President of Columbia
It is still a disappointment to many Americans that General Eisenhower preferred the Presidency of Columbia University to that of the United States, but it is a good deal easier to understand his choice after studying the speech he made at his installation on Tuesday. It was a speech which deserves as much attention in this country as it has received in America, not so much because he voiced any new ideas about higher education, but because he restated fundamental truths with a new emphasis and simplicity. " From the smallest school to a university as great as Columbia," said the General, " general education for citizenship must be the common and first purpose of them all." Remarks such as this have often been taken as the text for complicated courses in citizenship, but the General was thinking of much more than teaching people about the vote or local government. His belief is that universities should be institutions which automatically, by their structure and by the nature of their curricula, develop the idea of human freedom. General Eisenhower was anxious not to give the impression that he is one of those who consider research profitless and specialisation a danger ; he would only urge the universities to keep in the -front of their attention the danger which threatens them- through the growth of the secular State. The ideas of freedom, as we know them, owe a great debt for their survival and growth to the universities of - the West ; but the old battles for freedom of thought and expression will have to be fought all over again by the generation which formed General Eisenhower's student audience. It may well be that, as President of the largest of America's universities, General Eisenhower will be able to exercise almost as profound an influence on his country's future as if he had chosen the risk of politics.
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