SMALL SOULS
What every man and every organization of men in America want is to grow
big. If you ask why they want to grow big they are puzzled, because it
has never before happened to them to hear anybody question the moral
axiom that bigness is greatness. An office building which is twelve
stories high is twice as admirable as one which is six stories high; a
city which has a million inhabitants is twice as important as one which
has only half a million. It matters not that the additional population
may be festering in wretched slums; whatever they may be, grafters and
grabbers, drunkards and morons, a greater number of them is a thing to
be boosted for and boasted about. The city grows big in body, but in
soul it remains small.
And the same thing happens to the college. Every little college wants to
be bigger than its neighbor, and looks forward to being the biggest in
the state, and to that end employs the noisy arts of the real estate
promoter and the circus agent. An article published in “School and
Society,” April 22, 1922, tells about the activities of “field
secretaries” and “field agents” now employed by colleges. “According to
the president of one of Ohio’s state universities, only four or five of
the forty colleges in the state are able to dispense with the services
of one or more of these functionaries. Their use is apparently growing
in favor. The dean of one of Ohio’s strongest colleges confessed
regretfully that the authorities in his institution are about to yield
to the pressure being exerted within the institution to appoint a man to
‘sell the college’ to prospective students.” Crossing the prairies I
stepped from my train to get a breath of fresh air on a station
platform, and found myself confronted by an enormous sign, hailing me in
the breezy Western fashion: “Hello, this is Manhattan, Kansas, a Good
Town, home of the famous Kansas State Agricultural College, 1400 acres,
50 buildings, 433 faculty, 3500 students. Free auto camping grounds.”
The professor, needless to say, is expected to be a “good sport,” and
contribute his proper share to the “uplift” of his institution. Anything
notable that he does is seized upon and exploited by the college press
agent; and sometimes the efforts of publicity hounds to deal with
unfamiliar sciences and arts produce comical results. Professor Jacques
Loeb began to experiment in the artificial fertilization of the eggs of
sea-urchins, and this was marvelous material for stories, it went all
over the world. Hardly any of it was right, but that made no
difference—not even in academic circles; Professor Loeb’s star ascended,
and so did his salary. He was invited to the University of California to
continue his researches, and there he found the successful sons prepared
to use him as they do the Mission bells and the Bohemian Club “jinks.”
They put a “booster button” on him, and got out picture post-cards of
his laboratory, and a real estate firm started an advertising campaign
to sell lots in his neighborhood. But when they found that Loeb resented
this kind of exploitation, they lost interest in artificial
parthenogenesis, and discovered that the professor was a godless
materialist and a poor hand at teaching freshmen.
The average faculty member of course never scales the heights of fame,
never sees his portrait on picture post cards. The college grows big in
body and stays small in soul; while the professor is apt to stay small
in both body and soul. His salary does not permit a generous diet, and
his work is confining and tedious. He teaches three or four classes a
day, and corrects compositions and test-papers, and keeps records and
makes out reports, and obeys his superiors and keeps himself within the
limits of his little specialty. He leads a narrow life, withdrawn from
realities. He goes to lunch at the Faculty Club and talks “shop” with
his colleagues, men who live equally empty lives and are equally out of
touch with great events. There is gossip and intrigue and wire-pulling;
a professor at the University of Chicago heard his colleagues talk for
an hour about the fact that someone had got an increase in salary of two
or three hundred dollars. A professor at Johns Hopkins compared his
colleagues to the lotus eaters: “Peaceful, endowed and dull.”
As I write, Professor Frank C. Hankins, one of the rebels at Clark
University, hands in his resignation and formulates his criticism of the
teaching in our higher institutions:
The teacher of social science may treat his subject matter in a purely
formal manner, as is done in most high school courses in civics, where
attention is given to the powers and duties of Congress, the number of
justices in the Supreme court, etc. This is a pity; but the high
school teacher and, unfortunately, a large number of college teachers
of the social sciences must reckon with the “man in the street,” who
would feel that “sacred” things were being defiled if civics courses
discussed the origin and development of institutions, the relation of
patriotism to war, or the relative merits of individualism and
collectivism in social life. It is a real tragedy in the life of a
teacher if he must squeeze all the juice out of his subject matter and
give his pupils the dry pulp, in order to hold his job.
And to the same effect testifies Ludwig Lewisohn, out of many years
experience at Wisconsin and Ohio State. I jotted down his phrases in my
notes:
It is like teaching from a cook-book. There are certain receipts which
you follow. You try to explain the scientific spirit, but you find
that in college the word “science” means cut and dried experiments
without meaning. You teach the principles of a subject, but you never
apply them. You explain the “Novum Organum,” for example, but you
don’t apply Bacon’s method to the current formulas of capitalist
imperialism. You explain the relativity of morals according to Locke,
but you never test present-day marriage and divorce, property rights
and the duty of obedience to the state.
And again, a professor now at Wisconsin: “You teach the facts, but you
do not interpret them; and especially you do not deal with remedies. You
teach details, not vision. You accumulate ‘learning,’ in the narrow
sense of that word; raking in the dust-heaps of the past, and producing
carefully documented treatises about absurdities.” I have given a list
of such topics in the chapter on Harvard; I ran into others here and
there—Professor E. A. Ross mentioned two theses which won degrees while
he was at Berlin—“The Linden Tree in German Literature,” and “The Hay
Supply in the Army of Frederick the Great.” Or, if Germany is too far
away, perhaps you would be interested in a Columbia thesis, composed by
a man who is now a professor at Princeton: “Metaphors Concerned with
Nature in the Prose of Aelfric”; or a Columbia thesis, by a professor
who is now at Charleston: “The Dialect Contamination in the Old English
Gospels.” Said Nietzsche: “You beat them, and they give out dust like
meal-sacks. But who could guess that their dust came from corn, and the
golden wonder of the summer fields?”
Colleges are growing like those prehistoric monsters, the size of a
freight-car, with brains that would fit inside a walnut-shell. And as
they grow, there is more and more “administration,” more and more red
tape and routine; the professor is turned into a bookkeeper and a filing
clerk. Writing in “Science,” President Maclaurin of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology drew a picture of the adventures of Isaac Newton
in a modern American university:
The superintendent of buildings and grounds, or other competent
authority, calls upon Mr. Newton.
Supt.: Your theory of gravitation is hanging fire unduly. The director
insists on a finished report, filed in his office by nine A. M. Monday
next; summarized on one page; typewritten, and the main points
underlined. Also a careful estimate of the cost of the research per
student-hour.
Newton: But there is one difficulty that has been puzzling me for
fourteen years, and I am not quite ...
Supt. (with snap and vigor): Guess you had better overcome that
difficulty by Monday morning or quit.
How can dull men, absorbed in dull routine, hold the attention of large
groups of wide-awake youngsters? The answer is that they do not, and
that is the failure of our colleges. The situation is summed up in a
delightful anecdote, which was solemnly sworn to me by a college
professor who dares not let me use his name. He was doing the customary
“glad-hand” stunts at a reunion of the “old boys,” and one of these
successful sons came up to him, beaming with pleasure, and clasped his
hand in a hearty grip. “Professor Smith! Well, well, Professor Smith, I
sure am glad to see you! You have no idea what a good time I had in that
English class of yours. We read ‘Hamlet,’ you remember, but we only got
halfway through. I often find myself wondering how that play came out.”
Or, if you cannot believe that story, take the testimony of Professor C.
T. Titus of Whitman College, who tried the experiment of asking college
seniors in what state the city of St. Louis is located. There were
guesses as far apart as Louisiana, Kentucky and Tennessee! No wonder
that Bertrand Russell remarks that “Education has been one of the chief
obstacles to the development of intelligence.”