At a memorable dinner for alumni of Williams College, President Garfield defined the ideal university as “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.” Hopkins was president of Williams—then, as now, one of our country’s foremost liberal arts colleges—from 1836 until 1872. He was convinced that the main effort of a college ought not be the transmission of knowledge, important though that is, but rather the stimulation of students to reach out for it on their own. His reputation for courteous, lively, wide-reaching and broadly based exchanges of views remains legendary in the history of American higher education. Hopkins considered a student to be educated when that student became his own professor…

Garrison, T. 2010. The oceanography classroom: Teaching and learning in the age of distractions. Oceanography 23(3):180–181, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2010.36.

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