Inn 1876, Johns Hopkins University President Daniel Coit Gilman said,
The object of the university is to develop character — to make men. It misses its aim if it produced learned pedants, or simple artisans, or cunning sophists, or pretentious practitioners. Its purport is not so much to impart knowledge to the pupils, as whet the appetite, exhibit methods, develop powers, strengthen judgment, and invigorate the intellectual and moral forces. It should prepare for the service of society a class of students who will be wise, thoughtful, progressive guides in whatever department of work or thought they may be engaged.
Quoted by Timothy Taylor.
The very top colleges historically have been for training elites. The college administrators decided who ought to be part of the elite and what training they should receive.
There has always been some tension between this mission and a more democratic/utilitarian conception of colleges as instruments for promoting equality and upward mobility.
Has anyone shown that the mission outlined by Gilman is actually possible? If so, are there reliable techniques (ie double-blind study) that achieve it?
This does sound very much like a mission to train elites; Plato’s Philosopher King training applied more generally to leaders/administrators of all kinds.
There is a less anachronistic interpretation of “developing character”, in my opinion. In addition to ranking/matching mostly based on IQ and comparative advantage, modern universities serve as a kind of adult marshmallow test. Rather than develop character, they indirectly measure character, that is, university life is the first opportunity for young adults to test prioritize their effort pursuing long term goals versus short-term indulgences in an environment full of friends/peers and free of the guiding influence of family and community.
“Character”, in a sense, is the adult version of delayed gratification.
>> “Character”, in a sense, is the adult version of delayed gratification.
I don’t think “character” is so monistic that it can reduced to one thing. (Perhaps I am using the word “monistic” correctly).
Part of character is telling the truth even when it’s painful for oneself and others. Telling the truth is not delayed gratification, because the consequences for oneself may be negative in the long run.
The Persians knew but three three things: “To ride, to shoot the bow, not to lie.”
Part of character is probably “moral courage”–the courage to act and to make hard decisions in conditions of uncertainty.
Example One: Eisenhower giving the final “go” order for the D-Day Landing.
Example Two: Grant.
One of Ulysses S. Grant’s biographers noted that Grant had exceptional moral courage. He probably had more than Sherman, since after his nervous breakdown Sherman always preferred to be have Grant in a position of leaderhip over him.
The book I’m thinking of is _A victor not a butcher_ by Edward Bonekemper. See that book for details on Grant’s moral courage.
A relevant quote is this:
Sherman said:
“I am damned smarter man than Grant. I know more about military history, strategy, and grand tactics than he does. I know more about supply, administration, and everything else than he does. I’ll tell you where he beats me though and where he beats the world. He doesn’t give a damn about what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell. … I am more nervous than he is. I am more likely to change my orders or to countermarch my command than he is. He uses such information as he has according to his best judgment; he issues his orders and does his level best to carry them out without much reference to what is going on about him and, so far, experience seems to have fully justified him.”
Good point. Truth and honestly certainly fall under the theme of character. Courage is another, sometimes getting right down to overcoming low-level physiological response to high stress situations.
I’m not sure this level of gallantry is what Gilman had in mind but your point is well taken. Perhaps diligence or conscientiousness are better terms for the adult version of delayed gratification that I was thinking of.
Thank you for your reply. Deferred Gratification is veryimportant, that’s for sure.
Our topic of character is a fascinating topic–tending toward the protean.
Platonists tend toward lumping together (True, Good Beautiful). Aristotelians toward splitting things apart into more and more categories.
Somewhere there’s a list of “Signature Strengths.” This is a good start.
Not all of these are what people mean by character, but some of them probably are.
https://www.viacharacter.org/topics/articles/what-are-your-signature-strengths
“The idea of universal education collided with the idea of exclusive education, and the strife and struggle moves through phases and under sundry names into the present… …The result of school life then is philistinism. Just as we found our way into and permeated everything with which we were confronted during our childhood, so we discover and conduct ourselves in later years, resign ourselves to the times, become its servants and so-called good citizens. Where then will a spirit of opposition be strengthened in place of the subservience which has been cultivated until now, where will a creative person be educated instead of a learning one, where does the teacher turn into a fellow worker, where does he recognize knowledge as turning into will, where does the free man count as a goal and not the merely educated one? Unfortunately, only in a few places yet. The insight must become more universal, not so that education, civilization, the highest task of man is decided, but rather self-application.”
The False Principle of our Education (1842)
“Trust, but verify.”
Compare Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness, “Why Most Academic Advertising is Immoral Bullshit,” chapter 3, Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education (Oxford U. Press, 2019).
For the most part, colleges really did not engage in promoting promoting equality and upward mobility until after 1950 or so. There would be some people of humble means that could work through the system (Abraham Lincoln, etc.) but these were people of tremendous talent exception.
Again, the hardest part for me to understand your thoughts on ‘elites’ is we really to define Economic versus Political elites here. In 1876, I believe this line was not as distinct and closer to the Founding Fathers vision of the government, economics and society.
Remember that until the first wave of postwar GI bill students graduated, about 1950, college was not generally considered necessary or useful for a man of business. Even nearly-universal high school only dates from the first half of the 20th century. Before that, the expectation was that after middle school you would get a job (like my paternal grandfather did). Colleges were for the rare few who wanted to enter the professions (medicine and law, as the word was understood then) or who wished to become scholars.
We have bunches of tech elites that never finished college.
But they employ scads of mid six figure managers who did.
From the founder of my alma mater …
“Should it [a college liberal arts education] become universal, it would be as destructive to civilization as universal barbarism.”
— Dr. Benjamin Rush, Declaration of Independence signer and founder of Dickinson College on a college liberal arts education, June 27, 1810
[Ref. “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815”, Gordon S. Wood, pg 731]
Can somebody who is below avg. in “intelligence”, however measured, really be “wise”?
For each individual, thru constant decision making daily, “smart” people make “better” decisions than “less smart” people. On avg.
Liberal education with the goal of making more people filled with general wisdom seems doomed, somewhat, to be limited to a maximum of about half the people. The other half — should be looking to become educated, deeply, in their jobs.
Most non-college educated folk who are plumbers know far far more about real world plumbing than 90% (or more) of college graduates & students. The education most needed for most folk is so as to do their “jobs” better, including training for their next job. There’s not enough prestige and support for job training institutes after High School, and relatively too much for liberal ed colleges.
Percy Marks is the author of the ‘Animal House’ of his time. “The Plastic Age” (1924) bestseller The book was made into movies twice, in 1925 with Clara Bow and in 1928 under the title ‘Red Lips. “The Plastic Age provides a composite image of 1920s campus life with many references to campus traditions at Dartmouth and Brown including bonfires, beanies, and fraternity rushing.”
I found this article to be very blunt about college. Sadly, today colleges don’t force students to develop early but rather produce “hot house” flowers.
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“The idea is, of course, that men are successful because they have gone to college. No idea was ever more absurd. No man is successful because he has managed to pass a certain number of courses and has received a sheepskin which tells the world in Latin, that neither the world nor the graduate can read, that he has successfully completed the work required. If the man is successful, it is because he has the qualities for success in him; the college “education” has merely, speaking in terms’ of horticulture, forced those qualities and given him certain intellectual tools with which to work—tools which he could have got without going to college, but not nearly so quickly. So far as anything practical is concerned, a college is simply an intellectual hothouse. For four years the mind of the undergraduate is put “under glass,” and a very warm and constant sunshine is poured down upon it. The result is, of course, that his mind blooms earlier than it would in the much cooler intellectual atmosphere of the business world.
“A man learns more about business in the first six months after his graduation than he does in his whole four years of college. But—and here is the “practical” result of his college work—he learns far more in those six months than if he had not gone to college. He has been trained to learn, and that, to all intents and purposes, is all the training he has received. To say that he has been trained to think is to say essentially that he has been trained to learn, but remember that it is impossible to teach a man to think. The power to think must be inherently his. All that the teacher can do is help him learn to order his thoughts—such as they are. ”
Marks, Percy, “Under Glass”, Scribner’s Magazine Vol 73, 1923, p 47
http://www.archive.org/stream/scribnersmag73editmiss#page/46/mode/2up
I can’t say that I really know all the reasons that a man should go to college, but at least we can divide schools into two classes: Vocational, and Liberal Arts. Most students go to college nowadays for a vocational education. Accounting, or Marketing, etc. So they aren’t really attending classes for larger philosophical reasons. They just want a job.
If education takes place within a larger University system, then it would be nice if there were some diversity, so that students could choose. For example, Georgetown is technically a Catholic University. But really, it’s not. It’s your typical leftist school.
There is no chart which shows the various philosophical positions taken by all the Universities. The Universities don’t have any intellectual freedom anymore, they have all been taken over by the left.