t
he scientific temper and of unbiased inquiry. It is little likely to respect or heed them if it has
reason to believe that they are the expression of the interests, or the timidities, of the limited
portion of the community which is in a position to endow institutions of learning, or is most
l
ikely to be represented upon their boards of trustees. And a plausible reason for this belief is
given the public so long as our universities are not organized in such a way as to make impos-
sible any exercise of pressure upon professorial opinions and utterances by governing boards
of laymen.
Since there are no rights without corresponding duties, the considerations heretofore set
down with respect to the freedom of the academic teacher entail certain correlative obligations.
The claim to freedom of teaching is made in the interest of the integrity and of the progress of
scientific inquiry; it is, therefore, only those who carry on their work in the temper of the sci-
entific inquirer who may justly assert this claim. The liberty of the scholar within the universi-
ty to set forth his conclusions, be they what they may, is conditioned by their being conclusions
gained by a scholar’s method and held in a scholar’s spirit; that is to say, they must be the fruits
of competent and patient and sincere inquiry, and they should be set forth with dignity, cour-
tesy, and temperateness of language. The university teacher, in giving instruction upon contro-
versial matters, while he is under no obligation to hide his own opinion under a mountain of
equivocal verbiage, should, if he is fit for his position, be a person of a fair and judicial mind;
he should, in dealing with such subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the
divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with
the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at
issue; and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with
ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves, and to provide them access
to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.
It is, however, for reasons which have already been made evident, inadmissible that the
power of determining when departures from the requirements of the scientific spirit and
method have occurred, should be vested in bodies not composed of members of the academic
profession. Such bodies necessarily lack full competency to judge of those requirements; their
intervention can never be exempt from the suspicion that it is dictated by other motives than
zeal for the integrity of science; and it is, in any case, unsuitable to the dignity of a great pro-
fession that the initial responsibility for the maintenance of its professional standards should
not be in the hands of its own members. It follows that university teachers must be prepared to
assume this responsibility for themselves. They have hitherto seldom had the opportunity, or
perhaps the disposition, to do so. The obligation will doubtless, therefore, seem to many an
unwelcome and burdensome one; and for its proper discharge members of the profession will
perhaps need to acquire, in a greater measure than they at present possess it, the capacity for
impersonal judgment in such cases, and for judicial severity when the occasion requires it. But
the responsibility cannot, in this committee’s opinion, be rightfully evaded. If this profession
should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and the unworthy, or to pre-
vent the freedom which it claims in the name of science from being used as a shelter for ineffi-
ciency, for superficiality, or for uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task
will be performed by others—by others who lack certain essential qualifications for perform-
ing it, and whose action is sure to breed suspicions and recurrent controversies deeply injuri-
ous to the internal order and the public standing of universities. Your committee has, therefore,
in the appended “Practical Proposals,” attempted to suggest means by which judicial action by
representatives of the profession, with respect to the matters here referred to, may be secured.
There is one case in which the academic teacher is under an obligation to observe certain spe-
cial restraints—namely, the instruction of immature students. In many of our American colleges,
and especially in the first two years of the course, the student’s character is not yet fully formed,
his mind is still relatively immature. In these circumstances it may reasonably be expected that
the instructor will present scientific truth with discretion, that he will introduce the student to
new conceptions gradually, with some consideration for the student’s preconceptions and tra-
ditions, and with due regard to character-building. The teacher ought also to be especially on his
guard against taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with
298