Page:Modern review 1921 v29.pdf/47

34

After all it is not bricks nor printed papers nor scientific apparatus that really constitute a University. It is men. The university is, or ought to be, a brotherhood of Scholars assisting each other, co-operating in various ways, to promote the advancement of learning. The quality of its work will depend upon the capacity and spirit of its professoriate. If they are trained men, if they are ever alert to learn and to try the latest methods of education devised anywhere in the civilised world, if they frequently meet together (informally as well as formally) to exchange their ideas and discuss their different personal experiences, and above all if they are inspired by the spirit of self-criticism and divine discontent with things as they are, then only can our universities fall into line with the Universities of Europe and America. Otherwise, they will remain for ever pack-oxen importing to India the ready-made (intellectual) goods of the West, but producing nothing of their own. They will remain academic brokers and not manufacturers, the Marwaris and not the Parsis of the world of letters and science.

Nothing can have a more demoralising effect on the staff of a university than insecurity of tenure and advancement according to personal favour or family influence. These evils are not dreamt of in English Universities, which first of all secure the indispensable financial basis of a new chair, and then recruit its officer publicly in the open market of scholarship. Here in India in certain universities the unbusiness-like method is followed of creating chairs without any endowment or permanent source of income, but on mere speculation that it would attract some pious founder later on, that “something would turn up” to save the extinction of the chair through bankruptcy. Mr. Micawber as vice-chancellor is a sight peculiar to India and the results cannot be happier than his well-known method when applied to his domestic economy. This uncertainty about the financial basis of the post-graduate teaching organisation and the chronic rumours of deficit and impending bankruptcy every year, are the surest means of unsettling the minds of the staff and the students alike and effectually preventing any substantial work being done. I shall not insult the intelligence of the reader by labouring the point that a university cannot add to its reputation if it once abandons the principle that men are to be valued according to the work actually done by them and not according to their family influence or the country where they took their degrees.

The greatest enemies of a king are his flatterers and the most harmful poison that can enter into the chiefs of staff of a university is self-conceit and impatience of criticism. English universities welcome criticism and have periodical reviews of their work by impartial outside commissions. Self-criticism is their normal daily duty. As the Right Hon'ble Mr Fisher rightly says, “The spirit in a university—wide, tolerant, self-critical, alive to generous issues, disinterested,—should penetrate into every part of the educational system of the country, saving it from dull mechanical routine, from the unintelligent pressure of stereotyped examinations, and keeping it fresh and wholesome by contact with the living movements of thought and discovery and the true intellectual pleasures of the world” Prof Sir Oliver Lodge says the same thing, when he remarks that “everybody in a university is subject to sane and healthy criticism, and each is judged by his peers.”

The banishment of criticism would cause academic atrophy.