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

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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

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

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UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA IV vJ great investigator?, men wlio give themselves unweariedly to pure research, who dwell upon that hill of Truth of whicli Bacon wrote. Tolstoy represents the university as partaking of the life of the people: Arnold thinks of it as the preserver of ideals, a queen of romance, ' a home of lost causes, withdrawn from the passing clamor of an epoch of dissolution and transformation. Bacon also would have it removed from the flux of human struggle and error, in order that it may further, through research, the conquest of abstract truth. One effect of the Great War has been that it has brought all things to test. This test is not merely of physical courage and endurance, of the spirit of heroism, of the willingness to fight and, if need be, to die for that something not ourselves that is identified with justice and right; it is also a test of our conceptions of democracy, of our fitness to champion the ideals which humanity, through a long and painful evolution, has set up against arbitrary and pitiless despotism. Men and institutions are alike tried by fire. This test the university, like other institutions, can not evade. The province of the university may be defined through combining the conceptions outlined a moment ago. It must act as custodian and interpreter of the spiritual inheritance of the ages ; it nuist follow knowledge like a sinking s;ar beyond the utmost bounds of human thought; and it must bring these ideals and this truth to bear on life. In the light of the first of these duties, Kultur and frightful- ness, the ambition for a place in the sun, the false doctrine of the survival of the strongest, are put to a test that shrivels them and burns. Iru the light of the second, the investigator, untouched by the tumult and the shouting of warring hosts, adds bit by bit to the sum of knowledge that pushes back a little farther the realm of chaos and old night. In the light of the third, idealism and truth come down from the mountain top to bring the tables of the law to men. This threefold vision the University of Xorth Carolina has caught. Her years are the years of the American constitution. Her life is a symbol of American democracy in its best and purest form. Sometimes we think her devoid of beauty ; but this ground is holy ground, these buildings sanctuary. True to her spirit, her sons have given themselves freely to make this spirit prevail. In them, her warfare on falsehood becomes concrete. True to her spirit, those who remain arc preparing themselves, in mind and body, for the day when they too may be called upon to front a lie in arms, and not to yield. Thus is the first vision made flesh.