"Twelve Apostles" and a Few Heretics

Abstract

A YEAR or two ago we told our faculty that we were of the opinion that great deal, perhaps even more, could be learned from reading the biographical and philosophical writings of leaders in higher education about what education for librarianship was and should be than from the literature of library education itself. Accordingly we submitted list of 12 titles which we had found particularly helpful, which was immediately characterized by our colleagues as Shera's Twelve Apostles. Since this little compilation was prepared few titles that we found helpful have been added, and the whole is brought together here for whatever value it may have to those of you who may be interested in exploring the issues and problems of higher education, We should add the caution that the list is highly personal, subjective, and idiosyncrative. Certainly it is in no sense complete, exhaustive, or definitive. Certainly we do not pretend that these are the best books on the subject. Each of you will doubtless find inclusions with which he disagrees. We disagree with some of them, too; and there are omissions which you will regret. The only claim that we make for this selection is that it contains many writings that are stimulating, provocative, and often thoroughly delightful. Having said this, we send you offon your own.For us, the three great foundation stones, the rocks one might say upon which we have built our own philosophical edifice of higher education are: John Henry Cardinal Newman's The Idea of University, which first appeared in 1873 as an expansion of his Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education, which was published 20 years earlier. The contemporary reader may want to pick and choose from among these essays, but no person who pretends to be knowledgable about higher education can afford to be ignorant of them. Alfred North Whitehead's ten lectures, delivered between 1912 and 1928, and published under the title The Aims of Education, are, as he himself says, a protest against dead knowledge, that is to say, against inert ideas. For this reader, however, it is the supreme statement of the need to break down the departmentalization of the university for the benefit of students as well as the faculty. His was protest against the artificiality of interdisciplinary barriers, and an attempt to establish in place of the notion that courses are entities that exist in nature, recognition of the course as an artificial simplification for the mastery of complex organisms in which thought, ideas, and institutions are quite interdependent.Robert Maynard Hutchins' The Higher Learning in America, which came from the Yale University Press in 1936, only few years after its author had accepted the presidency of the University of Chicago, is watershed in American higher learning. Whatever one may think of Hutchins' concept of education, and despite the fact that the college which he created on the Midway is now only happy memory for those privileged to attend it, all higher education has felt the impact of his power. The year of its publication we told an audience at the Midwinter meeting of the American Library Association that academic librarian should read it religiously once week. We have never lived up to our rhetorical admonition, but the state of our own copy is clear evidence that it has been read and reread many times, and always with profit. One might well add to the listing below some of the collections of essays by the same author: No Friendly Voice, (University of Chicago Press, 1936) ; Education for Freedom (Louisiana University Press, 1947); The University of Utopia (University of Chicago Press, 1953); Freedom, Education, and the Fund (Meridian Books, 1956); Some Observations on American Education (Cambridge University Press, 1956) ; and The Learning Society (Praeger, 1968).Doubtless there will be many of you who think that we should have included John Dewey's Democracy and Education (Macmillan, 1916) among the golden tablets, to change the metaphor, and if that be your opinion you have every right to it. …