Northwestern University - Syllabus Yearbook (Evanston, IL)

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where, supposedly, you are to improve not only your mind, but also your soul and your character through contact with other great thought and art. Man as a whole, I think we see that now, seems to have failed. There ' s nothing but hatred and pettiness and conceit on this planet. Every nation, no matter how small, is still convinced that they are somehow superior, that they have an axe to grind; and the impression one has looking at world politics today is that you look at a kindergarten full of brats. Ideal situations very often require ideal teachers and ideal students. Learning as a painless process never has existed. The young herdsman who had to fight off lions had to work hours and hours throwing spears at anything that moved in the wind. And there is too much of a desire for Nirvana; for laxity, for getting things a joyful way. Life simply does not work like that. Nothing in life can be acquired by just sitting there. Not even love. Love is something you have to work at, too. Many people make such a mess of love — they don ' t work at it. This is very danger- ous in our day. There is the flaw, still left from the past, of too much discipline, of too much authori- tarian yelling at people, and uniformity. But the other danger is just as great. And as always, the answer is a creative synthesis. Dissatisfaction of students will always be here, because particularly in teaching, the personality must come through. I could well imagine that a professor of medicine could teach a specialty of the nervous system, and be himself an unfair, unjust, un- pleasant man — Yet an excellent scholar in his field, and he may also have pedagogical skill. In the humanities, it won ' t do. Personality is just as important as what the man teaches; in teaching liter- ature, and in teaching art, that stands out so distinctly. You cannot do that as a trade. It has to be a man ' s life work, he has to love it himself, and very often you don ' t have those men — you don ' t have them all the time. So you couldn ' t have a university if you only want to have excellent teachers. But, never- theless, students will only accept excellent teachers.

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THE TRAGICAL H I S TORIE OF THE DAMNABLE LIFE, AND DESEf VED DEATH OF DOCTOR. Based Tnosl loosely on the pJay ty tKe Eng lishriiin Chn MAJHOV JS Newkr prodvced,anJ in conuctiieni places, amiably amended and extended bvIVof MENO SPANN Dr of German Letterj anJ Puppet- PK.jMced ty spATvjv ' s ?vrpBT TumrRE F»»k H lljNortliwertern University, s.+vrday S«„day, ;Vfy . iJ, 9 y ,t 8 o ' cJockP «. Price of Admission: Soul Meno Spann Retired Professor of German The purpose of all education is to develop human potential; and that is the essence of all humanism. Human potential is not only the acquisition of a tremendous amount of information, or only the sharpening of one ' s logical powers. It is also the dev- elopment of one ' s character qualities. If it is possible at all, a man has to combine his intelligence with a certain concern for men, for his fellow men as such. And that ' s very difficult to do. The big question about building character is of course whether education can make better men. It can definitely make better minds. But whether one can educate better men, is questionable. I think that what one needs is examples. Today the fault is always given to some institution. When the revolution comes, all that will change ; as if somewhere there were a human god, a human elite, that could pull mankind out of the mud in which it is stuck right now — definitely stuck. I think it depends on the human beings, and not so much on the institutions. Moreover, the history of revolutions has taught us that you usually exchange another tyrant for the one you had. And, in the end, mankind suffers again. So, I ' m afraid that the university cannot do what the civilization does not do. If civili- zation is sick, the university will be sick, and the young revolutionaries will also be sick. That cannot be helped. To become a Homo Homonio — that means a man who has better developed his human potential within him — this, I think, is a grand idea; and is of course the core of the university. The university is not so much a professional school; it is that too, of course — you learn to become an engineer or a doctor — but it is, at its core, still a humanist institution. That means a place where humanities are taught; a place

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There is such an unwarranted, such a pathetic belief in education. Yet everyone knows that thousands leave our colleges no brighter and very little better informed than when they entered. Teaching, at the best, is merely an adjunct to learning. And most scholarship — at least in the humanities — is only explaining our explanations. Most college students are very pleasant people. Not merely are some of my best friends former students, most of my best friends are former students — though I find it disturbing when they hurl back at me, as they sometimes do, some lunatic whimsy or other that I palmed off on them forty years ago! Power used to be restricted entirely to the trustees and the administration — and most power must always be so restricted, I think. The managing of the university ' s finances, for instance, requires a great deal of highly-specialized knowledge; moreover, faculty members have, or should have, more knowledge with.n their speciality than their students have and so should have more control over the classroom. But students should be consulted and listened to, and, as far as I know, they always have been. They vote by choosing their careers and courses. A university is, as the word implies, a union of many bodies. The alumni, for example, are much more a part of the university than are the freshman students. I sometimes think that departments and courses are the greatest obstacles to learning in universities. But I can ' t see how to eliminate them. Publish or perish? Why not? Those who chant this dreary piece of alliteration as an indictment of the university are just blethering. The two things are not antithetical. A good man wants to publish. The fault is not in that but in the fact that the mediocrity who does not want to publish forces himself to grind out some dreary vacuity or pompousness and somehow gets it printed and the rest of his days inflicts it on his wretched students. Those who don ' t publish original, interesting, enlightening, amusing — or what you will — books and articles still have a place, even in colleges. The world needs ordinary people. It can ' t function without them. The world has to be arranged so that ordinary people can run it. The ordinary intelligent man knows just as much as the extraordinary man, outside the ordinary man ' s specialty, and his judgement is likely to be better.