The Truth About the Truth
Abstract
<p>THE PURSUIT of truth and knowledge is the entire purpose of the university. All other goals are secondary. The university is not primarily a purveyor of knowledge. It teaches, because young men and women pass successfully in this environment from adolescence to that intellectual maturity which civilization most needs. It plays its effective role in the community, not by intention or overt actions, but by setting up that standard of honesty and objectivity that assures a democratic society of justice—as witness the demoralization of social integrity when a totalitarian government takes over and destroys the universities as the sanctuaries of free enquiry.</p><p>By this semantic propaganda, defining a university by what it could and should be more than by what it usually is, MacIver sets the goal for his book, to which Hofstadter and Metzger write the historical introduction. The three collaborating authors write separately, with Hofstadter tracing the history of inchoate academic freedom through the collegiate period in the United States from the founding of Harvard to the emergence of Darwinism, with Metzger carrying the history onward through the university period up to the World Wars, and with MacIver marshaling all forces, as it were, on the firing