: The Universities and Education Today (1962): The Lindsay Memorial Lectures given at the University College of North Staffordshire

by Herbert Butterfield

First published in 1962, this book comprises lectures given in November 1961 to what was then the University College of North Staffordshire. It deals with the aims, rather than the administrative problems of the Universities, to put at the forefront of the reader's mind the fundamentals of University organisation, structure, and development. Butterfield has in mind the needs of undergraduates, and tries to concentrate attention on that electric contact between teacher and student for the sake of which all our elaborate educational machinery exists. He examines the position of the teacher, the status and function of an academic profession, and the relations between teaching and research.

122 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 22, 2017

About the author

Sir Herbert Butterfield was a British historian and philosopher of history who is remembered chiefly for two books—a short volume early in his career entitled The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and his Origins of Modern Science (1949). Over the course of his career, Butterfield turned increasingly to historiography and man's developing view of the past. Butterfield was a devout Christian and reflected at length on Christian influences in historical perspectives. Butterfield thought individual personalities more important than great systems of government or economics in historical study. His Christian beliefs in personal sin, salvation, and providence heavily influenced his writings, a fact he freely admitted. At the same time, Butterfield's early works emphasized the limits of a historian's moral conclusions, "If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance."