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ARTISAN REVIEW
Alfred North Whitehead as saying:
The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection
between knowledge and the zest for life, by uniting the young and the
old in the imaginative consideration of learning.
With reference to "teaching undergraduates from all over the college,
rather than the teaching exclusively of graduate students from the profes–
sor's field," Pelikan says it is "the best possible forum for relating one
scholarly discipline to another," and promoting their mutual stimulation.
It
is somewhat surprising that he fails to mention one reward of advanced
teaching that many lifelong teacher-scholars have experienced, and which
he undoubtedly also has: the rich opportunity it offers for trying out new
ideas, testing theories, and discovering effective ways of presenting new
findings. The two callings, teaching and writing, can complement and
sustain each other.
Since the Middle Ages, most reputable universities have included
at
least four "faculties," three of which we now call professional schools -
law, medicine, and theology. A faculty of philosophy, now known as
arts
and sciences, was the fourth. It is from this latter discipline that what
came to be called liberal education is largely derived. Newman believed
professional training should be preceded by a liberal education that would
teach the student "to think and to reason and to compare and discrimi–
nate and to analyze," that would produce a student with a sharpened
mental vision and a refined taste. Pelikan agrees with Newman on this
point and holds that professional training belongs within the university
because, as Newman said, outside it the student "is in danger of being ab–
sorbed and narrowed by his pursuit."
Apart from the faculty members, who do most of the writing about
the university and are likely to claim most of the attention and the major
role in it, there are other vital institutions within its walls that deserve
more credit and acclaim than they normally get - for example, the library
and the press. It is good to see full justice, long denied them and their
servants, done them in this book. Pelikan's tribute to the library is elo–
quent: "No single institution in the contemporary world of scholarship
has a greater bearing on the future of the university than the library."
It
takes pride of place not only as "the scholar's workshop," but as custodian
of the common memory "in an age of mass amnesia." And further,
"There is nothing so ecumenical as the library," for, to quote George
Crabbe, one of Newman's favorite poets,
