IV
To all this there is the ready objection of the schoolmasters
and utilitarians that such a project is fantastic and
unpractical, useless and undesirable; that such has not been the
mission of the university in the past, nor its accepted place and
use in the educational system of today and yesterday,. that the
universities of Christendom have from their first foundation been
occupied with professional training and useful knowledge; that
they have been founded for utilitarian purposes and their work
has been guided mainly or altogether by utilitarian
considerations; -- all of which is conceded without argument. The
historical argument amounts to saying that the universities were
founded before modern civilization took on its modern character, before the disinterested pursuit of knowledge had come to take the first place among the ideals of civilized mankind, and that they were established to take care of those interests which were then accounted of first importance, and that this intellectual enterprise in pursuit of disinterested knowledge consequently was not at that time confided to the care of any special establishment or freely avowed as a legitimate interest in its own right.
It is true that, by historical accident, the university at
large has grown out of professional training-schools, primarily
schools for training in theology, secondarily in law and
medicine. It is also true, in like wise and in like degree, that
modern science and scholarship have grown out of the technology
of handicraft and the theological philosophy of the
schoolmen.(7*) But just as it would be a bootless enterprise to
cut modern science back into handicraft technology, so would it
be a gratuitous imbecility to prune back the modern university to
that inchoate phase of its life-history and make it again a
corporation for the training of theologians, jurists and doctors
of medicine. The historical argument does not enjoin a return to
the beginning of things, but rather an intelligent appreciation
of what things are coming to.
The genesis of the university at large, taken as an
institution of civilized life, is an incident of the transition
from the barbarian culture of the middle ages to modern times, and its later growth and acquirement of character is an incident of the further growth of modern civilization; and the character of this later growth of the university reflects the bent of modern civilization, as contrasted with the barbarian spirit of things in the mediaeval spiritual world.
In a general way, the place of the university in the culture
of Christendom is still substantially the same as it has been
from the beginning. Ideally, and in the popular apprehension, it
is, as it has always been, a corporation for the cultivation and
care of the community's highest aspirations and ideals. But these
ideals and aspirations have changed somewhat with the changing
scheme of the Western civilization; and so the university has
also concomitantly so changed in character, aims and ideals as to
leave it still the corporate organ of the community's dominant
intellectual interest. At the same time, it is true, these
changes in the purpose and spirit of the university have always
been, and are always being, made only tardily, reluctantly, concessively, against the protests of those who are zealous for the commonplaces of the day before yesterday. Such is the character of institutional growth and change; and in its adaptation to the altered requirements of an altered scheme of culture the university has in this matter been subject to the conditions of institutional growth at large. An institution is, after all, a prevalent habit of thought, and as such it is subject to the conditions and limitations that surround any change in the habitual frame of mind prevalent in the community.