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President’s Letter
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.
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