The new idea of a university

The Objects of the College shall be to provide … all branches of a liberal education …. [Universities] began, as is well known, with their grand aim directed on Theology,—their eye turned earnestly on Heaven. And perhaps, in a sense, it may be still said, the very highest interests of man are virtually intrusted to them. … what is the nature of this stupendous universe, and what are our relations to it, and to all things knowable by man, or known only to the great Author of man and it. Theology was once the name for all this; all this is still alive for man, however dead the name may grow! In fact, the members of the Church keeping theology in a lively condition—(Laughter)—for the benefit of the whole population, theology was the great object of the Universities. I consider it is the same intrinsically now …. But the religious virtue of knowledge was become a flunkey to the god of material success. The land was lurching like a galleon steered by a drunken helmsman into the Gothic night of materialism and mailed ballyhoo. The humanities were spat upon; the Arts trampled under foot, the historic sense spurned and ridiculed—in all these haunts of Instruction— those whorehouses of the trades and paid sciences. … The literary and historic professoriate were all but starved; but they had a specially endowed Window Dressing Faculty with twenty-four branches all of whose professors lived on the scale of Hollywood Stars. It was insupportable. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.