to assume that this chance is equivalent to an effective vocational
training. They forget that of the 10,000 or more children whom
Wisconsin provides with compulsory continuation schooling a majority
must necessarily remain in the general improvement classes or else
get only a rudimentary training. And five hours a week for education
against fifty for routine labor is not likely to make over the boys
and girls who are pulled into the school for a brief respite from
the department stores, messenger and domestic service, mills and
factories, millinery and dressmaking shops. Even in the stimulating
Massachusetts atmosphere one hour a week for “civics, hygiene,
recreation and culture” seems hardly availing. In the light of the kind
of school-community life which every progressive state now knows enough
to provide and could afford to provide, the continuation school seems
a pathetic if necessary palliative for our educational sins. Already
loud complaints are heard against “allowing the public school to pass
on its failures for some one else to bury.” The first lesson of the
continuation school is that it should not be needed. Even employers
repeatedly declare that to industry children under sixteen are of no
real value as workers. The states are one after another jacking up
their child-labor limit to sixteen years. We are rapidly coming to
the public conviction that the school should care for all children’s
activity up to that age. What the continuation school does now for four
hours a week, we are insisting that the regular school shall do for
thirty or even forty hours a week.
But this means that we shall have to have a reinvigorated school. It
must not be a prison where children are kept when they long for the
freedom of outside work. It must be a place where full opportunity for
expression is provided for each child in a varied life of study and
work and play. It must be an organic life and not an institution. No
system of industrial and continuation schools piled on at the top will
effect this. The evening school has largely failed because it demanded
an impossible concentration and perseverance from the over-fatigued
and excitement-craving worker. The continuation school, dealing with
restless and unintegrated children, will be ineffective for the same
reason. The vocational movement goes blundering on in amazing disregard
of the psychology of the worker. Even the docile German child, it is
said, must be coerced into his admirable continuation school where he
gets a thorough orientation in his relations to his work, the community
and his comrades. What are admirable trades and studies going to mean
to boys and girls who are doing the most rudimentary work, their
impulses undirected, their minds filled with sex-fantasy, personal
mirages, and all the cheap and feeble excitements of the city streets?
The groping and desiring spirit of youth is going indomitably to resist
your most thoughtful schemes until you have a school which from the
earliest years, by its freedom, its expressive life, its broad communal
and personal excitements, its contact with real things, provides a
child-life which meets these inner needs. Our best American public
schools already begin to show that such a child-community life is not
at all impossible. Until we achieve it generally, our continuation
school will be one of the stop-gaps, and a lusty warning of what we
have failed to achieve.
XXVI
WHO OWNS THE UNIVERSITIES
The marked and immediate reaction of the thinking public to the Scott
Nearing case shows a growing conviction that all is not well within
the conventional forms of university control. It implies a sense that
universities, whether supported by the state or privately, are becoming
too vitally institutions of public service to be much longer directed
on the plan of a private corporation. University trustees are generally
men of affairs, and as men of affairs they naturally tend to hold
the same attitude towards the university that they do to the other
institutions--the churches and railroads and corporations--they may
direct. The university officers whom they appoint seem to have exactly
the same duties of upholding the credit of the institution, of securing
funds to meet its pressing needs, of organizing the administrative
machinery, which their corporation officers would have. Professors
are engaged by contract as any highly-skilled superintendent would
be engaged in a factory. If a well-paid subordinate of a mining
corporation could not get along with his colleagues and his men, or
if he consorted with the I. W. W. or made revolutionary speeches
in the streets, his services would be dispensed with as readily as
the Pennsylvania trustees rid themselves of the unpleasantness of
Professor Nearing. Trustees may respect a professor more than they
do intrinsically a fourth vice-president. They may tend to err, as
Chancellor Day has suggested, on the side of “merciful consideration.”
But they cannot see that the amenities of the case materially alter the
professor’s status.
This would be the case of university trustees stated in its rawest
terms. That they tend so often to act as if they were a mere board of
directors of a private corporation gives rise to endless suspicion that
they consult their own interests and the interests of the donors of the
vested wealth they represent as trustees of the university, just as
they would protect, as faithful corporation directors, the interests
of the shareholders of the company. It is just this attitude which the
thinking public is no longer inclined to tolerate. We are acquiring a
new view of the place of the university in the community. When the
American college was no more than an advanced boys’ academy, there may
have been some excuse for this form of control by self-perpetuating and
irresponsible boards of trustees. But many things have changed since
Harvard and Yale, Princeton, Pennsylvania and Columbia, were founded.
Now this determined autocracy may not have worked so badly when most
of the trustees and practically all of the instructors were ministers
of the Gospel, although even in those days faculties sometimes
complained that their careful plans were overridden by men ignorant of
collegiate business and little interested in educational policy. The
demand that trustees’ functions should be limited to the management of
funds, leaving the faculties to regulate administration and control
appointments is a hoary one. But with the passing of control from
the ghostly to the moneyed element, the gulf between trustee and
professor has become extreme. Professors have fallen into a more
and more subordinate place, and the president, who used to be their
representative, has now become almost entirely the executive agent of
the trustees, far removed in power and purse and public distinction
from the professor. The university president in this country has become
a convenient symbol for autocratic power, but even when he has become a
“mayor of the palace” and professors may not approach their governors
except through him, the real autocracy still lies in the external board
behind him.
This absentee and amateur form of university control is being
constantly ratified by our American notions of democracy, and that
folkway, which runs so omnipresently through our institutional life,
of giving the plain ultimate citizen control, in order that we may
be protected from the tyranny of the bureaucrat. The newer state
universities are controlled in exactly the same spirit. Regents,
elected by legislatures, have shown themselves quite as capable as the
most private trustees of representing vested political interests. Nor
has democracy been achieved by the cautious admission, in recent years,
of alumni trustees, as in the case of Columbia, or, as in the case of
Harvard and Yale, by the substitution of alumni for the former state
officials. Self-perpetuating boards will always propagate their own
kind, and even if alumni trustees were ever inclined to be anything but
docile, their minority representation would always be ineffective for
democracy.
The issues of the modern university are not those of private property
but of public welfare. Irresponsible control by a board of amateur
notables is no longer adequate for the effective scientific and
sociological laboratories for the community that the universities
are becoming. The protests in the most recent case imply a growing
realization that a professor who has a dynamic and not a purely
academic interest in social movements is an asset for the whole
community. The latest controversy between trustee and professors seems
to have been very definitely an issue between interested policy and
accurate, technical fact. It seems to have been clearly a case of old
tradition against new science, the prejudiced guesses of corporation
officials against the data of a scientific student of economics. Any
form of university control which gives the prejudiced guess the power
over the scientific research is thus a direct blow at our own social
knowledge and effectiveness. The public simply cannot afford to run
this risk of having the steady forging ahead of social and economic
research curtailed and hampered. We cannot afford to depend wholly
on the tempering of trustees by the fear of the clamor of public
opinion. It is wholly undesirable that trustees should be detained
only by “merciful consideration” from discharging professors whom they
find uncongenial or who they feel are spreading unsound doctrine.
Make university trustees directors of a private corporation and you
give them the traditional right of terminating contracts with their
employees without giving reasons or any form of trial. But if the
university is not to be a mere degree-manufactory, or a pre-vocational
school representing the narrow interests of a specialized economic
class, but is to be that public intellectual and scientific service
that we all want it to be, the governance must be different from that
of a mining company, and the status of the professor different from
that of a railroad employee. Professors should have some security of
office.
An interested public which feels this way will demand that the
faculties be represented strongly in the determination of all
university policy and in the selection and dismissal of the
instructors. It may even demand that the community itself be
represented. Trustees who really envisage the modern university as a
public service, as a body of scientific and sociological experts, will
gladly share their power. If they do not, they will demonstrate how
radically their own conception of a university differs from the general
one, and it will be the duty of professors to assert their rights by
all those forms of collective organization whereby controlled classes
from the beginning of time have made their desires effective.
XXVII
THE UNDERGRADUATE
In these days of academic self-analysis, the intellectual caliber of
the American undergraduate finds few admirers or defenders. Professors
speak resignedly of the poverty of his background and imagination.
Even the undergraduate himself in college editorials confesses that
the student soul vibrates reluctantly to the larger intellectual and
social issues of the day. The absorption in petty gossip, sports, class
politics, fraternity life, suggests that too many undergraduates regard
their college in the light of a glorified preparatory school where the
activities of their boyhood may be worked out on a grandiose scale.
They do not act as if they thought of the college as a new intellectual
society in which one acquired certain rather definite scientific and
professional attitudes, and learned new interpretations which threw
experience and information into new terms and new lights. The average
undergraduate tends to meet studies like philosophy, psychology,
economics, general history, with a frankly puzzled wonder. A whole
new world seems to dawn upon him, in its setting and vocabulary alien
to anything in his previous life. Every teacher knows this baffling
resistance of the undergraduate mind.
It is not so much that the student resists facts and details. He
will absorb trusts and labor unions, municipal government and direct
primaries, the poems of Matthew Arnold, and James’s theory of the
emotions. There is no unkindliness of his mind towards fairly concrete
material. What he is more or less impervious to is points-of-view,
interpretations. He seems to lack philosophy. The college has to let
too many undergraduates pass out into professional and business life,
not only without the germ of a philosophy, but without any desire for
an interpretative clue through the maze. In this respect the American
undergraduate presents a distinct contrast to the European. For the
latter does seem to get a certain intellectual setting for his ideas
which makes him intelligible, and gives journalism and the ordinary
expression of life a certain tang which we lack here. Few of our
undergraduates get from the college any such intellectual impress.
The explanation is probably not that the student has no philosophy, but
that he comes to college with an unconscious philosophy so tenacious
that the four years of the college in its present technique can do
little to disintegrate it. The cultural background of the well-to-do
American home with its “nice” people, its sentimental fiction and
popular music, its amiable religiosity and vague moral optimism, is far
more alien to the stern secular realism of modern university teaching
than most people are willing to admit. The college world would find
itself less frustrated by the undergraduate’s secret hostility if
it would more frankly recognize what a challenge its own attitudes
are to our homely American ways of thinking and feeling. Since the
college has not felt this dramatic contrast, or at least has not felt
a holy mission to assail our American mushiness of thought through the
undergraduate, it has rather let the latter run away with the college.
It is a trite complaint that the undergraduate takes his
extra-curricular activities more seriously than his studies. But he
does this because his homely latent philosophy is essentially a
sporting philosophy, the good old Anglo-Saxon conviction that life
is essentially a game whose significance lies in terms of winning or
losing. The passion of the American undergraduate for intercollegiate
athletics is merely a symbol of a general interpretation for all
the activities that come to his attention. If he is interested in
politics, it is in election campaigns, in the contests of parties
and personalities. His parades and cheerings are the encouragement
of a racer for the goal. After election, his enthusiasm collapses.
His spiritual energy goes into class politics, fraternity and club
emulation, athletics, every activity which is translatable into terms
of winning and losing. In Continental universities this energy would go
rather into a turbulence for causes and ideas, a militant radicalism
or even a more militant conservatism that would send Paris students
out into the streets with a “Cail-laux as-sas-sin!” or tie up an
Italian town for the sake of Italia Irredenta. Even the war, though
it has called out a fund of anti-militarist sentiment in the American
colleges, still tends to be spoken of in terms of an international
sporting event. “Who will win?” is the question here.
Now this sporting philosophy by which the American undergraduate
lives, and which he seems to bring with him from his home, may be a
very good philosophy for an American. It is of the same stuff with our
good-humored contempt for introspection, our dread of the “morbid,”
our dislike of conflicting issues and insoluble problems. The sporting
attitude is a grateful and easy one. Issues are decided cleanly. No
irritating fringes are left over. The game is won or lost. Analysis
and speculation seem superfluous. The point is that such a philosophy
is as different as possible from that which motivates the intellectual
world of the modern college, with its searchings, its hypotheses and
interpretations and revisions, its flexibility and openness of mind. In
the scientific world of the instructor, things are not won or lost. His
attitude is not a sporting one.
Yet the college has allowed some of these sporting attitudes to
be imposed upon it. The undergraduates’ gladiatorial contests
proceed under faculty supervision and patronage. Alumni contribute
their support to screwing up athletic competition to the highest
semi-professional pitch. They lend their hallowing patronage to
fraternity life and other college institutions which tend to emphasize
social distinction. And the college administration, in contrast to the
European scheme, has turned the college course into a sort of race with
a prize at the goal. The degree has become a sort of honorific badge
for all classes of society, and the colleges have been forced to give
it this quasi-athletic setting and fix the elaborate rules of the game
by which it may be won--rules which shall be easy enough to get all
classes competing for it, and hard enough to make it a sufficient prize
to keep them all in the race. An intricate system of points and courses
and examinations sets the student working for marks and the completion
of schedules rather than for a new orientation in important fields of
human interest.
The undergraduate can scarcely be blamed for responding to a system
which so strongly resembles his sports, or for bending his energies
to playing the game right, rather than assimilating the intellectual
background of his teachers. So strongly has this sporting technique
been acquired by the college that even when the undergraduate lacks
the sporting instinct and does become interested in ideas, he is apt
to find that he has only drawn attention to his own precocity and
won amused notice rather than respect. In spite of the desire of
instructors to get themselves over to their students, in spite of a
real effort to break down the “class-consciousness” of teacher and
student, the gulf between their attitudes is too fundamental to be
easily bridged. Unless it is bridged, however, the undergraduate is
left in a sort of Peter Pan condition, looking back to his schoolboy
life and carrying along his schoolboy interests with him, instead of
anticipating his graduate or professional study or his active life.
What should be an introduction to professional or business life in
a world of urgent political and social issues, and the acquiring
of intellectual tools with which to meet their demands, becomes a
sort of sequestered retreat out of which to jump from boyhood into a
badly-prepared middle age.
The college will not really get the undergraduate until it becomes
more conscious of the contrast of its own philosophy with his sporting
philosophy, and tackles his boyish Americanisms less mercifully, or
until it makes college life less like that of an undergraduate country
club, and more of an intellectual workshop where men and women in the
fire of their youth, with conflicts and idealisms, questions and
ambitions and desire for expression, come to serve an apprenticeship
under the masters of the time.
XXVIII
MEDIEVALISM IN THE COLLEGES
If the American college is to have a part in that new educational
movement which is beginning to make the school not merely a preparation
for life but life itself, interested in what has meaning to the student
at his particular age and situation, it will have to recast some of
its most cherished practices and ideals. The large university to-day
represents all stages in the adjustment of intellectual activity to
social demands, from the intensely practical schools of engineering,
correlating with the technical progress of industry, back to the
departments of literary scholarship--perhaps as pure an anachronism as
we have in the intellectual world to-day. The demands for technical
knowledge have pulled the university along, as it were, by the nose,
and strung it through the ages, so that a “professor” to-day may be an
electrical expert fresh from Westinghouse, or an archaic delver into
forgotten poetry.
The technical departments of the universities have kept bravely
up with the work of “learning by doing.” Laboratory and shopwork,
practical coöperation with industry, contact with technical experts,
have made the newer departments what they should be--energetic
workshops where theory and practice constantly fertilize each other,
and where the student comes out a competent technician in his craft.
But the place of the college in this scheme becomes more and more
anomalous. Devoted to the traditional studies--the literatures,
mathematics, philosophy, history--it is still strangely reminiscent of
old musty folkways of the schoolman and theologian. Every professor
knows the desire of the average student to finish his college course
and grapple with his professional studies. Every professor is aware
of the sharp quickening of interest which comes on entrance to the
professional schools. Though part of this feeling may be due to
impatience to get out into the world, much of it certainly arises from
a realization that at last one has come into a sphere where thinking
means action. The college, with its light and unexacting labor, is
cheerfully exchanged for the grind of the professional school, because
the latter touches a real world.
Whereas the higher schools give the student active work to do, almost
all the methods of the college teaching conspire to force him into
an attitude of passivity. The lecture system is the most impressive
example of this attitude, and the lecture system seems actually to
get a tightening grip upon the modern college. As standard forms
have become worked out, it is customary now actually to measure
the student’s course by the number of hours he exposes himself to
lectures. For the college course to be organized on a basis of lectures
suggests that nothing has happened since Abelard spoke in Paris to
twelfth-century bookless men. It is as if the magic word had still to
be communicated by word of mouth, like the poems of Homer of old. The
emphasis is continually upon the oral presentation of material which
the professor has often himself written in a text-book, or which could
be conveyed with much greater exactness and fullness from books. These
books the student knows only as “collateral reading.” Nothing is left
undone to impress him with the idea that the books and reviews and
atlases are mere subsidiaries to the thin but precious trickle of the
professor’s voice.
Now there may be some excuse for the lecture in a Continental
university, where the professor is a personality, is not compelled to
lecture, and may make of his delivery a kind of intellectual ceremony.
But American professors are not only likely to be atrocious lecturers,
but to hate such compulsory talking as the sheerest drudgery. Too
often their own palpable derision at the artificiality of it makes
the lecture an effective barrier between the student’s curiosity and
its satisfaction. This is not to deny that the lecture might be made
into a broad interpretative survey, which would give the student the
clues he needs through the maze of books. This is exactly what the best
college courses tend to become. But for this the college will need
interpreters, and not the humdrum recorders and collators that it has a
weakness for.