Harvard, Mr. Bolles described even more vividly than the social evil.
The bare fact of the problem he stated as follows: "In 1840 the
college contained 250 students; in 1850, 300; in 1860, 450; in 1870,
600; in 1880, 800; in 1890, 1300; in 1894, 1600." He then pointed out
that the only means the authorities have found for meeting this
increasing demand on the administrative office is, not to divide the
students into separate small bodies each under a single administrator,
but to divide the duties of administration among several officers.
Thus each of the added officers is required to perform his duty toward
the entire student body. It is apparently assumed that he can
discharge one duty toward two or three thousand students as
intelligently as in former years he could discharge two or three
duties toward two or three hundred. By this arrangement the most
valuable factor in administration is eliminated--personal knowledge
and personal contact between the administrator and his charges. It is
said that the members of the administrative board of the
college--professors whose time is of extreme value to the university
and to the world, and who receive no pay as administrators--sit three
hours a night three nights in the week deciding the cases that come
before them, not from personal knowledge of the undergraduates
concerned, but from oral and documentary reports. "It is only by a
fiction that the Recorder [or the Dean, or the member of the
administrative board] can be assumed to have any personal knowledge of
even a half of the men whose absences he counts, whose petitions he
acts upon, and against whose delinquencies he remonstrates; yet the
fiction is maintained while its absurdity keeps on growing.... If the
rate of growth and our present administrative system are maintained,
the Dean and Recorder of Harvard College will [in 1950] be personally
caring for 6500 individuals, with all of whom they will be presumed to
have an intelligent acquaintance."
Mr. Bolles lived through the period in which a brilliant band of
German-trained American professors, having made over our educational
system as far as possible on German lines, were endeavoring to
substitute German discipline, or lack of it, for the traditional
system of collegiate residence which aims to make the college a
well-regulated social community. At one time these reformers rejoiced
in the fact that Harvard students attended the ice carnival at
Montreal or basked in the Bermudan sun while the faculty had no means
of knowing where they were and no responsibility for the success of
their college work. The Overseers, however, were not in sympathy with
the Teutonized faculty, and soon put an end to this; but the reformers
were, and perhaps still are, only waiting the opportunity to establish
again the Teutonic license. "It is sometimes said," Mr. Bolles
continues, "that Harvard may eventually free itself from all its
remaining parental responsibility and leave students' habits, health,
and morals to their individual care, confining itself to teaching,
research, and the granting of degrees. Before it can do this, it must
be freed from dormitories. As long as fifteen hundred of its students
live in monastic quarters provided or approved by the university, so
long must the university be held responsible by the city, by parents,
and by society at large, for the sanitary and moral condition of such
quarters. The dormitory system implies and necessitates oversight of
health and morals. The trouble to-day is that the administrative
machinery in use is not capable of doing all that is and ought to be
expected of it.... If it be determined openly that the health and
morals of Harvard undergraduates are not to occupy the attention of
the Dean and Board of the college, then the present system may be
perpetuated, but if this determination is not reached, then either the
system must be changed or the present attempt to accomplish the
impossible will go on until something snaps."
Since Mr. Bolles's day there has been much earnest effort to solve the
administrative problem; but the difficulties have increased rather
than diminished. The duties of the Dean are still much the same as
when the freshman class numbered one hundred instead of five. Only the
Dean has been improved. He is at least five times as human and five
times as earnest as any other Dean; but the freshman class keeps on
growing, and when he has satisfied his very exacting conscience and
retires (or, not having satisfied his conscience, perishes), no man
knows where his better is to be found. Of the Secretary and the
Recorder and his assistants Mr. Bolles has spoken. A Regent has among
other duties a general charge of the rooms the fellows live in, and
usually makes each room and its occupant a yearly visit--which the
occupant, in the perversity of undergraduate nature, regards as a
visitation. Then there is the physician. So large a proportion of the
undergraduates were found to be isolated and unhappy in their
circumstances, and remote from the knowledge of the authorities, that
it became necessary to appoint some one to whom they might appeal in
need. Thus the details as to each undergraduate's residence are in the
hands of seven different officials, each of whom, in order to attain
the best results, requires a personal acquaintance with the thousands
of undergraduates. Furthermore the entire body of undergraduates
changes every four years. If every administrator had the commodity of
lives commonly attributed to the cat, the duties of their offices
would still be infinitely beyond them.
Mr. Bolles suggested a solution of the administrative problem: "If the
college is too large for its dean and administrative board to manage
in the way most certain to benefit its students, it should be divided,
using as a divisor the number ... which experts may agree in thinking
is the number of young men whom one dean and board should be expected
to know and govern effectively."
When Mr. Bolles wrote, one class of administrative officer and one
only was limited in his duties to a single small community: in each
building in which students lived, a proctor resided who was supposed
to see that the Regent's orders were enforced. Since then another
step has been taken in the same direction; a board of advisers has
been established, each member of which is supposed to have a helpful
care of twenty-five freshmen. These two officials, it will be seen,
divide the administrative duties of an English tutor. That they
represent a step toward Mr. Bolles's solution of the administrative
difficulty has probably never occurred to the authorities; and as yet
it must be admitted the step is mainly theoretical. The position of
both, as I know from sad personal experience, is such that their
duties, like those of all other administrators, resolve into a mere
matter of police regulation. The men are apt to resist all friendly
advances. In the end, a proctor's activities usually consist in
preventing them of a Sunday from shouting too loud over games of
indoor football, and at other times from blowing holes through the
cornice with shotguns. The case of the freshman adviser is much the
same. His first duty is to expound to his charges the mysteries of the
elective system, and to help each student choose his courses.
According to the original intention, he was to exert as far as
possible a beneficial personal influence on newcomers; but the result
seldom follows the intention. Beyond the visit which each freshman is
obliged to make to his adviser in order to have his list of electives
duly signed, there is nothing except misdemeanor to bring the two
within the same horizon. When the adviser takes pains to proffer
hospitality, the freshman's first thought is that he is to be
disciplined. When, as often happens, a proctor is also a freshman
adviser, he unites the two administrative duties of an English tutor;
but his position is much less favorable in that his duties are
performed toward two distinct bodies of men. With time, tact, and
labor, he might conceivably force himself into personal relationship
with his fifty-odd charges; but the inevitable ground of meeting, such
as the English tutor finds in his teaching, is lacking. An attempt to
become acquainted is very apt to appear gratuitous. In point of fact,
such acquaintance is scarcely expected by the university, and is
certainly not paid for. What little an administrator earns is apt to
be so much an hour (and not so very much) for teaching. A gratuitous
office is so difficult that one hesitates to perform it gratuitously.
If the young instructor is bent on making himself unnecessary trouble,
there is plenty of opportunity in connection with his teaching; and
here, of course, owing to the characteristic lack of organic
coordination, he has to deal with a body of men who, except by rare
accident, are quite distinct both from those whom he advises and
those whom he proctorizes. The system at Harvard may be different in
detail from that at other American universities; but wherever a large
body of undergraduates are living under a single administrative
system, it can scarcely be different in kind.
Enough has been said to show that the only office which an
administrator can perform is a police office. Where the college and
the university are identical, the element of personal influence is
necessarily eliminated. But if the college were divided into separate
administrative units, the situation would be very different. The seven
general and two special offices I have indicated might be discharged,
as regards each undergraduate, by a dean and a few proctor-advisers;
and as the students and their officers would be living in the same
building, personal knowledge and influence might become the
controlling force. The solution of the administrative problem is
identical with the solution of the social and athletic problem, and in
both cases a movement toward it is begun. If the student body is
eventually divided into residential halls of the early mediaeval type,
much good will result, and probably nothing but good, even if the
tutorial function proper is absent. As to the addition of the
tutorial function, that is a question of extreme complexity and
uncertainty, in order to grasp which it is necessary to review the
peculiar educational institutions of American universities.
III
THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
As regards the American teaching system, the fact that the college so
long remained identical with the university has caused little else
than good. At Oxford and Cambridge, when a demand arose for
instruction in new fields, the university could not meet it because it
had little or no wealth and had surrendered its teaching function; and
the score of richly endowed colleges, by force of their inertia,
collectively resisted the demand. The enlargement in the scope of
instruction has been of the slowest. In America, each new demand
instantly created its supply. The moment the students in theology
required more than a single professor, their tuition fees as well as
other funds could be applied to the creation of a divinity school; and
the professorships in law, medicine, and the technical professions
were likewise organized into schools, each fully equipped under a
separate faculty for the pursuit of its special aim. Thus the ancient
college was developed by segregation into a fully organized modern
university. American institutions are composed of a reduplication,
not of similar colleges, but of distinct schools, each with its special
subject to teach. This fact makes possible a far higher standard of
instruction. The virtue of the administrative and social organization
in the English university, as has been pointed out, results from
division of the university into separate communities,--distinct
organs, each with its separate activity. The virtue of the American
university in its teaching functions results from a precisely similar
cause.
In the case of the college, one or two details have lately been the
occasion of criticism. In the educational as in the social and
administrative functions, the machinery is apparently overgrown. Until
well into the nineteenth century, the body of instruction offered was
much the same as in the English colleges of the seventeenth century,
or in the pass schools of to-day,--a modified version of the mediaeval
trivium and quadrivium. When a new world of intellectual life was
opened, most academic leaders regarded it with abhorrence. The old
studies were the only studies to develop the manners and the mind; the
new studies were barbarous, and dwarfed the understanding. All
learning had been contained in a pint-pot, and must continue to be so.
If the old curriculum had prevailed, the old system might have
continued to serve, in spite of the enormous increase of students; but
it did not. Discussions of the educational value of the new learning
are still allowed to consume paper and ink; but the cause of the old
pint-pot was lost decades ago. All branches are taught, and are open
to all students.
The live question to-day both in England and America is not whether we
shall recognize the new subjects, but how and in what proportion we
shall teach them. In England, where the colleges and the university
are separate, the teaching and the examining are separate. The student
prepares in college for an examination by the university. It is as a
result of this that the subjects of instruction have been divided and
organized into honor schools; and here again the division and
organization have resulted in sounder and more efficient functioning.
In America, such a division has never been made: the teaching and the
degree-granting offices have remained identical. The professor in each
"course" is also the examiner, and the freedom of choice of necessity
goes not by groups of related studies but by small disconnected
courses. As the field of recognized knowledge developed, new courses
were added, and the student was granted a greater range of choice.
Whereas of old all the instruction of the college might and had to be
taken in four years, the modern courses could scarcely be exhausted in
a full century. This American system, earliest advocated at Harvard,
is called the elective system, and has made its way, in a more or less
developed form, into all American universities worthy of the name. Its
primary work was that of the Oxford honor schools--the shattering of
the old pint-pot. It has done this work; but it is now in train to
become no less a superstition than the older system, and is thus no
less a menace to the cause of education.
It is perhaps only natural, though it was scarcely to be expected,
that the university which in late years has most severely criticised
the elective system is that which a quarter of a century ago
deliberately advocated it, and in the face of almost universal
opposition justified it in the eyes of American educators. There has
evidently been a miscalculation. Yet though Harvard has cautiously
acknowledged its failure in the persons of no less authorities than
Professor Muensterberg and Dean Briggs, the element of error has not
yet been clearly stated, nor has the remedy been proposed. Many things
have been said against the elective system, but they may all be summed
up in one phrase: it is not elective. This is no specious paradox. It
is the offer of free election that is specious.
No offer could seem fairer. The student is at liberty to choose as he
will. He may specialize microscopically or scatter his attention over
the universe; he may elect the most ancient subjects or the most
modern, the hardest or the easiest. No offer, I repeat, could seem
fairer. But experience disillusions. Some day or other a serious
student wakes up to the fact that he is the victim of--shall we say a
thimble-rigging game? For example, let us take the case of a serious
specialist. Of all the world's knowledge the serious specialist values
only one little plot. A multitude of courses is listed in the
catalogue, fairly exhausting his field. Delightful! Clearly he can see
which walnut-shell covers the pea. He chooses for his first year's
study four courses--the very best possible selection, the only
selection, to open up his field. One moment: on closer scrutiny he
finds that two of the four courses are given at the same hour, and
that, therefore, he cannot take them in the same year. Still, there
are at his command other courses, not so well adapted to his purposes,
but sooner or later necessary. He chooses one. Hold again! On closer
inspection he finds that appended to the course is a Roman numeral,
and that the same numeral is against one of his other courses. After
half an hour's search in the catalogue he finds that, though the two
courses are given at different hours, and indeed on different days of
the week, the mid-year and final examinations in both take place on
the same days. Obviously these two cannot be taken in the same year.
With dampened spirits his eye lights on a second substitute. He could
easily deny himself this course; but it is vastly interesting, if not
important, and he must arrange a year's work. Behold, this most
interesting course was given last year, and will be given next year,
but neither love nor money nor the void of a soul hungering for
knowledge could induce the professor who gives it to deliver one
sentence of one lecture; he is busy and more than busy with another
course which will not be given next year. The specialist is at last
forced to elect a course he does not really want. One entanglement as
to hours of which the present deponent had knowledge forced a
specialist in Elizabethan literature to elect--and, being a candidate
for a degree with distinction, to get a high grade in--a course in the
history of finance legislation in the United States. This was a tragic
waste, for so many and so minute are the courses offered that the
years at the student's disposal are all too few to cover even a
comparatively narrow field. The specialist may well ruminate on the
philosophy of Alice and her Wonderland jam. Yesterday he could elect
anything, and to-morrow anything; but how empty is to-day!
Highly as the modern university regards the serious specialist, a more
general sympathy will probably be given to the man who is seeking a
liberal education. Such a man knows that in four years at his disposal
he cannot gain any real scientific knowledge even of the studies of
the old-fashioned college curriculum. As taught now, at Harvard, they
would occupy, according to President Eliot's report for 1894-95, twice
four years. But by choosing a single group of closely related
subjects, and taking honors in it, he hopes to master a considerable
plot of the field of knowledge. I will not say that he chooses the
ancient classics, for--though they are admirably taught in a general
way in the great Oxford Honor School of Literae Humaniores--the
American student may be held to require, even in studying the
classics, a larger element of scientific culture, which would take
more time than is to be had. For the same reason I will not say that
he chooses the modern languages and literatures, though such a choice
might be defended. Let us say that he chooses a single modern
language and literature--his own.[4] Surely this is not too large a
field for four years' study. Of classics, mathematics, science, and
history he has supposedly been given a working knowledge in the
preparatory school. For the rest he relies on the elective system.
Even in the beginning, like the specialist, he is unable to choose the
courses he most wants, because of the conflict of the hours of
instruction and examination; and this difficulty pursues him year by
year, increasing as the subjects to be taken grow fewer and fewer. But
let us dismiss this as an incidental annoyance. His fate is
foreshadowed when he finds that the multitude of courses by which
alone he could cover the entire field of English literature would fill
twice the time at his disposal. Already he has discovered that the
elective system is not so very elective. He sadly omits Icelandic and
Gothic, and all but one half course is Anglo-Saxon. Some day he means
to cover the ground by means of a history of literature and
translations; but in point of fact, as the subjects are not at all
necessary for his degree, and as he is overburdened with other work,
he never does. He sticks to his last, and is the more willing to do
so because, being wise beyond the wont of undergraduates, he knows
that it will be well to fortify his knowledge of the English language
and literature with a complementary knowledge of the history of the
English people, and of the history and literature of the neighboring
Germans and French.
Having barely time for a rapid survey of these complementary subjects,
he elects only the introductory courses. In the aggregate they require
many precious hours, and to take them he is obliged to omit outright
English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but he
knows that it is better to neglect a finial or two than the buttresses
of the edifice he is building. Again he has miscalculated. After his
complementary courses are begun, and it is too late to withdraw from
them, he discovers even more clearly than the specialist how very
unelective the elective system can be. It is the same old question of
the thimble and the pea. These introductory courses are intended to
introduce him to the study of history and of literature, not to
complement his studies of English. What he wanted to know in English
history was the social and the political movements, the vital and
picturesque aspect; what he is taught is the sources and
constitutions--the dry bones. In German and French he wanted to know
the epochs of literature; he is taught the language, considered
scientifically, or, at most, certain haphazard authors in whom he has
only a casual interest. If he is studying for honors, he is obliged to
waste enough time on these disappointing courses to reach a high grade
in each. The system of free election is mighty, for he is a slave to
it.
This difficulty is typical. Thus a student of history or of German who
wants to study Elizabethan literature for its bearing on his subject
is obliged to spend one full course--a quarter of a year's work--on
the language of four or five plays of Shakespeare before he is
permitted to take a half course on Shakespeare as a dramatist; and
even then all the rest of the Elizabethan period is untouched.
Let us suppose that our student of English is wary as well as wise,
preternaturally wary, and leaves all complementary subjects to private
reading--for which he has no time. He is then able to devote himself
to the three or four most important epochs in English literature. He
has to leave out much that is of importance, so that he cannot hope to
gain a synoptic view of the field as a whole; but of his few subjects
he will at least be master. Here at last is the thimble that covers
the pea. Not yet! In four courses out of five of those devoted to the
greatest writers, the teacher's attention is directed primarily to a
very special and scientific study of the language; the examination
consists in explaining linguistic cruxes. Literary criticism, even of
the most sober kind, is quite neglected. If the student learns only
what is taught, he may attain the highest grades and the highest
honors without being able in the end to distinguish accurately the
spirit of Chaucer from that of Elizabethan literature.
Furthermore, not every student is sufficiently well advised to know
precisely what courses he requires to attain his end. For example, to
gain an understanding of the verse forms and even the spirit of Middle
English and Elizabethan English, it is necessary to know the older
French and Italian; but, as it happened, our student was not aware of
the fact until he broke his shins against it, and it was nobody's
business to tell him of it. And even if he had been aware of it, he
could not have taken those subjects without leaving great gaps in his
English studies. He has graduated _summa cum laude_ and with highest
honors in English; but he has not even a correct outline knowledge of
his subject. His education is a thing of shreds and patches.
Whatever may be the aim of the serious student, the elective system is
similarly fatal to it. I must be content with a single instance more.
The signal merit of the old-fashioned curriculum was that its
insistence on the classics and mathematics insured a mental culture
and discipline of a very high order, and of a kind that is impossible
where the student elects only purely scientific courses, or courses in
which he happens to be especially interested. Let us suppose that the
serious student wishes to elect his courses so as to receive this
discipline. His plight is indicated in "Some Old-fashioned Doubts
about New-fashioned Education" which have lately been divulged[5] by
the Dean of Harvard College, Professor Le B. R. Briggs. The
undergraduate "may choose the old studies but not the old instruction.
Instruction under an elective system is aimed at the specialist. In
elective mathematics, for example, the non-mathematical student who
takes the study for self-discipline finds the instruction too high for
him; indeed, he finds no encouragement for electing mathematics at
all." The same is true of the classics.