Abstract
Nowadays we tend to regard the idea of a university as an outdated subject. The world of universities is today so complex and diverse that no general doctrine of the university seems possible. In a recent article Alasdair MacIntyre challenges this view and points out that by giving up the question “What is university?” we also give up the question “What is an educated mind?” In this article I will return to the old discussion on the idea of a university. I will go all the way back to Plato, but my main theme is J. V. Snellman’s essay On Academic Studies (1840). There Snellman, a young university lecturer at the time, defends his view that the university is a community of selves. The essay strongly emphasises that students should not only learn to know but also to act in a responsible way as selves. However, the text also reflects on Snellman’s own activity before the publication. He had defended academic freedom against the rector of the Imperial Alexander University of Finland. As a result, Snellman was in the end sentenced in an open court and forced to leave the university. Snellman’s view is certainly not the final definition of the university, but as it, besides presenting a theoretical view on the essence of the university, also reflects on activity in a university community, it gives us elements for reflecting on the idea of a university and an educated mind.
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Notes
Clark Kerr wrote about the idea of a multiversity already at the 1960s. According to him “… several competing visions of true purpose, each relating to a different layer of history, a different web of forces, cause much of a malaise in the university communities today. The university is so many things to so many different people that it must, of necessity, be partially at war within itself.” (1963: 8–9).
The self (autos) was a wider theme in ancient Greek culture. The legendary inscription in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi reads gnôthi seauton, “Know thyself”. The self in antiquity is a very difficult theme indeed to thematise. There is a general understanding among scholars that we who in modern times understand ourselves as subjects understand ourselves essentially differently from how people understood the self in antiquity. My aim here, however, is to give some background to modern views of the relationship between learning and the self, and I choose not to take on the difficult task of pointing out the differences between the ancient autos and the modern self. (Cary 2000; Jaeschke 1989; Remes and Sihvola 2008; Schrader 1989; Seigel 2005; Taylor 1989.)
One could also choose a shortcut. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hegel’s rival and one of the main figures in establishing a new university in Berlin, writes that a lecture should have the nature of an old dialogue, though not its outer form. (Schleiermacher 1808, 62) Plato’s Meno would serve well as an old dialogue in this reflection.
Cousin, too, thought that the aim of higher education is self-cultivation. It is interesting to see how Cousin and his followers tried to argue that women and members of the working class are not entitled to higher education although, from the point of view of Cousin's Cartesian theory, there is no principal difference between a woman’s and a man’s self. (Goldstein 1994, 2005).
The text is written in Swedish and unfortunately has not yet been translated into other languages besides Finnish. In the Finnish school of Hegelian thought, education has been a major theme from very early on (Väyrynen 1992).
Since 1919, the University of Helsinki. Finland was a part of the Russien Empire from 1809 to 1917.
Later on, however, he became a professor in education.
The quarrel between Snellman and rector Pipping can also be seen as a struggle for recognition. Pipping refused to acknowledge Snellman's right to teach and Snellman refused to recognise Pipping's right to give orders to him. The quarrel is well documented in the minutes of the university board and court sessions from November 1837 to June 1839. Here we have to leave this interesting theme aside.
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Himanka, J. The University as a community of selves: Johan Vilhelm Snellman's “On Academic Studies”. High Educ 64, 517–528 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-012-9508-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-012-9508-5