Sheldon Hackney

The University and Its Community: Past and Present

The history of university-community relations in this century has been characterized by periods of optimism and innovative action followed by disillusionment. During the years when cities were rapidly growing as a result of immigration and migration from the countryside, academics contributed to the search for solutions to urban problems and played a major role in the Progressive Movement. After World War I, research became increasingly esoteric, its focus shifting to national and international issues, until, with the sixties, efforts to find accommodations with a restive local community spawned a wide variety of new programs. The advent of technology appeared to satisfy needs for both research and jobs, but it also produced new frictions. In the present decade, new models for partnership and cooperation have evolved and community involvement has been linked more closely with the educational mission of the university. The hope is that a new spirit of optimism derived from the results of academically based public service will promote lasting progress. Ways must be found to institutionalize achieved goals that mutually benefit the urban university and its neighboring community.

Higher Education as a Medium for Culture

The American university is at risk because of the very fact that it is so culturally important and because it is so consonant with American cultural values. As cultural values become more contentious in the public arena, the university becomes more tempting as a trophy and as a weapon in the culture wars. Ironically, the university can best protect itself using the camouflage provided by its historical accumulation of multiple functions, by accepting the ambiguity of the cultural role it plays, and by simultaneously emphasizing the way it faithfully reflects American culture and the way its special mystique sets it apart as a different kind of institution in American life.

Supply, Demand, and the University

One reason there never seems to be adequate funding for the arts is that supply can never keep up with demand. Because of their mission and the environment they provide for creative minds, universities contribute to the problem by fanning the sparks of artistic desire. At the same time, because of their role in educating the audiences of the future, they are equally a part of the solution. In good financial times no less than in bad, Americans have tended to regard support for the arts in a puritanical light. Universities therefore make their most solid contributions to the arts in kind, by encouraging artists and the arts as part of the primary educational mission and by exposing all students to both the old and the new in art, music, and drama. Even though direct subventions are bound to remain inadequate, institutions can effectively provide support for the arts by resuming some responsibility for instilling aesthetic judgment in the citizens and consumers of tomorrow. Universities have a historical obligation to develop the highest in human awareness. This includes helping to determine tomorrows tune by taking responsibility for informing the tastes of those who will pay the pipers of the future.

Remarks on the 200th Anniversary of the Accession of John Marshall as Chief Justice

May it please the Court: It was a day in mid-January 1801. John Adams, the President of the United States, was conferring with the Secretary of State, John Marshall. President Adams, a Federalist who had been defeated for re-election, had much to do before turning over executive authority to his successor, Thomas Jefferson, a Republican, in early March. The President’s most important remaining chore was to select and install a new Chief Justice to succeed Oliver Ellsworth, the third Chief Justice, who had resigned a few weeks before. On receipt of Ellsworth’s resignation, the President had at once written, tendering the post, to his old friend John Jay, the first Chief Justice, who had left the bench five years before to become Governor of New York and who was now at the close of his second term. Concurrent with his letter to Jay, the President had sent Jay’s name to the Senate, which had quickly confirmed the nomination. But Jay did not respond to the President’s letter for some time. And when the letter came, it was in the negative. When Jay was Chief Justice, he had felt strongly that the Judiciary Act of 1789 had imposed on the Justices of the Supreme Court burdensome responsibilities of circuit-riding that were not compatible with the Supreme Court’s appellate responsibilities. In the years since leaving the Court, Jay had not changed his mind: