Quote of the Day (Megan Marshall, on Academic Fiction)

“After so many years of reading about them, fictional college professors have come to seem like family to me. I'm not…a member of their ranks, but I do retain a college student's fascination with what goes on behind the scenes, not unlike the curiosity children feel about what their parents may be doing when they’re not around. These books also explore sex—usually adulterous sex—and driving intellectual ambition, as in our American ‘ur-narrative,’ [Nathaniel Hawthorne’s] Fanshawe. But books about professors are novels of middle age, and their consolations are those of midlife: redemption and reconciliation. The college student has grown up to be a professor, and life, though not lacking in complexity, can be good after all.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning American scholar and biographer Megan Marshall, “Academic Discourse and Adulterous Intercourse,” The Atlantic Monthly, Fiction Issue 2006

Quote of the Day (Woodrow Wilson, on Universities and ‘The Object of Learning’)

“It is the object of learning not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of individual men, but also to advance civilization; and if it be true that each nation plays its special part in furthering the common advancement, every people should use its universities to perfect it in its proper role. A university should be an organ of memory for the state for the transmission of its best traditions. Every man sent out from a university should be a man of his nation, as well as a man of his time.” —Woodrow Wilson, 28^th President of the United States and Princeton University President (1856-1924) , “University Training and Citizenship,” The Forum, September 1894, reprinted in The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: College and State—Educational, Literary and Political Papers (1875-1913), edited by Ray Stannard Baker and William Dodd (1926)

Quote of the Day (James Bryant Conant, on Diversity of Opinion in Higher Ed)

“Diversity of opinion is not only basic for the welfare of our universities but for that of the entire nation.” —American chemist, educator and diplomat James Bryant Conant (1893-1978), “Education in a Divided World” (1949), in American Higher Education Transformed, 1940–2005: Documenting the National Discourse, edited by Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender (2008)

Quote of the Day (John Henry Cardinal Newman, on Education as Preparation for the World)

“Why do we educate, except to prepare for the world? Why do we cultivate the intellect of the many beyond the first elements of knowledge, except for this world? Will it be much matter in the world to come whether our bodily health or whether our intellectual strength was more or less, except of course as this world is in all its circumstances a trial for the next? If then a University is a direct preparation for this world, let it be what it professes. It is not a Convent, it is not a Seminary; it is a place to fit men of the world for the world. We cannot possibly keep them from plunging into the world, with all its ways and principles and maxims, when their time comes; but we can prepare them against what is inevitable; and it is not the way to learn to swim in troubled waters, never to have gone into them.” —Roman Catholic theologian, educator, and essayist John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), “Duties of the Church towards Knowledge,” in The Idea of a University (1852)

Photo of the Day: Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

I took the attached photo last month, while being driven through Pittsburgh. I never attended Carnegie Mellon University and have not toured the campus, but I was much taken by the façade of this building and resolved to learn more about it when I got home.

The industrialist Andrew Carnegie regarded his mother, Margaret Morrison Carnegie, as the person “to whom [he] owes everything,” according to a letter he wrote to the Board of Trustees of a major educational institution he endowed, Carnegie Technical Schools. He honored her in concrete fashion by founding the Margaret Morrison Carnegie School for Women in 1906. 

Six years after the 1967 merger of the Carnegie Institute of Technology and Mellon Institute, Margaret Morrison Carnegie College was closed. Since then, Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall has housed students and faculty in the Public Policy, Drama, Architecture, Music schools and now is home to the School of Design. It is also recognized as the campus women’s building.

 

I’m not sure even the most skilled biographer can sort out all the complications in Andrew Carnegie’s character. But I can’t think of many better ways of honoring the legacy of a mother than what he did with this building and the curricula associated with it for more than a century.