UNIVERSITY FORUM
(In downtown New York)
JEREMIAH W. JENKS
Director of the Division of Public Affairs, School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance, New York University
New York University has added a chapter to the history of “town and gown” by opening a University Forum in lower New York. This has been held throughout the winter in the Judson Memorial Building in Washington Square, and its purpose has been to put the university at the service of people in New York interested in a thoroughly impartial discussion of questions of the day.
The purposes of the forum as announced last fall are to make the university a greater force in training students to perform the duties of citizenship, in helping citizens to understand the problems of government, and in making thinking men act and active men think. Public officials, business leaders, social workers, eminent authorities were asked to present important questions of government and industry and discuss vital problems of civic and commercial life.
The methods employed were somewhat different from those usually followed in public discussions. In order that the academic atmosphere of thoroughness, sincerity and impartiality might so far as possible be conserved without sacrificing at the same time the interest that comes from having questions presented by experts and from the stimulus of controversy, it was decided that each question discussed should cover three sessions. At the first session an able authority has presented one side of the question. If there were time, as has usually been the case in the hour and a half, the audience has questioned the speaker in order to bring out more fully the points made.
At the second session, a week later, the opposite side has been presented with similar questioning.
At the third meeting the director of the forum has enumerated briefly the most essential points made on both sides, giving his own judgment regarding their validity and the relation of the question under discussion to the public interest. In some instances where it has seemed desirable, he has supplemented the arguments presented in the discussion by points of his own in order to make the discussion as complete as possible. In this summary an effort has been made to present the questions as impartially as possible from the viewpoint of the public interest.
In addition to this, representative citizens from the audience have given in brief talks of not more than ten minutes each their own views. Sometimes these voluntary speakers have been students, sometimes citizens. So far as possible the names were learned in advance in order that the discussion might proceed in the nature of a debate with the two sides presented alternately. In these third meetings especially, the interest has chiefly centered. In two or three instances, notably perhaps in the consideration of woman’s suffrage and the closed shop, the discussion was most animated, not to say excited, but nevertheless the temper of university study and the desire, however heated the feelings, to reach the truth and a fair judgment was not lost.
The list of topics and speakers included:
The Control of Vice and Crime—
William J. Gaynor, mayor of New York; Arthur Woods, former deputy commissioner of police, in special charge of the investigation of Italian criminals and the white slave traffic.
The Relation of Government to Corporations—
Martin W. Littleton, member of the Congressional Committee on Investigation of Industrial Monopolies; Herbert Knox Smith, late United States commissioner of corporations in charge of the Investigations of the Standard Oil Company, the American Tobacco Company, the Meat Packers, the International Harvester Company, and many other of the great corporations.
Socialism—
Victor L. Berger, the first Socialist to be elected to Congress; Bird S. Coler, former comptroller of the City of New York.
Woman Suffrage—
Anna Howard Shaw, president National American Woman Suffrage Association; Mrs. A. J. George, organization secretary of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to Woman’s Suffrage.
The Open Shop versus the Unionized Shop—
John Kirby, president National Association of Manufacturers, and Joseph W. Bryce, president of the Trades and Workers’ Association of America; James O’Connell, president Metal Trades Department and vice-president American Federation of Labor, and C. G. Norman, ex-chairman Board of Governors of the Building Trades Employers’ Association.
The meetings seem to have reached the results sought in more than one way. They have been well attended both by students and public, although comparatively few students have registered and done the reading required and passed the examination in order to secure university credit. For those students, however, who entered upon the work seriously the course has been as severe both in the quantity of reading required, in the reports upon that reading and in the examination as the regular university courses, and students have expressed their appreciation of the interest as well as the value of the course. Similar expressions have come from citizens in numerous instances. There have been regular attendants from Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Yonkers and also from New Jersey. Requests have been made for an extension of the forum to other boroughs and the matter is under consideration for the coming year. Inquiries have come from as far west as Kansas and Calgary in western Canada regarding the methods employed; and numerous requests for printed reports of the addresses and discussions have been received.[3]
The audiences in one respect at any rate seem to have lacked somewhat the university spirit of inquiry, having retained rather the normal human spirit of liking to hear views that agree with one’s own. It was noticeable, for example, that the people who came to hear the Socialist speaker were the Socialists coming to be flattered, and not the anti-Socialists coming to learn. Likewise, the anti-Socialist speaker was not listened to by so many Socialists as by those of his own opinion. Perhaps equally noticeable was this tendency to listen to speakers of their own side in the case of the discussion on woman’s suffrage. Surely it is to be hoped that in another year the academic spirit will have increased sufficiently so that each group will be equally anxious to hear their opponents, because it is, after all, primarily from those who differ from us that we learn, rather than from those with whom we agree.