Alumni Oration

"Alumni Oration by Arthur N. Carter, M.C. MA. B.C.L: 'Some Aspects of University Education'" (15 May 1941): 7-12. (UA Case 67a, Box 2)

My first duty today is to thank the President and Council of the Alumni Society for nominating me to address you. It is a task which I have approached with some embarrassment and with a diffidence which my subject may not suggest. For one to return to his University after twenty-eight years mainly devoted to non-academical activities and to express his views on that most controversial of topics "University Education" savours of presumption, imprudent if not offensive. To discuss such a subject at this critical moment may appear untimely.

The prime function of a university, however, is to educate for life in its manifold aspects: that function will continue and never will it be of more transcendent importance than in the years ahead. For in our universities rests our best hope, in a rapidly changing world, for the preservation and orderly development of the ideas and ideals upon which is based our way of life.

I offer no apology, then, for a subject, which in its nature is ever timely, real and vital. It is one, too, about which every man and woman, who has had university training and has tested that training in the work-a-day world, must have an interest and possibly some settled thoughts and convictions.

I have defined the prime function of a university as the education, that is, the preparation of its students for life. As you know, violent disagreement has existed for over a century on the form that preparation should take. The two conflicting views have never been more aptly or concisely expressed than by successive Rectors of the University of Saint Andrews: "A university", said John Stuart Mill, "is not a place of professional education. Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining a livelihood—their function is not to make skilled lawyers or physicians or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings."

Two years later, James Anthony Froude, spoke in quite a different strain and threw his whole weight on to the side of a specialized and professional education. "History, poetry, moral philosophy, classical literature," he said, "are excellent as ornament. If you care for such things they may be the amusement of your leisure hereafter; but they will not help you to stand on your feet and walk alone; You cannot learn everything; the objects of knowledge have multiplied beyond the power of the strongest mind to keep pace with them all. You must choose among them, and the only reasonable guide to choice in such matters is utility—If we mean to thrive we must take one line and rigidly and sternly confine our energies to it."

That was the other view sharply stated—A University is a group of professional, technical schools for the training of doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers and so forth.

As I look back to the year 1911, when a revered teacher of mine, and a former professor of classics in this University, the late Dr. H. S. Bridges, delivered as his Alumni address an impassioned plea for the more extended study of the classics, I realize how Froude's ideas have gained ground at the expense of Mill's. The old idea of a liberal education commands less and less support; education today is designed increasingly to fit students not for life but to earn their living in a practical employment.

This is melancholy and disquieting reflection for one who has owed much of his keenest pleasure to the interests stimulated and guided by his Arts Course in this University and who has venerated the endowments and achievements of men in many lands through the ages who were trained in the traditional cultural curriculum.

One must guard, however, against the mood which led Mr. Gladstone to write: "The world of today is not the world in which I was bred and trained and have principally lived. It is a world which I have much difficulty in keeping on terms with." Rather one must face the new world, reexamine his convictions on education, and if he is still persuaded of their soundness, seek their recognition, perchance by way of compromise and in a modified form.

Let us concede at once that from their origin universities have existed to serve practical ends: to give that sort of training to youth which the community deems necessary or desirable. The earliest types of university were training colleges for priests founded in Babylonia and Egypt. There was imparted the knowledge of supernatural forces and the technique of forecasting and influencing the future action of those forces. With the proper discharge of the priestly function was linked individual and national well-being. Education so given was essentially practical and not liberal.

Similarly, the universities of the Graeco-Roman world were designed to train organizers and administrators, and used as their staple subjects oratory, law, politics and finance. At the same time men who by birth or from choice were excluded or held aloof from the business of government now began to devote themselves to learning for its own sake: to the study of sciences, to the sciences of the human mind, like grammar and logic and metaphysics, to those of the physical world, like botany or chemistry or astronomy, and, to the applied sciences, such as engineering or mechanics or medicine, or to those sciences which are also arts, like rhetoric or music.

During the Middle Ages university teaching was circumscribed both by the limited content of then existing knowledge and by the restraining influence of the Church. Universal knowledge could in fact be acquired by a student endowed with mental vigor and industry. But he was barred from pursuing his enquiries beyond the sphere approved by theological dogma.

From the curbing influence of the theologians university teaching was freed neither by the Revival of Learning nor by the Reformation. It was not until 1751 that a university, the University of Pennsylvania, was founded, designed to pursue and impart learning unrestricted by theological limitations and with no limitations other than those imposed by human intelligence and capacity. That ideal, which had its effective conception in the fertile brain of the great American Benjamin Franklin, had become the professed ideal of the great universities of the world until a time within the memory of all of us. It still remains the ideal of the non-sectarian universities of the British Empire and the United States.

The period of the last two hundred years during which university teaching has been gradually and increasingly freed from external control has coincided with revolutionary changes in human ideas and in the environment in which men live. These facts are closely related, but to examine their relation is not my purpose. It is sufficient to recall that from a world in which the monarchical system of government was regarded as normal, if not inevitable, we have passed to one in which monarchy has been almost wholly discarded in favor of democracy, founded on universal suffrage on the one hand or despotism on the other. We have passed from a world which accepted without enquiry the Christian doctrine and ideals to one in which the doctrine is widely challenged and the ideals are scouted by large and powerful nations. From a world which respected and upheld the rights of private property as a main pillar of orderly society to one which shows an increasing and almost universal disregard for those rights. From a leisurely world in which human contrivances for overcoming space and for utilizing material resources had been little developed for over a thousand years to a world of speed, in which space has been almost annihilated and in which the capacity for converting material into wealth and for destroying wealth is incalculable, unlimited and terrifying.

This is the changed world for which the university of today must prepare its students. It must prepare them with the same practical object as in every age throughout history. That preparation as ever must be directed by a twofold objective: the well-being of the student and the welfare of society.

In a world which is dominated to such an alarming degree by the scientist, it is not difficult to argue that as regards its students the university will best serve by fitting them to take their place in the laboratories, in the plants and in the field, there to discharge the work which is set before them. There they will earn not wealth, for wealth is not the lot of university graduates, but a competence and a well assured place among their fellows. To set that as the whole ideal and aim of a university, however, does seem to me inadequate, short-sighted and to neglect the even more important duty of the University to Society. Indeed, I go further and challenge the claim that the University has fulfilled its duty to its students when it has fitted them solely to earn their living. If a man goes forth from the halls of his university, filled with special learning and trained as a technician, but with no vital intellectual interest in the part which his work contributes to Society, if he has no intellectual interests except such as bear on his vocation, he is only in a very limited sense an educated man. Please understand me. I do not ask that a university shall eschew instruction in practical subjects: to do so would be folly. But what I do plead for is a training which shall be permeated with the spirit of humane studies.

I can best clarify my meaning from a concrete subject—law. It is possible to train an intelligent student in civil wrongs, in contract, the law of property, equity and so on and produce a competent practitioner. Furthermore, if he is an exceptional man and naturally endowed with interest in intellectual matters, he will round out his knowledge of men and affairs by his own reading and observation: many instances of such unusually gifted men may occur to you. But they are the exception and their way is a toilsome one beset with difficulties and many false leads. By common agreement based on a lengthy experience the governing bodies of the Bar throughout the Dominion and generally throughout the United States require now that all students of the law shall have at least two years' training in an Arts Course, or its equivalent. They prefer a four years training in Arts. Underlying this requirement is the recognition that a general acquaintance with cultural subjects and with social, political and economic sciences corrects the perspective and enlarges the understanding of the legal practitioner; that his comprehension of the various factors both immediate and more remote which bear upon his clients' interests will be more fit, that his advice and judgment in a word will be sounder, if it is based upon wider considerations than the literal reading of the law; that he should, too, as a citizen have a juster appreciation of the interplay of social forces.

What I have said of the training of a lawyer should in the main be true too of the training of doctors, engineers and industrial administrators. For it is the men in these walks of life who should influence and guide the thought and action of our whole country. Unless they are trained and stimulated at their university to think liberally they can be but as the blind leading the blind.

The progress made by Science in the last twenty-five years has been the admiration and dread of us all. Science properly directed can repair the ravages of war and speedily rebuild a new world. At present it appears like the evil genie of an Oriental legend subject to no control and intent on destruction.

I can well remember a remark made in my hearing some twenty years ago by Mr. Lionel Curtiss the friend and close associate of the late Lord Tweedsmuir and the late Lord Lothian. "The main problem of our age" said Mr. Curtiss "is to develop human beings and human institutions to beneficent ends". That problem is still with us unsolved. One solution has been proposed by our enemies in the great conflict now raging. It is the oldest solution devised by man for social and political problems: the concentration of control in the hands of a despot who will use his power to make his immediate followers supreme in the world and to crush and subjugate all possible opponents. That is a solution which cannot be accepted by the British or American peoples, however dominant they may become in world affairs, without a recantation of the whole basis of their traditions and their system of free institutions.

It remains for the British and American peoples while remaining true to their democratic way of life, which alone gives them the freedom which is vital, to evolve more efficient and advantageous methods for controlling and using their resources. That can be done only by wise and far-seeing social, industrial and political leadership. It is too much to ask of the universities that they shall provide the leaders equipped and ready for their high task. That is to ask the impossible. But it is not too much to say to them: to your guidance is committed some of the most promising of our youth: so mold them that when they leave your halls they will carry with them in Mr. Asquith's memorable words "the best and most enduring gift that a university can bestow—the company of great thoughts, the inspiration of great ideals, the example of great achievements, the consolation of great failures". So moulded and equipped they will be prepared after experience in the practical affairs, of the world to give the enlightened leadership which will be their generation's greatest need.