Making the University Safe for Democracy, 1902-1910

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. C. Kemeny
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Small Body ◽  
University Education ◽  
American People ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
American University ◽  
Social Responsibilities ◽  
American Society ◽  
The University

The service of institutions of learning is not private but public,” Woodrow Wilson proclaimed at his inauguration as Princeton University’s thirteenth president. “Princeton for the Nation’s Service,” the title of Wilson’s 1902 inaugural address, captured his vision of Princeton’s mission. The nation, Wilson believed, desperately needed the university. The nation and its affairs, he observed, continued to “grow more and more complex” as a result of industrialization and bureaucratization. Furthermore, as successive waves of non-Protestant and non- Anglo-Saxon immigrant groups—”the more sordid and hapless elements” of southern Europe, as he described them elsewhere—congregated in the nation’s growing cities, Wilson, like other Protestant leaders of his day, feared that America’s democratic society stood on the verge of chaos. The very fabric of American society seemed to be ripping apart under the weight of ethnic and religious diversity. Like other educators of the day, Wilson envisioned the modern university’s playing a crucial role in ordering the nation’s business and political affairs and shaping the aspirations and values of the American people. A university education, Wilson explained, was “not for the majority who carry forward the common labor of the world” but for those who would lead the nation and mold the “sound sense and equipment of the rank and file.” The university’s task was twofold: “the production of a great body of informed and thoughtful men and the production of a small body of trained scholars and investigators.” The latter function gave the university a larger civic mission than a college. According to Wilson’s vision, Princeton would not train “servants of a trade or skilled practitioners of a profession.” By enlarging the minds of students and giving them a “catholic vision” of their social responsibilities, Princeton instead would cultivate “citizens” who would live under the “high law of duty.” “Every American university,” Wilson concluded, “must square its standards by that law or lack its national title.” Wilson’s inauguration appeared to confirm the New York Sun’s assessment of his election: “the secularization of our collegiate education grows steadily more complete.”

A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers: 1880-1980

1980 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Political System ◽  
City Government ◽  
American People ◽  
Engineering Problems ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
Technical Question

In 1980 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers celebrates the centenary of its founding. The occasion has provided an opportunity for the Society to look back and survey its accomplishments, its distinguished members, and its constant dialogue — among its members and with the American people — concerning the role of engineering in a technological society. The dynamic tensions within the ASME make a fascinating background to this centennial history. The central role of the Society’s headquarters in New York is examined the light of various movements for regional and professional sections within (and occasionally outside) the Society. The technical question of standards is shown to be a constant and creative problem for members — reflecting their attitudes towards their role in a political system often reluctant to enforce nation-wide standars in business and industry. From the Progressive Era, and its attempts to reform city government and check the power of private utilities, to the 1970s and its renewed concern with ecology and business ethnics, the Society has provided a microcosm of informed debate about technical engineering problems which — as this book makes clear — concerns us all.

Religion and the Modern American University, 1910-1928

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. C. Kemeny
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Graduate Training ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
National Interests ◽  
American University ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Society ◽  
Mainline Protestantism ◽  
The University

Princeton, read a trustees’ report in January 1927, “has always recognized a dual obligation to its undergraduates.” One side of this commitment involved providing “a curriculum which will meet the needs of a modern university” and the other involved creating within students “those spiritual values which make for the building of character.” Wilson had reshaped Princeton into a modern university and had left as his legacy an unyielding commitment to serving national interests. Undergraduate education, graduate training, and a variety of impressive specialized research programs enabled the university to help meet the nation’s need for liberal, civic-minded leaders and the demand for science and practical technology. Wilson and his successors in early-twentieth-century Princeton continued to insist, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, that Protestantism was indispensable to the public good and that civic institutions, such as Princeton, served public interests when they sought to inculcate students with a nonsectarian Protestant faith. In this way, the university, they believed, helped mainline Protestantism play a unifying and integrative role in a nation of increasing cultural and religious diversity. By doing so, they reasoned, Princeton, like other private colleges and universities, would maintain its historic religious mission to advance the Christian character of American society. During the presidency of Wilson’s successor, John G. Hibben, controversies challenged the new configuration of Princeton’s Protestant and civic missions. These controversies, however, helped to strengthen the new ways in which the university attempted to fulfill its religious mission in the twentieth century. In liberal Protestantism, the university found a religion that was compatible with modern science and the public mission of the university. Those traditional evangelical convictions and practices that had survived Wilson’s presidency were disestablished during Hibben’s tenure. Fundamentalists’ criticisms of the university hastened this process in two ways. Sometimes fundamentalist attacks upon the university convinced the administration to adopt policies that guaranteed the displacement of traditional evangelical convictions and practices. This was the case, for example, when fundamentalists’ condemnations of the theological liberalism of the university’s Bible professor accelerated the administration’s approval of a policy of academic freedom.

scholarly journals Book Reviews

1998 ◽  
Vol 154 (3) ◽  
pp. 478-517
Author(s):  
Peter Boomgaard ◽  
R.H. Barnes ◽  
Sini Cedercreutz ◽  
Janet Carsten ◽  
Freek Colombijn ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Rural Women ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Irian Jaya ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
Marital Disputes ◽  
American Society ◽  
Islam And Modernity ◽  
The University

- Peter Boomgaard, R.H. Barnes, Sea hunters of Indonesia; Fishers and weavers of Lamalera. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, xxii + 467 pp. - Sini Cedercreutz, Janet Carsten, The heat of the earth; The process of kinship in a Malay fishing community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, xv + 314 pp., plates, figures, maps, bibliography, index. - Freek Colombijn, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting space; Power relations and the urban built environment in colonial Singapore. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford, Singapore and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, xxiii + 351 pp., tables, figures, plates, index. - Robert Cribb, H.A.J. Klooster, Bibliography of the Indonesian Revolution; Publications from 1942 to 1994. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997, viii + 666 pp., indices. [Bibliographical Series 21.] - Gavin W. Jones, Sharifah Zaleha Syed Hassan, Managing marital disputes in Malaysia; Islamic mediators and conflict resolution in the Syariah courts. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1997, 252 pp., Sven Cederroth (eds.) - Bernice de Jong Boers, G.J. Schutte, State and trade in the Indonesian archipelago. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994, viii + 199 pp. [Working Papers 13.] - Nico Kaptein, Greg Barton, Nahdlatul Ulama; Traditional Islam and modernity in Indonesia. Clayton, Victoria: Monash Asia Institute, 1996, xvii - 293 pp., Greg Fealy (eds.) - Gerrit Knaap, J.E. Schooneveld-Oosterling, Generale Missiven van Gouverneurs-Generaal en Raden aan Heren XVII der Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie. Vol. XI. Den Haag: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis. [Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, Grote Serie 232], 1997, xii + 949 pp. - Niels Mulder, Unni Wikan, Managing turbulent hearts; A Balinese formula for living. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990, xxvi + 343 pp. - Sandra Niessen, Janet Rodenburg, In the shadow of migration; Rural women and their households in North Tapanuli, Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press, vii + 214 pp. [Verhandelingen 174.] - Dianne W.J.H. van Oosterhout, Roy Ellen, The cultural relations of classification; An analysis of Nuaulu animal categories from central Seram. Cambridge University Press 1993, 315 pp. [Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology 91] - Anton Ploeg, Douglas James Hayward, Vernacular Christianity among the Mulia Dani; An ethnography of religious belief among the western Dani of Irian Jaya. Lanham, Maryland: American Society of Missiology and University Press of America, 1997, ix + 329 pp. - M.J.C. Schouten, Laura Summers, Gender and the sexes in the Indonesian Archipelago. (complete issue of Indonesia Circle 67 (November 1995), pp. 165-359.), William Wilder (eds.) - Bernard Sellato, Y.C. Thambun Anyang, Daya Taman Kalimantan; Suatu studi etnografis organisasi sosial dan kekerabatan dengan pendekatan antropologi hukum. Nijmegen: Nijmegen University Press, 1996, xii + 268 pp. - Gerard Termorshuizen, E.M. Beekman, Troubled pleasures; Dutch colonial literature from the East Indies, 1600-1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, 654 pp. - Jeroen Touwen, J.Th. Lindblad, Historical foundations of a national economy in Indonesia, 1890s-1990s. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1996, iv + 427 pp. [KNAW Verhandelingen, Afdeling Letterkunde, Nieuw Reeks 167.]

scholarly journals Farhat J. Ziadeh 1917–2016

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-239
Author(s):  
Nicholas Heer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Full Time ◽  
American University ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
American University Of Beirut ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Distinguished Scholar ◽  
The University

Farhat Jacob Ziadeh, founder and first chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington, and a distinguished scholar in the field of Islamic law, writer, teacher, and administrator, died on 8 June 2016 at the age of ninety-nine. Ziadeh was born on 8 April 1917 in Ramallah, Palestine where he received his early education. After graduating from the American University of Beirut in 1937, he studied law at the University of London, receiving an LL.B. degree in 1940. For the next eight years he worked as a lawyer and Arabic instructor in the United States, England, and Palestine. In 1948, he joined the Princeton University faculty as a lecturer in Arabic. The following year he married Suad Salem, who, like himself, was also from Ramallah. They raised five daughters: Shireen, Susan, Rhonda, Deena, and Reema. In 1950, Ziadeh began working with the Voice of America in New York as the editor of the Arabic desk. Since this was a full-time job, he could continue as a lecturer at Princeton only on a part-time basis. In 1954, however, Princeton offered him an assistant professorship, which he accepted. At Princeton, Ziadeh collaborated with the late R. Bayly Winder to write An Introduction to Modern Arabic (1957). It was during this period also that Ziadeh began to work on his translation of Ṣubḥī Maḥmaṣānī’s Falsafat al-Tashrīʿ fī al-Islām under the title, Mahmassani's Philosophy of Jurisprudence in Islam (1961).

Composition, 1900-2000

PMLA ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 115 (7) ◽  
pp. 1950-1954
Author(s):  
David Bartholomae
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Education ◽  
Composition Courses ◽  
English Composition ◽  
American University ◽  
The Public ◽  
English Departments ◽  
The North ◽  
The University

By 1900, composition as a university subject was already a century old. Writing instruction and the writing of regular “themes” were part of the university curriculum in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, with goals and methods perhaps best represented in Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), Newman's A Practical System of Rhetoric (1827), Parker's Aids to English Composition (1844), Boyd's Elements of Rhetoric and Literary Criticism (1844), and Quackenbos's Advanced Course of Rhetoric and English Composition (1855). Composition courses, usually required, are among the most distinguishing features of the North American version of university education. They represent a distinctively democratic ideal, that writing belongs to everyone, and a contract between the institution and the public—a bargain that, over time, made English departments large and central to the American university and to the American idea of an undergraduate education.

scholarly journals The Russian-Jewish New York, the Balfour Declaration and the Revolution in Russia in Leon Kobrin's Play Back to Your People!

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-43
Author(s):  
Galina Eliasberg
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
Political Life ◽  
American University ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Social ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
American Society ◽  
Generational Conflicts

The article analyzes Kobrin’s play Back to Your People! and the Yiddish press reviews of its performances in New York at Boris Thomashevsky’s Peoples Theater in December 1917 by A. Cahan, I. Vartsman, B. Gorin and others. Critics defined the genre of Kobrin’s play variously as “national drama”, “sentimental melodrama”, “modern sketch” and “tendentious drama” but unanimously noted that it was a direct response to the landmark events of 1917, including the Russian Revolution and the Balfour Declaration. These events triggered nationalist feelings and had a significant impact on Jewish socialists like Kobrin, whose writing and political views were strongly influenced by Russian populism. The play depicted a dramatic clash between two cultural models: an American banker as a “self-made man” and the Russian-Jewish intellectual and Zionist leader. It reflected the issues of inter-generational conflicts, Jewish assimilation and anti-Semitism in America. Kobrin portrayed representatives of conservative and liberal circles in American society and demonstrated different attitudes towards the tragedy experienced by European Jewry during the First World War. The depiction of the younger generation allowed Kobrin to show the American university milieu, the work of the settlement house movement and the educational institutions for the Jewish immigrants. The play touched upon the social, intellectual and political life on the Lower East Side.

scholarly journals A Tribute to the Professor

1991 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-166
Author(s):  
John Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Church History ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Common Experience ◽  
Graduate Seminar ◽  
Recent Meeting ◽  
American Society ◽  
The University ◽  
Intellectual Leadership

At the recent meeting of the American Society of Church History in New York I was recollecting with a friend our common experience in a graduate seminar at the University of Chicago. In the course of that conversation we came to realize that the majority of the papers from the seminar eventually had found their way into print, in one form or another. We noted with satisfaction how seeds planted years ago had borne some fruit, but with that curious admixture of emotions that men and women reserve for their academic mentors, we also understood that finally the seminar was another page of testimony to the energetic intellectual leadership of the professor who had conducted it, Jerald C. Brauer.

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