Johns Hopkins University - Hullabaloo Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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ical admirers may not have known of him as a Sanskritist, and it seems that the fewest of the thousands who are familiar with the name of the Ilellenist, XYilhelm Dindorf, have ever thought of him as a railroad man. And instances might be multiplied indefinitely to show that the breed of Admirable Crichtons is not extinct. Iiut on the whole, for the progress of education, for the advance of science, it is better that the professor should be a professional man, and should have received a training with special reference to his calling in life and, to this distinct recognition of the professorship as a career, we Hopkinsians think that our University has made a decided contribution, though, as individuals, we must always endeavor to widen our sympathies and strive to apprehend something of the great movement of the world outside of our special lines of work. The title of my paper calls for professorial types and may lead some reader to expect that I am going to treat my subject in a scientific manner, either after the approved evolutionary fashion or after the pattern of Aristotle or Tlieophrastus. I might take up the professor when he first makes his appear- ance on the stage of society under the name of Sophist and bring him down through a formidable array of successive differentiations and integrations to the present complex organism of professorial life. I might point out that every- thing that was to come lay implicit in that first sophist cell, that the very name bears the professional stamp, that the wisdom which those early teachers possessed and imparted was professorial wisdom. I might show how these first professors evolved other professors, whom I do not like to contemplate, the sophists of a later day, those gentlemen of the Greek Renaissance of the second century after Christ, whose lives were spent not so much in the pursuit of science as in the pursuit of sound, who were forever stirring up the gift of speech that was in them, who spent their days and nights in making extem- poraneous discourses about everything and nothing, in manufacturing similes and similitudes which were sent around to admiring friends, and in fabricating witticisms which were ill-natured when they were not silly. Some of their professorial jokes still survive in college circles, and the traits of these old- world professors are so persistent that I am not especially fond of my tar distant colleagues, for these superficial likenesses are extremely disagreeable. Iiut if the professor of the present day is plagued with the parallelism, let him forth- age

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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

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with introduce the seminary method so much employed in our I'niversity. This method puts the student, for the time being, in the place of the professor and re- veals to him the difficulties of the situation and its remorseless requirements, so that he who groaned over the profes:,or's dry and tedious disquisitions and point- less jokes, finds, in his turn, that his erudition is not so interesting to others as it is to himself, and that the genuine wit, with which he enlivens his discourse, is not always appreciated. But the evolutionary method would require too much space, as is manifest from the specimen already given, nor do I intend to turn traitor to my own guild and show it up, after the manner of Ar1stotle's Rhetoric and Theo- phrastus' Characters. I am not going to tell you that a professor is a man who is capable ot' doing this absurdity and that absurdity. I am not going to lend a handle to the undergraduates, most of whom will never be professors, and what is left of the space I have promised to till up for the I-Iopkinsian' will be occupied by some slight sketches of some of my own university teachers. They are all in the Elysian fields, and their shades will not object to the use I shall make of their earthly lives. As I think over the chief of them, I recognize the fact that, despite the diversity of human character, the great professional lines are clearly manifest, and while it may not be expedient to divide professors into sheep and goats, or to sort them as styles were sorted by the ancient rhetoricians into three classes, which might be translated by a stretch into the pompous, the dry and the mediocre, still, I fancy that the professors I knew represented fairly the varieties of the species and may serve as a manner of bnrlnx szrfzzx for further study. I was a boy of nineteen when I entered the I'niversity ot Berlin. Of my special preparation for philological work the less said the better. II arf fizvfrzuf F1 fflllffi said the French mother as she urged the claims of her son on the head of the bureau. lf ravi jrrvprr 5 f0llf,' if llitl I'I't'll tIj5fJI'I..8'.U But I had German enough to understand the lectures, and that was something. My first professor was the illustrious Boeckh. He was then sixty-five years old, and the yellow pages from which he read his lectures seemed to be almost as old as the lecturer. There was no attempt at oratory. He sat quietly in his chair, put his nose into his manuscript, fished out what he wanted to say and then said it deliberately, looking out screnely towards l'nter den Linden, 14