Short History of Pittsburgh — Intellectual - Chapter 4

IV

The author ventures to repeat in this little book a suggestion which has been made by him several times, looking to a working cooeperation or even a closer bond of union between the Carnegie Institute and the University of Pittsburgh.

In an address delivered at the Carnegie Institute on Founder's Day, 1908, the author made the following remarks on this subject: The temptation to go a little further into the future first requires the acknowledgment which St. Paul made when he wrote of marriage: "I speak not by authority, but by sufferance."

There will soon begin to rise on these adjacent heights the first new buildings of the Western University (now University of Pittsburgh), conceived in the classic spirit of Greece and crowning that hill like a modern Acropolis.

With its charter dating back one hundred and twenty-five years the University is already venerable in this land.

Is it not feasible to hope that through the practical benevolence of our people, some working basis of union can be effected between that institution and this?

Here we have painting, and sculpture, and architecture, and books, and a wonderfully rich scientific collection, and the abiding spirit of music.

We have these fast-growing Technical Schools.

And yet the entire scheme seems to be lacking something which marks its unfinished state.

The Technical Schools do not and should not teach languages, literature, philosophy, and the fine arts, nor the old learned professions, but these must always rest in the University.

Should not one school thus supplement the other?

And then, the students on each side of this main building would find available here those great collections which, if properly demonstrated, would give them a larger opportunity for systematic culture than could be offered by any other community in the world.

For we should no longer permit these great departments of the fine arts and of the sciences to remain in a passive state, but they should all be made the means of active instruction from masterful professors.

Music, its theory, composition, and performance on every instrument should be taught where demonstrations could be made with the orchestra and the organ.

Successful painters and sculptors, the elected members of the future faculty, should fix their studios near the Institute and teach painting and sculpture as well as it could be done in Paris or Munich.

Architecture should thrive by the hand of its trained votaries, while science should continue to reveal the secrets of her most attractive mysteries.

Then, as the ambitious youths of the ancient world came to Athens to obtain the purest culture of that age, so would our modern youths, who are already in the Carnegie Technical Schools from twenty-six States, continue to come to Pittsburgh to partake of the most comprehensive scheme of education which the world would obtain.

Believing firmly in the achieving power of hopeful thought, I pray you think on this.

[Illustration: The Carnegie Institute]