ADMINISTERING THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FUTURE
443
everyday oratory has petrified like a log from a Carboniferous swamp. We
recognize that certain occasions require certain kinds of speech, but what
we usually rise to resembles the achieved marriage of the right thought
with the right word no more than the scaly imprint of a tree-fern in
ancient shale resembles the living tree.
For many people the mere possibility of language reaching to some–
thing higher, better, or truer in the human condition has been sealed shut.
When did the art of rhetoric slip away from its place in the liberal arts?
Just moments ago. When a student applied to Boston University in 1870,
he was expected to be conversant with great works: Milton, Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Homer. Candidates for the freshman class took examinations
in Latin (on the
Aeneid),
in Greek (on the
fliad),
in mathematics (arith–
metic, algebra, geometry), in English (five works of literature, in that year
Othello
and
King John,
Goldsmith's
Vicar of Wakifreld,
Carlisle's
Essay on
Scott,
and
The Mill on the Floss),
as well as in geography and history.
Rigorous though these may seem, the faculty and administration
found it necessary to raise standards higher-quite simply, too many peo–
ple could meet them, and enrollment hit its limit. Thus, examinations were
added to test applicants' abilities in four languages other than English.
Once admitted, things weren't any easier. Boston University's yearbook
of 1880 stated, "The aim of the college is to give that liberal education which
is the true preparation for the study of a learned profession, or for a life devot–
ed to letters, education, or public
affairs.
It
accordingly provides thorough and
systematic instruction in all three branches of literature, philosophy, and sci–
ence known as the liberal
arts!'
Perhaps you've read passages to this effect in
your own college catalogues, but I suggest to you there is a difference. Then,
it meant something. To prepare students for learned professions or lives in
arts
and letters, Boston University freshmen were required to take Latin, Greek,
Mathematics, English Composition, and Rhetorical Exercises and Elocution
for a full year, together with a two-hour course in German, and one-hour
courses
in
Greek and Roman History. Sophomores took Physics, Chemistry,
Geology, Biology, Botany, Zoology, and Physiology.
You will have noted that among these requirements was the require–
ment for a full year of Rhetorical Exercises and Elocution. For students to
use their substantive knowledge, they also needed to learn how to com–
municate in substantive ways.
In
a splendid article last year in
The Chronicle of Higher Education,
Lawrence Bierniller recounts the history of the Goethean Literary Society
at a York, Pennsylvania, school which later became Franklin and Marshall
College.
In
the mid-nineteenth century, the society met on Saturday
mornings to discuss such things as "Would it be beneficial for the United
States to admit Texas to the Union?", "Is England justified in carrying on
