5. There are Kings of Academic Thought, men who lead in professions and in collegiate careers. The wise man is the true aristocrat. His court may not be in a palace, but within its precincts are received and entertained the leaders of the race. To be provost, to be college president or university professor, is to be seated on an intellectual throne.
The problem of academic rule is not to attract a large number of students, to put up imposing buildings, to have endowments, and fill chairs with learned specialists; to grant many degrees, and to keep the hum of a teaching staff and of a student body alive in the ears of a community, marking the college group by flags and colors, cap and gown, processions and occasions. These things are right, but are mainly accessory. We have not all of a university when we have men and buildings, money, students, brains. Back of a university there lies its foundation-idea, that of academic control.
What is academic rule? It is rule over the pride of man. A college is a place whose chief power is to inculcate humility by the means of true learning; to establish intellectual honor and integrity by searching out the ways of God in nature, science, and philosophy, and in letters and in art.
It is the primary work of a university to make men humble. The Freshman is not teachable. The Sophomore is an intellectual upstart. But by the time a man has been beaten and conquered by the great ideals of the world, which have pierced his bones and humbled his conceit—by the time the race-passions and the race-sorrows have crept across his spirit, by the time that he has been confronted with the achievements of Homer, Empedocles, Hippocrates, Michelangelo, Socrates, Buddha, Plato, Emerson, Gladstone, Bismarck, Lincoln, and Carlyle—his self-exaltation drops from him like a garment. He—who knows how to construe a few pages of the classics, who knows how to demonstrate a few mathematical problems, scan a few verses, recite a few odes, carry on a few scientific experiments, undertake a small research—how shall he compete with these rulers of the thought of men?
Then it is that the real rule of a university—its spirit of humility, and of reverence for antiquity—begins. The true university man, born and bred in the century, not in the years, in the race halls, not those alone in his Alma Mater, is neither a scoffer nor an atheist, nor a critic, sceptic, or cynic. He is a man of simple and exalted faith. God, who hath brought such great things to pass in science, nature, and art, in human character, in the destiny of nations, and the history of humble men and women, is a God before whom there must be awe and reverence, and not a flippant scouting of the ancient ideals. Man, who is so tried by temptation and scourging of the spirit, is a creature to be loved, appreciated, understood; not a being to whom shall be shown arrogance, aloofness, and pride. The university that makes snobs of its graduates has not yet entered into its kingdom of control.
A university also holds rule over truth. Absolute truth is in God's hand. But the university has class-rooms and libraries, apparatus and laboratories, which are intended for the discovery and furtherance of truth. The university is not a place to cry out for big salaries. The salaries should be living salaries. The seeker after truth should not be left without enough money for heat and shelter, for bread and meat, rest and summer-change; for the coming of children and their education. But truth may lodge without shame in an humble dwelling and may be greatly furthered without an elaborate bill of fare.
The university men of the times are the establishers of a kind of righteousness that is not always found in books. Their individual value, as they go out into the world, is to set right values on social customs and decrees; to establish the law of freedom in the home; to lead men and women out of the thraldom of ignorance, vulgarity, hearsay, and "style," into simplicity of living and a sane scale of household expense. The university leader of the future is the man who shall set laws over household accounts and who shall rule over such simple things as what best to eat and buy. He shall be an economist of the larger sort, providing for the spiritual necessities of men and their moral conduct, rather than for their balls, card-parties, and social side-shows, including church entertainments and philanthropic dances and bazaars. He shall pave the way to a larger view of wealth, influence, and reform; endue man with a keener sense of his own responsibilities, make him a creature of larger desires and of more aspiring wants.
In particular, he shall pass down from generation to generation the high and noble learning of the past; he shall keep alive the flower of courtesy and charity; he shall tell the dreams of past sages, and interpret them; he shall review the thronging nations; and he shall so imbue the mind with a love of truth, of ideals, of excellence, of honor, that a new race shall go out into a larger and a nobler world. And then a better day shall dawn for men.
6. The Kings of State. Says Milton, in his sonnet on Cromwell:
"Yet much remains
To conquer still; Peace hath her victories
No less renowned than War: new foes arise,
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains.
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw."