University of North Carolina Chapel Hill - Yackety Yack Yearbook (Chapel Hill, NC)

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- - THE SPIRIT OF ' 6l AND THE SPIRIT OF ' 17

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hClasses 2:Piofessior 5l Schools 5= Activities 4:MilltdrV arvd Athletics 5:Or5ar izd tior s r

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1916 YACKETY YACK THE UNIVERSITY AND THE WAR WS?S ' ,EO TOLSTOY somewhere speaks of wliat he calls the female boarding school or JLl cailet-acadcniy conception of a nniversity. The nniversity of his time, he thinks. is aloof from real life; in it boys learn lessons, as in the schools; attending it is going to schoiil. A lietter conception is that of a collection of men for the pnrpose of their mntnal cultnre ; and he explains what tliis means by telling us that such universities, unknown to us. spring up and exist in various corners of Russia ;| in the universuies them- selves, in the students ' clubs, people come together, read and discuss, until at last rules establish themselves when to meet and how to discuss. There you have real universities ! A different idea is expressed by Matthew Arnold, in the description of Oxford that everyone knows by heart ; Beautiful City ! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged Ijy the fierce intellectual life of our century . . . steeped in sentiment as she lies, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, to beauty? And a third conception, older than these, is expressed by Francis Bacon, pioneer of research as a miiversity ideal, when, after speaking of the search for truth as the sovereign good of human nature. he quotes Lucretius; II is a pleasure to stand upon the sliore. and see ships tossed upon the sea ; a pleasure lo stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below : but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of Truth la hill nut to be commanded, and where the air is always cleai; and serene), and to see the errors, and wandermgs, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below. To this he adds merely that the sight of human error and suffering must be with pity, and not with swelling or pride. Each of these conceptions, taken singly, is partial. Tolstoy would define his university by the group of earnest men and women, connected with an institution or not, wno read and discuss serious matters for niuiual culture. He has in mind the Circles of Tchaykovsky, organized in the latter part of the nineteenth century in almost every province of Russia, in whicli university men and women lived with peasants and artisans, and sought not only lo better their circumstances but to implant in them ideals of freedom, seeking also to learn from them sincerity, truth, and their own conceptions of life. But this ideal leaves out of account both that function of the university which makes it the conserver of the accumulated riches of human experience and that not less important function wliich is discharged by