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2024年6月8日发(作者：linux tail命令详解)
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The Idea of a University
Clark Kerr
"The Idea of a University" was, perhaps, never so well expressed as by Cardinal
Newman when engaged in founding the University of Dublin a little over a century
ago. His views reflected the Oxford of his day whence he had come. A university,
wrote Cardinal Newman, is "the high protecting power of all knowledge and
science, of fact and principle, of inquiry and discovery, of experiment and
speculation; it maps out the territory of the intellect, and here is neither
encroachment nor surrender on any side." He favored "liberal knowledge," and
said that "useful knowledge" was a "deal of trash".
Newman was particularly fighting the ghost of Bacon who some 250 years
before had condemned "a kind of adoration of by means whereof men
have withdrawn themselves too much from the comtemplation of nature, and the
observations of experience, and have tumbled up and down in their own reason
and conceits." Bacon believed that knowledge should be for the benefit and use of
men, that it should "not be as a courtesan, for pleasure and vanity only, or as a
bondwoman, to acquire and gain to her master's use; but as a spouse, for
generation, fruit and comfort."
To this Newman replied that "Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such
is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it really be
such, is its own reward." And in a sharp jab at Bacon he said:"The philosophy of
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Utility, you will say, Gentlemen, has at least done its work; and I grant it—it aimed
low, but it has fulfilled its aim." Newman felt that other institutions should carry on
research, for "If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see
why a University should have any students"—an observation sardonically echoed
by today's students who often think their professors are not interested in them at
all but only in research. A University training,said, Newman, "aims at raising the
intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national
taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular
aspirations, at facilitating the exercie of political powers, and sobriety to the ideas
of the age, at life." It prepares a man "to fill any post with credit, and to master any
subject with facility."
This beautiful words was being shattered forever even as it was being so
beautifully portrayed. By 1852, when Newman wrote, the German universities were
becoming the new model. The democratic and industrial and scientific revolutions
were all underway in the western world. The gentleman "at home in any society"
was soon to be at home in none. Science was beginning to take the place of moral
philosophy, research the place of teaching.
"The idea of a Modern University," to use Flexner's pharse, was already being
born. "A University," said Flexner in 1930, "is not outside, but inside the general
social fabric of a It is not something apart, something historic,
something that yields as little as possible to forces and influences that are more or
less new. It is on an expression of the age, as well as an influence
operationg upon both present and future."
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