IN a recent publication on German Literature, I hinted to the reader my
design of giving an account of an event in my personal history, which I
alleged to be the cause of an absentment from my proper place of study,
and consequently of an injustice to my public. I now proceed to fulfil
my promise, by offering to my personal friends, and to such as are
interested in matters of academic education and morality, a few of the
many letters written by me during the past year. I might have added
others, both of an anterior and of a more recent date. The question
however was not to write a volume, but simply a brief exposition, of a
page or two from my life in connection with a public institution of the
metropolis, and thus to bring a matter of private and iniquitous dispute
before the forum of the public, after having vainly sought redress in
private. My main object was of course to vindicate and defend my
character, my professional honor and my most sacred rights as a rational
man and as a public educator, against the invasions of narrow-minded and
unjust aggressors, whose machinations have for several years been busily
at work in subverting what other men have reared before them, in
retarding and impeding what the intelligence of our age and country is
eager to accelerate and to promote. The much agitated question of
University reform and of the liberty of academic instruction, which of
late years has engaged the attention of some of the best intellects on
both sides of the Atlantic, and which within a month past has again
occupied the public mind, and even called forth legislative intervention
may, however, perhaps likewise receive some additional light from the
following pages, which I now submit, not from any motive of vanity, or
from the expectation of self-aggrandisement or of histrionic applause;
but from a sense of duty to the cause of liberal culture and of sound
morality, to which I have devoted many a year of laborious effort and of
earnest thought.
NEW-YORK UNIVERSITY, } G. J. A.
_June_, 1854. }