1. Theme

The author tries to clarify the purpose of a university: to put the students in touch with the best civilization that human race has created.

2. Structure

1) Part 1 (Para. 1-8): The writer describes his encounter with one of his students.

2) Part 2 (Para. 9-14): The author restates what he still believes to be the purpose of a university: putting its students in touch with the best civilizations the human race has created.

3. Discussion

1) As a college student, what do you think of the question put forward by the author? Give your own answer to the question, and compare it with the author’s.

2) After finishing reading the whole text, how do you evaluate the author’s answer?

3) How does the writer present his argument?

Writing Devices

1. Language Style & Tone

1) Style: Colloquial, familiar style

2) Tone: Humorous and mildly sarcastic

2. Metaphor

Part of the student body was a beanpole with hair on top who came into my class, sat down… (Para. 1)

New as I was to the faculty, I could have told this specimen a number of things. (Para. 2)

That is about what I said, but this particular pest was not interested. (Para. 7)

Sentence Paraphrase

1. … I was fresh out of graduate school starting my first semester at the University of Kansas City. (Para. 1)

2. I could have pointed out that he had enrolled, not in a drugstore-mechanics school, but in a college and that at the end of his course meant to reach for a scroll that read Bachelor of Science. (Para. 2)

3. That is to say, he had not entered a technical training school but a university and in universities students enroll for both training and education. (Para. 2)

4. “For the rest of your life,” I said, “your days are going to average out to about twenty-four hours.” (Para. 4)

5. You will see to it that the cyanide stays out of the aspirin, that the bull doesn’t jump the fence, or that your client doesn’t go to the electric chair as a result of your incompetence. (Para. 5)

6. Along with everything else, they will probably be what puts food on your table, supports your wife, and rears your children. (Para. 5)

7. They will be your income, and may it always suffice. (Para. 5)

8. “I hope you make a lot of it, ” I told him, “because you’re going to be badly stuck for something to do when you’re not signing checks.” (Para. 8)

9. If you have no time for Shakespeare, for a basic look at philosophy, for the continuity of the fine arts, for that lesson of man’s development we call history—then you have no business being in college. (Para. 9)

10. If you are too much in a hurry, or too arrogantly proud of your own limitations, to accept as a gift to your humanity some pieces of the minds of Aristotle, or Chaucer, or Einstein, you are neither a developed human nor a useful citizen of a democracy. (Para. 12)

11. … when I say that a university has no real existence and no real purpose except as it succeeds in putting you in touch, both as specialists and as humans, with those human minds your human mind needs to include. (Para. 14)