Nationalism Is Not Enough

Seventy-five of the world's leading scholars, poets and philosophers gathered in Princeton last week. They were there to help 200-year-old Princeton honor its own past by planning for the world's future. The problem: what is a university's responsibility to One World? The visitors (and such local talent as Albert Einstein) argued for three days, in lecture halls and over coffee. Nationalism came in for some heavy blows from everybody.

"All of us," said Professor Garrett Mattingly of Manhattan's Cooper Union, "recognize the tendency of the emotionally naive ... to distort history into patriotic legend. But these obvious perversions are not really dominant. . . . What does need correction is another form of cultural isolationism which is spreading in this country. I mean our increasing preoccupation with our national past, so that history, in the U.S., is coming to mean almost exclusively the history of the U.S." New York City, he said, now teaches twice as much U.S. history as 25 years ago.

The University of Geneva's Professor William E. Rappard pointed to Germany as the nation which had done most to make "her scholars the intellectual bodyguard of her warlike rulers. . . . [But] who, in this totalitarian age of ours, is without sin in this respect? .... Those who expect the university ... to turn out good citizens in the conventional sense of the term, successful men of affairs and staunch adherents to any prevalent religious, social, or political creed, will inevitably be led to limit the freedom of research and teaching."

How then, should a world-minded university teach history? Britain's famed Historian Arnold Toynbee answered: "To explain the history of your country or my country, the smallest unit that one can take into account is Western Christendom. . . . But it, too, turns out to be inadequate. . . . Western Christendom is merely one of five civilizations that survive in the world today [the others: Orthodox Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Far Eastern]. . . . Within the last four hundred years all five have been brought into contact with each othe. . .as a result of successive expansions. . . . [We historians] must make the necessary effort of imagination and effort of will to break our way out of the prison walls of the local and short-lived histories of our own countries and our own cultures. . . ."

Howard E. Wilson, UNESCO's deputy director, had already seen a need for the person so trained: the international civil .servant. Said Wilson: "He must be more than a transplanted citizen of his homeland. He must be a citizen of the world."

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