the moulding of the whole into an organic unity. Just as our young men
by the millions took their place in the line when the bugle blew, older
men by the tens of thousands left their private affairs to get along as
best they might, and regardless of political affiliations or personal
convenience, found place for themselves in the administrative army. And
they were ably seconded by the women. Hundreds of men in key positions
have gladly borne witness to the share which their secretaries and their
other women associates played in bringing about the needed results.
The first days of the war were days of whirling confusion, colored by
glowing forecasts. Then followed months of experimentation, by trial and
error, of hope deferred by long delays, of well meant but none the less
embarrassing internal rivalries, of sudden spurts. Later came the days
of last autumn, when the whole great machine was throbbing rhythmically
and steadily, with only a minor "knock" here and there--a sure
indication to the watchful enemy, who had had more than a taste of what
the machine could produce, that the game was up; and finally the
eleventh of November and the order to reverse the engines.
It ought to be evident from our experience that for any great enterprise
we need all the young men and the young women, and all the older ones
who are still young in heart. We need to know who they are, where they
are, what they can do, and we need to touch them at every point; for not
only do we need them all, but we need all of each one of them. We should
never again face a great national crisis with nearly one-third of our
men of military age unfit for hard physical work. We need campaigns of
physical education and social hygiene, and we need to apply the lessons
in human salvage which the army has learned during the war. But we need
more than each individual and all of him. We must see to it that the
individual star, of whatever magnitude, is subordinated to the team play
of the group. And team play means more than energy and "pep." It means
a marshalling of the old fashioned and homely virtues of courtesy,
deference and consideration.
* * * * *
In the third place, we have learned that to accomplish a great result we
need the leadership of those who know and who know vividly and
constructively. Our experience has been that in certain fields, finance,
science, manufacturing in quantity production, medicine, we had a supply
of those who knew. In other fields, in intimate knowledge of foreign
conditions and foreign languages for example, we had not.
At first we didn't know where our leaders were, and in many cases we
began by following false prophets. The value of one man with training,
brains and persistence can be shown by a single example: There was a man
who answered these qualifications connected with the Council of National
Defence, not in a very exalted position. He was the first in all this
country to see that the army program and the shipping program did not
fit. It took him a long time to convince the two groups of overworked,
harried officials that neither could play the game alone; that the
closest cooperation was necessary. He had no access to the records, but
he finally managed to build up a convincing statement out of the shreds
of information which he gathered here and there, and at last he
succeeded in getting everyone concerned into the attitude of wanting to
face the facts. Everyone would have had to face them sooner or later,
but without the devotion and leadership of this one man, it would have
been only as the result of a very serious dislocation of function.
One field in which the right leadership has been most brilliantly
rewarded is that of medicine. Just consider what we have done in this
field: The success of the anti-typhoid injections; the reduction in
dysenteric diseases due to chlorination of drinking water; the
encouraging fight against cerebro-spinal meningitis and pneumonia; the
identification of trench fever, and the practical freedom from typhus.
As to wounds, a tetanus antitoxin which has made lock-jaw almost a
negligible disease; a serum against gas gangrene; the Carrel-Dakin
method of chemical sterilization of wounds; the splinting of fractures
on the battle field and overhead extension apparatus in the hospital. To
quote Simon Flexner, "The entire psychology of the wounded men was
altered, the wards made cheerful and happy, pain abolished, infection
controlled, and recovery hastened by means of the new or improved
surgical and mechanical measures put into common use."
* * * * *
The fourth lesson of which I wish to speak is that a high aim and ideal
is what counts most of all, what lifts the individual up from
selfishness and sloth. To bind the country together and to make the
transformation which still seems miraculous, we had a noble national
aim, a complete dedication to the task before us, an utter absence of
any selfish or self-seeking factor in the whole enterprise. The conduct
of our soldiers, their submission to a discipline to which most of them
were completely unused was, I think, in a very large measure due to the
recognition of this aim. We recognized it as a nation and we recognized
it in one another. The standard of contact set by our soldiers during
the days of conflict is unique in military history. Whole divisions went
for months without a single court-martial. The reason was, more than
anything else, the national assumption that they would give a good
account of themselves and the fact that they felt themselves in
training for the championship, and no man wanted to miss his chance on
the battlefield for the sake of a selfish indulgence.
Some of the experiments in conduct tried in the American Expeditionary
Forces were extraordinary in their success. The leave areas, an immense
enterprise, were run on the basis of absolute freedom to the enlisted
man. He lived in the best hotels in Europe and amused himself in casinos
where crowned heads had been in the habit of gambling away the money of
their subjects. He had no roll calls, no taps, no officers in sight, no
military machinery whatever. He arose when he pleased, either before or
after his breakfast; he ate and drank when he pleased, and he stayed out
as late as he pleased. The physical and moral effect of this absolute
change from the military regime was a very interesting and instructive
phenomenon, but that is not the point I wish to make. Out of the
thousands and thousands of men who were sent to these leave areas, there
was hardly a single case in which a man abused the trust which was put
upon him or failed to turn up on time to go back to the grind of
military duty. This could never have been done with soldiers of another
type, with soldiers lacking an ideal.
Someone has recently written that fine minds have been finely touched by
the war, and base minds basely. He might have added that wise minds have
been wisely touched, and foolish minds foolishly. In general, I think it
may fairly be said that when the appeal was to the finest in a man's
character, the result was correspondingly fine.
* * * * *
These, it seems to me, are the four main things we have learned, or at
any rate we have had a chance to learn. First, that we are a real
nation, potentially strong with the strength of youth. Second, that to
fulfill our mission, every man and woman and all of every such
individual is an object of national concern; that we must be mobilized
and we must continue our lessons in team play. We have still plenty to
learn in this field. Third, that we must have and must recognize the
leadership of those who know, which, after all, is the great test of a
democracy. Fourth, that to bring out the best that is in us, as
individuals and as a nation, we must have an aim, high, clear-cut and
clearly understood. If, now, I attempt to apply these four lessons which
we have had a chance to learn, to educational conditions, and
particularly to university conditions, it will be for three reasons: The
first is the general wisdom of confining one's remarks to things he
knows something about. The second, that there is no single institution
more characteristic of the best in our American life than a great
American University. And there is this third reason, that if we had not
had a supply of young men with the stamp of the American college upon
them, we could never have met the call for officers, for nearly a
quarter of a million of them. I am told that the Germans were prepared
to admit and to discount our wealth in money, in materials and in man
power, but they looked forward confidently to a complete failure on our
part in training officers to lead our men in battle. Of course, all the
citizen officers who made good records were not college men, but the
college trained citizens were the men who set the pace and made the
standard.
It was Pitt who said, "The atrocious crime of being a young man I shall
attempt neither to palliate nor to deny." Nor should a university seek
to palliate or to deny the charge of being a place of resort for youth.
A university, it seems to me, should be a place where the primary object
is not the repression of youthful exuberance nor the correction of
youthful failings (though both may be necessary on occasion), but
rather, a place for the encouragement of the great and vital qualities
of youth--enthusiasm, energy, power of acquisition, sensitiveness of
impression. It is the place where the older members of the community
have the best chance to stay young. The university should be essentially
a company of enthusiasts, of pioneers. There is a frontier for every
worker to clear--no matter how narrow or how wide his horizon may be. In
a university there is no proper place, among faculty or students, for
the disillusioned, the cynical, the defeatist.
* * * * *
Now we come to the application of the second lesson, the lesson of
mobilization, of team play. In the first place, no university is alive
where mobilization is limited to the Recorder's office. In a live
institution, regent, professor, student, janitor, each is a part of the
game and must feel that he is. He must feel that in its administration
the institution has learned the great lesson of direct and human
personal contact. Science, among all its triumphs, cannot include any
device for conveying a message from mind to mind or from heart to heart
half so good as the human voice and the human eye. Within the faculty,
this element of human cooperation should be reflected by the vitality of
the organism rather than by the complexity of the organization, which
may not be vital at all. Each member must feel that the general repute
is safeguarded by honest and intelligent standards, honestly and
intelligently administered. The university, like the country at large,
must make itself responsible for all of each and every student, his
bodily condition, for example, just as directly as his mental.
It will be recalled that one of my justifications for applying war
experiences to university conditions was the share which the college and
university men had in building up our supply of officers. If we study
why the college men made good officers, and make allowance for the fact
that it is the kind of man who goes to college who is likely to make a
good officer anyway, and all the other allowances we can think of, we
can't dodge the conclusion that there is something outside of the
college curriculum which has been an important factor in bringing about
the results. On the other hand, important as the other factors are, the
curriculum has had its share, and it is in my judgment a leading and
not always an adequately recognized share. The comfortable theory that
once he has settled down to something important the college
ne'er-do-well will suddenly blossom forth into a competent leader of men
didn't work out in practice. It may have happened here and there, but it
didn't happen as a general rule. In the fighting line, it was very
generally the man with a sound academic record, not necessarily the Phi
Beta Kappa lad, but the good scholar and active college citizen, the man
who had taken the trouble to learn things and learn people, who made the
best record. I naturally watched with particular interest the records of
my own old students at Columbia, and I know that this is so.
* * * * *
It is a significant fact, however, for those of us who are interested in
the welfare of college boys and girls, that the United States government
deliberately built up what was to all intents and purposes an
undergraduate college life for the young men of the army, with
athletics, dances, dramatics, singing, and all the rest, even including
opportunities for reading and study. Even the most hardened of regular
officers, who at the first, I fear, regarded this as some of the
civilian foolishness with which all soldiers have to contend, came to
see that the program was a vital factor in building up such a body of
fighting men as they had never seen. And this is only another way of
saying that if you want to use the human machine for any purpose, you
must concern yourself with the whole of it. Human nature does not come
in air-tight compartments.
President Wilson coined a phrase which has thoroughly gone the rounds
when he said that the side-shows of college life should not overshadow
nor distract from the entertainment in the main tent. We all agree to
this. But I think we are more inclined than when the words were spoken
to urge that the side-shows, properly and intelligently subordinated,
should be under the same management as the main tent. The army has tried
the experiment on a large scale and it has worked well. In February last
there were in France and on the Rhine six million and a half individual
participants in athletic games, ten million attendants on
entertainments, nearly a quarter of a million students.
* * * * *
None of the lessons which the Army has learned are more significant
than those which have to do with mobilization and classification. The
activities of the Provost Marshal General, of the Committee on
Classification and Personnel, in cooperation with the Committee on
Education, furnish the best record of large scale human engineering in
the new science of personnel of which we have any record, either in this
country or, I think, elsewhere.
A university like this one is an army, and not such a small army either,
judging by peacetime standards. The United States found that it was
worth while, indeed that it was absolutely necessary in organizing its
forces, to find out everything it could about every man in the army,
what he needed physically to increase his efficiency; what he needed to
keep him interested and out of mischief; what he should have in the way
of training--based on what he knew already and based on careful mental
tests--to make him of the greatest usefulness; whether he had the will
to win, and if not, whether anything could be done to get it into him.
In a word, the United States wanted to know just what each man's
possibilities were. Was he officer material or non-com material? Should
he go into the line or one of the special corps--or to the labor
battalion? As a result of this program, the Army succeeded in finding a
place that counted for 98 per cent of the drafted men.
Now I realize that a university can't do all these things with its army
in just the way the government can. It can't casually transfer a man
from engineering to psychology, nor a girl from philosophy to
cookery--or _vice versa_--no matter how desirable such a transfer might
be for the individual and the community. But it can do a great deal more
than it now does in finding out about all its members, informing them of
their strength and weaknesses, in seeing that every student gets a
chance to enjoy in so far as possible the high privileges of youth, and
to get a helping hand over the bumps in the road, which also come with
youth. Every student ought to have the opportunity to round out his
character and his capacities. It ought not to be left to chance that any
student gets the best personal contacts for him or her with faculty and
fellow-students, the best opportunities for learning team play. Every
student ought to leave with some definite aim in life, and if possible
an aim high enough to be an ideal that is worth working for.
A university is not doing its full duty if its athletics and social life
are limited to those who need these the least; if its alumni are
regarded merely as fillers of the grandstands or recipients of oratory,
and possible sources of pecuniary support. The alumni are the best
possible sources of keeping the faculty informed as to what the world
really wants in the way of trained men and women, and, for the students,
of information, suggestions, and jobs, both temporary and permanent.
I realize that many of these things are now done here and elsewhere, but
in the light of what we have learned from the experience of the
University of Uncle Sam, I am sure that our American universities and
colleges have hardly scratched the surface of what they might do and
what, I think, they will ultimately do in the realm of human
engineering. Nearly all educational institutions merely follow what they
find the leaders are doing, and in this field there is an opportunity, I
am sure, for real leadership.
We know now that men and women can be measured by impersonal tests and
that it is practicable to put aside the material which it is either
impossible to fashion in the academic mould, or for which, even if the
job is possible, the expense in wear and tear is entirely beyond the
value of the result to be obtained. To be specific, why shouldn't we
have an intelligence test of candidates for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy, just as we had a physical and psychological examination for
candidates for the flying schools?
I don't mean that we should leap from one illogical position clear
across the road into another. Mental measurements are not yet an exact
science, and a man of moderate ability, with a will to succeed, may be a
better academic investment than his more brilliant brother who lacks
that quality; but, by pruning very sparingly (one does not have to chop
down a tree to prune it) the saving in time and energy will be enormous.
Fundamentally the human relationships are what count, the qualities
leading to team play and cooperation, and away from isolation and its
ills. This means that if a faculty is to exercise its leadership, it
must know the student body, it must maintain and develop points of human
touch. Impersonal tests, impersonal records, all that modern practice
and modern science can teach us we must have, but these must be used
only as the framework for what is after all the fundamental thing,
direct human contact between teacher and teacher, teacher and student,
and student and student.
* * * * *
Now as to leadership, and in a university we can identify the leaders
with the teachers, there is no doubt, I think, that the teachers'
profession comes out of the war in a higher place than it went in, and
the scholar goes back to his work with a feeling of confidence in
himself in view of his record in competition and comparison with men in
other callings. I venture to predict that we shall hear a good deal less
frequently in the future the old gibe that the man who could do things
did them and the man who couldn't, taught them. The teachers made good,
not only because of their scholarship, but because of their personality.
I think this experience of the last two years is going to accelerate
greatly the movement which had already started of turning to the
academic world for the man who can do things and do them with other
people. Entirely apart from the contrasts in income, the sheer fun of
executive work, with plenty of money to spend on what you want to get
done, is a pretty strong temptation for a man with a heavy teaching
schedule and an annual department appropriation of say $75. Both the
regular army officers who have made conspicuously good, and the scholars
of the cooperative type who have made conspicuously good, are being
actively bidden for by bankers and manufacturers and all sorts of
people. Neither profession can compete on the purely financial side with
these tempters and, in order to hold their first-rate men, they will
each have to make some greater contribution in the things that money
alone can't buy.
Both in the nation and in our republics of letters and science, we must
learn to distinguish more clearly between the power that comes with
knowledge, and the ability to talk about things. It was very interesting
to watch in Washington the gradual substitution of the man with the
latter quality by the man with the former in positions of
responsibility, and I am going to confess that, in the early days, some
of the conferences which it was my privilege or my duty to attend,
reminded me for all the world of certain faculty meetings, in which
gentlemen without definite knowledge of the matter in hand were
discussing at considerable length what they were pleased to call
principles, but which were really off-hand impressions.
I think that in their service to the university and to the nation, the
scholars may well profit by the demonstration that it was not only the
man who knew his subject, but the man who knew how to deal with his
fellow men, who was likely to make his impression. Isn't there such a
thing as academic provincialism, even within the walls of a man's own
university, certainly as between institution and institution, which can
be remedied by the encouragement of these social and cooperative sides
of the scholar's character? It seems to me that we all should face a
fundamental extension in the definition of a scholar, away from the
individual, the selfish, out to the social and constructive.
In our educational institutions scholarship has three functions: To
broaden the field of existing knowledge, and the war has shown us that
every field has its valuable practical applications; to train the coming
generation of experts, and any country needs not only a handful of
distinguished leaders but a great body of well-trained men and women
who, when the emergency arises, stand ready to meet it; and last but not
least, to inspire a recognition of what scholarship is and a respect for
it in the minds of the general students, few of whom, by the most
generous stretch of the imagination, can be regarded as scholars
themselves, but whose influence in their generation throughout the
country is a very important factor. Our nation needs a respect for
expert knowledge and it needs a respect for intelligence, and our
college graduates can do more than any other group to develop this
respect.
* * * * *
We have taken up three of our four lessons as these affect the
university: the emphasis on youth, the need of mobilization and team
play, and the need of leadership. There remains the fourth factor, a
high, clear-cut aim.
The most serious charge against the American undergraduate in the past
has been the lack of a sense of responsibility. We now know from their
war records that the sense of responsibility lay latent in thousands of
these boys and was only awaiting an impulse sufficiently strong to
arouse it.
President Hibben of Princeton, who ought to know the American
undergraduate if anybody does, said recently: "Young men are capable of
far greater amounts of intensive work day in and day out than we had
dreamed of; capable of greater concentration of mind upon their tasks.
They respond more quickly than we have conceived to the call of duty.
The sense of responsibility is there latent, and we teachers must
endeavor to quicken and to appeal to it. We have seen that when the
occasion comes these young men rise to meet it."
We can't very well stage a world war for the purpose, and I don't think
we need wait for any such crisis to bring it out. There is in every
normal, wholesome-minded student some motor nerve that can be touched in
such a way as to release that type of coordinated energy which we call a
sense of responsibility. This all goes back to knowing our men and women
and establishing human contacts and human confidences.
In spite of individual disappointments, and as a college dean, I have
had my share, I am confident that the normal young American either
already possesses as a motive force some worth-while aim or that he can
be guided toward such an aim if approached in the right way.
Let me quote a paragraph or so from the report of the War Department
Committee on Education: