President’s Letter

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

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