Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1929-10-20
BY DR.. NICHOLAS MURRAY
RETLER.

| President OF Columbia University.
w YHAT is the university tradi-
n ton? BY that phrase
! wv mean the significance of the
university from its beginning
! Until this hour-the purpose,
the ideal. the foundations of the univer-
; sity, in the ancient, the medieval and
! the modern worlds.
Frequently I have pointed out that
man in building his civilization has put
as its foundation five fundamental insti-
buttons. Upon these five fundamental
| institutions civilization rests and has
long rested, and as they are strength
grows richer and fuller and more splen-
| did These five fundamental inStitu-
tions are, first, the family, which is the
! foundation and the cornerstone Of our
whole domestic and social order. De-
stroy the family. weaken the family,
| take away the family, and civilization,
as We know it and have known it,
would cease to exist.
Property Economic Cornerstone.
The second of these fundamental in
situations is property: the right of own
! ership and control of that which may
| be lawfully gained. Property is the
cornerstone and the foundation of our
whole economic order.
The third of these Is the state, and
| the state, of course, came later than the
family or property. The state is that
| institution which man has builded in
| order that we may live happily and
| helpfully together in organized society.
The state erects governments. No time
| need be spent in emphasizing the fun
| damental character of that institution.
The fourth is the church. The church
| has been brought into existence in an
Gent as we'll as in modern times, in
order that man may give expression to
his sense of dependence upon a higher
| power, to his faith and to his wish to
worship.
The fifth is the university. The uni
versity came into being in order that
man might satisfy his curiosity, that
deep urge which is in his heart and
mind to break through the boundaries
! that separate the known and the I'M
known, to learn new truth, to establish
new fact, to bring himself in touch with
new experiences, to lift himself out OF
the present, the now, the static, into the
future, the tomorrow. the moving, the
| dynamic.
We have come to look upon the uni
] versity as type of school. the highest
| type browning the educational system OF
many lands. But that, believe me, is
an accident. If there were no schools
/ there would still be universities. There
were universities before there were
schools, and perhaps there will be uni
versities when schools will have taught
everybody to be intelligent and to have
common sense. I do not know.
Mode Of Expression.
The university, therefore, is one OF
mans fundamental modes Of expressing
| himself. The university is one of those
| institutions, those builded things, which
human nature brings into existence TO
| give satisfaction, opportunity, achieve
ment. No one knows when the un1ver-
sity tradition began. When the curtain
rose upon the panorama of recorded his
tory. the university instinct was already
| at work. Wherever there came great
| intelligence which was able to pierce the
! veil that bounded the known there were
| scores, hundreds. thousands who gath
| cred to hear the report Of that intelli-
gence upon what he saw. Before the
invention of printing, naturally the
| great university leader, seer, interpreter,
could send out his message only by word
of mouth, or later, for hundreds and
| hundreds of years, by written record
that must be painfully, very painfully,
| copied and read only here and there
where men assembled
Plato was a university teacher. Can
| you not see him walking restlessly up
and down in the grove called Academic,
under the very shadow of the Acropolis,
and offering those stupendous inter-
pretations Of life and thought and
| morals and manhood and immortality
which have placed him on the pinnacle
he so long has occupied? He was a
sharer and in large part builder of the
| university tradition. And so one might
! come down the centuries, picking here
and there great personalities that
sounded the note of progress and gave
this tradition new power, new meaning,
| and made it strong enough to bring
Columbia University to this celebration
of the l75th anniversary of the grant,
ing Of its charter, well on in the TWEEN
! tieth century. nearly 1880 years after
Plato walked In the groves Of Academe.
SaIerno Came Into Being.
Then, a little later. men began to
worry about those stories of healing that
came from the Far East. What amount
of truth was there in the reports that
reached Europe of the possibilities of
curing disease in various forms? And
there gathered little company around
healing spring in Southern Italy. For
what purpose? To find out what meas
ure of truth there might be in all this
and the University of Salerno came into
being.
Almost at the same time there were
great discussions in Europe over the
question of law. Law and lawlessness
are not twentieth century problems
They are eternal problems for organized
man. They we're discussed, and 1t oc-
CURED to men that there must be some
one who knew what had been done in
this great field. So at Bologna Irnerius
appeared to teach the Roman law. to
call it up from the forgotten crevasses
OF history into which it had fallen, to
make 1t real and to make it alive, and
the great University Of Bologna came
into being.
One Of my earliest academic memories
Is going as official representative of what
was then struggling little historic CO.
lumbta to the celebration at Bologna of
the 800th anniversary Of its establish
ment.
Then Paris, mother of us all-Paris,
which became the intellectual capital at
one bound and has remained the intel
lectual capital ever since. It's seat was
on that hill, that sacred spot called
Mont Ste. Genevieve, on the slopes of
which the Sorbonne now stands and
which the Pantheon crowns. That hill
and its slope toward the River Seine
have seen the asSemblage of seekers
after truth for nearly 1000 years. Is
there any incident in the whole uni
verSity tradit On more extraordinary
than what we read of Abelard and his
adversary. William of Champeaux, de-
batting by the hour those great ques-
lions OF medieval metaphysics which
were then SO real. so determining and
so controlling? The great company of
students swept up one hill to hear the
one. Having listened to his argument,
they crossed the river and swept up the
opposite hill to hear the other So the
method OF diSputation was established,
not in response to theory but as a
practical result of logical and phil