Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes
Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros.
Readers of Thackeray will remember that these are the lines in which
Colonel Newcome used regretfully to sing the praises of those arts
into which he had been but barely initiated. Of the thousands in the
United States who are now annually certified as bachelors of arts,
nine-tenths would be unable to translate the passage, and if the
passage were translated, fully one-half would see little or nothing in
it. When men are asking what is the matter with our colleges, one is
tempted to suggest that perhaps this is the matter: that a controlling
interest in the academic establishment is made up of those who have no
belief that higher education should result in refinement of mind and
transformation of character, and no comprehension of what these things
would mean; or, in plain terms, that higher education is in the hands
of the barbarians.
That our academic population has grown some three or four-fold within
a generation, is no indication of a corresponding increase in the
number of persons of cultivated intelligence. The growth has been
brought about mainly through a change in the tone and purpose of the
college course to appeal to those who formerly despised a college
education as a useless luxury; so that now we have a large number of
college graduates in whose eyes the degree confers no distinction and
imposes no responsibility. It may be that the older science was crude
and the older scholarship vague. By no means all college students of a
generation ago were animated by a love of knowledge. Yet even the
idlers, who sought the degree because it was reputable, testified to a
general respect for higher education, and bore witness to the idea
that a college graduate was supposed to be a gentleman. No such
expectation prevails today; and least of all in the West, where the
increase of numbers has been most marked. Today a college education is
supposed to be merely useful. Yet at the same time it is felt to be a
ground for wonder that so many can pass through the college course
with no visible refinement of taste or speech, no clarification of the
sense of honor and justice, and no increase in thoughtfulness or in
independence of mind--that, in a word, a college graduate is
indistinguishable in general society. Some time ago I sat at a hotel
table with six commercial travellers and one college graduate, who was
also a college professor,--all talking baseball. Sherlock Holmes
himself could not have identified the professor. Some time before, I
had ventured to propose in a talk to some students that a college
degree should impose the obligation of _noblesse_, and preserve a man
from some of the meaner things which might be condoned in the less
fortunate. I learned afterwards that the idea was resented as
"undemocratic"--yet not by the students: for today it seems to be the
college professor who is chiefly contemptuous of liberal culture.
It is rather difficult to see how _higher_ education is to be
conceived as "democratic" in the sense of creating no personal
distinctions. Only, it should seem, if the gifts of education are
purely external and without effect upon mind and character. On the
other hand, if democracy is to stand simply for freedom of
opportunity, and selection of the best, doubtless few will deny that
the college should be open to every youth who shows himself capable of
measuring up to the idea of an educated man. But this is another
matter. The "democratic" theory of higher education stands for a
process of measuring down. The process began when the teachers of
science insisted that a student whose course was made up mostly of
laboratory practice in natural science should nevertheless be
graduated as a bachelor of arts. One may cheerfully admit the
importance of scientific conceptions for general culture: the point is
that if scientific training had developed half of the intellectual
qualities that were claimed for it, the degree in science should soon
have displaced that of bachelor of arts. As it was, the issue was
obscured, and under the blessings of the blanket degree, "democracy"
has made rapid progress. No form of speech is now too destitute of
ideas to be called a science. Leaving aside the last new science of
"efficiency," we have a science of cooking and of dressmaking, a
science of carpentering (called manual training), a science of
commerce, a science of journalism, and a science of football, any of
which may now entitle one to credit towards a degree of bachelor of
arts--so that no one can now charge that the college degree implies an
invidious distinction.
Such is the outcome of "democracy." At first glance the term conveys
the pleasing suggestion that our universities attach a high importance
to the cultivation of individuality. But the suggestion is misleading.
In the academic "democracy" every student, like every dollar, counts
for just one "and nobody for more than one," and the only question of
importance is how many. Not long ago, while crossing the Rocky
Mountains, and listening to the admiration expressed by my
fellow-travelers for the impressive engineering and industrial
undertakings of that region and the Pacific Coast, I became gradually
aware that the conventional mode of describing such an
enterprise was to speak of it as "a two-million-dollar plant" or
"twenty-million-dollar plant," as the case might be, on the ground,
evidently, that no other aspect of the matter could conceivably be
interesting. Such barbaric innocence seemed to me diverting until I
remembered that this was the point of view and these the same tribe of
barbarians as those whose aspirations now control the policies of our
institutions of learning. With few exceptions, our academic managers
prefer to state their attainments and their ambitions in terms of an
n-million dollar plant, with n-thousand students and n-hundred
instructors. And in the interest of bigness any argument is good. Just
now the argument is vocational, and college presidents and professors,
especially in the state-universities of the West, are fairly falling
over one another to prove that they are "practical men," and
incidentally to disavow any interest in the promotion of liberal
culture. When the fashion changes, as it doubtless will--for it is
unlikely that even the agricultural communities are as uncivilised as
the appeal that is made to them--the argument will change. Especially
instructive from this point of view is the standing appeal for more
money to make good a deficit; or to improve the quality of instruction
by paying better salaries to the faculty. In the logic of academic
administration there appears to be no contradiction between pleading
poverty and at the same time using the funds in hand to establish some
new department, some advertising feature, such as a summer session,
correspondence courses, university extension, or what not, which will
attract a more illiterate class of students, scatter the energies of
the faculty, lower their teaching efficiency, preserve the deficit,
and leave the institution less than ever free to shape its own course
or to act as a critic of popular opinion.
Academic authorities are accustomed to explain these seeming
inconsistencies by a vague appeal to the obligations of the university
to the community. These "social obligations" will repay a careful
study. To grasp the idea that is now current in most of the
state-universities, one must think of a state-hospital for the insane
in which the care of patients is regarded as secondary to the purpose
of impressing the people of the state with the evil of insanity, and
the need of larger appropriations for the state-hospital. A careful
analysis of present academic conceptions of "social obligation" fails
to show that such obligation differs in any essential respect from the
obligation of a merchant to procure new customers, and incidentally
to take some of them away from his competitors. The merchant's
obligation is made humanly intelligible by considerations of profit or
prestige. It is rather difficult to grasp the sort of academic
prestige that comes from cheapening the college degree. And when we
find that even the older and richer institutions show a disposition to
sacrifice their academic distinction for the prestige of numbers, it
seems simpler to abandon the search for rational motive, and to refer
the ambitions of our institutions of learning to the same primitive
instinct that prompts one man or woman to outshine his neighbor in the
splendor of his diamonds or his dinners, and another in the size of
his motor-car.
A sure key to the interpretation of "social obligation" will be found
in inter-collegiate athletics. I am speaking here, not of athletic
sports as such, nor necessarily of athletic contests between colleges,
but of inter-collegiate contests as a matter of public exhibition--"a
Roman holiday"--and commercial enterprise. Only a finely drawn
distinction saves the college athlete from being classed as a
professional. It is true that (as a rule) he does not pay for his
living out of the gate-receipts. But the gate-receipts pay for his
sport, and the sport covers a good deal of expensive traveling and
sojourning at expensive hotels, not to speak of the services of a
professional coach, now commonly appointed by the college
administration at a salary often higher than that of a full
professor. And when we remember that the gate-receipts total many
thousands--$50,000 from a single game is not uncommon--and further
that such sums are needed to maintain the sport at its present (shall
we not say "professional"?) perfection, it is hard to see that amateur
sport is not a business enterprise of serious dimensions. The
difficulty becomes greater if we define a man's profession to be that
which consumes most of his time and attention. This applies especially
to football. The very purpose of the training is to provide that
during the season no member of the team shall waste his time or
strength on any other purpose. The schedule for practice would be
sufficient to demonstrate this point, apart from the testimony of
numerous football men, among them men of fair ability and
conscientious students. During the season they can do little more than
attend their classes and trust to the mercy of the instructor. This
mercy they are pretty sure to receive, first, because they have, as a
rule, carefully avoided electing the courses of the unmerciful,
secondly, because even a rather independent instructor will often
prefer to give a football man the grade needed to keep him on the team
rather than face a storm of execration from students and colleagues,
not to speak of a long argument in the president's office. Such
arguments are not uncommon; and a college professor who attaches any
importance to the reports published of the high average of scholarship
maintained by athletes must be lacking in a sense of humor.
Older apologists for inter-collegiate athletics were accustomed to
talk about _mens sana in corpore sano_. But every one knows now that
inter-collegiate athletics are as little related to sound health as
inter-collegiate debates to sound logic. Nor does it suffice to point
to the need of a safety-valve for the spirits of youth. This argument
may pass for some of the Eastern colleges, but the Western student is
apt to be a sober and steady, if somewhat unimaginative youth, who
looks at college mostly from a business standpoint; and it is fair to
say that inter-collegiate sports would have amounted to little in the
West if they had not been carefully fostered by the college
administration. This is so far true that a youth who happens to be
husky and strong can hardly hope to escape the football team except
under the imputation of "disloyalty;" and more than one who had hoped
to give his time to other things has yielded to the importunities, not
so much of his fellow-students as of the faculty sports and those
connected with the administration. In the college community generally,
and in the speeches made by the faculty before gatherings of students,
the highest tribute is reserved for the athletic heroes. Those who win
college honors, or who make Phi Beta Kappa or Sigma Xi, are rarely
heard of. The present theory seems to be--and again, the theory, not
so much of the students as of the faculty and administration--that the
student who wins honors work only for himself, while he who helps win
a game does something for the college.
A generation ago the management of athletics was in the hands of the
students, and the faculty was content to confine itself to the task of
keeping the games within proper limits. But the amount of money
involved became too great for undergraduate business methods and, in
some cases, for undergraduate honesty. Hence, in one college after
another, the administration assumed the direction of athletics in the
interest of good management and at the same time, it was claimed, of
preserving their amateur character. This claim has been very strangely
justified. The result has been rather that in the hands of the
administration athletics became an instrument of competition, and for
the first time a serious and important business; and in the
prosecution of the business along professional lines, the
administration has been shown to be, not more scrupulous than the
undergraduates, but only more resourceful. Impecunious athletes could
now be provided for by scholarships or by places in the library, the
college office, or the college book-store. Why, pray, should a student
be debarred from the privilege of "working his way through" because he
happens to be an athlete? Or why, for this reason, should a president
be deprived of the benevolent satisfaction of helping a deserving
student out of his own pocket? Or why should a similar privilege be
withheld from "loyal" alumni or from disinterested persons who happen
to have money on the game? Cases of this kind are matters of common
report in academic circles; and when players are disqualified for
professionalism by the inter-collegiate conference, the circumstances
point not seldom to complicity on the part of the academic
authorities. Among men of the world who are gentlemen, it is thought
to be one of the primitive moralities to be a good sport--to play the
game on the square and to treat your opponent as a gentleman. Neither
of these points seems to be quite intelligible to many of our academic
sports. One college president might be named whose speeches at
football "rallies" are said to suggest an expedition against savages.
A private citizen who should set up a billiard table in his house, and
then earn the cost of it by giving exhibition games for admission
fees, would be promptly put down as a professional sport. I have
suggested to a number of colleagues that college athletics will never
be a gentleman's sport until the gate-receipts are abolished, the
professional coach dismissed, and the scope of athletics is limited to
what can be supported by private subscription, preferably confined to
students. One can readily see how this would improve the _morale_ of
athletics. There would be some loss of proficiency, but in matters of
sport no gentleman can afford to be too proficient. The usual reply
has been, however, "Oh, that would never do." Now of course it would
never do. But there is just one reason why, namely, that athletics are
today regarded as the most important measure and criterion of academic
prestige. They are indeed an abominable nuisance. They absorb the
attention of the administration, take up the time of faculty meetings
or of governing committees, send traveling about the country students
who ought to be at work, and give to the members of the team a public
importance which their personality fails to justify. But every
institution feels itself bound to make a good showing for fear that a
barbarian public, and the rich barbarians among the alumni, will judge
that it is lacking in vitality. The fear is doubtless exaggerated,
but such is the _rationale_ of inter-collegiate athletics.
Further light upon the "social obligations" of our colleges and
universities will be afforded by a study of the departments of
education, or teachers' colleges, which have been established in most
of the larger institutions, and which now often receive a greater
share of the attention of the administration than any other part of
the institution. It is unnecessary to ask whether the history or
philosophy of education are important subjects of study. The fact
remains that the history of education is about as necessary a
preliminary to the practice of teaching, as the history of medicine to
the practice of medicine, while any genuine philosophy of education
implies a broad basis of ripe culture. Nor may we question the need of
a higher standard of general culture for the teachers in the secondary
schools. All of this is irrelevant to the department of education. The
very last thing named there is the need of broad culture and sound
knowledge. On the contrary, the idea is commonly conveyed that a too
thorough knowledge of the subject will be bad for the teacher. As I
write, there comes to me the published report of a speech by the dean
of one of the teachers' colleges, who says that "it is harder for a
Phi Beta Kappa to learn to teach than for medium students." Of course
the moral is clear: no student who intends to teach, and who hopes to
receive an appointment, can afford to waste his time in making a
record for excellence of scholarship and breadth of culture, such as
would recommend him to Phi Beta Kappa, especially since any
deficiencies in these directions can be more than made good by a
"professional training" in child-psychology, the science of method,
and the social aims of education.
The result of this appeal is to bring to the university a large class
of students whose personal ambition does not extend beyond the desire
for a comfortable job, and who regard the university, not as an _alma
mater_, but simply as an emporium from which they may procure a
professional outfit; and at the same time to instal in the faculty a
set of men whose prevailing point of view is that of the
_entrepreneur_. In all of our universities, from the Atlantic coast to
the Pacific, the department of education, with its courses, students,
and instructors, is an object of ridicule and malediction on the part
of most of the faculty. Even the less fastidious are disposed to
resent the presence in the university of a department whose
intellectual and cultural status is hardly superior to that of a
normal school. There would seem to be only one reason for the
importance attached to the department by the administration, namely,
the large and steady constituency which it is able to command through
the questionable logic of its vocational appeal. For the purpose of
enlarging the "plant," nothing better has been yet devised than the
plan of offering "professional training" for teachers.
Hardly less significant, however, for a study of the social
obligations resting upon our universities is the graduate school. In
the West local patriotism demands that every state shall have its
state-university, and no institution is a complete university without
a graduate school. That several states should combine to form one
graduate school of really good quality has, to my knowledge, never
been suggested. Meanwhile, to measure the urgency of the need for
graduate schools, it will be sufficient to contemplate the kind of men
who are awarded fellowships in the graduate schools already well
established, in the East or in the West. A dispassionate observer
might readily conclude that the capacity of the country for graduate
work had been satisfied for a century to come. And he would be the
more confirmed in his opinion if he should reflect upon the cost of
graduate instruction, the small number of students who attend the
graduate courses, and the few who are not subsidized to attend. In his
book on _University Control_ Professor Cattell has called attention
to the fact that our graduate schools procure most of their students
only by paying them, and to the more significant fact that, with all
the inducements offered by scholarships and fellowships, the material
is of not more than mediocre quality. Even at Harvard it has been
noted that the graduate students were as a class inferior in personal
genius and intellectual endowment to the best class of undergraduates.
Nor does it seem worth while to increase the stipend. Some years ago
one of our college presidents, an artist in inflation, conceived the
idea of splitting his fellowships into two; with a scarcely observable
change of quality, he obtained two graduate students for the price of
one. From all this one would be led to conclude that what is now
needed is, not more graduate schools, but a working outfit of really
eligible students for those already established.
Since the college faculty is recruited from the graduate school, this
means that there is a corresponding lack of eligible material for
college professorships. Professor Cattell suggests that the lack of
good material for the graduate fellowships is due to the
unsatisfactory conditions which, in America, surround the profession
of scholar and teacher. Doubtless this is true, but the deeper fact
seems to be that cultural conditions in the United States have not yet
developed a sufficient number of men with a taste for academic work to
fill the places created by a policy of hasty expansion. The result is
that a fair number of those composing our college faculties--fully
half, one might say, viewing them as a whole,--are men who have no
special sense of professional dignity or of professional
responsibility; and some of those who write "Professor" before, or
"A.B., Ph.D." after their names are all but illiterate. An unselected
group of college professors leaves no impression of special culture.
Their ordinary conversation conveys no impression of superior insight
in matters of politics, or of art, or of social reform--very probably
the subject of conversation is football and the prospects of the team.
In any community a group of college professors is likely to represent,
not a higher level of culture, but simply a fairly assorted average, a
vertical section, so to speak, of the culture of the community. Under
normal conditions many of those who now compose our college faculties
would probably be teaching in the elementary schools, while others,
especially those, now highly esteemed by the administration, who
prefer the stir and bustle of traveling and speech-making to the
humdrum of study and teaching, would be carrying a case of samples or
selling life-insurance. One of the striking things about our college
professors is their frequent distaste for quiet occupations. Hence,
while it is true that the conditions prevailing in the profession
react upon the graduate schools, the reverse is also true. One reason
that operates against better salaries for college professors is that
so many are now worth no more than they get, while for men of a better
quality there is no immediately promising source of supply.
On the other hand, it is obvious that a policy of indiscriminate
expansion is committed to the employment of Chinese cheap labor in
teaching. To this necessity we owe the elaborate academic hierarchy
extending through the grades of fellow, assistant, instructor,
assistant professor, associate professor, full professor, to the
culminating dignity of "professor and head of the department;" to this
we owe the employment of women in the coëducational colleges (who
rarely get beyond the grade of instructor); and to this we owe the
fact that, even in the oldest and richest of our universities, a great
part of the instruction is given by instructors at about a thousand
dollars a year. Yet all the while a course by a thousand-dollar
instructor yields the same amount of credit towards the degree as a
course by a full professor. From the administration's standpoint,
however, it is foolish to pay four or five thousand dollars for one
man when you can get two or three for that sum; and especially when
your public is of a kind that only a small portion of it will know the
difference.
Peculiarly favorable to this policy has been the importation from
Germany of the _wissenschaftliche Methode_ and, in particular, of the
scientific method of creating a Doctor of Philosophy, based upon the
curious Teutonic conception of a "contribution to knowledge." One such
contribution is sufficient for a Doctor of Philosophy; the number of
them is the measure of a scientific reputation. What is positively
needed to constitute a contribution to knowledge, is not altogether
clear. It seems quite certain, however, that a contribution to
knowledge need not be a contribution to ideas. And a census of the
contributions printed by the journals devoted to special departments
of knowledge suggests that little more is needed than an industrious
description of some region of unexplored fact. It matters little that
the fact is insignificant, or that the analysis (if there be analysis)
throws no new light upon the principles of science or upon the motives
of history or of literature--a fact is still a fact; and a "negative
result" in response to an improbable hypothesis is still a
"contribution." It is evident that the "scientific method," whatever
be its first intention, need not in practice imply the operation of
intelligence. And this may help to explain why the "results of
science" are occasionally indistinguishable from those of manual
labor, and how a man may rank as a scientific authority whose general
intelligence would not clearly distinguish him from an ordinary
carpenter or bricklayer. All of this, indeed, is implied in the logic
of "method." As the purpose of a machine is to be foolproof, so is it
the purpose of scientific method to make scientific discovery
independent of personal endowment or genius. In the wholesale creation
of academic establishments the method plays a particularly important
part, since it furnishes a supply of accredited reputations at a
relatively moderate cost.
The scientific method represents the introduction of "democracy" into
the fields of science and scholarship. And thus it enables us to
explain the paradox, otherwise mystifying, that college professors are
the first to teach the student to attach a superior importance to men
of affairs; to value a practical experience of things above a clear
understanding of them; the intuitions of the plain man, or of the
child of nature, above the decisions of reflective judgment; and that
they are the first to warn him against allowing plain common sense to
be disturbed by the exercise of reason. All of this would be rather
perplexing if one were unfamiliar with the democratic theory that a
contribution to knowledge implies no exercise of intelligence, and
that intellectual discipline works no change in the quality of the
man.
When, however, it becomes a question of democracy for the faculty--or,
in other words, of a form of academic administration appropriate to
the idea of a learned profession--the democrats of this type are apt
to be either silent or contemptuous. One of the reasons why academic
administration is imperialistic in democratic America, while it is
democratic in imperialistic Germany, is that American scholars have no
illusions regarding the dignity of their profession. On the other
hand, a commercial, or, if you please, scientific, theory of academic
organization leads quite naturally to the conception of the
college-president as a captain of industry--while a study of the acts
of college professors in their corporate capacity as a faculty might
easily lead one to believe that most of them are capable only of doing
what they are told. But all this is but one manifestation of a deeper
reason. For a true basis of comparison, we must turn, not to the
German university, but to the German army, and then back again to the
citizen soldiery of the United States. On a peace footing, if academic
progress be the end in question, there appears to be no reason why a
body of academic teachers, presumably men of culture and of experience
in academic affairs, should not be able to govern an educational
institution both efficiently and progressively under the presiding
direction of one of their number responsible to themselves. Nor may we
see why any scholar should be disinclined to interrupt his studies for
a term to assume the office. But for an aggressive campaign against
the state-treasury, or the pockets of the wealthy, or a raid upon the
constituency of a rival institution, such a form of organization would
be as little fitted as our National Guard for an invasion of Canada. A
campaign of conquest calls for the autocratic powers of a captain of
industry.
In institutions of established reputation, the tradition of culture is
usually strong enough to demand that the president be a scholar and a
man of distinction--though he need not be a conspicuous illustration
of the theory that familiarity with the arts _emollit mores, nec sinit
esse feros_. A glance, however, at what is expected of the president
in the great majority of colleges and universities will convince one
that it is easier for the rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than
for the president to live up to the ideal of a scholar and a
gentleman. It will also help to account for the number of strange and
even grotesque characters which have figured in the office. Every one
has known college presidents whose personality would suggest the
politician, the promoter, the theatrical manager, or the
quack-doctor--anything rather than the head of an institution of
learning. When a professor is elevated to the presidency, he ceases to
be a teacher, and becomes an "educator" (with a long _o_). The duties
of the office leave no time, as a rule, either for teaching or for
study--for which, doubtless, those who have been "training" for the
office are often grateful. The result is that the educational manager
is usually far removed from the realities of education. And, indeed,
the last thing of which our college presidents are expected to have
any personal knowledge is the courses that are given in their
institution and the ideas of the instructor who is giving them. What
is chiefly demanded of them is "executive ability," especially that
kind of which the chief ingredient is a histrionic capacity for
attracting attention.
Thus the duties of the office are only remotely academic. On the side
of internal administration, the first duty of the president is to
swell the volume of "life" by a paternal encouragement, mingled at
times with insistence, of all the organizations representing "student
interests"--those athletic, first of all, but then the countless other
societies, religious, social, dramatic, musical, terpsichorean,
journalistic, forensic, or what not, which give a tone of "vitality"
to our academic life (or, as you may choose to put it, make a howling
wilderness of the academic halls); and among which the literary
society of the older days is the least considered. If college life is
to yield material for publicity nothing should be left to the
student's spontaneity; on the other hand, the modern college student
is apt to blame the administration if he is backward in making friends
or fails to make a place for himself among his fellows. On the side of
external administration, the duties of the president may be summed up
in the two words, money and publicity. To procure the first of these,
he is expected to make himself acceptable to men of wealth; or, in the
state-university, to the politicians. Those who idealize the
independence of the state-university are apt to forget that it has its
own seamy side. At the same time, to strengthen his appeal, the
college president is expected to create a larger clientele among the
public, and, for all these purposes, to organize the alumni into a
compact fighting force. This means that he must be half the time
traveling and making speeches. The demands upon him for talk alone are
usually far in excess of any normal capacity for thinking; and it
would be an extraordinary man who, under all these conditions, should
preserve a high sincerity or a deeply thoughtful attitude towards
life.
All of this is the outcome of an expensive "democracy," based, we are
told, upon broad conceptions of social responsibility. How far the
elevation of society is involved in this democratic program I have
tried to make clear. In any case there would seem to be a need for a
few institutions of learning with the courage to be aristocratic. An
aristocratic college (or university, as the case may be) would
necessarily limit the scope of its work, in range of courses and
number of students, to what it could do well upon the income at its
command. Several of our academic endowments might seem to be already
sufficient for maintaining a uniformly high standard of very fair
scope. An aristocratic institution of learning would then be
represented by an aristocratic faculty, composed of men whose life and
teaching rest upon the conviction that exercise of intellect and
cultivation of taste produce a finer type of man. With the possible
exception of a few of the younger men, an aristocratic faculty would
be made up of men worthy of the rank and salary of a full professor.
In the aristocratic college or university the competition for students
would be replaced by the competition of applicants for entrance; and
an institution which preserved its independence by thus deliberately
determining the scope of its work would have the choice of the best.
Admission to college would then become what it might conceivably be
expected to be, an aristocratic privilege. Of course, an aristocratic
institution of learning could not hope to make a constant noise in the
world. It should none the less be an inspiring and pervasive influence
in the direction of a higher tone of thought and morals for all of
society.