Date: Thu, 23 Dec 1993 19:25:46 +0100 Reply-To: Marc Nelissen <FFAAI01@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be> Sender: University history discussion list <STUDIUM@BLEKUL11.BITNET> From: Marc Nelissen <FFAAI01@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be> Subject: Rothblatt lecture As announced before, here follows the summary of a lecture by Sheldon Rothblatt, prof. at the University of California, Berkeley, that was held in Leuven on December 18th. The summary was prepared by Mark Derez, archivist of the Catholic University of Leuven. Best wishes, Marc Nelissen ******************************************************************************* Sheldon ROTHBLATT: The genius loci in the History of the Anglo- American University. Each essay on universities nowadays is a footnote to Newman's classic The Idea of a University (1852). There even exists a French translation. Only the Germans do not need him; they have their own classic, von Humboldt and his ideas of self-education, 'Bildung' in a research oriented university. Newman's book generated new publications, even up to now, as for instance Jaroslaw Pelikan's Discourses on the Idea of a University (1992). In his famous essay John Henry, cardinal Newman asked the question 'what is a university ?' In the first line the answer is: a university is a place for the dissemination of learning. While at that moment the ideal of von Humboldt took root everywhere in Europe, Newman affirmed that a university is not a place for original inquiry or research, but a place where you teach. But what is a place? The term sounds rather ambiguous, being the neutral term for a spot. In the French translation it is a 'milieu', a special kind of environment. Newman in fact meant a college, not a university. He could never forget his own college time. Newman was an Oxford scholar, thinking about Englishness and its complicated relationship to Roman Catholicism. He had been a fellow of Oriel College. As an Oxford Don he was a bachelor, not allowed to mary at that time because the college was their family. In a college the world stays outside. A college is a privileged private space, jealous of the rest of the world. The undergraduates could not get out. Walls were closed; the entrance gate controlled over incoming and outgoing people. The college walls were the boundaries of a total institution. Every late 18th-century college has a special mood if you are inside. It is a space having a 'genius loci'; it is a place occupied by a god. This genius loci is a spirit, a presence, a kind of sentiment, a shaping experience. Newman's view was purely romantic: he remembered himself as an undergraduate, wandering on the roofs of his college, gazing at the space of the inner courtyard, a place full of mystery. Space has no meaning, until we give it a meaning; we could even attribute another meaning to it. A place has meaning if there are associations which are important for us. A college has meaning because it is associated with persons, fellows, scholars, great minds. Their portraits are on the wall. The college is important because all those people were there. The total environment reinforces the notion that the undergraduates will have a special responsability in society. College students were aristocratic or were to become members of the clergy. They would be the leaders of this society. They had to maintain the traditions that they had inherited, they did not have to make up their mind. A college was meant for young people in a dangerous age. It has the educational function to guide them from adolescence to adulthood. What they learn there is not so important. Not knowledge but moral values and traditions have to be drummed into them. Original research makes someone critical, independent, but college does not want to do so. A college produces continuity by reproducing the elite. A college gave young people the right associations by exposing them to the genius loci. There were nine colonial colleges in the United States of America. The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia - the second oldest - still calls itself a college. The American college inherited the idea of the English college with its magic space and its spiritual associations. But the USA is not an aristrocratic, Church of England-society. The USA is a decentralised, not anglican (no State Church), pluralist country. The American college has to establish another relationship to society. From the English college it takes over the educational function, the idea of shaping the moral character of people and the genius loci. Every undergraduate must learn the history of the college. What is the history of the college? History allways keeps harping on the same string: 'this is a special place', subject to the magic of history. And this special place seems allways to be in danger, in danger of loosing its values and its functions, close to extinction. Even if the college is rich, it speaks with the voice of poor: 'In 1830 we went through a crisis... In 1914 we were close to extinction, but we did survive thanks to the undergraduates, to the alumni'. This makes history into an epic story with allways some benefactor in the heroic role of saviour of the college. The message is clear: the college constantly needs money, the college may not survive, unless supported by alumni and rescued by benefactors. The permanent crisis situation appeals to the generosity of the alumni. It is historiography functioning as a strategy for fundraising. In the 17th century a new type of college emerges with the building of Emmanuel College in Cambridge, which was a puritan institution: the courtyard is only surrounded by buildings at three sides, the fourth side being a wall with a gate. A young graduate of Emmanuel College, John Harvard, took this collegiate structure to New England, where he founded Harvard University. In America the front wall disappeared: the college was now open to the world. In the vast area of America where there is plenty of land, the buildings became detached from one another (because of fire- protection) and around the liberated colleges there arose several new buildings in the open field. The idea of a campus was born: university buildings clearly spread out in open order in a green grassy area. The word campus is invented in the 18th century and refers to Princeton University. The new American university offers a new kind of space: the college green has no mistery because the campus is open. What kind of institution is this new university? 1. The university is not necessarily concerned with education but with knowledge. 2. The university has lost its superintendent function because there are also older students, more mature, often married people, sometimes part-time students: they do not accept moral guardianship. The university will not tell you how to live your life. 3. The university is no longer producing teachers but anybody, professional people in particular. 4. The university is connected with the city. It respects excentricity, individuality, originality. It accepts people from all ages and all countries. What kind of place is this university? This university is a collection of buildings where people are trained for different occupations. It is not a milieu, it has no mystery, it does not play on romantic imagination. In the American context the university and the college have to live together in one place. They are two institutions in one at the same place. Even in the largest institution of mass-education, there is a shady memory of 'college'. Here and there on campus are picturesque spots (gardens, a romantic lake), reminders, memories of the college (cfr. Oklahoma State University, Ohio State University). The university is open to the city but it likes the intimacy of a garden. How to understand? It is the dual inheritance of the university and the college. The USA needs universities like every modern country but will not lose the ideal of a college. Without the heritage of the college the university would be different. Even more: without colleges, the USA would have another history. The alumni form a group of citizens which you can mobilize for social purposes. Remember the university curriculum in USA: after four years of undergraduate studies, young Americans join the alumni association of their college. Then they move to graduate schools in order to obtain a Ph.D., a law or medical degree. Afterwards there are no memories of graduate school that excite them. It is the college they remember. The college is the heart of sentimental experience you have ('I went to college at Ohio university'). In the sixties, during the so-called Robbins' era in Britain, the university expanded. New universities were built everywhere. The British, inspired by the American campus idea took over the idyllic model with its genius loci, by building brand new universities in a park around an old aristocratic manor or a rectory on the countryside. In the seventies, there was a reaction to this: more radical, left wing proponents of mass-education began to condemn the romantic, historical, backward looking tradition of the college and denounced the bourgeois model and the noble architecture of the past. Especially Marxists hate the collegiate structure with all its class society associations. They were in favour of a functional, utilitarian university, totally integrated in society, providing facilities to get knowledge for free, mobile students who ought to be metropolitan citizens. The new university should attract anonymous students, embedded in a city culture, with a modern, fractioned personality. The university would not pay attention to the lifes of students as organic persons, it would not do appeal to mood, spirit, sensitivity. Old history and beauty have no place in modern life. The modern democratic university needs a straightforward, unilinear, monotonous architecture. So the new universities tended to be linked to cities like a sort of airport or shopping mall, where you go to get what you need and leave. But nevertheless the college life idea remained. In concluding: we need our university as university but we also need to include some mysterious place, a space of intimacy, beauty and privilege, a memory of the ancient college. Up