What is a university? What is the spirit of university?

University is a national institution of higher education, which comprehensively provides teaching and research conditions and authorizes the awarding of degrees.

Today's universities generally include a graduate school that can award master's and doctoral degrees, several professional colleges, and an undergraduate school that can award bachelor's degrees. Universities also include higher vocational colleges.

"University spirit" is the civilized achievement of the spiritual form with unique temperament formed in the existence and development of the university itself. It is the epoch symbol and concrete condensation of the scientific spirit and the advanced form of the civilization of the whole human society. Facing the opportunities and challenges of knowledge economy, building "university spirit" is not only the need of the development of higher education itself, but also the need of social progress. The essential characteristics of "university spirit" are summarized as creative spirit, critical spirit and social care spirit.

creative spirit

creative spirit is the value of the existence of universities with "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 transmission. Education has been an important means to transmit and retain human culture from the very beginning. It is in this sense that Einstein understood 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 traditional carrier of education, has been weakened. Therefore, compared with the past, the continuity and health of human society depends on schools to a higher extent. University education chooses human culture by establishing educational content. Organize human culture. By renewing the educational concept, people's values, people's value orientation, and changing the way of thinking, the regeneration of culture can be realized.

judging from Humboldt's principle of unifying teaching and scientific research, scientific research has become a basic function of universities, and the number of scientific research achievements of universities also marks the contribution of universities to society. If the creative talents cultivated by universities for the society are called high-quality workers, then the scientific research achievements of universities are another direct contribution to social productivity, and the isomorphism of them has become the symbol of the productivity and vitality of universities. The reason why the "Stanford Spirit" is praised by the world is that it has won numerous Nobel Prizes and National Science Prizes, and has the Silicon Valley effect of transforming scientific research into productivity.

Universities take the cultivation of talents as their responsibility, and creativity is precisely the core characteristic of talents. Eliot, a former president of Harvard University for 4 years, believes that the most valuable achievement of university culture is to make students have an open mind, a trained and cautious thinking attitude, humble behavior, master philosophical research methods and fully understand the ideas accumulated by predecessors. Einstein thought more directly that "the goal of schools should be to cultivate individuals with independent actions and independent thinking, but they should regard social service as the highest purpose of their lives." "A society composed of individuals with uniform specifications without individual originality and individual willingness is an unfortunate society with no possibility of development."

On the other hand, universities also create social ideals, and pass these ideals on to members of society. Through people's practice, the ideals can be turned into real cultural entities. Social ideal is a concrete reflection of social needs, which reflects and is based on the law of social development. Because of their special advantages in cultural accumulation, intellectuals, especially those concentrated on university campuses, can better understand the laws of social development than other members of society. With the understanding of social laws, we can put forward social ideals that conform to the laws of social development.

critical spirit

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 gather all kinds of knowledge from ancient times to modern times, at home and abroad, and have a strong knowledge capacity. The intersection of ideas and academic thoughts. College students produce new ideas and embrace new ideas. Different academic ideas can coexist here, and different ideas can influence each other through academic exchanges, which has a good tradition of contention. Pursue the eternal characteristics of ideals.

since the early medieval universities in Europe, there has been a tradition of autonomy, and the highest ideal is to spread knowledge and research knowledge, which is relatively beyond the 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 teaching and scientific research in universities is the unfolding history of the important process of the history of science, and it is a sublation process combining affirmation and negation.

On the other hand, the critical spirit of universities is 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 worships 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 person" who only knows technology but has a pale soul, and the other is a "marginal person" who doesn't know technology and talks about humanities. It is powerless to change this "technical 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 way of convergence of science and technology and humanities. Harvard students offer "general education courses" in the first and second grades, covering all aspects of humanities, society and natural sciences. Engineering students at MIT should take humanities courses, which account for about 22% of the total class hours. The education of human nature, holistic education, general education, moral education and psychological education, which have been repeatedly called for in our country, are all the results of criticizing the alienation of people in view of technology.

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 to government decision-making, but it is not easy to make scientific decision due to the limitation of decision-makers' own quality. Therefore, it is a 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.

spirit of social care

spirit of social care Higher education is the inevitable product of social development, and social needs are the first driving force. In the industrialized and information-based society, universities have been more and more deeply involved in the operation of social machines. Paying attention to reality and serving the society has become the third 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 the contribution to society in terms of productivity, universities provide spiritual products for society through direct research and publicity in humanities and social sciences, including philosophical research, literary creation and criticism, ideological and moral construction, etc. While refining and criticizing social life, intellectuals also invest all kinds of spiritual products in society, providing direct content for socialist construction.