By Robert W. Madry
Chapel Hill, March 22—Taking issue with the authors of many articles and speeches of late, who find themselves divided on what they call “radicalism and class privilege” in American colleges and universities, President Harry Woodburn Chase of the University of North Carolina says neither the radicals nor capitalists control these institutions. In a chapel address to University students Sunday he expressed some pertinent views regarding recent utterances by well known authors and speakers.
President Chase asserts that those who sponsor the view that colleges and universities are “hot beds of radicalism” are just as mistaken as are those on the other side who hold that “our educational system is in the hands of class greed and selfishness, based upon economic privilege.”
“Neither group has the slightest idea what a university is for,” he says. “It is not the business of a university to tyrannize over the minds of men, to take their minds and shut them up within he limits of a particular doctrine and a particular system that is forced on them. That, I think, is just the trouble; each group thinks that because the universities of the country are not doing this they are not doing their duty, and that they are in the hands of the enemy. Any university that is worth anything at all has an intellectual ideal, and that ideal has to do with truth, and with the opening of men’s minds to seek the truth. If the university does anything it ought so to discipline men’s minds, that they can go into the business of thinking for themselves.”
President Chase’s address in whole follows:
“You are familiar with the old saying that truth is might and will prevail. Now the question of just how truth is to be made to prevail is one that is exercising the minds of a great many people nowadays, and there are two very different theories about it. I can illustrate the first theory by a quotation from the German philosopher Fichte. Here is what he says: ‘To compel men to a state of right, to put them under the yoke of right by force, is not only the right but the sacred duty of every man who has the knowledge and power.’ Fichte was a Prussian, and he was stating an attitude that I suppose we would all agree is a typical Prussian attitude. His point is, as I understand it, that if you believe a thing is right or true, it is your business to use all the force at hand to see to it that other people come to your way of thinking about it; that you must conquer men’s minds with all the force of constituted authority, if that is necessary, and suppress everybody who has a different idea of right and truth from yours. It is the autocratic view of making truth prevail.
“I want to set over against this quotation from Fichte a statement from that great interpreter of democracy, Thomas Jefferson. I think it is one of the finest statements about intellectual freedom that has ever been made, and it is this: ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’ In other words, Jefferson says that Fichte is wrong, and that as he conceives it, democracy has no business tyrannizing over men’s thinking any more than it has tyrannizing over their lives. Jefferson was just as much interested in making truth prevail in the world as was Fichte, but his idea of how to go about it was altogether different. Here is what he says about it: ‘Truth will do well enough if left to shift for itself. It has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men. Truth is a proper and sufficient antagonist to error.’ I believe that Jefferson was right, and that he stated the American point of view, when he said that truth will prevail through her own intrinsic power, without any machinery of conquest and of suppression of tyranny, I think it is the business of the University to stand for that point of view.
“Now I want to test this point of view a little on the side of university life that has been giving some people a great deal of concern. A good many articles have been written lately, and a good many speeches have been made, that have taken as their text the assumption that the colleges and universities of this country are interesting statements, and I think it is very interesting to know what a real radical thinks about them. There has recently appeared a book called “The Goosestep” that was written by Upton Sinclair, and I suppose that everybody including Sinclair himself, would agree that he is a thorough-going radical. This book, which was written by a radical from a radical point of view, has as its central teaching that higher education in America has been ‘stolen by a bandit crew which is using it deliberately for its own ends.’ ‘Our higher education system,’ he says, ‘is today in the hands of its last organized enemy, which is class greed and selfishness, based on economic privilege.’ In other words, Upton Sinclair is preaching that the colleges and universities of the country are in the hands of what [Theodore] Roosevelt used to call ‘malefactors of great wealth,’ who are using them to send men out into society to perpetuate their own supremacy.
“You see, if you put these two views side by side, that both groups agree that higher education is in the hands of the enemy, but each side is convinced that the other fellow has got hold of it and is using it for various purposes of his own.
“The point is just this, that neither group has the slightest idea of what a university is for. It is not the business of a university to tyrannize over the minds of men, to take their minds and shut them up within the limits of a particular doctrine and a particular system that is forced on them. That, I think, is just the trouble; each group thinks that because the universities of the country are not doing this they are not doing their duty, and that they are in the hands of the enemy. Any university that is worth anything at all has an intellectual ideal, and that ideal has to do with truth, and with the opening of men’s minds to seek the truth. If the university does anything it ought so to discipline men’s minds that they can to into the business of thinking for themselves. It ought to teach them regard for facts and evidence, and it ought to lift them above the danger of mob-thinking. Mob-thinking is every bit as dangerous as is mob-action, and a man’s thoughts are just as subject to the mob spirit as is his conduct, if he has not developed such intellectual stability that he can weigh facts and seek truth for himself. The man whose mind has been trained to the point that he does not succumb to mob-thinking is not going to rush into radicalism because it makes an impulsive and sensational appeal to him; nor, on the other hand, is he going to fall into the equally dangerous assumption that everybody who does not agree with him in everything is a Bolshevist and a danger to American institutions. He is not going to try to explain everything that goes wrong as being due to the wicked designs of capitalists, nor is he going to see an emissary of Soviet Russia hiding behind every tree. Thinking on that level is mob-thinking, and it is fundamentally contrary to the kind of thinking that is needed if American institutions are to be perpetuated and built up, and if they are to undergo, without unnecessary shock and friction, that process of constant re-interpretation which the President of the United States has recently pointed out must go on to meet the needs of changed conditions in a democracy.
“And now to sum it all up, it is the business of a university to stand for truth, and for so opening men’s minds and enlarging their horizons that they are in a position to seek truth for themselves. The university has only one possible position to take in such a matter as this, and that is the position that was taken by Jefferson, when he said in that fine statement of his that I repeat once more, ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’”
From the front page of the Durham Morning Herald, March 23, 1924
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