The essential characteristics of "university spirit" are summarized as innovative spirit, critical spirit and social care spirit.
initiative spirit
Innovative spirit is the value of "university spirit" and the fundamental vitality of universities to ensure their status in social organisms. The inheritance of culture cannot rely on heredity, but can only be inherited and developed through inheritance. Education is an important means to transmit and retain human culture from the beginning. It is in this sense that Einstein understood the school: "School has always been the most important means to pass on traditional wealth from one generation to the next." Compared with the past, this situation is more applicable today.
Due to the role of economic modernization, the family as the carrier of traditional education has weakened. Therefore, compared with the past, the continuity and health of human society depend on schools to a greater extent. University education chooses human culture by establishing educational content. Organize human culture. By renewing the educational concept, human values, human value orientation and changing the way of thinking, the regeneration of culture can be realized.
Since Humboldt's principle of integrating teaching and scientific research, scientific research has become a basic function of universities, and now the number of scientific research achievements of universities also marks the contribution of universities to society. If the creative talents cultivated by universities for society are called high-quality workers, then the scientific research achievements of universities are another direct contribution to social productivity, and the combination of the two constitutes the symbol of university productivity and vitality. The reason why "Stanford Spirit" is praised by the world is that it has won numerous Nobel Prizes and National Science Prizes, and it has the Silicon Valley effect of transforming scientific research into productivity.
Universities take it as their responsibility to cultivate talents, and creativity is precisely the core feature of talents. Eliot, a former president of Harvard University for 40 years, believes that the most valuable achievement of university culture is to make students have an open mind, a well-trained cautious thinking attitude, humble behavior, master philosophical research methods and fully understand the ideas accumulated by predecessors. Einstein thought more directly, "The goal of a school should be to cultivate individuals with independent actions and independent thinking, but it should take serving the society as the highest purpose of life." "A society made up of individuals without individual originality and individual will is an unfortunate society with no possibility of development."
On the other hand, universities also create social ideals, pass them on to members of society, and turn them into real cultural entities through people's practice. Social ideal is a concrete reflection of social needs, which is based on the law of social development. Intellectuals, especially those concentrated on university campuses, can better understand the laws of social development than other members of society because of their special advantages in cultural accumulation. Only with the understanding of social laws can we put forward social ideals that conform to the laws of social development.
Compared with other social structures, universities have their own advantages. Specifically: the place where knowledge gathers. Universities are places that inherit traditional scientific and technological cultural heritage and constantly create new scientific and technological cultures. They have gathered all kinds of knowledge from all over the world and have a strong knowledge capacity. The intersection of ideas and academic thoughts. College students have new ideas and embrace them. Different academic ideas can coexist here, and different ideas can influence each other through academic exchanges, which has a good tradition of contending. Pursue the eternal characteristics of ideals.
Europe has a tradition of autonomy since universities in the early Middle Ages. The highest ideal is to spread knowledge and research knowledge, which is relatively beyond social reality. The critical spirit of universities is firstly manifested in that university teachers can treat tradition and reality with a scientific attitude, deny unscientific content, get rid of superstition and conservatism and establish a scientific knowledge system in the process of teaching and scientific research. It can be said that the development history of university teaching and scientific research is the development history of this important process, and it is a sublation process combining affirmation and negation.
On the other hand, the critical spirit of universities is a rational reflection on social reality and value construction. After entering the era of technology, technology has diluted human nature and made people lose their enthusiasm and sensitivity to others. As a result, human nature has become a victim of technology. At the same time, human nature succumbs to technology and regards technology as a god. As a result of the separation of science and humanities, there are two kinds of deformed people, one is a "hollow man" who only knows technology but has a pale soul, and the other is a "marginal man" who talks about humanities without knowing technology. There is nothing we can do to change this kind of "technology poison" in the real society, but university educators, especially humanities and social sciences education, regard it as their due content.
As early as the beginning of this century, some famous universities in the west paid attention to overcoming this one-sidedness and exploring the road of integration of science and technology and humanities. Harvard students offer "general education courses" in the first and second grades, covering humanities, society, natural science and other aspects. Engineering students at MIT should take humanities courses, which account for about 22% of the total class hours. The human nature education, holistic education, general education, moral education and psychological education advocated repeatedly in China are all the results of criticizing human alienation from the technical point of view.
The last aspect of critical spirit is the advice and suggestions of university knowledge groups on government decision-making. Scientific decision-making is the key of government decision-making, but it is not easy to make scientific decision-making because of the limitation of decision-makers' own quality. Therefore, it is part of the decision-making mechanism to listen to experts' opinions and invite experts to participate in decision-making. Experts become experts because of their professional scientific attitude and objective critical spirit.
Social care spirit Higher education is the inevitable product of social development, and social demand is the first driving force. In the industrialized and information society, universities are more and more deeply involved in the operation of social machines. Paying attention to reality and serving the society has become the third major function of colleges and universities, and higher education is directly transformed into the first productive force of society-science and technology through scientific research; Through the cultivation of talents, we can provide the society with the most active factor in productivity-high-quality human resources.
The spirit of social care is also manifested in the participation and construction of social spiritual civilization by universities. In addition to contributing to the society in terms of productivity, universities also provide spiritual products for the society through direct research and publicity of humanities and social sciences, including philosophical research, literary creation and criticism, and ideological and moral construction. While refining and criticizing social life, intellectuals also put all kinds of spiritual products into society, providing direct content for socialist construction.
The university also provides an exemplary role for community civilization through the construction of campus culture. There are two conditions to play an exemplary role: one is to be ahead of the times; First, it is perfect and has ideal value. The creativity of universities provides an endless source of power for them to stay ahead of the times, while the unique academic atmosphere of inclusive universities and schools of thought contend ensures the impact of various ideas and is conducive to the formation of a more harmonious spiritual environment. If the demonstration function is comprehensive and explicit, then the value guidance is profound and lasting.
The realistic value of society is always pluralistic, and it is short-term and changeable. However, due to the influence of historical and cultural accumulation, university values have the characteristics of getting rid of short-term utilitarian narrowness, so we can balance the development of negative social values with the help of critical spirit and play a leading role in the formation and promotion of mainstream values. Brubeck believes that American universities since the 1960s "are not only the center of American education, but also the center of American life, the main service provider and the main tool of social change after the government." It is the source, advocate, promoter and communication center of new ideas.