Inaugural Address at St. AndrewsJohn Stuart Mill

Mill delivered his Inaugural Address as Rector of the University of St. Andrews on February 1, 1867. The speech is a defense of liberal education against models that would reduce the university to professional training or to a single dominant subject, whether classical, scientific, or theological. A university, Mill argues, exists to form the whole cultivated intelligence: languages and literature that furnish the materials of thought; logic and mathematics that discipline it; the natural sciences that teach careful observation; and moral and political philosophy that prepare citizens for public judgment. Specialization has its place in later life. The university's task is breadth joined to rigor. Mill insists that educated persons bear responsibility for national conduct; bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men look on and do nothing. The Address stands in the Conversation as a mid-Victorian restatement of the old question, what is an education for? It answers with the formation of minds able to know and to act.