STUDY AND RESEARCH. 655 



the German universities, mention of which recalls the Carlsbad Eesolu- 

 tions, has at last vanished, and we realize with gratitude that it has 

 left us in undiminished enjoyment of our most precious possessions — 

 liberty of instruction and liberty of study (Lehrfreiheit und Lernfrei- 

 heit), possessions in which we have abundant reason to take pride when 

 we compare our own with other European nations. Teachers and 

 students have lost none of that independence and self-dependence 

 which grow out of the feeling of responsibility, and are incomiiatible 

 with control from without. In particular, liberty of instruction, granted 

 as a special privilege by emperors and rulers up to the dissolution of 

 the German Empire, has become a constitutional right in our time. 

 Moreover, we retain the privilege of choosing our rector through our 

 professors (ordentliche Professoren), and the corporate character of the 

 university has not been called into question before the law. 



To be sure many other privileges, originating when the body of 

 students was well nigh sovereign and medieval customs determined 

 the conditions of student life, have vanished wholly. Even academic 

 jurisdiction, with the exception of a certain degree of disciplinary 

 competence, has been abolished; our scepters, which appear on occa- 

 sions like this, are ornaments rather than the insignia of power. The 

 student is wholly amenable to civil law; he is a citizen, like those in 

 other walks of life, and it behooves him to know that he now enjoys no 

 privilege but that granted him by reason of his preparatory education, 

 namely, liberty of study, and that to be acquired by devotion to uni- 

 versity studies, namely, eligibility to many, in fact tlie highest, positions 

 in the gift of the state. For the rest, we no longer have any academic 

 liberty that differs from ordinary civil liberty. The student has no 

 peculiar legal code; the academic citizen, like every other citizen of 

 the state, must look to the constitution as the source of law. But 

 the constitution has granted him more rights than he possessed before, 

 especially the right of occupying himself with politics within the 

 limits set by the constitution and by law, and exemption fi'om the 

 jurisdiction of special courts. 



Therefore, my dear students, receive my well-meant counsel to 

 devote yourselves to study as your first and foremost task, with high 

 seriousness and with the consciousness of all it involves. Self-evident 

 as it may seem, experience teaches that this admonition can not be 

 repeated too often or with too much emphasis. It applies not alone to 

 the last terms at the university, but to the early ones as well. The 

 more abstruse and comprehensive the science which the matriculate 

 student chooses as his specialty, the earlier must methodical study 

 begin; for the instruction of the later terms is intelligible only when 

 based on that of the earlier. The temptation to enjoy academic liberty, 

 first of all by neglect of study, is doubtless great with a young student. 

 Stepping out from under the rigid discipline of the gymnasium into the 

 golden sunlight of academic liberty, he feels sensuous delight in stretch- 



