Johns Hopkins University - Hullabaloo Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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Professorial Types. HOSIC of us who, for one reason or another, were especially interested in the establishment of the johns I-Iopkins University, may lie pardoned for considering the year T876 a memorable year in the history of higher education in America, may be pardoned for thinking, and even for saying, that the centenary of the Declaration of Independence witnessed a second Declaration of Indepen- dence-Independence of the tyrannous Use and XVont that kept, and still keeps, so many of the higher schools of our country bound. The motto of our University, The truth shall make you free, at once a prophecy and a commandment, is a sentence that can never be pondered too muchg but it must be remembered that if it is the truth that makes us free, it is freedom that opens the way to truth, and it was this freedom proclaimed in 1576 that produced the thrill of life that we can never forget, that the educational world of America has continued to feel. But, though this annual bears the name Hopkinsian, and the writers for the I-Iopkinsian may be allowed to say all manner of patriotic things about Hopkinsian achievements, still we must not claim everything, and it may be as well to admit gracefully that much of what we have wrought had been in preparation for a long time. Our song ot victory, like one of Pindar's noblest odes, must be a glorilication of opportunity. The fullness of time had come and the season was ours. In any case, whether it be opportunity, whether it be coincidence, there is no question that in the period of time that has elapsed since 1876 many features, either wholly new or else only lore-shadowed in former days, have entered permanently into the aspect of university life, and one of them, and not the least important, is the protes- sionalism of the professorship, XVithin a comparatively recent period there was no such thing in this country as training for a college or university profes- sorship. Training schools tor teachers are no novelty, but that a young man should deliberately select a professorship as a career in life would have been II

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PROFESSOR BASIL L. GILDERSLEEVE

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considered, say forty years ago, as savoring of presumption, Professors were made, it is true, and not always ill made, and the roll of the earlier gener- ations of professors is not unillumined by distinguished names, but there was a mystery about the matter, akin to that which hangs about predestination, a mystery that no longer exists and is nowadays hardly comprehensible. If a young graduate ot my day had proclaimed his intention to lit himself for a professorship, he would have exposed himself to ridicule for his uppishness, and the only wise course for such an one was to flee the country and seek refuge in lands where such an aspiration was not considered absurd. And yet those who sat in the seat of the scornful had no very exalted opinion of the professor. Une might readily aspire to be a tutor, and the tutorship often led to a prolessorship, but the tutorship was not an especially dignified ollice, and the tutor was as often as not selected for general availability rather than for special attainments. It is almost incredible in these days of specialization how, even in the larger colleges, the tutors and, for that matter, the professors, were shifted from department to department. Imagine a professor of Greek address- ing his class somewhat after this fashion: Yovxcs f.iEN'l'I-EBlEN. Do not neglect your Greek after you leave college. I was for several years tutor in mathematics and hoped to become a professor of mathematics. But I kept up my Greek. Morning and night I read my chapter in the Greek Testament. The professorship of Greek unexpectedly fell vacant. And there I was, ready for the place. Young gentlemen, keep up your Greek. And now, in continuation of our course, I will ask you to listen to the names of the principal Greek cyclic poets. You will probably never hear them again. I do not mean by this to cast aspersions on the all-round men and to glorify the specialists. The limitation of the specialist has its drawbacks, and every lnan should, if possible, have an avocation as well as a vocation. There is no harm, but much profit, in being a many-sided scholar, it is only your polygonal sciolist that is a nuisance. And yet, so separate are the departments now, that it often happens that men lead double intellectual lives unknown to their neighbors, and only death reveals that two Muses are in mourning for the same scholar. Certainly it was not until Churchill Babington died that I lound out that he was a botanist and a conchologist. t1rassmann's mathemat- I2