RUSSIAN ’VARSITY LIFE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2145, 30 July 1907, Page 3

RUSSIAN ’VARSITY LIFE.

Nowhere is tho university, and nowhere are the students, held in such high esteem as in Russia. For the average educated Russian, a university professor is not merely a scholar who teaches chemistry or mathematics or law to a number of young men. This is all very well for a teacher in a lyceum, but much more is expected of a professor. The latter, if he keeps true to the good old traditions, says a writer in the Windsor Magazine, must be an enthusiast and a philosopher in his subject. Ho must possess a spark of divine fire, so as to be able to inspire his. students with the worship of scionce and truth; and, above all, ho must be a man advanced in thought—one of those who make history, and not one of those who let themselves be dragged along By historical events.

As to tho student, he, too, must not merely be a young man who studies certain manners in order to become in due time a doctor or a lawyer, so as to get earnings so much higher than those of an artisan. This might do for the men whose one aim is to make a succeesful “career,” and one of whom, of course, there are a number in each university, but the true student must be a worshipper of science and art—a seeker of truth, one of those whom the great philosophical questions of human understanding interest and perplex more than the miserable, petty questions concerning personal welfare, and one who has come to the university to find there a reply to theso questions. Such is- the tradition; such were all the best men in Russia who have left in literature a description of their student life; and whatever one may become in after life, the real Russian students try to keep in harmony with the good traditions during the years they pass at the university.