UNC System Board of Trustees

Pages That Need Review

Volume 01: July 11, 1932–July 8, 1938

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creative intellectual and spiritual power. All gone the training, the potential discoveries, inventions, literature, ideas, and dreams of youth done to death. Disillusionment to those who killed them! With all the heroism and idealism of the war, came also the moral and spiritual damages suffered far from the battlefront by millions caught in the awful backwash of the war and the wreckage of the values of human life and personality. Upon the backs of those who fought the war and whose work sustains a broken and bewildered world are now loaded the crushing costs of the war to he paid by them, their children, and their children's children.

Today as the sun makes its way across the world to the armistice hour, the peoples of Europe and America become still and silent as they remember their dead and the peace that came. It ties us to all mankind as we listen to the deep stillness of the millions in their silent commemorative aspiration for peace. Here in this beautiful Kenan Memorial Stadium we were silent and joined in the stillness of the peoples in a spiritual fellowship of the hope for peace on earth and goodwill toward men. We would be untrue to the spirit of this University, which has ever given and will ever give her life and her youth to every call that comes to the idealism and heroism of youth, if we did not link the purpose of this day to the purpose of this University and schools everywhere.

The colleges and universities, by virtue of their humane purpose and the very nature of their social being, have the responsibility of helping to build a world in which the call to the idealism and heroism of youth should never again be a call to war. It is their function to make realistically intelligent and morally heroic the aspirations and work of mankind toward a warless world, vivid with the unfolding possibilities of coöperative work and play, valorous with the adventures of physical and social mastery, and beautiful with the creations of the human spirit.

THE COLLEGE

To these high ends stands the University. At the center of the University is the college of liberal arts. In these recent decades the college of liberal arts, as a result of its own incoherence, the advance of the junior college, and the encroachments of the professional and vocational schools, has been subjected to a severe defensive reëxamination as to its place in the scheme of higher education. Several funda-

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mental and dramatic experiments are now under way involving both the personalities of the experimenters and the function of the college. Scores of other experiments involving the purpose of the college in general and the curriculum and teaching methods in particular give a various and cumulative content to what has been called "a movement" for the college of liberal arts. The history of the college of liberal arts, whether as the denominational college which heroically blazed the trail for all the others, or as the privately endowed independent college, or as the central college of the modern university, private or state, gives solid ground for such reinvigoration of the college of arts and sciences. The college of arts and sciences, the foundation college for the professional and graduate schools and service province of them all, has a kingdom of its own and a purpose within its own high nature. This purpose, toward which it has in various forms been groping for centuries, is the development of the more complete human being, a unified victorious personality, increasingly equipped to understand himself and the world in which he is to play his useful and coöperative part. The struggle of the college to find its place and purpose has helped both to reflect and develop the spirit of the age. Any sound reconsideration of the curriculum of the college should be from the approaches of historical experience, the unchanging values of the whole personality, and the needs of the changing times.

1. The Background of the Curriculum

Amid its mediaeval origins the liberal arts were subordinated to the ecclesiastical ends of preparation for the next world. With the Renaissance, despite its vivid implications in the affairs of this world, its recovery of old ideas, leading to discoveries of a new world and a new way to an old world, a new earth and the new heavens, yet the widening interests of the universities centered largely in the ancient learning as containing all learning. Learning for the next world gave way in part to learning from the classic past. The scientific revolution of the last three centuries brought the minds of the men of the universities from their absorption in the next world and their preoccupation with the ancient culture to a concern for the present and the mastery of this earth and the forces of nature. It came to be thought that the human intellect, with its new sciences, could go beyond the learning of the ancients and bring heaven to earth now, whether in the New Atlantis or in New Worlds for Old.

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that can come from the new curriculum of the college is essential not only to a student's better understanding of himself and the most acute problems of the modern age, but is essential also to a view of the universe.

We listen to a great American physicist as he traces the steps in the gradual integration of the six formerly rigorously separated branches of physics on the way to becoming one great whole. The professor of theoretical physics in the University of Berlin recently writes that the study of philosophy, once in scientific disrepute, is coming back with a new meaning and a wide power. Professor Planck points out that, as scientific research by its conquest of the world of sense "simplifies the world picture of physics, the structure of the physical world moves further and further away from the world of sense." What Professor Planck points out as the increasing simplification of the world picture becomes the basis for a more complete view of the universe. We deeply need the values in the general view of the great philosophers. The scientist and philosopher are approaching a more respectful meeting in the presence of the mystery of life and the universe. Haldane moves from matter to mechanism to life to personality to spirituality. Personality, as an evolutionary achievement, reveals the spiritual quality of the materialistic process. From physics we go into metaphysics. Matter becomes energy, and energy brings us to the borderland of a universe, seen and unseen, the reverberations of whose moral sovereignty are in the inner man in answer to the intuitions and aspirations of the human spirit.

As in life so in college, subjects, ideas, and processes cannot be kept in separate departments. We should in college, if for no other reason than convenience, have departments of subjects but not compartments of knowledge. The very fluidity of ideas and the organic nature of life processes make it necessary that in our very respect for specialization and the value of departments we should from time to time reexamine the curriculum. Let us welcome the scores of experiments under way all over America and not adopt any of them by way of imitation but adapt what is good as we venture on our own account according to our own needs. In no other way than by the integrated view can we understand the wider implications of the specialized knowledge. Only with the whole view can we build up correlative social control of the new forces and mechanisms let loose upon the world by specialized knowledge with the power to destroy or rebuild the structure of the modern world.

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These are the high stakes for which the college would play its part. Its conception of the unity of learning, the unity of life, and the unity of the universe makes for a sense of the spiritual potentiality of the total personality. This integrated view makes for a sense of the spiritual essence of civilization, even in its gathered fragments transmitted more and more from age to age with the possibility of being transformed into the Kingdom of God according to the pattern of Him who was the master teacher of the inner way of the unified life.

THE PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS

In the rebuilding of the civilization of the Kingdom, we need not only the specialized knowledge and the integrated way of life but also specialized ways of making a living. The college is based on the idea of Jesus that man does not live by bread alone; but we must remember that the first petition in the Lord's Prayer is "Give us this day our daily bread." Youth to play a significant part in the world s life needs a specialized skill, a vocation, a profession. The vocational and professional schools came in America largely outside the universities on account of the gaps in the university structure. This specialized skill in law, medicine, pharmacy, agriculture, engineering, education, business, journalism, and public administration and welfare was learned by the apprentice on the job. But as the professions and vocations became more complex, proprietary schools of law, medicine, pharmacy, and business arose to meet a real life need. Schools of religion have a rightful place in the modern university. The School of Religion at our next-door neighbor, Duke University, has high potential value to the whole South. In time the joint processes of specialization and synthesis in all fields of knowledge resulted in the incorporation of all professional schools and some high-grade vocational schools within the framework of the university.

The university needs the professional schools with their specialized knowledge, equipment, and skill, their high standards of scholarship, their spirit of work, thoroughness, and excellence. The professional schools, assimilated into the organic structure of the university, need the university with its wide variety of skills, interests, and contacts; its general resources, and wholeness of view. Consider the reciprocal contributions of Osler, Welch, and Hopkins, the Pound group and Harvard, the Russell group and Columbia, Shailer Mathews and Chicago.

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The professional schools, while raising the standards of specialized scholarship, need to be concerned more and more with the liberal cultural equipment of the master. The teacher in the professional school is in a strategic position to preserve and carry forward the liberal culture and the general view. He can bring to a focus on the most highly technical case all the historical, economic, social, psychological, political, or philosophic influences which converge upon it with implicating power. In the law schools there is the beginning of the recognition of the value of the liberal reënforcement of the most highly technical knowledge. For example, a professor who received his liberal arts training in a Southern university, his doctorate in economics in the Middle West, is teaching torts in the law school of an Eastern university. Another who has the liberal arts degree, the doctorate of philosophy in economics and politics, and two law degrees, is, despite his youth, already a productive scholar and able teacher of law. A new professor of pharmacy in this University has a liberal training as the foundation of, and doctorate of philosophy on top of, his special scientific training. Without making a fetish of degrees, this liberal training is basic to a wholesome attitude of mind in professional training. Some of the most scholarly and liberally cultured minds in America are in schools of engineering, commerce, agriculture, education and other highly professional schools. Many also who have never seen a college have a spirit of the rarest culture distilled from nature, books, and life. These men have been careful not to set method over against liberal learning. With a view to cultural and human implications of the most specialized knowledge, they find themselves in the midst of work and culture, surging life, and the difhcult, but at times thrilling, processes of rebuilding a world.

A teacher in an East Carolina city communicated the flame within his heart to men and women who transformed communities, became teachers, superintendents of schools, and presidents of several Southern colleges and universities. A permanently crippled but youthful ex-Confederate, no longer master of slaves but master of botany and chemistry, scientifically remade old plantations, built mills, endowed a college, and became the source of hope to people over a wide area. A later youth trained culturally in the South and vocationally in the North brought back into the Southern piedmont a kit of tools and a youthful dream for a venturesome part in refounding the structure of our Southern civilization. A young lawyer in a public religious meet-

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ing, standing up for freedom of scientific inquiry against the tides that rolled in upon him, stood unmoved in the tumult, steadfast in the strength of science, history, the humanities, and the religion of Jesus which mustered to his almost lonely side. Many business men in these hard times are draining their reserves and are taking their losses standing up in order that people may have work and food. Editors, with courage for opprobrium and financial loss, have fought the fight of the inarticulate peoples and of despised minorities. Physicians daily minister to the bodies, minds, and spirits of broken men. Rabbis, priests, and preachers come out of lonely vigils to sustain the sympathies, courage, and faith of men in cruel times. To lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, journalists, manufacturers, business men, scientific engineers, social engineers, farmers, statesmen, and ministers of religion; to them with the depth of a specialized mastery and the cultural breadth of an imaginative mind, there open professional opportunities as wide as the needs of the people.

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

But a group of professional schools around the college do not make a university. Without a graduate school there can be no university. Postgraduate courses do not make a graduate school. The American Association of Universities, essentially an association of graduate schools, founded in 1900 by Presidents Eliot, Gilman, and Harper in the interest of excellence in graduate research, holds as one of its present requirements for membership that a university be equipped in faculty, laboratories, general library, and special source materials to give the degree of doctor of philosophy in five departments. However adequate be the laboratories and supplies, departmental libraries and source materials, carrells, seminar rooms, and all the valuable facilities for thorough research, without great scholars the whole apparatus of research may become as so much sounding brass. There can be no great graduate school and no great university without great teachers. A good part of a lifetime given by day and by night on scant income to the deep exploration of a field is the price of the scholarship of the master. No smattering and no sham; only thoroughness and excellence among the masters. Several groups of these masters, distinguished in different fields, prevent unchecked specialization in any one field. These various groups of eminent scholars, seekers for truth,

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and teachers, by the very interrelation of fields, intellectual interchange, and coördination on the level of graduate excellence are integrated in the university. The university guidance of graduate work should make impossible research in ultra-scholastic and utilitarian trivialities, but at the same time should not by a routine uniformity or traditional control cramp the vigorous and autonomous life of schools and departments. Tradition and routine should give way to excellence. The quality of the college, the professional schools, and the whole university is renewed from and advanced by the excellence of the graduate school. The college of arts and sciences is the youthful heart of the university, the professional schools are its skillful arms, and the graduate school is its crowning glory.

1. Research and Teaching

The two particular functions of the graduate school are to train students in research and to prepare students to teach. The two functions, though separate in their techniques, reënforce each other in the unity of the graduate purpose for the advancement of knowledge and the well-being of the race. In some universities three-fourths of the graduate students become teachers. A great teacher, without publication of his researches, is sometimes an apparently unrecognized gift of God to his generation. Yet research is a resource of the teacher. There is a sense of reverent humility in him who has to dig in the sources for his own facts and ideas. There is often a contagious enthusiasm communicated to the students by the teacher who comes fresh from the mine bringing the ore in the hands that dug it out. Research on the part of the teacher in the humanities and sciences deepens the content and insight of the teacher and makes available fresh resources for other teachers; develops the scholarly research spirit in many students, and thus widens the association and the interchange of the ideas of teachers and scholars around the earth who, by their patient discovery and teaching of truth, are doing their hopeful bit toward the gradual making of a better world.

2. Research on its own Account

Research, apart from teaching, has values on its own account. It was James Madison's patient and thorough researches into the structure of the Ancient, Western European, and Colonial governments

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that enabled him, as a practical statesman in the critical period, to guide the framing of the constitution of the United States. Hertz, the German research scholar, standing on the pure researches of the English professor, Clerk Maxwell, discovered the idea out of which Marconi, the Italian, invented the mechanism for wireless telegraphy. The researches and hypotheses of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler helped to make possible the theory of gravitation which came from the integrating mind of Isaac Newton, or as President Walter Dill Scott calls him, Professor Newton of Cambridge University. The American Professor Michelson, by his researches, helped to prepare the way for the revolutionary theory of the German Professor Einstein.

3. The Utility of Scientific Research

If we were to recapitulate with President Scott the list of the names of the men whose researches in pure science have not only explored the far reaches of the universe and the inside of the atom but have also discovered the scientific principles on which is erected the technological structure of our modern industrial civilization, we would call, for the most part, the names of college professors and quiet relentless seekers for truth in university laboratories. He has estimated that college and university research make possible in a normal time the production of more wealth in America in one year than has been spent on all the colleges and universities since John Harvard founded the college under the elms in Cambridge. It has also been estimated that the results of college and university research in the pure sciences as the basis for sanitary and hydraulic engineering, personal and public health, save in America the lives of one million people a year.

4. The Graduate School and Organized Research

In the complicated modern world it was inevitable that research should be organized in institutes, councils, and big industries. Mr. Vernon Kellogg has pointed out that the research organizations are dependent on the colleges and universities for manning and recruiting their staffs. The graduate school is par excellence the training ground for research, organized and unorganized. In graduate research there is no immediate profit motive, and the student has the unadulterated scientific freedom necessary for training in research. Deeply spe-

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cialized as is research, it should for that very reason keep its connection with all divisions of graduate work and never narrow its special eye to the wider implications of the smallest bit of truth found in the laboratory or library stacks or tentatively guessed on a walk about the campus or in some lonely nook in the woods or where you will. In the meagerly equipped laboratories of this University before the twentieth century and since, the researches of unpretentious scholars in the natural sciences have been recognized for their value to learning and mankind by scholars on four continents.

5. Research in the Social Sciences

The social sciences, of course, are lagging behind the natural sciences. For the most part they have risen in recent times. Scholars in the social sciences have a tremendous task to bring their researches up to the needs of the times. Individuals in graduate schools and organizations here and there are doing heroic work, with civilization itself as the stakes of social mastery. On account of the complicated nature of our social structure, institutes for research in the social sciences are being organized mainly and naturally within the universities, as, for example, the Institute of Human Relations at Yale. The Institute for Research in the Social Sciences here is an indispensable reënforcement of the graduate resources and impulses of this University in the unexplored fields of the social sciences. Together with the pioneer department of rural social-economics, the departments of economics, education, history, sociology, psychology, and the law school, it is making realistic studies and significant contributions to the better understanding of the human and social implications of our economic, political, and legal structure. The Institute has had considerable regard for interracial relations with all their problems of human injustice and unequal opportunity in the present South. These researches in interracial relations are based on the human attitude that, with all our racial solidarities and pragmatic expedients of social separation, the two great races have fundamentally a common destiny in building a nobler civilization and that, if we go up, we go up together. The University Press has made these researches available for the people of the South and has carried forward an intellectual exchange with scholars and institutions over the world. Five of the books from this press are on the League of Nations list for international intellectual coöperation.

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a. Research, Integrated Thinking, and War

Scholars, colleges, universities, and research agencies all over the world need to join their intellectual and spiritual resources in research and make specialized and integrated studies of the problems whose social consequences reach around the world and down the ages. The World War and the world economic depression have taken their toll in human lives, human well-beings and happiness beyond measurement or imagination. Wars and depression throw their cruel and sinister shadows across the homes of the people on all the continents of this earth. We, who, in our scientific pride, consider that we have mastered the earth, stand baffled in the midst of these two mighty foes of every locality and all mankind. The very fact of recurring wars and recurring depressions raises a question as to the quality of our education and the sincerity of our religion. The people in a world in which such depressions and wars can recur are not yet intellectual and spiritual in the control of their institutions. The nature of the wars and depressions illustrates the complex structure of life and the world. They make necessary greater depths in specialization and a new integration of old and new knowledge in all fields for a better understanding of the problems and the processes of solution. The explanation that war is caused by economic interests is too simple to be true to the complex nature of human beings and human society. The human being carries around as part of his structure and heritage biological, psychological, anthropological, historical, economic, political, philosophical, and spiritual equipment. Human society is as complex as the human life implicated in its framework. Wars may come from springs deep in the structure of human beings or deep in the structure of human society or in both. It is the heroic task of biology, psychology, and all the social sciences to try to light up the origins of war and work out its social control and abolition. On the surface it is clear that science and technology have with power engines, farms, factories, stores, banks, ocean lanes, rails, cables and concrete roads, flung across the earth the mechanical framework of a mighty economic structure. A pistol shot in remote Serajevo or a stock market crash in Wall Street causes repercussions around the world. A Slavic student, in killing a German Archduke, precipitated national antagonisms, imperial ambitions, economic rivalries, and released the human passions and the dynamic energies of the peoples of two hemispheres which

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