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Overview
Originally published in 1969.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691621531 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #2047 |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Human Nature of a University
By Robert F. Goheen
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1969 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09348-2
CHAPTER 1
OUT OF TENSIONS, PROGRESS
Universities are increasingly in the news today, not only because of student unrest and enlarging campus populations, but also because the role of universities as centers of teaching and research has been getting more pervasive and more critical in myriad aspects of our national life. In Washington and in the state capitals, in city offices, on farms, and in homes, people find reason to give heed to the once-sequestered halls of higher learning.
Ironically, as more attention is paid and more people are involved, there seems to be less understanding of what a university is, other than simply a training ground. Everyone apparently has a pretty clear idea of what a hospital is for and how it works, or a law court, or a school; but despite the torrents of printed words about universities these days, there seems to me to be a vast amount of misunderstanding about them. And along with this misunderstanding, there is questioning — often with the wrong questions being asked — and there is distrust.
The purpose of this volume is to try to shed some light on certain essential aspects of the university, generically viewed. The objective is not to set down guidelines for the handling of protesting students, or for dealing with disaffected faculty members, or troublesome trustees, or even political figures who nowadays, increasingly, show an inclination to tell the university how to conduct its affairs. I would hope, though, that light shed on the university's basic nature might help to illuminate these and other problem areas.
In many ways, a university is a loose and peculiar association of persons, assembled for the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Misunderstanding grows at least in part out of the tendency so many of us have to see others only as stereotypes — even in a day of instant and wide communications. Thus we hear pronouncements about university faculties as if they walked in lock-step and could be uniformly labeled. It has been my observation that if you gather a hundred professors together, you have a hundred individualists. Professors may kick — often do — but seldom with uni-soned precision.
Another stereotype is applied to college students — as if over six million young men and women engaged in higher education in this country could be categorized simply! I have known a good many of them and I see few signs of a common stamp.
Then there is the alumnus. If anyone harbors the notion that the alumni of any university form a solid, homogenized phalanx of nostalgic, reactionary old grads, let him read my mail for a week. As for trustees, I can only say that if those of my own university are a fair example, they are certainly no clutch of corporate tycoons, as the stereotype would have them. From physicians to scientists, to clergymen, to lawyers, to publishers, to educators — as well as to bankers and businessmen — the trustees I have seen at Princeton and elsewhere tend to be a cross-section of the leadership in American life. As such, they rarely agree unanimously — as I well know. What they do have in common is considerable experience beyond the university and a willingness to give to her generously of their time and effort, without reward and with little recognition.
As the constituent groups within a university embrace human differences and individualities, so do universities themselves vary widely — in the base of their support, in the range of their activities, and in the way they are organized. From their beginnings in the western world, the universities have persistently resisted pressures to uniformity.
In this country, some are public, some are private, some are a bit of both; some are large, some small; some are church-related, some not; some are confined to one campus, some spread out to many. Universities also differ in the range of their efforts. Some extend themselves widely in programs of direct service for community and state; others tend to stick closely to the traditional business of instruction and scholarship.
Finally, universities are variously organized. One can point to the oligarchic self-governance enjoyed by the professors in European universities, or to monarchical presidencies that appeared in certain late nineteenth-century American institutions, or to the many forms of academic organization to be found on today's campuses — none quite like the other. Whether one sees the presidency or the faculty as weak or strong, the governing board as involved or remote, the decision-making as more, or less, democratically based — seems to depend mainly upon what institution one is looking at and at what time.
Today it is clear that there is a marked desire among many students and many faculty members to have an effective role in the direction of their universities. And what is more important, they seem willing — in principle, at least — to devote time and effort to it. This was not always so, and may not be again. As long as faculty and students are inclined to effective participation, it is in everyone's best interest, I believe, to draw on what they can contribute. For when decisions are discussed widely and hammered out jointly among the principal parties of interest, they tend to be sounder institutional decisions, and the additional time and effort required to achieve them that way is usually justified by the wider, readier acceptance they are likely to find.
None of this is to suggest that a university can be run on the principle of one man, one vote. As I shall say repeatedly in this volume, the university's main objective is the advancement of learning and of thought — not its own governance or any other activity. It is not a political entity and not intended to be one. Nevertheless, in my view, if the procedures for student as well as faculty participation are soundly conceived, if responsibility is seriously assumed, and if everyone concerned will work together for the common good with forebearance and mutual respect, the power and authority of the university can be widely and effectively shared.
Yet in this as in most matters, universities may differ greatly. Why should they not?
But if universities are first of all associations of human beings, diverse and variously organized, they nevertheless have significant things in common. All are basically concerned with the advancement of learning. All seek to carry on their proper work in an atmosphere of freedom: freedom to pursue the truth wherever it leads, and to talk about it. All are optimistic enterprises, presupposing that man's lot on earth may be improved, albeit slowly, bit by bit. They share, besides, many of the attributes of the human creature. Thus, they are sites of both reason and emotion. They are complex, changeable, but also resistant to change. At their best, they are laudable; at their worst, disappointing; most of the time, both of these at once.
Such is the nature of a university — its human nature. I once saw an abandoned college campus. The broken windows, crumbling brick, cobwebs, and caved-in roofs expressed more eloquently than many words the simple truth that an educational institution does not essentially consist of walls and ivy, but of the human beings who make it up. And just as that which most distinguishes human from other vocal and gregarious forms of life is man's capacity for reasoned thought, so, I submit, a basic commitment to the life if the mind most properly marks the university. It does not seek victories; it does not work for profits; its production is not measurable. Its truest goals are not precise targets, but high ideals — the enrichment of the minds and lives of its students, the advancement of knowledge, the increase of understanding among men, and the unending search for truth.
Obviously, in this imperfect world the loftiness and Tightness of a university's aims do not guarantee harmony or insure against disintegration. Much depends upon a subtle, hard-to-define set of human relationships within it, organic filaments of mutual trust and at least minimal friendliness. These are easily broken. When emotion gets astride of reason, when invective displaces argument, when suspicion erodes trust, then the filaments may snap and the university may fall into pieces — into hostile cliques. Or, disturbed by too much discord on campus, outsiders may invite themselves in to "straighten things out" — with results that can only be injurious.
I do not suggest for a moment that there should be no disagreements, no strong feelings, no righteous indignation. Teaching and research do not preclude passion or emotion. On the contrary, scholarly inquiry is often prompted by passion, and scholarly research often helps to clarify men's deepest convictions and make them effective. At the same time, thoughtful examination and reasoned argument must be defended in the university against all who would substitute force and coercive types of protest, or else the university loses its prime function. There may be causes worth shattering a campus for, but when it happens, a very high price is paid.
Like a human being, a university can suffer bruises, be pushed around and temporarily damaged, while yet preserving its basic strength and capacities. Like a human being, it can learn from experience and is adaptable — more adaptable than some would have us believe. But like a human being also, it can suffer irreparable wounds. It can be crippled or even destroyed when attacks are pressed too far against its fundamental nature, which is to be a site and stimulus for the free-ranging, uninhibited, judicious, impartial action of the mind.
As a one-time classicist I am naturally inclined in viewing the university to take my starting point in the distant past. Frequently in recent years my thoughts have been drawn back there — in particular to two of the pre-Socratic philosophers, both men of the early fifth century before Christ.
One was Parmenides of Elea in southern Italy. Perhaps because conditions in the western Greek world of his time were relatively stable, but for other reasons too, Parmenides centered his attention on the permanence of things — or, better, the permanence within things. He banished, as matters of illusion and unsteady opinion (doksa), the flux and uncertainties of experience, the transitoriness of events. Against them he set a vision of the real as something without beginning or end, single, constant, motionless, final, complete. All the diversity of nature and of history exist, he said, only "in name"; reason leads us not to them, but to a steady, unchanging world order.
At the other extremity of the Greek world, where the westward thrust of the Persian Empire was being felt, a slightly older contemporary of Parmenides was meantime expounding a very different view of the world and of life. He was Heraclitus of Ephesus. For him movement, tension, and strain were fundamental; "everything comes about by strife and necessity"; "all is flux, nothing is stationary"; the universe is an unending conflict of opposites.
Heraclitus' favorite images were the bow and the lyre. The tension of the bow, the strain put on its opposite ends, gives the arrow force to carry firmly to a mark. In the playing of a lyre, harmony results only where there is contrast — when there is interplay among tones at variance with one another.
Need we ask ourselves which of these men speaks to us today in terms that strike home? Surely it is Heraclitus. A large array of compelling and competing demands bears on every American university to force historic choices. Almost everywhere we look we encounter forces making for change and strain, and this is no less true in the supposedly tranquil halls of higher learning than in the multitudinous, shifting, shrinking world of human affairs. For the American university of today is very much a part of these affairs both at home and abroad, and increasingly it is subject to heightened and to spreading calls for service — and for change — from the society and the world of which it is a part.
In some this situation evokes dismay; and in most of us no doubt the wish for a calm, stable ordering of things runs strongly. Nevertheless, what we should see plainly is that, within the strains and tensions that confront and involve us, there lies the hope of progress, with great potential benefits to the nation and to mankind. Indeed, as they bend their efforts to respond with vigor and with purpose, our institutions of higher education are likely, I believe, to drive to higher levels of beneficial accomplishment than ever before.
In the pages that follow I shall talk of the modern university in terms of some of the internal tensions that give it dynamism, using the word tension in a Heraclitean sense: meaning a cross-pull not of a good thing against an evil thing but, most often, between competing goods.
The tensions dealt with here are only a few of those that exist. I have chosen them because they are the ones I have felt most keenly myself and about which I hope I may have something generally applicable to say. I have omitted some important ones, such as University & Community, because, although I have had experience with them, I do not feel that such expertise as I may have gained is exportable. (Universities and their communities vary too widely for generalizations on that subject to be very helpful.) Others such as Age & Youth or Faculty & Students I have omitted because they are too large to be dealt with profitably in a small book. Science & the Humanities — "the two cultures" — has already had at least an adequate airing. Quantity & Quality — the pull toward improved education and the counter-pull toward making education available to many more students — is surely one of the most wrenching tensions of our time. This entire book bears upon that one by suggesting — under each of the tensions — what the word "quality" means in higher education.
The book contains, I fear, inevitably, a certain amount of restatement and overlapping, since some principles apply to more than one tension. And some of what I have said under Conservation & Innovation might, for example, have gone under Detachment & Involvement — which might instead have been called The Long View & Relevance. No claim is made for perfection in the packaging. Nor do I claim to have shed all possible light on the few tensions about which I have chosen to write. I offer this book primarily as a way of looking at the university, and at other human institutions: at ourselves, for that matter, though Dr. Freud is well ahead of me in suggesting that human beings who refuse or fail to recognize and deal with their inner conflicts may lose requisite balance and direction, and become ineffectual.
Insofar as its nature is human, the university seems to me to have that same unhappy option.
CHAPTER 2DETACHMENT & INVOLVEMENT
Few of the tensions facing universities today are new ones. What is new is the intensity of the pressures they exert. An example is the cross-pull between the university's need to be detached from the world's turmoil and immediate demands, in order to concentrate on developing manpower and ideas for the future; and at the other end of the bow, the university's need to become involved, to be "relevant," to contribute what it can (and this can be a great deal) to the solution of immediate problems. This cross-pull is greater today than ever before because our society has an unprecedented number of complex immediate problems; and yet anyone with imagination can see both that their roots run deep and that today's problems are simple compared to tomorrow's.
Clearly, most choices between the university's detachment and its involvement in immediate problems have to be made on a case-by-case basis. What I have to say on the point is so general, so elementary, that I hesitate to express it. I do so only because I have found in my years as a university president that one is helped in making even the most complex decisions by referring back to basic principles.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Human Nature of a University by Robert F. Goheen. Copyright © 1969 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Foreword, pg. vii
- Contents, pg. ix
- 1. Out of Tensions, Progress, pg. 1
- 2. Detachment & Involvement, pg. 19
- 3. Conservation & Innovation, pg. 49
- 4. Teaching & Research, pg. 77
- 5. Mind & Spirit, pg. 93