this reversal of policy was needed in order to give energy and independence their fair chance, for, as J. S. Mill observed, it is even more fatal to exertion to have no hope of succeeding by it than to be assured of succeeding without it, and whether the doctrine of Greece and Wisconsin or the doctrine of the physiocrats and Benthamites will prove in the long run to be the best for the stimulation of inventive thought and enterprise and for the general advance of the community, is a question I will not stop to discuss. This at least may be said, that this particular form of State intervention which the new principle has taken in the West has the merit of associating all the citizens in a direct and personal way with the university, making them feel it to be their creation, arousing the liberality of the legislature to it, and giving the whole State an interest in its prosperity and efficiency.

There are, however, two risks incident to popularly managed governmental control of all institutions of teaching and learning, against which it is well to be forewarned. Although neither you nor your sister State universities may have yet encountered them, they may some day threaten you, for popular management is no guarantee against their appearance.

One of these is the possibility that a legislature, or a governing authority appointed by a legislature, may carry politics into academical affairs, as politics have been sometimes carried into those affairs in parts of the European Continent where the university is an organ of the State. Freedom is the life-blood of university teaching. Neither the political opinions of a professor, nor the character of the economic doctrines which he holds and propagates, ought to be a ground for appointing or dismissing him, nor ought he to be any less free to speak and vote as he pleases than any other citizen. And though it is right and fitting that the State should be represented in the governing authority of a university which it supports, experience seems to have proved that both the educational policy and the daily administration and discipline of a university ought as far as possible to be either left in academic hands or entrusted to an authority on which the academic element predominates.

The other risk is one to which in our time most universities are exposed, and State universities perhaps even more than others. The progress of natural science has been so rapid, the results obtained by the application of science to all forms of industry and to many forms of commercial exchange, have been so wonderful, the eagerness of every man to amass wealth and of every nation to outstrip its rivals in commerce and material progress is so keen, that the temptation to favour at the expense of other branches of instruction those branches from which pecuniary gain may be expected has become unusually strong.

It is a temptation felt everywhere, in Europe hardly less than here. We constantly hear men who are ready to spend money freely on the so-called practical branches of study, such as mining, agriculture, and electrical engineering, disparage the study of theoretical science as unprofitable, while they seek to eliminate altogether the so-called "humanistic " subjects, such as philology, history, and philosophy.

This is a grave error. In the physical sciences the discoveries of most practical importance have sprung out of investigations undertaken purely for the sake of knowledge, without any notion of those applications to the industries and arts which were to be their ultimate results. These it would indeed have been impossible to foresee. All we know of electricity, of those chemical effects of light which have led to photography, of those properties of certain rays in the spectrum which have proved capable of being turned to such admirable account in surgery, was discovered in the pursuit of abstract science by men who were not thinking of practice or gain and most of whom gained little except fame from their discoveries. None of them dreamed that the telegraph and the dynamo would issue from their experiments any more than Napier when he invented logarithms, or Newton and Leibnitz when they gave us the differential calculus, were thinking of how much these improved mathematical methods would help the engineer in his calculations. All sound practice must be rooted in sound theory, and the scientific thinking that leads to discovery must begin in the theoretic field. Whatever a nation achieves, whatever a university achieves, is the result of patient observation, close reasoning, and, let me add, of the love of knowledge for its own sake ; for the man who is bent only on finding what is pecuniarily profitable will miss many a path at the end of which there stands the figure of Truth, with all the rewards she has to bestow. Just as any nation which should force its children to narrow their energies to purely gainful aims would soon fall behind its competitors, and see its intellectual life fade and wither, so any university which sacrificed its teaching of the theory of science to the teaching of the practical applications of science would be unworthy of its high calling and would handle even the practical part of its work less effectively. The loss of a high ideal means the loss of aspiration, of faith, of vital force.

In no country are these things better understood than in Germany, to which I refer because she has achieved so much in the extension of her commerce and her industry. No country has been more successful in the application of science to the arts, and in none has the need for a wide foundation of abstract scientific teaching been more fully recognized.

The planting and the development of these State Universities and the hold they have acquired upon the people of the State, are among the most cheering evidences of the wisdom and capacity for good work of your new democracies. They have their defects, but they are filled by the desire to help the common man onward and upward, and to help him in the best way by providing him with the amplest measure of knowledge and mental training so that he may know how to help himself. The peoples of the Western States, most of whom have had no college teaching themselves, show their sense of the worth of learning and culture by the liberality with which they support these institutions and the pride they feel in their prosperity.

These States have made you, the professors and students of their universities, their debtors. How can you repay that debt, and what service can you, some of you as professors remaining here, others as youthful graduates going out into the world, render to your States in return ? In order to answer this question, let me first ask another. What is it that the graduate has received ? What does he carry away with him as the fruit of the days of study here ? What will he remember forty years hence as the best things his university has done for him ? If I may judge of what you will then feel from what I and my own contemporaries feel as we look back, through a vista of more than fifty years, to our happy Oxford days, you will then say that your university bestowed on you two gifts of supereminent value.

One was Friendships. The opportunities for making congenial friendships are ampler in college life than ever afterwards. Besides the familiar intercourse of the class room, and on the campus, and wherever students meet together, the acquiring of knowledge in company is itself a foundation for sympathy. Joint study becomes a bond. To have the same tastes, to enjoy the same books, to work side by side in the laboratory, to help one another in difficulties, to argue out one's differences of opinions, to be inspired by the same ideals and confide them to one another, these are the means by which young men best enter into one another's hearts and hopes, and form ties, which, lasting as long as life itself, may be a source of joy until the end.

The other gift was the delight in Knowledge, a sense of how much there is to be known, of the vast horizon that is ever widening as one goes on learning, of how with each one of us the enlargement of personal knowledge seems only to enlarge the sense of the regions of mystery beyond that horizon. With this delight there goes also a perception of the invaluable help which real knowledge, accurate, thorough, duly arranged and systematized, can render to each man and each community in dealing with the facts of every situation. And with the joy in knowledge there ought to go, and in the minds of all who really enjoy knowledge there will go, the love of Truth. Devotion to truth, loyalty to truth under all temptations, is the intellectual conscience of the man of learning and the man of science; and to create it is the chief aim for the sake of which universities exist. If your university teaching and life have not taught you that, they have left the main thing undone.

Is there then not a way in which you as university men going out into the world can repay to your Alma Mater and to your State the debt you owe them ? We live in an age when difficulties thicken upon us, when, in spite of the dissatisfaction so frequently ex-pressed with the existing methods of government, new work is being constantly thrust upon governments, when the strife of labor and capital and the social unrest that growls and mutters all around us make it at once more necessary to determine what justice requires and harder to persuade any section of the community to recede from its claims. Never was there a more urgent need either for applying every kind of knowledge to the solution of these problems, or for trying to seek the solution in a spirit free from all prejudice or bias. Your university studies have taught you both to realize the worth of thorough and systematized knowledge and to moderate the vehemence of partisanship by a disinterested devotion to truth. Thus you can contribute to the community of which you are citizens three things. One is the spirit of progress, which is hopeful because it is always seeking to better things by knowledge and skill. Another is the spirit of moderation, cautious because it resists the temptations of party passion, or the impulse, often honest enough, to grasp at the first hasty expedient for removing admitted evils without considering whether that may not involve other evils just as great. And the third is the love of truth, which, when it is strong enough, will help a man to overcome the promptings of personal ambition or the baser lures which the power of selfish wealth can offer.

It has sometimes been claimed for the University that it is the mind of the State, or at least the organ which the State may employ to examine and think out the problems the State has to deal with. That may be too large a claim. But I am speaking now not so much of the university as a body of men organized in an institution dedicated to teaching and research but rather of those children of the university who go forth from it into the world, preserving the real academic spirit through the whole of their business or professional careers, furnishing skilled leaders in political and social movements, and forming the public opinion of the whole community by which nation and State, more truly here in America than anywhere else in the world, are led and ruled. Upon these citizens comes with special force the call to translate into reality that noble ideal of an educated democracy, reason-able and just because it is educated, which the people of America have long ago set up for themselves, and towards which, through many obstacles, they are steadily and surely moving.