Stanford Today Edition: March/April, 1998 Section: Letter from the President WWW: Letter from the President
Letter from the President
By Gerhard Casper
Ulrich, the "Man Without Qualities" in Robert Musil's great novel, closed the folder filled with suggestions for improvement received by Count Leinsdorf, the inventor of the "great patriotic action" for the Jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph:
"It is amazing," he said, "that half of them seek salvation in the future and the other half in the past. I don't know what we are to make of that. . . .
"It's amazing how many people tell us that the world was better off in earlier times. . . . Without counting the understandable slogan Back to Religion!, we still have a Back to the Baroque, Back to Gothic, Back to Nature, Back to Goethe, to ancient Germanic Law, to Moral Purity, and quite a few more."
This sounds very familiar to a university president. I, like Count Leinsdorf, receive letters every day from alumni and members of the public that one could gather under the heading "Back to . . . !" Among these are the subcategory: "Back to pure teaching!" or "No trade-offs between research and teaching!"
Yet, if one truly looks back, research and teaching always have been linked at Stanford. Our university and its great American contemporaries - universities founded around the same time, such as Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago - were modeled on Wilhelm von Humboldt's Berlin University. And the conscious linking of research and teaching was Humboldt's most important contribution to the notion of the university. When teaching is carried out by those who have no direct relationship to research, this link is broken and the result is not a university.
Humboldt recognized the dialectical nature of the relationship between research and teaching, and expressed it succinctly. The university instructor does not exist for the sake of the students, Humboldt said, but rather:
Both teacher and student have their justification in the common pursuit of knowledge. The teacher's performance depends on the students' presence and interest - without this, science and scholarship could not grow. If the students did not gather round of their own free will, the teacher would have to seek them out in the quest for knowledge. The goals of science and scholarship are worked toward most effectively through the synthesis of the teacher's and the students' dispositions. The teacher's mind is more mature but it is also somewhat one-sided in its development and more dispassionate; the student's mind is less able and less committed but it is nonetheless open and responsive to every possibility.
Not only do such students profit when taught by scholars who are themselves engaged in creative endeavors; scholarship itself is enriched when the younger generation consciously, if naively, questions it.
This assumes, of course, discussion and interaction in lectures, seminars and laboratories. It seems to me that in those universities overwhelmed by the sheer number of students or by hierarchical structures - or in countries in which research and teaching are fundamentally, or even partially, separated - much of the creative force lies fallow.
In an age when technology can deliver information - if not teaching or education - to everyone's home by videotape, cable, CD-ROM and the Internet, perhaps the only thing about a university that is irreplaceable is the link between teaching and research in the laboratory and the classroom, the working environment that both requires and makes possible a particular brand of camaraderie between professors and students.
In a 1791 talk on artists' and scholars' need for the company of others, Humboldt's friend Goethe said:
We owe inestimable benefits and an unmistakable usefulness to the printing press and the freedoms it has bestowed upon us; but there is another sort of usefulness connected to the greatest feeling of satisfaction that we owe to lively interaction with educated beings and the candidness of this interaction. Often, a gesture, a word, a warning, a cheer, a contradiction is, at the right time, able to change us for the better.
Without such interaction, without Humboldt's link between the "mature development" of the teacher and students "open and responsive to every possibility," the university could be replaced. So, at least in this sense, I join Count Leinsdorf's correspondents in their call for a return to Goethe and add Humboldt. ST