Universities

American, English, German

Abraham Flexner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000680430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1930. Flexiner's Universities was the big book on higher education when it was first published in 1930 and continued to be such until the appearance of Robert Maynard Hutchins' The Higher Learning in America in 1936. Universities continues to be one of the great books in the field more than sixty years later?but for quite different reasons now than then.

PART I

THE IDEA OF A MODERN UNIVERSITY

I

SEVENTY-FIVE years ago, an eminent Oxonian, Cardinal Newman, published a book entitled The Idea of a University. I have adopted in a modified form the title of that volume. I am undertaking in this chapter to discuss the idea of a modern university. In inserting the word “modern” I am endeavouring to indicate in the most explicit fashion that a university, like all other human institutions — like the church, like governments, like philanthropic organizations — 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 — so I shall assume — an expression of the age, as well as an influence operating upon both present and future. I propose to elaborate this point of view and, as I proceed, to ask myself to what extent and in what ways universities in America, in England, and in Germany have made themselves part of the modern world, where they have failed to do so, where they have made hurtful concessions, and where they are wholesome and creative influences in shaping society towards rational ends.

Quite obviously I am assuming that to some extent, however slight, we are masters of our fate. The modern world is developing under the pressure of forces that reason cannot readily control. Pitted against these forces, our abilities may for the moment seem feeble and ineffectual. But the existence of universities implies there is something, perhaps much, in the past for which it is worth while to fight, to which it is worth while to cling; and that there is something — no one knows how much — which we may ourselves do to mould to our liking the civilization of the future. Man, as Professor Woodbridge has admirably said, “is not content to take nature as he finds her. He insists on making her over.”¹ But the modern world — no matter how new we think it to be — is rooted in a past, which is the soil out of which we grow, a past during which poets and scientists and thinkers and peoples have accumulated treasures of truth, beauty, and knowledge, experience, social, political, and other, which only a wastrel would ignore. On the other hand, science, democracy, and other forces steadily increasing in intensity are creating a different world of which universities must take account.

II

Universities differ in different countries; if, as Lord Haldane says, “it is in universities that … the soul of a people mirrors itself,”² then it would be absurd to expect them to conform to a single pattern. Moreover, as a matter of history, they have changed profoundly — and commonly in the direction of the social evolution of which they are part. The Paris of 1900 has little in common with the Paris of 1700; the Oxford of the twentieth century, externally so largely the same, is nevertheless a very different thing from the Oxford of the eighteenth century; Althoff’s Berlin is not Wilhelm von Humboldt’s, though they are separated by hardly a hundred years; very different indeed is the Harvard, of which Mr. Eliot became president in 1869, from the Harvard which he left on his retirement in 1909. Historians have traced certain aspects of this evolution in detail; and nothing in their stories is more striking than the adjustments — sometimes slow and unconscious, sometimes deliberate and violent — made in the course of centuries by institutions usually regarded as conservative, frequently even as the stronghold of reaction. I say then that universities have in most countries changed; but have they latterly changed profoundly enough, or have they been so intelligently modified as to be the effective and formative agencies which are needed in a society that is driven it knows not whither by forces of unprecedented strength and violence? An American sociologist has invented the term “social lag.” Institutions as such tend for quite obvious reasons to lag behind the life which they express and further. To what extent are the universities of America, England, and Germany hampered by “social lag”?

III

There is danger at precisely the opposite end of the line. I have spoken of the intelligent modification of universities — of their modification in the light of needs, facts, and ideals. But a university should not be a weather vane, responsive to every variation of popular whim. Universities must at times give society, not what society wants, but what it needs. Inertia and resistance have their uses, provided they be based on reasonable analysis, on a sense of values, not on mere habit. In response to the criticism that universities lag, instances in plenty can — and will — be given by way of showing that universities are up to date or even ahead of the times. But the two characteristics are not mutually exclusive. Universities are complex and organic institutions: their arms may be sound, while both legs may be broken. They may lag fundamentally, even while superficially catering to whim or fashion; they may lag fundamentally at the very moment when at this or that point they are as expert as newspapers and politicians in catching the current breeze. A proper amount of critical resistance, based on a sense of values, would — as we shall see — save them from absurd, almost disastrous blunders.

IV

Of all this, more hereafter. In the present chapter, I shall not discuss universities, but merely the idea of a university, and I am going to procure a free field for speculation by assuming the impossible and, indeed, the undesirable; suppose we could smash our existing universities to bits, suppose we could remake them to conform to our heart’s desire, what sort of institution should we set up? We should not form them all alike — English, French, American, German. But, whatever allowances we might make for national tradition or temperament, we should see to it somehow that in appropriate ways scholars and scientists would be conscious of four major concerns: the conservation of knowledge and ideas; the interpretation of knowledge and ideas; the search for truth; the training of students who will practise and “carry on.” I say, to repeat, “the major concerns” of scholar and scientist. Of course, education has other and important concerns. But I wish to make it plain at the outset that the university is only one of many educational enterprises. It has, in the general educational scheme, certain specific functions. Other agencies discharge or should discharge other functions. We shall see whether universities now discern and discharge their special functions or whether they meddle with functions which do not constitute their proper business.

The conservation of knowledge and ideas is and has always been recognized as the business of universities, sometimes, perhaps, as almost their only business, occasionally, even today, as too largely their business. In any event, universities have always taken this to be one of their functions; and however universities may change, no reconstruction will or should deprive them of it. But one should add this: conservation and interpretation are one thing in institutions that are concerned with merely or chiefly that; they are a different thing in a university where fresh streams of thought are constantly playing upon the preserved treasures of mankind.

Original thinkers and investigators do not therefore represent the only type of university professor. They will always be the distinguished figures; theirs will usually be the most profound and far-reaching influence. But even universities, modern universities, need and use men of different stamp — teachers whose own contributions to learning are of less importance than their influence in stimulating students or their resourcefulness in bringing together the researches of others. Michael Foster was not the less a great university professor, though he was not himself a great original thinker: in subtle ways that defy expression, he created the great Cambridge school of physiology. So, too, Paulsen was not the less a great university professor, though he was not himself a great original thinker, but rather a broad and profound scholar of sound judgment and beautiful spirit who helped hundreds, struggling with the perplexities of life and thought, to find themselves. But, be it noted, both did this not for boys, but for mature students, under conditions that threw upon them responsibility for efforts and results. And this is a university criterion of first-rate importance. The university professor has an entirely objective responsibility — a responsibility to learning, to his subject, and not a psychological or parental responsibility for his students. No fear that he will in consequence be dehumanized. What could be more charming, more intimate, more personal, more coöperative than the relations between the great continental masters and their disciples during the best part of the nineteenth century?

It is, however, creative activity, productive and critical inquiry — all in a sense without practical responsibility — that must bulk ever larger and larger in the modern university. Conservation continues to be not only important, but essential alike to education and to research; but, as other educational agencies improve and as our difficulties thicken, it is destined, I think, to become incidental to the extension of knowledge, to training at a high level, and to a critical attempt to set a value upon the doings of men.

Of the overwhelming and increasing importance of the study and solution of problems or the advancement of knowledge — they are interchangeable phrases — one can readily convince one’s self, no matter where one looks. Let us consider for a moment the social and political situation within which we live, and I take this realm first, because it is the realm in which universities are doing least, the realm which is most difficult and dangerous to approach, the realm which is for these reasons perhaps the most important to master. Democracy has dragged in its wake social, economic, educational, and political problems infinitely more perplexing than the relatively simple problems which its credulous crusaders undertook to solve. Society cannot retreat; whatever may happen sporadically or temporarily in Italy or Spain, we shall in the end probably fare better, if the adaptations and inventions requisite to making a success of democracy are facilitated. But adaptations in what ways? Statesmen must invent — not statesmen, fumbling in the dark or living on phrases, but statesmen equipped by disinterested students of society with the knowledge needed for courageous and intelligent action. Now the postulates, ideas, terminology, phraseology, which started the modern world on new paths, have become more or less obsolete, partly through their own success, partly through changes due to science and the industrial revolution. To be sure, men have always acted blindly, ignorantly; but for the time being at least, the chasm between action, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other, is widening rather than contracting. Practice cannot be slowed down or halted; intelligence must, however, be accelerated.

This contention could be equally well illustrated by Germany, France, England, or the United States. What has happened in the United States? There was between 1776 and 1790 a revolution based upon a simple philosophy. Time, even a brief century, brought changes; but the philosophy had meanwhile crystallized. A thin rural population living on the seaboard had increased beyond a hundred millions spread over an empire; steam and electricity had transferred importance from agriculture to industry; huge cities had grown up; enormous discrepancies of wealth had been created. But the documentary basis of government and society remains essentially the same. We find ourselves therefore now enmeshed in a phraseology that is discordant with the facts. The phraseology tends to hold things fixed; but readjustments have somehow to be effected. Publicists and jurists have therefore been forced to make inherited formulae mean something that they do not mean and could not have meant. The easy and effective reconceiving and rewording of theory and ideas are thus gravely hampered. Somewhere, away from the hurly-burly of practical responsibility and action, the social and political problems involved in these discords must be exposed. The “great society” must and wants to understand itself — partly as a matter of sheer curiosity, partly because human beings are in a muddle and cannot get out unless they know more than they now know. Towards fundamental knowing the newspaper cannot help much; men of action — politicians and business men — help but slightly. They themselves know too little; they are not disinterestedly concerned with finding out; they have usually their own axes to grind. Almost the only available agency is the university. The university must shelter and develop thinkers, experimenters, inventors, teachers, and students, who, without responsibility for action, will explore the phenomena of social life and endeavour to understand them.

I do not mean to say that this is altogether a novelty. Great scholars have in all countries in fragments of time snatched from routine duties made important contributions to political and economic thought: “in fragments of time snatched from routine duties” — from administrative burdens, from secondary instruction, from distracting tasks undertaken to piece out a livelihood. But though individuals differ in their requirements, no university in any country has made really adequate provision or offered really adequate opportunity and encouragement. I have not in mind the training of practical men, who, faced with responsibility for action, will do the best they can. That is not the task of the university. Between the student of political and social problems and the journalist, industrialist, merchant, viceroy, member of Parliament or Congress, there is a gap which the university cannot fill, which society must fill in some other way. Perhaps no outright educational institution should be expected to fill it; educated men can be allowed to do some things for themselves — though, at the moment, we appear to be under a different impression.

One may go further: a study of mediaeval charters, of the financing of the Napoleonic Wars, of the rise of Prussia, of the origins of local government in the American Colonies, of the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, or Hobbes — these topics — just slightly musty — would be generally regarded as appropriately academic, for they may be investigated in a library. But is it equally good form — academically speaking — to study Mr. Keynes rather than Ricardo, the war debts with which successive commissions have wrestled rather than the repudiated state debts which most Americans quite wrongly prefer to regard as possessing merely historic interests, the present-day consequences of the industrial revolution rather than its early evolution? A field expedition to unearth an Assyrian palace is admittedly a proper undertaking for university professors; but should coal strikes, Indian unrest, rubber, oil, and American lynchings be for the present mainly left to journalists, travellers, and politicians? Do they become proper subjects of academic interest only when they approach the post-mortem stage? Quite the contrary: with all the difficulties arising from contemporaneousness, the task of the scientist, dealing with present social phenomena, is probably easier than that of the Hellenist or mediaevalist, intent upon reconstructing the past. “Think of the happiness of the scholar if he could see a Greek republic or a Roman colony actually living under his own eyes — granted that he recover from the havoc of some of his best established delusions!”³

I have said that data of one kind or another are not so difficult to obtain. But generalization is another matter. The social scientist may resent the premature generalizations of his predecessors. He will himself not get very far unless he himself tentatively generalizes; unless, in a word, he has ideas as well as data. Essays and investigations may be piled mountain high; they will never by themselves constitute a science or a philosophy of economics, psychology, or society. The two processes — the making of hypotheses and the gathering of data — must go on together, reacting upon each other. For in the social sciences as elsewhere generalization is at once a test of and a stimulus to minute and realistic research. The generalizations will not endure; why should they? They have not endured in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. But, then, neither have the data. Science, social or other, is a structure: “a series of judgments, revised without ceasing, goes to make up the incontestable progress of science. We must believe in this progress, but we must never accord more than a limited amount of confidence to the forms in which it is successively vested.”⁴

The task, then, of finding a basis and providing a methodology for the social sciences, is today more pressing than it has ever been because of the accelerated rate of social change and the relatively more rapid progress in the physical and biological sciences: “The events of 1914–1918, to quote a single example, showed that the statesmen, the social scientists, the moral and religious teachers of Europe, to whom belonged, as their main duty, the preservation of peace, failed utterly; the directors and inventors of the physical sciences had assigned to them as their main duty the killing of as many of the national enemies as possible, and they succeeded magnificently. Twenty years hence the same situation may recur; and unless the two disciplines concerned can meanwhile come to an understanding, half the population and all the accumulated wealth of Europe may be destroyed with even more complete efficiency.”⁵

As long as evolution proceeded slowly over centuries, men could feel their way and make adjustments imperceptibly on an empirical basis. But the restraints which for centuries slowed down or limited adjustments have been largely removed. Societies have to act — intelligently, if possible — if not, then unintelligently, blindly, selfishly, impulsively. The weight and prestige of the university must be thrown on the side of intelligence. If the university does not accept this challenge, what other institution can or will? In this present-day world, compounded of tradition, good and bad, racial mixtures, nationalistic and internationalistic strivings, business interests, physical forces of incredible power for good or ill, emancipated workers and peasants, restless Orientals, noisy cities, conflicting philosophies — in this world rocking beneath and around us, where is theory to be worked out, where are social and economic problems to be analysed, where are theory and facts to be brought face to face, where is the truth, welcome or unwelcome, to be told, where are men to be trained to ascertain and to tell it, where, in whatever measure it is possible, is conscious, deliberate, and irresponsible...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Part I: The Idea of a Modern University
• Part II: American Universities
• Part III: English Universities
• Part IV: German Universities