No Friendly Voice

37 H97

Kefep Your Card in This Pocket

Books will be issued only on presentation of proper
library cards.

Unless labeled otherwise, books may be retained
for four weeks Borrowers finding books marked, de-
faced or mutilated are expected to report same at
library desk; otherwise the last borrower will be held
responsible for all imperfectionsjig^vered

The card holder is responsmWfor all books drawn
on this card

Penalty for over-due bpo t fcs 2c a day plus cost of
notices

Lost cards and change of residence must be re-
ported promptly

Public Library

"Kansas City, Mo.
Keep Your .Card in This P

KANSAS CITY MO PUBLIC LIBRARY

D DDD1 DlfiSb^l 5

19-

29

OE'37 <j

^^1

..srt -,fV-

JUN

'03

NOV1V4C

12

FEE

NO FRIENDLY rVOL-GE

OF OTLCAGCXPRESS, CHICAGO

fiE ^AKJfc&jrAYlOS. CO-..NEW YORK., T3t OXBRIDGE UNIVERSITY
PRESS, LONDON, THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIS.I-KAISHA, TOKYO, OSAKA,
KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SE*TBAT- TEE COMMERCIAL PRESS, LIMITED, SHANGHAI

NO FRIE^PLY VOICE

By ROBERT MAYNARP HUTCHINS

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO ILLINOIS

BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 4LL RIGHIS
WESE^VED PUBLISIJLD&ARC.H J^6 * SECOWD IMPRESSION APRIL
1936* COMPOSED AND*TRIKTD fiy. THfiV UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, USA

To
THE PRESIDENT OF BEREA COLLEGE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

To THE GRADUATING CLASS, 1935 . . i

Convocation, University of Chicago, June, 1935

WHAT Is A UNIVERSITY ? . .... 5

Radio Address, April 18, 1935, Parent-Teachers Association

PROFESSORS AND TRUSTEES ... 12

_From the President's Report, September, 1935

WHAT IT MEANS To Go TO COLLEGE . . . . 19

~ Radio Address, CBS, October 2, 1935

THE HIGHER LEARNING. I . . 24

Convocation, University of Chicago, December, 1933

THE HIGHER LEARNING. II ... . 33

Trustees' Dinner to the Faculty, January n, 1934

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN Ex-LAW STUDENT . . . 41

Association of American Law Schools, December 29, 1933

BACK TO GALEN ... . . . . . 51

American College of Surgeons, October 13, 1933

THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE INTELLECTUAL LOVE OF GOD . 59
Founder's Day, University of Virginia, April 13, 1934

THE EDUCATIONAL FUNCTION OF NEW ENGLAND . . 70

Phillips Academy, Stearns Lecture, April 17, 1934

THE WESTERN UNIVERSITIES 81

Western Universities Club, New York, May 18, 1933

THE SENTIMENTAL ALUMNUS . . 87

Commencement, Oberlin College, June, 1934

EDUCATION AS A NATIONAL ENTERPRISE . . ... 95

National Education Association, February 25, 1932

""N

THJE OUTLOOK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION . . . . 100

Pittsburgh Teachers Association, April 29, 1935
vii-

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

THE SHEEP LOOK UP . n^

Los Angeles The Modern Forum, November 25, 1935

THEY.MCA. . . I32

Employed Officers Association, Y.M.C.A., June 9, 1933
RADIO AND PUBLIC POLICY . . ... 140

National Advisory Council on Radio in Education, October 8, 1934
THE PROFESSOR PAYS ..... i 4 8

American Association of University Professors, November 27, 1931

THE PROFESSOR Is SOMETIMES RIGHT . 155

Bond Club of New York, May 17, 1933

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO To THE STUDENTS 161

Convocation Sunday, University of Chicago, December 20, 1931

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO To THE FACULTY AND TRUSTEES 167
Trustees' Dinner to the Faculty, January 9, 1936

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH. I . 17 j

Convocation, University of Chicago, June, 1934

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH. II . . . jgi

Convocation, University of Chicago, June, 1930

THE CHICAGO PLAN .... . . . 188

** Department of Superintendence, March 2, 1933, Minneapolis

Vlll

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, 1935

IT IS now almost fifteen years since I was in the position
you occupy. I can therefore advise you about the dan-
gers and difficulties you will encounter. They are not,
in my opinion, chiefly economic or financial. Presumably
some of the American people will always be able to earn a
living; and presumably the graduates of a great university
will have a good chance of being among them. You have
the advantage of your fellow-citizens. You have learned
how to work; you have had some experience with people;
you have had good teachers and read good books; you have
been enlightened by the accumulated experience of man-
kind. If anybody can hope to survive, you can.

I am not worried about your economic future. I am wor-
ried about your morals. My experience and observation lead
me to warn you that the greatest, the most insidious, the
most paralyzing danger you will face is the danger of
corruption. Time will corrupt you. Your friends, your
wives or husbands, your business or professional associates
will corrupt you; your social, political, and financial ambi-
tions will corrupt you. The worst thing about life is that
it is demoralizing. ^^

The American system is one which offers great incentives
to initiative. It is based on the notion of individual enter-
prise. The path to leadership is open to anybody, no
matter how humble his beginnings. The most striking
paradox of American life is that this system, which must
rest on individual differences, produces the most intense
pressure toward uniformity. The fact that any boy can
become President, instead of making every boy an indi-
vidual, tends to make him a replica of everybody else.

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

"Getting on" is the great American aspiration. And here
the demoralizing part comes in; the way to get on is to
be "safe/' to be "sound/' to be agreeable, to be inoffensive,
to have no views on important matters not sanctioned by
the majority, by your superiors, or by your group. We are
convinced that by knowing the right people, wearing the
right clothes, saying the right things, holding the right
opinions, and thinking the right thoughts we shall all get
on; we shall all get on to some motion-picture paradise,
surrounded by fine cars, refreshing drinks, and admiring
ladies. So persuasive is this picture that we find politicians
during campaigns making every effort to avoid saying any-
thing; we find important people condoning fraud and
corruption in high places because it would be upsetting to
attack it; and we find, I fear, that university presidents
limit their public utterances to platitudes. Timidity thus
engendered turns into habit, and the "stuffed shirt" be-
comes one of the characteristic figures of our age.

The pressure toward uniformity is especially intense
now. More effective methods of applying it are constantly
appearing. The development of the art of advertising and
the new devices now at its disposal make more moving
than ever the demand that every American citizen must
look, act, and think like his neighbor, and must be afflicted
with the same number of gadgets. In the second place,
almost everybody now is afraid. This is reflected in the
hysteria of certain organs of opinion, which insist on free
speech for themselves, though nobody has thought of
taking it away from them, and at the same time demand
that it be denied everybody else. It is reflected in the
return of billingsgate to politics. It is reflected in the
jgeneral resistance to all uncomfortable truths. It is re-
flected in the decay of the national reason. Almost the
last question you can ask about any proposal nowadays
is whether it is wise, just, or reasonable. The question is
how much pressure there is behind it or how strong are the
vested interests against it.

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, 1935

Current fears are reflected, too, in the present attacks
on higher education. From one point of view these attacks
are justified. From the point of view of those who believe
that heaven is one big country club, universities are dan-
gerous things. If what you want is a dead level of medioc-
rity, if what you would like is a nation of identical twins,
without initiative, intelligence, or ideas, you should fear
the universities. From this standpoint universities are sub-
versive. They try to make their students think; they do
not intend to manufacture so many imitative automatons.
By helping the students learn to think, the universities
tend to make them resistant to pressure, to propaganda,
or even to reward. They tend to make them dissatisfied
if there were no dissatisfaction, there would be no progress
and they are likely to make them want to do something
to improve the conditions under which our people live.
They tend to make them individuals, therefore, and indi-
viduals on a strictly American plan, asking no quarter for
themselves, but alive to the needs of their fellow-men.

So much is this the case, so sharp is the contrast between
the atmosphere of America and the aims of the universi-
ties, with the country afraid of independent thinking and
the universities committed to nothing else, that in one
sense the universities may be accused of deliberately un-
fitting their students for life. Their graduates may not
"get on." They may not even be interested in getting on.
Yet you will note that the virtues which a university seeks
to inculcate are those which our form of government con-,
templates and without which it cannot endure. In sub-
verting ignorance, prejudice, injustice, conformity, medioc-
rity, self-satisfaction, and stupidity, and in sponsoring
instead the cause of intelligence and independence, the
universities are performing an essential service to democ-
racy. Democracy rests first on universal comprehension,
to which the universities contribute through the education
of teachers for the public schools and through the discovery
and communication of knowledge. Democracy rests sec-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

ondly on individual leadership, not necessarily political,
but intellectual and spiritual as well. To this the univer-
sities contribute through the labors of their professors and
their graduates. As Thomas Jefferson saw when he estab-
lished the University of Virginia, these services are always
indispensable to democracy. But the founders of this
republic can hardly have foreseen how acute the need of
them would be today. They cannot have anticipated the
terrific storm of propaganda from every quarter that now
beats upon the citizen. They cannot have expected a
government by pressure groups, groups able and willing
to drive into oblivion anyone who opposes them. They
cannot have imagined that the day would come when
individualism would mean: Look out for yourself, and the
devil take the community. If they had foreseen these
things, they would have left even more prayerful exhorta-
tions to their countrymen to foster and strengthen the
higher learning.

So I am worried about your morals. This University
will not have done its whole duty to the nation if you give
way before the current of contemporary life. Believe me,
you are closer to the truth now than you ever will be again.
Do not let "practical" men tell you that you should sur-
render your ideals because they are impractical. Do not
be reconciled to dishonesty, indecency, and brutality be-
cause gentlemanly ways have been discovered of being
dishonest, indecent, and brutal. As time passes, resist the
corruption that must come with it. Take your stand now
before time has corrupted you. Before you know it, it will
be too late. ^Courage^ten^perance 7 J^erality, honor, jus-
tice, wisdom^gasoav^fisL^
the virtues. In the intellectual virtues this University has
tried to train you. The life you have led here should have
helped you toward the rest. If come what may you
hold them fast, you will do honor to yourselves and to the
University, and you will serve your country.

.4.

WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY?

AJNIVERSITY is a community of scholars. It is
not a kindergarten; it is not a club; it is not a
reform school; it is not a political party; it is not
an agency of propaganda. A university is a community of
scholars.

The scholars who compose that community have been
chosen by their predecessors because they are especially
competent to study and to teach some branch of knowl-
edge. The greatest university is that in which the largest
proportion of these scholars are most competent in their
chosen fields.

To a certain extent the ability of a university to attract
the best scholars depends on the salaries it can pay. To a
certain extent it depends on the facilities, the libraries, and
laboratories it can offer. But great scholars have been
known to sacrifice both salaries and facilities for the sake
of the one thing that is indispensable to their calling
and that is freedom.

Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom
of teaching without these a university cannot exist.
Without these a university becomes a political party or
an agency of propaganda. It ceases to be a university.
The university exists only to find and to communicate the

truth. If it cannot do that, it is no longer a university^

* Socrates used to say that the one thing he knew posi-
tively was that we were under a duty to inquire. /Inquiry
involves still, as it did with Socrates, the discussion of zjK
important problems and of all points of view. You will
even find Socrates discussing communism in the Republic

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

of Plato. The charge upon which Socrates was executed
was the same that is now often hurled at our own edu-
cators: he was accused of corrupting the youth. The
scholars of America are attempting in their humble way
to follow the profession of Socrates. Some people talk as
though they would like to visit upon these scholars the
late which Socrates suffered. Such people should be
reminded that the Athenians missed Socrates when he
was gone.

. There is nothing new about this issue in America. At
the opening of the eighteenth century the foundation of
Columbia University was delayed for fifty years because
of arguments about what religious teaching should be
permitted in the institution. Thereafter the fight was over
the advance of experimental science and its repercussions
on religious faiths. In the first ten years of the University
of Chicago the quarrel turned on the religious teachings
of the staff. The battle for freedom of inquiry and teach-
ing in the natural sciences and religion has now been won.
No sane citizen, however he may disagree with any pro-
fessor, can wish that battle had been lost. The scientific
advance of the past century and the release from bigotry
which we now enjoy can be traced directly to the success
of the universities in securing the right to study these
fields without interference.

In the past forty years universities have taken up the
study of economics, politics, sociology, and anthropology.
They have been endeavoring to create social sciences
which, if they can be created, may prove as beneficent to
mankind as natural science and the technology which rests
upon it. In inquiry into social problems professors have
run into prejudices and fears, exactly as they did in
studying natural science and theology.

These prejudices and fears are now especially intense
because we have been passing through a period of severe
depression. In the twelve years I have been in higher

WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY?

education I have seen a marked change. In 1923 we often
heard that the professor was a useless creature, remote
from the real world and giving his students no knowledge
of it. Now we hear that the professor should get back to
the cloister and not let his students learn any more about
the real world than he can help. I ascribe this change to
the bad case of nerves induced in many people by the
depression. The normal reaction to misfortune is to blame
somebody else for it. Universities are easy marks. They
are tax-exempt. They do not reply to abuse or misrepre-
sentation. One who suffers from business cares, or domes-
tic worries, or political disappointment, or general debility
can relieve his feelings with impunity by talking about the
Reds in the universities. I know that many honest and
earnest people are seriously alarmed. I know, too, that
they are misinformed.

As a matter of fact, I have never been able to find a
Red professor. I have met many that were conservative,
and some who would admit they were reactionary. J^have
met some who were not wholly satisfied with present
conditions in this country. I have never met one who
hoped to improve them through the overthrow of the
government by force. The political and economic views
of university faculties are those of a fair cross-section of
the community. The views of those who are studying
social problems are worth listening to, for these men are
studying those problems in as unbiased and impartial a
fashion as any human being can hope to study them.

When I was in college fifteen years ago, students were
the most conservative race of people in the country.
Everybody lamented their indifference and apathy to the
great questions of the day. I used to hear complaints that
they read only the sporting pages of the newspapers and
derived their other knowledge of current affairs from the
movies. When I began to teach, I taught a course called
"Introduction to Social Science." There were many as-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

pects of the social sciences to which I could not introduce
my class because they would not let me. The political
and social dogmas then current these gentlemen had
accepted whole. No suggestions of mine could sway or
even arouse them.

At every age their elders have a way of overestimating
the pliability of the young. As a result many people seem
:o have the notion that the student comes to college a sort
Df plastic mass, to be molded by the teacher in whatever
ikeness he will But at eighteen, or nineteen, or gradu-
ation from high school, it is far too likely that the student
has solidified, and too often in more ways than one. The
most that a teacher can hope to do with such students is
to galvanize or stimulate. If he wanted to, he could not
hope to persuade.

It must be remembered that the.purposg of education,
is not to fill the minds of students with facts; it is not to
reform them, or amuse them, or make them expert tech-
nicians in any field. It is to^ teach them to think, if that js'
possible, and to think "always for themselves. Democratic
government rests on the notion that the citizens will
think for themselves. It is of the highest importance that
there should be some places where they can learn how
to do it.

I have heard a great many times in recent years that
more and more students were getting more and more Red.
In universities that are intelligently conducted, I do not
believe it. In universities which permit students to study
and talk as they please, I see no evidence of increasing
Redness. The way to make students Red is to suppress
them. This policy has never yet failed to have this effect.
The vigorous and intelligent student resents the suggestion
that he is not capable of considering anything more
important than fraternities and football. Most of the
college Reds I have heard about have been produced by
the frightened and hysterical regulations of the colleges.

WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY?

They are not Reds at all; they are in revolt against being
treated like children.

Mr. Thomas W. Lamont, partner in J. P. Morgan and
Company, has advanced another reason for the interest
of students in unconventional doctrines, a reason which is
doubtless operating too. Mr. Lamont says, "I hear com-
plaint that our college professors are teaching too much
of socialistic theory. That would not be my observation."
"These are days/' says Mr. Lamont, "when among the
teaching forces .... the freest sort of academic freedom
should prevail." He goes on: "But to me it is little
wonder that many of our students today are radical,
joining the Socialist party, or are even looking with a
kindly eye upon the allurements of Communism." "The
sort of world they have seen," says Mr. Lament, "is one
of chaos "

If Mr. Lamont is right, instead of attempting to suppress
free discussion, we should set ourselves to remedy the
cause of radicalism, the chaos of the modern world. I
venture to suggest the value of encouraging intelligent,
calm, and dispassionate inquiry into methods of bringing
order out of chaos. That is the American way.

In the state of Illinois the Communist party is on the
ballot. Should students be allowed to graduate from
Illinois colleges in ignorance of what communism is? If
they did, they might vote that ticket by mistake. The
greatest historian of the South has shown that the War
between the States arose largely because the southern
colleges and universities did not dare to say that there
were any arguments against slavery and secession. Those
who would suppress freedom of inquiry, discussion, and
teaching are compelled to say that they know all the
answers. Such a position is egregiously conceited. It is
also a menace to our form of government. As Waltti
Lippmann has said, "The essence of the American system

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

.... is a way of life in which men proceed by unending
inquiry and debate.'*

Nobody who has real familiarity with higher education
will hesitate to assert that professors are not engaged
in subversive teaching. They will also remind the public
that professors are citizens. They are not disfranchised
when they take academic posts. They therefore enjoy all
the rights of free speech, free thought, and free opinion
that other citizens have. No university would permit
them to "indoctrinate" their students with their own views.
No university would permit them to turn the classroom
into a center of propaganda. But off the campus, outside
the classroom, they may hold or express any political or
economic views that it is legal for an American to express
or hold. Any university would be glad to have Mr. Ein-
stein among its professors. Would anybody suggest that
he should be discharged because he is a "radical"?

All parties, groups, and factions in this country should
be interested in preserving the freedom of the universities.
Some of our states now have radical administrations which
have reached out to absorb the universities. The only
hope in those states for the preservation of another point
of view is in adhering to the doctrine that if a professor
is a competent scholar he may hold his post, no matter
how his political views differ from those of the majority.
Not only so; the newspapers, the broadcasters, the
churches, and every citizen should uphold the traditional
rights of the scholar. Wherever freedom of inquiry, dis-
cussion, and teaching have been abolished, freedom of the
press, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech have been
threatened or abolished too.

Look at the universities of Russia and see how they
have sunk to be mere mouthpieces of the ruling party.
Look at the universities of Italy, where only those doc-
trines which the government approves may be expounded.
Look at the universities of Germany, once among the

10-

WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY?

greatest in the world, now a mere shadow, because their
freedom is gone. These are the ways of communism and
Fascism.

In America we have had such confidence in democracy
that we have been willing to support institutions of higher
learning in which the truth might be pursued and, when
found,, might be communicated to our people. We have
not been afraid of the truth, or afraid to hope that it
might emerge from the clash of opinion. The American
people must decide whether they will longer tolerate the
search for truth. If they will, the universities will endijre
and give light and leading to the nation. If they will not,
then, as a great political scientist has put it, we can blow
out the light and fight it out in the dark; for when the
voice of reason is silenced the rattle of machine guns
begins.

ii

PROFESSORS AND TRUSTEES

EALLY the University is the Board of Trustees;
they are responsible for the selection of the staff;
they determine their salaries and tenure, and con-
trol the institution in such detail as they wish. They have
greater powers than the directors of an ordinary corpora-
tion; they are self-perpetuating, and there are no stock-
holders.

The public concern with the University is shown by its
incorporation under the laws of Illinois and the tax-exemp-
tion conferred upon it by the legislature. It may be sug
gested that the public regards the Board as its representa^
tive, with the duty of seeing to it that the University is
conducted in the public interest. This may be urged par-
ticularly in regard to the teaching of very young people; it
may be said that the Board has a special responsibility to
guarantee that the instruction at these levels is the kind the
community would like to have, or at least that it is not the
kind that the community would not like to have. In this
view the Board has an obligation to keep the University in
tune with the life of the community, with its aspirations
and ideals, and must exercise such supervision over educa-
tion and research as to insure this result.

Since the University is a corporation, and one spending
millions of dollars a year, it is easy to think of it as a busi-
ness. If it is a business, there must be employers and em-
ployees, with the usual incidents of that relationship. In
business an employer ordinarily would not tolerate an em-
ployee with whom he seriously disagreed, or whom he
heartily disliked, or who, he thought, was bringing the or-
ganization into disrepute. In this view the Trustees are

* 12-

PROFESSORS AND TRUSTEES

the employers of the Faculty and have the right, if not the
duty, to discharge those who in their judgment discredit or
embarrass the University.

In attempting to analyze functions in a university it
should be noted that a board of trustees is a unique Ameri-
can organization. Since the Middle Ages the European uni-
versities have been controlled directly by the state, with-
out the intervention of a board of any kind, and the British
universities have been controlled by the faculties. The uni-
versities of colonial America were not universities at all;
they were professional schools, designed to train ministers
for the churches which founded them. Some of the trustees
of these institutions were teachers in them; but they were
all clergymen, who were doubtless charged with the duty of
making the education given by the college conform to the
Nwishes and needs of the denomination. Since the colonial
>period the major universities have outgrown their original
^purpose and have become institutions concerned with re-
^search, general education, and all varieties of professional
""training. The sole object of the Harvard of 1636 has be-
^come a minute fraction of its activities today.

When we examine what the aims of the modern univer-
sity are and what the community's legitimate interest in it

* is, we see the various relationships in a university in a dif-

* ferent and, I think, a clearer light. The modern university
Bairns to develop education and to advance knowledge. It

is obvious that the freer it is the more likely it is to achieve

these purposes. All the history of education shows the dan-

^gers of permitting public opinion to determine the content

-.of the course of study. In Europe until the current dic-

J tatorships the state has recognized this fact by granting the

most complete freedom to the universities. All the history

of science shows the fatal consequences of allowing popular

prejudices to inhibit the search for truth. Although no

modern university would decline to abide by the law, as

many medieval ones did, they would contend that they

13'

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

will perform their greatest service to the community if they
are left free to determine for themselves the content of edu-
cation and the direction of research.

I should argue that society has thought it worth while
to set apart men who are to search for knowledge impar-
tially and to communicate it in the same spirit. It has
thought it worth while to provide a haven for the indi-
vidual specially qualified to pursue the truth and to pro-
tect him from the community, from influential citizens,
and even from his colleagues. In this view a university is,
first of all, a group of professors.

If ideally a university is a group of professors, what is a
board of trustees? A board of trustees is a body of public-
spirited citizens who believe in the aims of the professors,
namely, the development of education and the advance-
ment of knowledge. They have undertaken to relieve them
of two responsibilities they cannot carry: the responsibil-
ity of managing their property and the responsibility of
interpreting them to, and defending them from, the public.
They fix the salary scale in order to make sure that the
university's money is not squandered. They find out all
about the faculty in order to interpret them to the public.
But they have renounced for all practical purposes any
right to pass on their qualifications to be professors. The
faculty is not working for the trustees; the trustees are
working for the faculty. The analogy of business or what
an employer may do in business is therefore inapplicable.

The president of a university represents both the trustees
and the faculty. At Chicago this is made explicit by the
practice of having the President nominated by a joint com-
mittee. One of the President's duties to both the Faculty
and the Board is to act as chief interpreter of the Univer-
sity. One of his duties to the Trustees is to see to it that
they have all the information about the University they
will consume. Another is to prevent the Faculty from wast-
ing the University's funds. One of the President's duties to

14-

PROFESSORS AND TRUSTEES

the Faculty is to help the Trustees so to understand the
University that they will not be tempted to use their finan-
cial control to control the educational and scientific work
of the University.

How may the legitimate interest of the public be pro-
tected if the Trustees are not to regulate education? Pro-
fessors are citizens and are affected by the customary in-
fluences brought to bear by the community on members of
it. They are, of course, subject to law. The President is in
a position to communicate to the Faculty the state of public
opinion, which in turn the Trustees are in a position to com-
municate to him. But it must be clear that, if professors
are to be guided by the prejudices of editors, bankers, law-
yers, ministers, industrialists, politicians, or any other
groups, they cannot hope to be professors or constitute a
university in any real sense of those words. We must hold
that the community wants real professors in real univer-
sities and that it has conferred upon them such privileges
as are required to make its wishes effective. 1

It follows that a professor on permanent tenure should
not be removed unless he is incompetent or commits some
illegal act. Whether he is competent is not a question the
Trustees or any other group of laymen would wish to de-
cide. Aside from their lack of acquaintance with many of
the fields studied in the University, the Trustees would not
wish to establish a precedent which in the hands of their
successors might be an instrument of destroying that free-
dom of teaching and inquiry which is indispensable to a
university. Only a group of qualified scholars can deter-
mine whether a professor is competent.

When the issue is the renewal of a temporary appoint-
ment, it would be unfortunate if the teacher's political^
social, economic, or religious views played any decisive
role. In the past few years the Board has adopted a policy
of making all new appointments temporary. This was done

1 The Catholic parochial schools are wholly independent of public control.

.15.

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

as a matter of financial discretion, to protect the Univer-
sity from the possible consequences of the depression. If
the University permits considerations other than compe-
tence to affect the continuation of temporary appointees,
the dangers of this policy are obvious. A professor on tem-
porary tenure may fail of reappointment because he does
not meet the requirements of the President of the Univer-
sity, the dean of his division or school, or the chairman of
his department. These officers should, however, limit their
investigation to the professor's scholarly and teaching abil-
ities and his personality as it affects their exercise, to his
desirability in comparison with others qualified for the
post, and to the funds available for carrying on the work in
his field.

This amounts to saying that a professor on permanent or
temporary tenure should not be removed or fail of reap-
pointment because of outside activities, assuming they are
not illegal and do not consume so much of his time as to
render him incompetent to do his university work. Out-
side activities are as much protected by academic freedom
as the actual business of teaching and research. If this
were not so, members of the Faculty could be removed be-
cause a Board of Protestants did not like Catholics, or a
a Board of Baptists did not like Christian Scientists, or one
of Democrats did not care for Republicans.

I do not deny that professors under these circumstances
may embarrass the University. Even if they say, as they
should, that they do not represent the University, the
headlines they get usually originate in the fact that they
are professors at the University of Chicago; and their title
is never missing from newspaper accounts of their doings.
This occasional embarrassment is part of the price that
must be paid if the University is to be a great university, or
indeed a university at all.

When a professor is accused of being indiscreet, un-
wise, or foolish in his off-campus activities, we may

16*

PROFESSORS AND TRUSTEES

first ask ourselves how we know that he is. In the recent
investigation most of the witnesses against the University
seemed to confuse nationalism and patriotism. They felt
that anybody who could advocate free trade or even world-
peace must be unpatriotic. To hold that a professor em-
barrassed the University if he took an internationalist,
as against a nationalist, position would debar from our
Faculty every orthodox economist in the country.

But assuming a case where the President, the Trustees,
and the Faculty all agreed that a professor had embarrassed
the University, what then ? If he were a competent teacher
and scholar on permanent tenure, he should not be re-
moved. If he were a competent teacher and scholar, on
temporary appointment, if the funds were available for his
work, if there were no man as good to take his position, he
should not fail of reappointment.

Although a professor in the case assumed should not be
removed, it does not follow that he would not feel the con-
sequences of his actions. He would be admonished by the
chairman of his department. He would be subjected to the
criticism of his colleagues. His professional standing and
professional future would be seriously affected. These pres-
sures a group of professors know very well how to apply,
and they apply them constantly.

These are the consequences of regarding a university as
a group of professors rather than a legal person, a public
utility, or a business corporation. I have no hesitation in
saying that the more a university approaches this defini-
tion the greater it will be. In a state university the exigen-
cies of politics make the attainment of this ideal difficult,
if not impossible. The University of Chicago suffers under
no such handicaps. It is admirably situated to continue
the demonstration that began with its foundation the
demonstration of what a university should be.

I cannot conclude this part of my report without record-
ing my gratitude to the Board for its courageous support of

-17-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

the Faculty and the Administration during the unpleasant
period of the investigation. The Trustees have helped the
University grow to greatness by their intelligent and far-
sighted view of the nature and purposes of the institution.
Their conduct reveals again their devotion to the welfare
of the University.

WHAT IT MEANS TO GO TO
COLLEGE

I HAVE been asked to speak to students and their
parents about what it means to go to college. Let us
start with the Freshman. In the first few days of the
year the college may seem to him like a big buzzing con-
fusion. To the Freshman's parents, who have ^watched
him go with mingled feelings of anxiety and relief, it may
seem like a quiet haven where their boy can for four years
be protected from low company and new ideas. To both
Freshman and parents it may seem, too, a place where he
can make good friends and find out how to earn a living.
There is some reality in all these appearances. A college
is a complete democracy and has at first that look of
disorder which is characteristic of democracy and which
is so distressing to the Fascist mind. Parents may feel
sure, too, that the moral, physical, and social well-being
of their Freshman child will be safe-guarded to the best
of the institution's ability. There is not a college in the
country without a health service to look after the students.
There is not a college without a large staff of advisers,
assisting all the students not only with their educational
problems but also with every kind of personal question.
In every college friendship has, from time immemorial,
been one of the fine by-products of college life, though we
cannot be sure that college men and women would not
have made the same kind of friends if they had not gone
to college. / It is fair to say that whether the college
graduate has taken vocational courses or not he will
usually earn a larger income than the man who is without

19-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

higher education, though nobody knows why or to what
extent this is so.

But it has long been clear to educators that the cus-
todial, social, and vocational aspects of the colleges could
not justify the vast public support which has come to
them from governments and individuals in this country;
nor could these functions, important as they are, justify
the sacrifices of parents or of the hosts of teachers who,
with little reward and no applause, have made our educa-
tional system. Neither the public nor the teaching pro-
fession would long be interested in higher education if its
object were to keep young people out of trouble while
they were being taught how to make money.

The object of higher education is the training of the
mind. Since the student will not live in a vacuum when
he has graduated, his mind must be so trained that he
will act intelligently after he receives his degree. Or, to
put it another way, the object of the college is the pro-
duction of intelligent citizens. This is the object to which
the educational profession has dedicated itself. This is the
object which has led legislatures and donors to establish
and maintain the colleges. This is the object, too, which
parents and their children have come increasingly to
recognize as the purpose of the college, for one result of
the depression has been a new seriousness and a new
industry in students. Students know that the income of
their parents has been drastically reduced and that
sending a boy or girl to college means much self-denial at
home. Students know, too, that on graduation they will
face a world where the competition is keener and the
easy opportunities are fewer than at any time in the last
forty years. The report from every part of the country is
that American students are buckling down to the business
of education as never before.

How does a college set about its task of training the
mind for intelligent action? The college leads the student

20*

WHAT IT MEANS TO GO TO COLLEGE

into the world of ideas, and does it under the best possible
auspices.

When the student graduates from Jiigh school, he has
not yet caught a glimpse of vast reaches of science, his-
tory, philosophy, literature, and the arts. Most colleges
now attempt to give him, during the first two years, an
understanding of the leading ideas in these fields of learn-
ing. This is not done by a Cook's tour of all human knowl-
edge; the effort is to get the student to master those funda-
mental principles upon which understanding must rest.
The college attempts to avoid superficiality on the one
hand and premature specialization on the other.

The course of study is framed by experts, people who
have devoted their lives to the difficult problems of gen-
eral cultural education. These men and women have been
selected because of their interest in undergraduates and
their ability to supply the kind of education that under-
graduates need. The old days when the Freshman classes
were handed over to the youngest instructors to give these
immature teachers experience are gone forever. Today
the colleges appreciate the basic character of the first two
years and realize that students during these years cannot
be put at the mercy of amateurs or novices. The staff is,
then, experienced, able, and interested in introducing the
student into the world of ideas.

The course of study is defined by this group. The most
democratic thing about that democracy which is a college
is the faculty. Older alumni of the University of Chicago
may recall that in their time the faculty was so democratic
as to resemble a collection of soloists. A given teacher
worked up his courses by himself, taught them by himself,
and examined and graded his students by himself. In
the College of the University of Chicago this has now
been changed. Each course that is part of the curriculum
is worked over by the whole group. Courses are seldom
constructed by a single teacher. The course in biology

21 *

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

for Freshmen and Sophomores, which occupies one year,
was framed by twelve professors. A detailed outline of
each of our courses is placed in the student's hands. He
may obtain, in addition, sample examinations, indicating
what he has to expect at the end of the year.

The examinations, in turn, are not framed by one man,
nor are they given by the teacher who has taught the
course. They are prepared by an independent board.
The effect on the student is that he studies the subject
and not the teacher. The effect on the teacher is that he
teaches the subject and not his private hobbies. If he
spent the time of the class in airing his own prejudices,
his students could not pass the examinations. Whatever
tendency teachers may have displayed in the past to
wander far afield is now disappearing anyway, for the
national organization of professors, known as the Ameri-
can Association of University Professors, has condemned
any attempt by the teacher to indulge in day-dreaming,
propaganda, or other irrelevant behavior in the classroom.

The student, then, enters the world of ideas under the
auspices of stimulating personalities who have worked
together to produce the fairest and most effective pres-
entation of those principles which the intelligent citizen
should understand. In the course of four years the student
will have between forty and fifty teachers. They will, of
course, represent different points of view. They will make
a deliberate effort to see to it that the student hears
about things he never heard of, and that he knows there
are other opinions than his own. There would not be
much point in sending young people to college if they
were not to learn something they did not know before.
Parents who are not willing to have their children enter
the world of ideas should keep them at home. Even there
they will not be safe. From the newspapers, from books,
from the radio, from the movies, some new idea may reach
them, and reach them in garbled or fragmentary form.

WHAT IT MEANS TO GO TO COLLEGE

It has never been possible to insulate young people
from the world; and with modern methods of transporta-
tion and communication it is less so now than ever. If
they must meet new ideas sometime, it would seem the
part of wisdom to have them meet those new ideas where
they are fairly presented by intelligent people who have
no ax to grind. If their conversation is disquieting when
they come home for their first vacation, remember that
their education is not complete, that they have learned
only a small fraction of many subjects, the rest of which
they will learn as they go on; that they are going through
a process that they must experience sooner or later; and
that the auspices under which they are going through it
are the best that can be found.

Indeed, the discouraging thing about education is not
that it makes so much change in the individual but that
it makes so little. A university president once said that
he knew his institution was a reservoir of learning because
every student brought some knowledge with him and
none of them ever seemed to take any away. Three things
are necessary if the college is to do its job with any given
student. iThey are a certain minimum intellectual equip-
ment, habits of work, and at least a latent interest in
getting an education. The college cannot give these things
to the student; he must have them when he comes. If he
does not possess them, he may have a good time and be
kept out of trouble. If he does possess them, then the
gifts of higher learning will be showered upon him, the
world of ideas will open to him, and the college will pro-
duce one more intelligent citizen. The student who has
learned how to think will be able to solve his problems
and to share in the solution of those of his generation.
His parents may feel at last rewarded for the sacrifices
they have made. And we may have some confidence that
in such young people lies the hope of our country.

23-

THE HIGHER LEARNING. I

^HE most characteristic feature of the modern
world is bewilderment. It has become the fashion
to be bewildered. Anybody who says he knows
anything or understands anything is at once suspected of
affectation or falsehood. Consistency has become a vice
and opportunism a virtue. We do not know where we are
going, or why; and we have almost given up the attempt
to find out.

This is an extraordinary situation. Certainly we have
more facts about the world, about ourselves, and the
relations among ourselves than were available to any of
our ancestors. We console ourselves with the delusion
that the world is much more complicated than the one
our ancestors inhabited. It does not seem possible that
its complexity has increased at anywhere near the same
rate as our knowledge of facts about it. If, as Descartes
led us to believe, the soul's good is the domination of the
physical universe, our souls have achieved a very high
degree of good indeed. If, as we have been convinced
since the Renaissance, the advance of the race is in direct
proportion to the volume of information it possesses, we
should by now have reached every imaginable human
goal. We have more information, more means of getting
more information, and more means of distributing in-
formation than at any time in history. Every citizen
is equipped with information, useful and useless, suffi-
cient to deck out a Cartesian paradise. And yet we are
bewildered.

For three hundred years we have cherished a faith in

24-

THE HIGHER LEARNING

the beneficent influences of facts. As Hilaire Belloc's dog-
gerel puts it:

The path of life, men said, is hard and rough
Only because we do not know enough.
When science has discovered something more,
We shall be happier than we were before.

Our faith in facts grew with every succeeding century,
until it became the dominant force in our society. It
excluded every other interest and determined every proce-
dure. Let us get the facts, we said, serene in the confidence
that, if we did, all our problems would be solved. We got
them. Our problems are insoluble still.

Since we have confused science with information, ideas
with facts, and knowledge with miscellaneous data, and
since information, facts, and data have not lived up to
our high hopes of them, we are witnessing today a revul-
sion against science, ideas, and knowledge. The anti-
intellectualism of the nineteenth century was bad enough.
A new and worse brand is now arising. We are in despair
because the keys which were to open the gates of heaven
have let us into a larger but more oppressive prison-house,.
We thought those keys were science and the free intelli-
gence of man. They have failed us. To what can we now
appeal? One answer comes in the undiluted animalism of
the last works of D. EL Lawrence, in the emotionalism of
demagogues, in Hitler's scream: "We think with our
blood." Man, satisfied that he has weighed reason and
found it wanting, turns now to passion. He attempts to
cease to be a rational animal, and endeavors to become
merely animal. In this attempt he is destined to be
unsuccessful. It is his reason which tells him he is be-
wildered.

My thesis is that in modern times we have seldom tried
reason at all, but something we mistook for it; that our
bewilderment results in large part from this mistake; and
that our salvation lies not in the rejection of the intellect

-25-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

but in a return to it. Let me say at once that in urging a
return to the intellect I do not urge a return to that
vicious intellectualism whose leading exponent is Descartes.
He turned his back to the world and its past, and there
by his German stove in a heavy woolen bathrobe thought
himself into a mathematical universe which was to be
understood by measurement alone. His thinking pro-
duced a reaction in succeeding generations which led at
the last to a denial of the intellectual powers of mankind.

Let me say, too, that in advocating a return to reason
I do not advocate abandonment of our interest in facts.
I proclaim the value of observation and experiment. I
would proclaim, also, the value of rational thought and
would suggest that without it facts may prove worthless,
trivial, and irrelevant. In the words of a great contempo-
rary, "The flame remains feeble on which piles of green
wood are flung." During the nineteenth century and
since, we have been flinging piles of green wood on the
fire and have almost succeeded in putting it out. Now we
can hardly see through the smoke.

Our program has amounted to a denial of the nature of
man. Tested a priori, such denial results in self-contra-
diction; tested by its consequences, it has been found
unsuccessful It has led us to devote ourselves to measur-
ing and counting the phenomena which passed before our
eyes. It has diverted us from the task of understanding
them. Modern empirical science, which in origin was the
application of mathematics to experience by means of
measurement and experiment, has come in recent expo-
sition to be considered exclusively an affair of experiment
and measurement. Contemporary physical and biological
research inherited the analytical procedures which, com-
bined with observation, constitute a science; and to a
great extent the heritage has been fruitful But contem-
porary physical and biological scientists have also inherited
the nineteenth century's anti-intellectual account of

26-

THE HIGHER LEARNING

empirical science, which placed primary emphasis upon
the accumulation of observed facts. The practice of con-
temporary scientists is thus paradoxically better than
what they preach about the nature and ideals of science.
In this paradox we have a source of our bewilderment.
And, unfortunately, other disciplines, the social studies
and the humanities, have been more influenced by the
precepts of the natural scientists than by their practices.
They, too, even in the fine arts, have decided they must
be scientific and have thought they could achieve this aim
merely by accumulating facts. So we have lots of "gadg-
ets" in the natural sciences and lots of information in
the other fields of knowledge. The gadgeteers and the
data-collectors, masquerading as scientists, have threat-
ened to become the supreme chieftains of the scholarly
world.

Now, a university should be a center of rational thought.
Certainly it is more than a storehouse of rapidly aging
facts. It should be the stronghold of those who insist on
the exercise of reason, who will not be moved by passion
or buried by blizzards of data. The gaze of a university
should be turned toward ideas. By the light of ideas it
may promote understanding of the nature of the world
and of man. Its object is always understanding. In the
faith that the intellect of men may yet preserve him, it
seeks to emphasize, develop, and protect his intellectual
powers. Facts and data it will obtain to assist in formu-
lating and to illustrate the principles it establishes, as
Galileo used experiments to assist and exemplify his
analysis, not as a substitute for it.' Rational thought is the
only basis of education and research. Whether we know
it or not, it has been responsible for our scientific successes;
its absence has been responsible for our bewilderment. A
university is the place of all places to grapple with those
fundamental principles which rational thought seeks to
establish.

27-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

A university so organized and so conducted might stand
unmoved by public clamor; it might be an island in a sea
of turmoil; it might be a rallying-point of all honest and
upright men. It might show us the social order we should
desire, and help us keep it when it was achieved. A
university may make these contributions not by having
its professors politicians on the one hand or hermits on
the other. Both extremes are equally disastrous. The
university must find better and better means of communi-
cating the ideas which it is its duty to foster and develop.
A university without these means of communication will
die, or at least will not be fruitful. Its ideas are not intel-
lectual playthings, but forces which will drive the world.
A university must be intelligible as well as intelligent.

If we look at the modern American university, we have
some difficulty in seeing that it is uniformly either one.
It sometimes seems to approximate a kindergarten at one
end and a clutter of specialists at the other. The specialists
are frequently bent on collecting more and more informa-
tion rather than grappling with fundamentals. So much
is already known, so much is being discovered, so many
new fields are opening up, that this approach requires
more courses, more hours, more laboratories, and more
departments. And the process has carried with it sur-
prising losses in general intelligibility. Since the subject
matter is intelligible only in terms of the volume of known
facts which must be familiar to the scholar, universities
have broken down into smaller and smaller compartments.
And yet Whitehead may have been right when he said,
not long ago, that "the increasing departmentalization of
universities has trivialized the intellect of professors."

Nor do we seem always to grapple with fundamentals
when we come to education as distinguished from research.
The system has been to pour facts into the student with
splendid disregard of the certainty that he will forget
them, that they may not be facts by the time he graduates,

28-

THE HIGHER LEARNING

and that he won't know what to do with them if they are.
It is a system based on the false notion that education is
a substitute for experience, and that therefore little
imitation experiences should be handed out day by day
until the student is able to stand the shock of a real
experience when he meets one. Yet we know that it
is impossible to imitate experience in the classroom and
that the kind of experience we might reconstruct there
would not be the kind the student will meet when he
leaves us.

To tell a law student that the law is what the courts
will do, and have him reach his conclusions on this point
by counting up what they have done, is to forego rational
analysis, to deny the necessity of principles, and to prevent
the exercise of the intellect. To remit a business student
to cases representing what business used to do, not only
provides little intellectual experience but also little prac-
tical experience, for the cases of the past might be a
positive disservice in solving the problems of the present.
To turn the divinity student away from the great intellectu-
al tradition of the church and teach him how to organize
a party in the parish house is neither to prepare him for
the ministry nor to contribute to its improvement. To
instruct a medical student in the mechanics of his trade
and to fill him full of the recollection of particular instances
may result in a competent craftsman, but hardly in a
product of which a university may be proud. If pro-
fessional schools are to rise above the level of vocational
training, they must restore ideas to their place in the
educational scheme.

The three worst words in education are "character,"
"personality," and "facts." Facts are the core of an anti-
intellectual curriculum. Personality is the qualification we
look for in an anti-intellectual teacher. Character is what
we expect to produce in the student by the combination
of a teacher of personality and a curriculum of facts. How

29*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

this result can emerge from the mixture of these elements
is a mystery to me. Apparently we insist on personality
in the teacher because we cannot insist on intellect; we
are anti-intellectual. Wfc talk of character as the end of
education because an anti-intellectual world will not
accept intelligence as its proper aim. Certainly since the
Meno of Plato, we have had little reason to suppose that
we could teach character directly. Courses in elementary,
intermediate, and advanced character will fail of their
object. The moral virtues are formed by lifelong habit;
a university education contributes to them, but it is not
its primary purpose to supply them. A university edu-
cation must chiefly be directed to inculcating the intellec-
tual virtues, and these are the product of rigorous intellec-
tual effort. Such effort is the indispensable constituent of
a university course of study.

We see, then, that an anti-intellectual university in-
volves a contradiction in terms. Unless we are to deny
forever the essential nature of man, unless we are to
remain content with our bewilderment, we must strive
somehow to make the university once again the home of
the intellect. I repeat: a university is the place of all places
to grapple with those fundamental principles which may
"Be established by rational thought. A university course
of study, therefore, will be concerned first of all not with
current events, for they do not remain current, but with
the recognition, application, and discussion of ideas.
These ideas may chiefly be discovered in the books of
those who clarified and developed them. These books are,
I suggest, at once more interesting and more important
than the textbooks which, consumed at the rate of ten
pages a day, now constitute our almost exclusive diet
from the grades to the Ph.D. To aid in his understanding
of ideas the student should be trained in those intellectual
techniques which have been developed for the purpose of

.30-

THE HIGHER LEARNING

stating and comprehending fundamental principles. Armed
with these, he may at length be able to effect transforma-
tions and combinations in any subject matter.

Such a course of study would involve in the fine arts,
for example, more aesthetics and far less biographical and
factual material. In the physical sciences and in experi-
mental biology it would require more attention to the
nature of measurement and its relation to the formulation
of a science, and far fewer of the countless isolated measure-
ments and exercises now performed in the laboratory.
Here I am referring, of course, to the laboratory as an
educational institution, not to the laboratory method as a
method of research. In so far as biology deals with evolu-
tion, a university course of study would diminish the
emphasis now given to innumerable details about innumer-
able organisms and place it on the comprehension of the
general scheme of evolution as a theory of history. And
in all that study which appears in every department and
which is called "history," a university would endeavor to
transmit to the student, not a confused list of places,
dates, and names, but some understanding of the nature
and schemes of history, through which alone its multi-
tudinous facts become intelligible. By some such course
of study the university might pass on the tremendous
intellectual heritage of the race.

The scholars in a university which is trying to grapple
with fundamentals will, I suggest, devote themselves first
of all to the rational analysis of the principles of each
subject matter. They will seek to establish general propo-
sitions under which the facts they gather may be sub-
sumed. I repeat: they would not cease to gather facts,
*but would know what facts to look for, what they wanted
them for, and what to do with them after they got them.
They would not confine themselves to rational analysis
and ignore the latest bulletin of the Department of Com-
merce. But they would understand that without analysis

.31.

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

current data remain a meaningless tangle of minute facts.
They would realize that without some means of ordering
and comprehending their material they would sink deeper
and deeper beneath the weight of the information they
possessed, as the legal scholar has long since sunk beneath
the countless decisions and statutes rained down upon
him every year.

Since the multiplicity and overlapping of specialties are
caused by the superficiality of our analysis, and since
grappling with fundamentals should show us what our
subject matters are, the ordering of our concrete material
by rational means should show us, too, the absurdity of
many intellectual barriers that now divide us. We might
see again the connections of ideas, and thus of subject
matters. We might recapture the grand scheme of the
intellect and the unity of thought. Once the three "depart-
ments" of the European university, and the only ones,
were medicine, theology, and law. These three fields were
so studied as to deal with the same propositions and facts,
but with different ultimate references. Each one thus pene-
trated the whole of contemporary thought and was pene-
trated by the other two. The scholar and student laboring
in one of these fields never lost consciousness of the rest.
Thus, wherever he was working he remained aware of the
individual, living in society, and under God. To this for-
mal organization of a university we cannot and should not
return. But it may suggest to us some consequences of be-
lieving that the result of general education should be clear
and distinct ideas; the end of university training, some no-
tion of humanity and its destiny; and the aim of scholar-
ship, the revelation of the possibilities of the highest powers
of mankind.

.32-

THE HIGHER LEARNING. II

I HAVE affirmed on another occasion that the object
of a university is to emphasize, develop, and protect
the intellectual powers of mankind. Scholarship and
teaching must be tested by their contribution to this
intellectual end. I have attempted to show that facts are
not science and that the collection of facts will not make a
science; that scientific research, therefore, cannot consist
of the accumulation of data alone; that the anti-intellectual
account of science given by scientists has produced unfor-
tunate effects on the work of other disciplines which
wished to be scientific; and that our anti-intellectual
scheme of education, resulting in large part from this
anti-intellectual account, was misconceived and incapable
of accomplishing the objects set for it by its sponsors. At
the same time I have proclaimed the value of observation
and experiment. Nor have I suggested that ideas are
revealed. All ideas come from experience. Propositions,
however, do not. Propositions are relations between ideas,
and science consists of propositions. As Whitehead has
said in speaking of the world which is the goal of scientific
thought, "My contention is that this world is a world of
ideas, and that its internal relations are relations between

abstract concepts " I have insisted upon the logical

priority of rational analysis, not its psychological priority.
The psychology of scientists and the time order in which
they do things their behavior, in short is something I
have never ventured to discuss. I have been talking about
how a science, which must be distinguished from the
isolated activities of individual scientists, is constructed.
I repeat: I am concerned with the logic of science, not with

33-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

the psychology of scientists. Without proposing that we
discontinue anything we are doing, I have proposed a
shift in emphasis and attitude. Our emphasis and our
attitude should be intellectual. If they are, we may then
discover whether all the things we are doing are equally
significant.

These ideas were not original with me. If they were,
they might be discredited merely by pointing out that
fact. I offer you instead Bertrand Russell: "Many
people/' he says, "have a passionate hatred of abstraction,
chiefly, I think, because of its intellectual difficulty, but
as they do not wish to give this reason they invent all

sorts of others that sound grand Those who argue

in this way are, in fact, concerned with matters quite

other than those that concern science " "The power

of using abstractions," says Russell, "is the essence of the
intellect, and with every increase in abstraction the
intellectual triumphs of science are enhanced."

Perhaps you prefer Jevons: "Hundreds of investi-
gators," he says, "may be constantly engaged in experi-
mental inquiry; they may compile numberless books full
of scientific facts, and endless tables of numerical results;
but . . - . they can never by such work alone rise to new

and great discoveries Francis Bacon spread abroad

the notion that to advance science we must begin by
accumulating facts, and then draw from them, by a
process of digestion, successive laws of higher and higher

generality His notion of scientific method was a

kind of scientific bookkeeping. Facts were to be indis-
criminately gathered from every source, and posted in a
ledger, from which would emerge in time a balance of

truth It is difficult to imagine a less likely way of

arriving at great discoveries. The greater the array of
facts the less is the probability that they will by any
routine system of classification disclose the laws of nature
they embody " "Newton's comprehension of logical

34-

THE HIGHER LEARNING

method/' says Jevons, "was perfect; no hypothesis was
entertained unless it was definite in conditions and
admitted of unquestionable deductive reasoning, and the
value of each hypothesis was entirely decided by the

comparison of its consequences with facts " "Francis

Bacon/' Jevons says, "held that science should be founded
on experience, but he mistook the true method of using
experience, and in attempting to apply his method,
ludicrously failed. Newton did not less found his method
on experience, but he seized the true method of treating it,
and applied it with a power and success never since
equalled. It is a great mistake to say that modern science
is the result of the Baconian philosophy; it is the New-
tonian philosophy and the Newtonian method which have
led to all the great triumphs of physical science "

Perhaps you prefer Poincare: "Can we not be content,"
he asks, "with just the bare experiment? No, that is
impossible; it would be to mistake utterly the true nature

of science Science is built up with facts, as a house

is built up with stones. But a collection of facts is no
more a science than a heap of stones is a house."

Or listen to Claude Bernard: "The experimental method
cannot give new and fruitful ideas to men who have none;
it can serve only to guide the ideas of men who have them,
to direct their ideas and to develop them so as to get the

best possible results As only what has been sown

in the ground will ever grow in it, so nothing will be
developed by the experimental method except the ideas
submitted to it. The method itself gives birth to nothing."

You may say that all this is perfectly obvious; that
everybody knows it; that you don't know anybody that
is merely gathering facts for the sake of gathering them;
that I am simply setting up a straw man in order to knock
him down again. I agree that research in the natural
sciences proceeds, for the most part, in accordance with
the principles which I am advocating. Physics, for

35'

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

example, is an excellent empirical science. The reason for
this is not necessarily that all physicists have a clear
understanding of what they are doing. It is rather because
of the intellectual heritage of the science. This has
resulted in turn from the intellectual endowments of such
men as Galileo and Newton. It is not necessary for phys-
icists to understand the nature of science, because the
techniques of experimental and theoretical work in physics
are so explicit and so well established that they cannot
escape them. In the law, the humanities, and the social
sciences, however, scholars have received no such inher-
itance. If they are to be scientific, they must understand
what science is. From Francis Bacon on, many people
have advised them that it consists merely in accumulating
data. Some of them have taken this advice seriously and
have concluded that their scientific attainments would be
measured by the number of items of fact which they had
written on cards. I know some of them have done it; I
have done it myself.

You may deny that natural scientists even think or
talk as though science were the accumulation of data.
For answer I refer you to what they teach. We have in
every university in America the interesting spectacle of
pure scientists teaching in ways which cannot be recon-
ciled with the way they work. They offend as much as,
or more than, the rest of us in filling their students full of
facts, in putting them through countless little measure-
ments, in multiplying their courses, in insisting they must
have more of the student's time so that they can give him
more information, and in dividing up their subjects into
smaller and smaller bits. Contrast the amount of informa-
tion which the student in science has when he enters the
medical school here and in Europe. Here I am sure the
student knows many more facts than some of the older
professors. In Europe his information will probably not
be a third of that of his American contemporary; but he

.36-

THE HIGHER LEARNING

will have something else: he will have ideas, and he will
have that understanding of the relation of ideas which
John Locke thought was all that knowledge could be.

As for the rest of us, we have taught our students in
harmony with the worst American tradition. We have
assumed that they could learn nothing except in the
classroom or from textbooks* The reading periods at
Harvard and Yale are ridiculous because they show how
little time those universities feel should be devoted to
thought. Courses get longer and longer. There are more
and more of them. The number of hours in the classroom
is the measure of the labors of both teacher and student.
And the hours in the classroom are devoted to the expo-
sition of detail.

And yet the words of Whitehead are apposite: ". . . .
the university course/' he says, "is the great period of
generalization. The spirit of generalization should domi-
nate a university. At the university [the student] should
start from general ideas and study their application to
concrete cases. A well-planned university course is a wide
sweep of generality. I do not mean to say that it should be
abstract in the sense of divorce from concrete fact, but
that concrete fact should be studied as illustrating the

scope of general ideas Whatever be the detail with

which you cram your student, the chance of his meeting
in after-life exactly that detail is almost infinitesimal; and
if he does meet it, he will probably have forgotten what
you taught him about it The function of a univer-
sity is to enable you to shed details in favor of principles."

An anti-intellectual attitude toward education reduces
the curriculum to the exposition of detail. There are no
principles. The world is a flux of events. We cannot hope
to understand it. All we can do is watch it. This is the
conclusion of the leading anti-intellectuals of our time.
Since the fact that certain things went by us once is no
guaranty that they will go by again, there is really not

37-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

much use in watching them, except that we may be able
to discover certain patterns of behavior which will enable
us to tell sometimes what is going to happen next. In this
view our object, in so far as we have one, is prediction
and control, the exploitation of the universe.

I may point out that this anti-intellectualism will mean
the end of pure science and of education. The driving
power behind science has not been merely the desire to
master nature; it has been the desire to understand it.
If we cannot understand it, we may as well abandon pure
science and betake ourselves to engineering. If we cannot
understand it, we can give our students nothing but
evanescent facts selected on the basis of the kind of
experiences we think they will have when they graduate.
The multitude of facts, as well as their evanescence, and
the tremendous number of possible experiences mean that
education in this view is a hopeless task. If we want to
give our students experiences, we should go out of busi-
ness. The place to get experiences is in life.

Nor can education in this view include any contact
with the intellectual inheritance of the race. So to anti-
intellectuals, rational values are worthless; they are based
on the past. They cannot be valid for the future, because
man and his world are changing. A curriculum of current
events, without reference to the intellectual and artistic
tradition that has come down to us from antiquity, is the
only possible course of study which anti-intellectualism
affords.

Anti-intellectualism dooms pure science; it dooms any
kind of education that is more than training in technical
skill. It must be a foreboding of this doom which accounts
for the sense of inferiority which we find widespread
among academic people. Those who have it feel that
business and politics are the really important things in
the world, far more important than education and
research. Certainly they are right if research is merely

.38-

THE HIGHER LEARNING

the collection of facts, and education is committing them
to memory. Neither process is significant and neither
will long be supported by a hard-pressed people. But if
research is understanding and education is understanding
and what the world needs is understanding, then education
and research are what the world needs. They become at
once the most significant of all possible undertakings.
They offer the only hope of salvation, the hope held out
to us by the intellect of man.

It was such considerations as these that induced John
Dewey in 1930 to clarify his views a clarification, unfor-
tunately, which has escaped the notice of some of his
followers. Mr. C. I. Lewis had written that "Professor
Dewey seems to view such abstractionism in science as a
defect something unnecessary, but always regrettable/*
Mr. Dewey replied: "I fear that on occasion I may so
have written as to give this impression. I am glad therefore
to have the opportunity of saying that this is not my
actual position. Abstraction is the heart of thought; there
is no other way .... to control and enrich concrete
experience except through an intermediate flight of

thought with conceptions, relata, abstractions I

wish to agree also with Mr. Lewis that the need of the
social sciences at present is precisely such abstractions as
will get their unwieldy elephants into box-cars that will
move on rails arrived at by other abstractions. What is
to be regretted is, to my mind, the tendency of many
inquirers in the field of human affairs to be over-awed by
the abstractions of the physical sciences and hence to fail
to develop the conceptions or abstractions appropriate to
their own subject-matter." This statement of Dewey is a
recognition that ideas are the essential elements in the
development of a science, and is a repudiation of the anti-
intellectual position.

The anti-intellectual position must be repudiated if a
university is to achieve its ends. Its buildings may be

39'

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

splendid, its endowment adequate, and its faculty notable;
it may have achieved unity, liberty, and clarity in its
Drganization. Its mechanics may be perfect. It is nothing
without an abiding faith in the intellect of man. Without
such faith its efforts are blind and groping, and will at
Length expire. The university is the home of the intellect;
tt is its natural and perhaps its only home. Teaching and
scholarship will be fruitful in such measure as the univer-
sity realizes its intellectual aims. Such realization will be
fruitful not merely in the higher learning. It may create
an atmosphere congenial to philosophy and the arts, to
moral and social theory, to the imaginative reaches of
science, and to the noblest aspirations of mankind. And
it may at last bring order, enlightenment, and under-
standing to a bewildered world.

40-

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN
EX-LAW STUDENT

WHEN I began to study law In 1920, we were
chiefly concerned with two things: one, our
definition of law; and two, our desire to be
scientific. We knew what we wanted in both cases. The
law was what the courts and other governmental officers
would do. If we were scientific, we could predict what
they would do. The task of lawyers, law teachers, and
law students was therefore clear. It was to learn how to
predict what the courts and other governmental agencies
would do.

To acquire facility in this mode of prophecy we turned,
as Langdell had turned, to what the courts had done.
Since what they had done last was what they were most
likely to do next, we kept up with the recent cases, and
even studied accounts of them in newspapers and mimeo-
graphed sheets. Since what the courts had said shed some
light on what they would do, we devoted a good deal of
attention to analyzing and reconciling the language of
learned judges. What they had said and done, carefully
noted item by item, made up the vast collection of items
which at the end constituted our legal information.

You will observe that we were thoroughly Baconian as
to science and thoroughly behavioristic as to psychology.
It was scientific to collect and examine a multitude of
particular items, which gradually arranged themselves
into rules the courts had followed. We knew that the
court would follow these rules in the future as they had
in the past, because courts were people, and people be-

41-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

haved as they were in the habit of behaving. Our scheme
was very simple and quite complete.

Yet even in those remote days we had some qualms
about it. Since we were a university law school, we could
not limit ourselves to what the courts had done. Our
function was to improve the law, not merely to learn it.
We had to decide, therefore, whether the courts had done
right. We could not content ourselves with the weight of
authority; that was too much like counting noses. We
could not test the cases by their conformity to principle.
There were no such things as principles in our definition or
our science. How were we to tell whether the cases were
"sound" ? Fortunately, at this juncture pragmatism came
to our aid. It told us that we could test the rules of law
by discovering whether or not they worked.

This helped us a great deal. For a long time we sat
and speculated about how the rules worked. In public
utility law, for example, we decided that Mr. Justice
Brandeis was right about the rate base and Mr. Justice
Butler was wrong, because Mr. Justice Brandeis' rule
would work better than Mr. Justice Butler's. Whether
this was really because we were in favor of lower rates and
thought the Brandeis rule would lower them, though today
it would raise them, or whether it was because we liked
liberals and therefore preferred Mr. Justice Brandeis to
Mr. Justice Butler, I do not care to say. In attempting to
decide which rule worked better, we had to assume a
social order and the aims thereof, and then try to determine
which rule did more to achieve the aims we favored. What
made this difficult was that we didn't know much about
the social order; we didn't have any special competence in
the matter of social aims; and we didn't have the slightest
idea how to go about finding out whether a given rule
helped to accomplish them or not.

Suddenly we discovered that there were people who
knew all these things, people who could tell us how the

42-

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-LAW STUDENT

law worked and why. They were the social scientists.
We had every reason to resort to them. The courts were
social agencies; their conclusions must be conditioned by
society. The social scientists could help us to predict what
the courts would do. The psychologists would help us
understand the behavior of judges. The psychiatrists
could help us there, too, and could also assist us in com-
prehending criminals. Hand in hand with these other
scientists we could become scientific.

Therefore we added to law-school faculties men who
had no legal training but who were experts in these other
sciences. Where such additions were impossible because
of penury or prejudice, we took co-operation for our
watchword and began to work with scholars in other
departments of our universities. The social contacts we
developed were very pleasant. Imagine our confusion,
however, when we discovered that from their disciplines
as such the social scientists added little or nothing. They
taught us to reverence our own subject; it was more
interesting to them than their own. With the enthusiasm
of converts they showed us the masses of social, political,
economic, and psychological data which lay hidden in the
cases. They then proceeded to teach the cases better than
we could teach them 3 not because they had been nurtured
in the social sciences, but because they were good teachers.

The fact was that though the social scientists seemed to
have a great deal of information, we could not see, and
they could not tell us, how to use it. It did not seem to
show us what the courts would do or whether what they
had done was right. For example, the law of evidence is
obviously full of assumptions about how people behave.
We understood that the psychologists knew how people
behave. We hoped to discover whether an evidence case
was "sound" by finding out whether the decision was in
harmony with psychological doctrine. What we actually
discovered was that psychology had dealt with very few

43-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

of the points raised by the law of evidence; and that the
basic psychological problem of the law of evidence
what will affect juries, and in what way was one psy-
chology had never touched at all. Thus, psychologists
could teach you that the rule on spontaneous exclamations
was based on false notions about the truth-compelling
qualities of a blow on the head. They could not say that
the evidence should be excluded for that reason. They
did not know enough about juries to tell you that; nor
could they suggest any method of finding out enough
about juries to give you an answer to the question.

We decided, then, that it was nice to have met the
social scientists and that we should continue to associate
with them in the hope of some day striking some mutual
sparks. If, for the moment, they could not help us to tell
whether the rules worked, we could at least see for our-
selves what the courts were doing. Since the law was what
the courts would do and since all the courts do is not in
books, we decided to observe the law in action. We
collected tremendous numbers of facts about the operation
of procedural rules and set about getting them in other
fields. We thus added greatly to our accumulated data
about what the courts had done. It was data of another
kind than cases. But, like the cases, it was data absolutely
raw. We did not know what facts to look for, or why we
wanted them, or what to do with them after we got them.
We were simply after facts. These facts did not help us
to understand the law, the social order, or the relation
between the two.

Nevertheless, this new interest in facts had some effect
on the curriculum. It culminated in what was known as
the "functional approach." The functional approach was
based in the "fact-situation." The fact-situation became
the center of our educational attention. We knew that we
were supposed to train young people to practice law. We

*44*

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-LAW STUDENT

knew that cases do not present themselves to the lawyer
labeled "Torts/' "Contracts/' "Equity I," or "Consti-
tutional Law." The lawyer is faced with a fact-situation.
The fact-situation may involve five or six of the traditional
law-school disciplines. We could see that this was wrong.
We could see that if we could organize a curriculum of
fact-situations we could, by passing the young man
through it, prepare him to meet these facts or these
situations in afterlife. He would recognize a familiar
fact-situation that he had known in law school and could
deal with it as an old friend. So we shifted our courses
around and renamed them in the hope that we might
sooner or later find out how to introduce the student to
those fact-situations he was most likely to encounter in
the practice.

The trouble with the functional approach was that it
threatened us with a reductio ad absurdum. If the best
way to prepare students for the practice was to put them
through the experiences they would have in practice,
clearly we should abolish law schools at once. I challenge
you to find the least excuse for one in the manifestoes of
Mr. Jerome Frank. We could not successfully imitate
experience in the classroom. Even moot courts were prob-
ably a waste of time. The place to get legal experience is in
a law office. Since there were already too many law offices,
we saw no reason for turning the law schools into law
offices, too. The functional approach seemed likely to re-
move the last vestige of excuse for the maintenance of law
schools in universities.

By another route this general program led us toward
another absurdity. The law is what the courts will do.
Courts are people. What people do largely depends on
their visceral reactions. The law may thus depend on
what the judge has had for breakfast. The conclusion is
that legal scholars, adopting the slogan, "Tell me what
you eat and I'll tell you what you are,'* should devote

-45-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

themselves to studying the domestic larders of judicial
wives. The prospect of a life of such investigation might
well put an end to legal scholarship altogether. Digestive
jurisprudence and the functional approach were on the
verge of destroying the two characteristic activities of the
university law school.

At the time when I stopped studying law, these horrid
possibilities were just appearing on the horizon. They
struck terror to the heart of at least one law teacher. And
there were other fears that daunted me. Had we not
engaged in a hopeless task? There were thirty thousand
cases and eight thousand statutes a year. In addition we
had taken up the burden of discovering and studying a
lot of facts outside the cases. In addition we had decided
to master the data of the social sciences. We had to do
all these things if the law was what the courts would do,
and our job was to predict what they would do next. How
could we hope to make the slightest impression on all this
material in one short lifetime? Of course we could break
the field down into smaller and smaller compartments,
narrowing our individual vision to our individual capacity.
But this would mean adding to the faculty every year
until the number approached infinity.

Another thing bothered me. Suppose the legislatures
should repeal everything we ever knew. Mastery of all
the facts about the Sherman Act painstakingly acquired
in the course in trade regulation might be a positive dis-
service under the N.R.A. Could it be that in presenting
our students with fact-situations of the present or immedi-
ate past we were actually handicapping them in their
battle with the fact-situations of the future? We had
given them no weapons but our advice about these good
old fact-situations. But, suppose the foe was a brand new
one, the product of a New Deal?

Finally, I was haunted by the notion that our duty to
our students was to educate them. We knew, of course,

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-LAW STUDENT

that they came to us without education. We had learned
not to expect any from the colleges of liberal arts. When
we got through with them, we might flatter ourselves that
we had trained them to be good technicians,, competent
draftsmen, or, as Mr. Beale has put it, to make a noise
like a lawyer. I could not see that we had done anything
about their education. Education, I had supposed, was
chiefly an affair of the intellect. Our curriculum was anti-
intellectual from beginning to end. It involved not a
single idea, not a single great book, not a single contact
with the tremendous intellectual heritage of the law. We
did not even expect intellectual exercise. We discussed
the logic of the cases, it is true; but none of us knew any
logic. We could not engage in intellectual exercise because
we were not competent in the intellectual techniques
which it requires.

I found myself, therefore, at the end of my legal career
facing a series of dilemmas. We must educate students,
but we couldn't do it because the law is what the courts
will do and our students must become able prophets. This
requires them to know all about what the courts have
done and are doing. There is no time to do more than
train them, even if we knew how to educate them.

We must, then, train students. This is a vain hope,
because the law offices can do it better and because, just
when we get them trained, new legislation which we
cannot foresee may make the habits we have given them
the worst they can possibly have.

We must, then, devote ourselves to legal research. But,
if the law is what the courts will do and we are going to be
scientific, we must get the cases, and the facts outside the
cases, and the data of the social sciences. But, when we
get this material it is useless, because we don't know what
to do with it. It is a hopeless job, anyway, because there is
so much material that we can't possibly accumulate it all,
and we have no basis for selection and discrimination.

47'

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

Now, I put it to you that these dilemmas are the in-
evitable consequences of our notion of law and our con-
ception of science. I do not deny that our definition of
law and our conception of science are possible. I do assert
that they are not complete and not fruitful for the study
of the law.

Let me emphasize as strongly as I can that we must
accumulate cases, facts, and data. I simply insist that we
must have a scheme into which to fit them. The law school
that ignores the cases, the facts, or the social sciences will
be a poor law school. The legal scholar who ignores these
things will be a poor legal scholar. What I am suggesting is
not to be taken as consolation or encouragement to those
lazy, unimaginative, or irresolute souls who have opposed
going beyond the language of judges into the facts of the
law and of social science.

But I suggest that if we are to understand the law we
shall have to get another definition of it. I suggest that the
law is a body of principles and rules developed in the light
of the rational sciences of ethics and politics. The aim of
ethics and politics is the good life. The aim of the law is the
same. Decisions of courts may be tested by their conform-
ity to the rules of law. The rules may be tested by their
conformity to legal principles. The principles may be
tested by their consistency with one another and with the
principles of ethics and politics.

The duty of the legal scholar, therefore, is to develop
the principles and rules which constitute the law. It is, in
short, to formulate legal theory. Cases, facts outside the
cases, the data of the social sciences, will illustrate and con-
firm this theoretical construction. Where formerly they
were worthless because we had no theoretical construction;
where formerly we did not know what facts to look for or
what to do with them when we got them; where formerly
we could make no use of social scientists because neither
they nor we had any mutual frame of reference which made

48*

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-LAW STUDENT

material transferable, we may now see how all these things
will assist our attempt to understand the law. We can
even see how to tell whether cases are "sound/'

The concern of the law teacher and of the law student,
as well as the legal scholar, is with principles. The leading
philosopher in America, Alfred North Whitehead, once
addressed himself to the problem of the university school
of business. His conclusions are applicable to the univer-
sity law school, too. He said: "The way in which a univer-
sity should function in preparation for an intellectual
career, such as modern business or one of the older pro-
fessions, is by promoting the imaginative consideration of
the various general principles underlying that career. Its
students thus pass into their period of technical apprentice-
ship with their imaginations already practised in connect-
ing details with general principles." The general principles
of the law are derived from politics and ethics. The student
and teacher should understand the principles of those
sciences. Since they are concerned with ideas, they must
read books that contain them. To assist in understanding
them they should be trained in those intellectual techniques
which have been developed to promote the comprehension
and statement of principles. They will not ignore the
cases, the facts, or the social sciences. At last they will
understand them. They will be educated.

I take it that an educated man knows what he is doing
and why. I believe that an educated lawyer will be more
successful in practicing law, as well as in improving it,
than one who is merely habituated to fact-situations. His
training will rest not on his recollection of a mass of specific
items but on a grasp of fundamental ideas. The importance
of these ideas cannot be diminished by the whims of
legislatures or the vagaries of practical politics.

You will say that even if all this is true, it is utterly
impractical: the students, the bar, and the public would
never tolerate a law school organized to formulate and

49'

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

expound legal principles, even though such formulation
and exposition must take account of the cases and the
facts of the law and of social science. They believe these
schools are founded to train students in the art of practic-
ing law and that facility in this art is best acquired through
homeopathic doses of experience in law school. I think
you are right. Therefore, I suggest that in every university
where there is a law school a department of jurisprudence
be established. The object of such a department would be
to formulate and expound legal principles. Gradually its
efforts would be reflected in the curriculum and studies of
the law school. Gradually it would be discovered that its
students were more successful at the bar and even in pre-
dicting what the courts would do than the progeny of the
law school. And gradually, very gradually, the law might
become once more a learned profession.

.50-

BACK TO GALEN

MY BRIEF remarks this evening are entitled
"Back to Galen/' Their purpose, however pre-
sumptuous they may sound, is not to tell you
anything you do not know but to remind you of some
things which in the busy and lucrative practice of your
profession you may sometimes forget. This is all the easier
for me because, as the Department of Surgery at the
University of Chicago will tell you, I know nothing what-
ever about your profession and have so far preserved my
figure intact from any association with your admirable but
uncomfortable investigations. Since by definition a classic
is a book that nobody reads, I feel all the more free to base
my discussion on Galen. Where he does not agree with me,
I shall suppress the fact, in the hope that you will not be
aware of it.

Galen was the summary of Greek medicine. He had that
faith in the beneficent operation of nature which was the
slogan of Hippocrates. But the anatomists had shown him
things Hippocrates never knew. He rested his argument
on clinical observation. He proclaimed the value of experi-
ment. In these respects he was completely modern. He
attacked the atomists, who broke the body down into parts
and looked at them alone. They wanted the practitioner to
believe that the sole object of attention when a leg was
fractured was the fractured leg. He attacked the method-
ists, who conceived of diseases as independent entities un-
related to anything. Here, as Brock has said, "What Galen
combatted was the tendency .... to reduce medicine to
the science of finding a label for each patient, and then
treating not the patient, but the label."

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

The central idea which Galen entertained was that the
organism is a whole. As such it cannot be further divided.
The whole is not the sum of the parts. An organism is just
that, nothing more or less. The organism is a whole with
an environment. It cannot be considered apart from that
environment. Knowledge of the environment is, therefore,
as important as knowledge of the organism. Knowledge of
the organism as living is more important than knowledge
of it as body. And knowledge of the whole organism living
in its environment is more important than the most inti-
mate familiarity with all its parts. I think you will agree
that in respect of this central idea Galen can hardly be
called modern at all.

And yet I venture to suggest that it is to the least
modern aspects of Galen's thought that a return is most
desirable. We need not fear that medicine will underesti-
mate the importance of clinical observation or experiment.
The outstanding achievements in these fields are the
proudest boast of the profession. But we still have our
methodists, who treat the label instead of the patient. We
still have our atomists, who believe that mere collection of
minute facts about parts will in some mysterious way add
up to a solution of the problems of the whole. The conse-
quences of this denial of Galen's principal idea are of
some importance to medicine, to education, and to the
public.

The first of these consequences is vicious specialization;
for a corollary of forgetting Galen is to assert that under-
standing depends upon analysis. No one will deny that it
may. But the whole theoretical foundation of exclusive in-
sistence on this attitude has now been swept away. Such
insistence rested on physical doctrines of space and matter
which incited investigators to look at little bits of matter,
and the smaller the bits the better. It is possible in this
view to examine one bit without any relation to any other

52-

BACK TO GALEN

bit, except perhaps a relation in space. This notion modern
physics has now discarded. Its leading concept is that of a
unified world in which there is no such thing as an isolated
object or organism. Every dislocation anywhere produces
another dislocation somewhere. Every organism is con-
stantly modifying its environment and is being modified
by it. The theoretical basis of raw empiricism is gone*

We may be permitted to doubt whether raw empiricism
can be the foundation of science. We may refer with profit
to the words which Claude Bernard kept repeating again
and again. "By simply noting facts," he said, "we can
never succeed in establishing a science. Pile up facts and
observations as we may, we shall be none the wiser." And,
once more, "Endless accumulation of observations leads
nowhere."

Failure to respect this axiom has produced confusion,
and not in the natural sciences alone. The current desire
to be scientific has led social scientists, and even humanists,
to imitate what they conceive to be the method of natural
science. Some of my friends in social fields seem to think
that, by collecting data on cards and continuing the proc-
ess until all available space in the University is filled with
them, all social problems will be solved. To most medical
men this view will no doubt seem archaic. In medicine
there is a demand for understanding based on synthesis as
well as on analysis. We see the fruits of this demand most
obviously in the theory of the glands of internal secretion
and in modern neurological doctrine. Nevertheless, we
may sometimes feel that the wealth and prominence of a
surgeon may depend on the degree to which he has suc-
ceeded in forgetting that he is dealing with a whole body,
a whole person, with a living organism in its environment.

This attitude has had a disastrous effect on the study of
problems of personality. Insistence upon empirical analy-
sis led medical men for a time to ignore these problems,
because there was no empirical method of investigating

-53*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

them. At length, however, the belief that anything that
had to do with health fell within the province of medicine,
together with the assumption that medical problems must
be tackled atomistically, produced, first, resentment against
the attempts of other groups to deal with these matters;
secondly, failure to co-operate with scholars in other fields
having to do with organisms and their environment; and
finally, efforts to solve problems of personality by such
methods as the minute anatomy of the brain.

The family doctor at his best understood the organism
as a whole. His disappearance under a wave of specializa-
tion has thrown the public into the arms of one cult after
another. The modern clinic is a strenuous effort to reincar-
nate the general practitioner in corporate form. Here a
group of specialists, frequently with an attachment of
social workers, try to capture and pool knowledge of the
organism in its environment* The effort is admirable and
has great accomplishments to its credit. Yet, because of
the cursory acquaintance that can at best be achieved and
because of the difficulties of constructing a composite pic-
ture of an individual, we may feel that even here the sum
of the parts will not quite equal the whole.

Then, too, raw empiricism in medicine has impeded
other attacks on problems of personality, such as psycho-
analysis, which provides at once a theory of personality
and a method of investigating psychological processes.
Whatever we may think of psychoanalysis, we must admit
that it was, in its inception, an honest attempt to under-
stand the organism as a whole. Those things in its later
history of which we may disapprove have resulted as much
from deliberate or ignorant misconception of its purposes
as from any inherent weaknesses in its theory. Psycho-
analysis, standing alone, is certainly not the answer to all
problems of personality. But any solution of them must
begin from the same starting-point, the one which Galen
has given us.

BACK TO GALEN

The educational consequences of forgetting Galen are no
less serious. I pass over the question of lay education in
medicine, where we may simply note that the public has
become hysterical in matters of health and manifests neu-
rotic symptoms in response to the slightest impact of
journalistic information. Instead, I would point out that
all education, and not medical education alone, has suffered
from overlooking the lesson that Galen might teach it. We
have witnessed a shift of emphasis throughout education
from thought to information, from idea to fact. The presi-
dent of one of our greatest universities said a little while
ago that it would soon be impossible to educate people in
the time at our command. More and more facts come to
light each year, so that there is more each year to know.
Indeed, he said that there is now so much to know that it
is almost impossible to know much.

The development of modern medicine, though its rec-
ord is a grand one, has carried with it surprising losses in
general intelligibility of subject matter, with unfortunate
effects on research and practice, not least in problems of
personality. We see that the general unintelligibility of the
subject matter has confused the public and drawn its at-
tention to spectacular or trivial details, to which it has re-
acted in accordance with well-known economic and psy-
chological "laws." We see, too, that medical education,
like all education, has broken down into smaller and small-
er compartments, since the subject matter is intelligible
only in terms of the volume of known facts which must be
covered by the student and the scholar. Do not misunder-
stand me. The kind of analysis which medicine has pur-
sued, under which the concrete data of a science are
divided, classified, and selected for specialization, has re-
sulted in the accumulation of tremendously valuable data
and in the development of new and effective therapeutic
modes. It has invented instruments, established labora-
tories, built schools of medicine, and endowed research

"55-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

foundations. It deserves all the praise it has received. But,
as the Renaissance could accuse medieval medicine of be-
ing rich in principles and poor in facts, we are now entitled
to inquire whether modern medicine is not rich in facts and
poor in principles.

How did Galen secure his extraordinary balance of
speculation, observation, and experiment, and how can we
regain that balance today? He took his stand on Aristotle's
physics, which was not mechanics, but which was a state-
ment of the general principles applicable to change and
motion in nature. These principles governed change and
motion in organisms as well as in inorganic things. The
development of these principles led to the insight that the
microcosm mirrors the macrocosm, and that the problem
of medicine is the relation between the two. This is simply
another way of saying that the problem of medicine is the
organism as a whole.

Here we see another mode of analysis than that which
modern medicine has employed. It is less showy and has
been generally suppressed for two hundred years. It con-
cerns the abstract rational content of a science. It is some-
times spoken of as "the interpretation of data," "the analy-
sis of fundamental concepts," or in medicine as "the corre-
lation of the sciences which lie at the basis of the medical
arts." It should be recognized as the fundamental constitu-
ent of a science, without which all the rest is ultimately
worthless. The proper immediate subject matter of a
science is its abstractions, as can be seen as soon as the
question is asked, What is the basis of the division, classifi-
cation, and selection of the concrete material? The answer,
contrary to Francis Bacon, is that the basis must be found
in the rational science, which is logically prior to the empir-
ical operations involved.

We can thus discover why and how Galen saw, through
Aristotle, the problem of the organism as a whole. Ration-
al analysis finds and orders abstractions which can be

BACK TO GALEN

organized into wholes, and it is by the application or recog-
nition of these abstract wholes in concrete material that
we understand things in nature. Questions of mechanism,
materialism, vital principle, structure, and function can be
answered if the abstractions in the analysis have been
thought through, and not otherwise. The present con-
fusion rests on doctrinaire empiricism, the antidote to
which is the recapture of the rational science or sciences
that lie hidden in medical knowledge.

In the absence of such rational science or sciences each
other science orders its abstractions on a limited set of
categories and offers its uncriticized results to the scientific
world. The recipient of these results has, with his present
training, the almost impossible task of reinterpreting the
data in this raw form. He should be able to put them to
work in his own science, but he has no rational scheme in
which he can locate them. Whitehead has lately shown the
fatal consequences that have overtaken theories of in-
heritance because biologists regarded genes as hard pellets
of matter which were not affected by their environment.
These fatal consequences ensued because of the inability
of one science to keep up with the speculative progress of
another. Only the development of rational sciences at the
base of medicine can integrate the sciences and make true
interchange between scientists possible.

In the Middle Ages the student, equipped through train-
ing in the seven liberal arts to effect transformations in any
subject matter, continued in one of the three fields of the
university medicine, theology, and law without forget-
ting the others. Thus he never forgot the organism as a
whole, living in society and under God. Today, filled with
little useless facts, 60 per cent of which he has had to re-
peat to pass countless quarterly tests, his intellectual in-
terest stifled by the hopeless prospect of acquiring all the
information he is told he must possess, the student treads
his weary round, picking up a fragment here and a frag-

57'

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

ment there, until he has been examined on fragment after
fragment and has served his time. Without intellectual
scope or grasp, with the belief that thought is memory and
speculation vanity, with no obvious incentive but the need
to make a living, he becomes the proud product of our in-
stitutions of higher learning. Now that health has suc-
ceeded happiness as the ruling passion of mankind, your
profession has an obligation to be intelligible and intelligent
surpassing that of any earlier day. To that end I recom-
mend a return to Galen, which is perhaps only another
way of saying what Galen said in the title of one of his
treatises, "The Best Physician Is Also a Philosopher."

58-

THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE
INTELLECTUAL LOVE OF GOD

THE note that recurs most often in Thomas Jeffer-
son's writings is his insistence on the importance
of education. The reason for this was, of course,
principally political. He was a democrat. He had to prove
that the people could operate their institutions. He had to
supply some method by which the poor might meet the
rich on equal terms and the slow-witted protect themselves
against their more intelligent, but perhaps less scrupulous,
compatriots. The doctrine of equality of opportunity was
meaningless if knowledge was to be a monopoly of the few.
That doctrine was to rest on universal comprehension and
individual leadership. The common schools were to pro-
vide the first; the universities were to develop the latter.
So Jefferson wrote in 1818, CC A system of general instruc-
tion, which shall reach every description of our citizens,
from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so
will it be the latest, of all the public concerns in which I
shall permit myself to take an interest/' Again he said,
"Education generates habits of application, of order, and
the love of virtue; and controls by the force of habit, any

innate obliquities in our moral organization What

but education, has advanced us beyond the condition of
our indigenous neighbors ? . . . . Nor must we omit to men-
tion among the benefits of education the incalculable ad-
vantage of training up able counselors to administer the
affairs of our country in all its departments . . . .; nothing
more than education advancing the prosperity, the power,
and the happiness of a nation." In 1816 he wrote, "Al-

.59.

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

though I do not, with some enthusiasts, believe that the
human condition will ever advance to such a state of per-
fection as that there shall no longer be pain or vice in the
world, yet I believe it susceptible of much improvement,
and most of all in matters of government and religion, and
that the diffusion of knowledge among the people is to be
the instrument by which it is to be effected." Again in
1818 he said, "If the condition of man is to be progressively
ameliorated, as we fondly hope and believe, education is to
be the chief instrument in effecting it." His object, he said,
was to "give activity to a mass of mind, which, in propor-
tion to our population shall be double or treble of what it
is in most countries."

To give double or treble activity to this mass of mind he
did more than any other statesman to advance the cause
of public education, and left as his greatest monument an
historic university, "the pride and idol of his old age." To
insure the dominance of the educated he proposed an edu-
cational qualification for the suffrage/^ confirmed devotee
of states' rights, he nevertheless advocated, as President,
federal aid to the public schools through funds acquired by
duties on luxuries. He provided the basis for the tremen-
dous structure of public education to which we have grown
accustomed; he supplied the reasons which support it; he
first employed the slogans which are still used to justify it.
^Because of the impetus given us by the ideas and lan-
guage of Jefferson, we have today a system of popular
education which is the wonder, if not the admiration, of
the world. It is extensive. It is free. It is elaborate. It is
costly. In these respects it exceeds the most highly colored
of Thomas Jefferson's dreams. We have everything he
wanted, and a great deal more.^ But I think no one will
deny that democracy is in a worse plight than it was before
Jefferson began to labor in its behalf. We should hardly
today be ready to say that education has corrected any
innate obliquities in our moral organization or that because

60-

JEFFERSON AND THE LOVE OF GOD

of it we had advanced beyond the condition of our indig-
enous neighbors, or that through it we had trained up
able counselors to administer the affairs of our country;
and an educational qualification for the suffrage would
seem to us a meaningless addition to the multiplicity of
our laws.

How can this be? Why is it that we no longer feel that
naive confidence in education which was natural to
Jefferson? Why is it that the blessing of universal enlight-
enment has not produced the results that seemed inevitable
to him?

As to the organization, methods, and scope of education,
Jefferson's views were sound when they were expressed and
are sound today. The trouble is that we have not adhered
to them'The great democrat understood very well that
the same kind of education is not equally desirable for
everybody.^He divided the community into the laboring
and the learned, and provided a different type of education
for each group. He knew that some adolescents ought to
go to work while others were continuing their education.
It would have seemed to him fantastic that all students
should pursue the same course of study up to their twenti-
eth year. His letter to Peter Carr in 1814 stated the basis
of the Bill for Establishing a System of Public Education
which he drew in 1817. He wrote to Carr: "At the dis-
charging of the pupils from the elementary schools [after
three years of schooling], the two classes separate those
destined for labor will engage in the business of agriculture,
or enter into apprenticeships to such handicraft art as may
be their choice; their companions, destined to the pursuits
of science, will proceed to the College "

It would have seemed to him equally fantastic that a
pupil might educate himself indefinitely at public expense
merely by minimizing his stupidity or misconduct. He
would have seen little merit in granting such an individual
a Bachelor's degree because he had been around a long

61-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

time, had memorized some things he had been taught, and
had resorted only to the less noisy and noticeable vices.
The rigid system of selection which he proposed from 1779
to 1817 was carefully designed to limit free education for
all to three years of elementary schooling. Beyond that,
education at public expense was to depend on survival of
a competitive process the like of which has never been seen
in the United States. The present democratic notion that
higher education is open to a student merely because he is
the offspring of a voter would have seemed sheer nonsense
to the most democratic of the Founding Fathers.

Nor would he have permitted the nation as a whole to
ignore the national problem of education. As one of his
biographers has pointed out, he felt so strongly the neces-
sary connection between free institutions and free educa-
tion that he would have been able to think of no way in
which the Union could guarantee a republican form of
government to the States unless it guaranteed them ade-
quate support for their public schools. Had we followed
Jefferson to this conclusion, illiteracy would long since have
disappeared from our country, we should not have had
schools closed all over it during the last few years, and
the administration might have regarded reopening them
as almost as important as reopening the banks.
^The variations in Jefferson's program that he would now
introduce are made necessary by the change from an
economy of scarcity to an economy of plenty. .Children
cannot now go to work after three years in the grades.
They cannot go to work after eight years there. We must
construct our educational system with a view to sending
the ordinary individual into gainful occupations not earlier
than his eighteenth or even his twentieth year. Jefferson
would have insisted on his two principles: differentiation
and selection. The principle of differentiation means that
the pupil should find his way into an institution adapted
to his individual needs and capacities. If such institutions

62-

JEFFERSON AND THE LOVE OF GOD

do not exist, they must be created. Jefferson would under-
stand that students who have difficulty in existing insti-
tutions should not necessarily be excluded from all edu-
cational opportunities. Nor is their failure a reflection on
the institution they happen to attend. It simply shows
that they ought to be in another one. Under present con-
ditions they must be educated; there is nothing else that
can be done with them.

Jefferson would, I believe, extend his ward schools and
his county colleges to cover a longer period of the pupil's
life. In addition, he would provide in them, or parallel with
them, training for those who are the modern counterpart
of his group destined to labor. He would understand that
these students must be taught to be self-sustaining, that
they cannot be expected to thrive in institutions whose
sole function is to enrich the mind or prepare for the pro-
fessions or advance knowledge. Their presence there mere-
ly confuses the faculty, the students, and the public as to
what it is the institution is about.

If we had followed Jefferson, then, we should have today
a system of public schools, supported, where necessary, by
the national as well as the local authorities, culminating in
numerous local colleges and technical institutes designed
to accommodate the youth of the land up to their twentieth
year. We should have, in short, a tremendous expansion
and diversification of educational opportunity. The prin-
ciple of differentiation would operate all through these
institutions; the principle of selection would not operate
at all, for the reason that it cannot do so in the present
economic situation.

This does not mean that the principle of selection should
disappear from the educational scene. On the contrary, it
should be invoked in all its Jeffersonian rigor at the end of
the schools, colleges, and institutes that I have just de-
scribed. It should be invoked at the beginning of the uni-
versity. Our failure to invoke it there, where Jefferson would

.63.

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

have insisted on it most forcibly, has done more than most
things to debase the higher learning in America. The state
must foster the state university, to which only those who
evidence genuine ability should be admitted, because of the
necessity of fostering scholarship, elevating the professions,
and cultivating the minds of those who have minds to
cultivate.

Such, I take it, would be the consequences of being truly
Jeffersonian about the methods, scope, and organization
of education at the present day. Our failure to take a
Jeffersonian attitude on these issues is partly responsible
for the failure of education to realize the hopes Jefferson
had of it. But the principal failure of education is more
fundamental: it has failed to develop a content which can
achieve the results for which Jefferson yearned. The reason
is either that we have followed Jefferson's language with-
out understanding it or that Jefferson himself, faced with
the practical problems of his day, overlooked the intellec-
tual problems of the higher learning. The language that he
used has been employed to describe institutions quite
different from those he was describing; the intellectual life
was not a primary concern of the democratic statesman.
It is clear that Jefferson thought of education chiefly as
the accumulation of useful information. This information
was to help people earn a living and become good citizens.
He rejected any curriculum that was not useful. He re-
duced the speculative elements in the course of study to a
minimum. We are deceived in looking at his program to-
day, because it seems much less useful than our own.
Actually, it was much more utilitarian than any that had
appeared before his time. It contains the elements of the
present curriculum, and the language used to justify it
could be and has been employed to justify the worst fea-
tures of the modern course of study.

In the letter written to Peter Carr in 1814 Jefferson
expressed the hope that Virginia would make an establish-

JEFFhKSON AND IhLJL LUVJL (Jb

iient, "where every branch of science, deemed useful at
this day and in our country should be taught . . . ." In
lis letter to Governor Nicholas in 1816, he said, "The

university must be intended for all the useful sciences

The report will have to present the plan of an university,
analyzing the sciences, selecting those which are useful

" The report of the Commissioners Appointed To

Fix the Site of the University, written by Jefferson in 1818,
referred to "the sciences which may be useful and even
necessary to the various vocations of life."

The preliminary drafts of a course of study for the
university and the enactment of the Board of Visitors on
April 7, 1824, are the embodiment of these views. Of the
eight schools or departments in the University, only one
does not contain specific mention of subjects designed to
improve morals or develop vocational aptitudes. That ex-
ception, the school of ancient languages, is more apparent
than real; that school was thought of either as preparatory
to something else or as illuminating the current scene in
which the young Virginian would have to vote and earn
his living.

Jefferson was not proposing a plan for the higher learn-
ing. He was proposing, rather, a system of education de-
signed to produce self-sustaining and law-abiding citizens.
That is, he was interested in the lower ranges of education.
He used the words "college" and "university" in such a
way as to confuse us now. He did not mean college and
university in our sense. The student went to his "college,"
for example, at the age of ten, and to his "university" at
fifteen. He was advocating an educational system that cen-
tered on external goods and the moral virtues. The intel-
lectual virtues were not for him. What used to be called
the "intellectual love of God," what we now call the "pur-
suit of truth for its own sake," the inculcation of which is
the object of the higher learning, scarcely appeared in his
prospectus. He was a practical, social reformer anxious to

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

make his people prosperous and civilized. He was correct
as far as he went. Our mistake is in taking him farther
than he meant to go.

At the lower levels of education the political and eco-
nomic situation determines the content of education; edu-
cation does not determine the political and economic situa-
tion. Jefferson could not hope to improve society, there-
fore, by improving elementary education. The quality of
society must inevitably govern the quality of elementary
education. Those representatives of the educational pro-
fession who today urge that the schools should be turned
into an agency of social reform are making an error that
we can trace to Jefferson. An effort to turn them into such
an agency will merely succeed in ruining the schools.

Jefferson's plan of producing decent citizens able to earn
a living was sound. He could not hope to secure an im-
proved society by this means. He could legitimately hope
to perpetuate the one he had. Because he said "college"
when we should say "high school/' and "university" when
we should say "junior college" and "vocational school/ 5 we
have been led to import his plan into the higher learning.
Here it is quite inappropriate. As a result, in the higher
learning the intellectual love of God has been submerged
by external goods and the moral virtues. These are proper
objects of elementary and secondary education. They
should be the objects of such education as may be required
to enable the citizen to be economically independent and
politically responsible. We might even go so far as to say
that they should be the objects of all technical and voca-
tional training. They play only an incidental role in the
higher learning. The intellectual virtues should be the pre-
occupation of the university.

Now it is clear that the intellectual love of God is the
same in any good state. External goods and the moral vir-
tues may vary in quality and supply from nation to nation.
The intellectual virtues remain the same in a democracy,

66-

JEFFERSON AND THE LOVE OF GOD

an aristocracy, an oligarchy, or a monarchy. It is through
the exercise of the intellectual virtues that the statesman
orders means to ends and achieves the common good. The
principal signification of a bad state is that it prevents the
free and independent exercise of the intelligence. We may
with confidence foresee the decline and fall of some Euro-
pean governments because they are, by this test, bad
states. We can discern the dangers in the proposal of the
professional educators who desire collectivism; they would
force the intelligence to subordinate itself to the social
purposes that they desire. The free and independent exer-
cise of the intellect is the means by which society may be
improved.

Because we have misunderstood Jefferson, we have not
yet secured a university in the United States. And what
we call universities have been made less effective than they
would be if we had grasped the fact that Jefferson was
not really talking about the higher learning, because he
was not talking about the intellectual life. The accumula-
tion of useful information has been made the object of our
universities as well as of our inferior schools. And, because
we have not been pursuing the truth but have been piling
up helpful facts, we have had to multiply courses and
departments. We could not get them all or teach them all
otherwise. We have been able to justify the social aspects
of college life you make friends who will help you in busi-
ness. We have been able to devote much time, effort, and
money to the physical and moral welfare of students. We
have been able to forget that a university should be de-
voted to the intellectual love of God.

The university should renounce any ambition to in-
crease the ability of its graduates to acquire external
goods and should relax its desire to train them in the
moral virtues. Instead, it should see to it that in the col-
lege or in the university itself students might first learn
how to deal with ideas. This means an education in disci-

67-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

plines designed to teach the student how to discover, an-
alyze, and utilize ideas. At the same time he should be-
come acquainted with the principal ideas which have di-
rected the activities of mankind. These are to be found
in books. It is true that many of them were written in
the ancient languages. I am not suggesting, however, a cur-
riculum largely composed of these languages. I am sug-
gesting a curriculum composed in part of these books,
which may be studied in translation.

This preliminary period would equip the student with
the techniques which he needs to deal with ideas and would
familiarize him with important examples. He should now
be ready for the real work of the university. This should
consist of the utilization of his previous training in some one
large intellectual field; even this should not be studied by
itself, but in relation to the other major disciplines. For ex-
ample, medicine and the natural sciences at its base, law
and the social sciences on which it rests, and theology are
intellectual areas of study having a definite rational con-
tent, any one of which might constitute the scene of the
student's intellectual activity. You will note that this ac-
tivity should be intellectual and not vocational. It would
have nothing to do with training a student to be a teacher,
or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a preacher. It would involve
the search for truth for its own sake, the practice of the
intellectual virtues, that study which is the intellectual
love of God.

A university with students and faculty so trained and so
occupied would be freed automatically of the burdens
which the curriculum and extra-curriculum now impose
upon it. Its graduates would be educated. They might
then, through the independent exercise of the understand-
ing, make their contribution to the evolution of our politi-
cal and social life. With clear ideas, instead of a mass of
rapidly aging information, they would face the world,
bringing to its problems the ordering and beneficent in-

68-

JEFFERSON AND THE LOVE OF GOD

fluence of trained intelligence. This is the influence that
both our educational and our political institutions require
today as at no earlier period. Now that we have passed the
pioneering stage> now that we have established the crude
structure of the basic educational system which was the
concern of Jefferson, we must press forward to secure for
our country the blessings of the higher learning. The intel-
lectual love of God is indispensable to the fulfilment of
Thomas Jefferson's dreams.

69'

THE EDUCATIONAL FUNCTION OF
NEW ENGLAND

I AM here tonight to utter a Macedonian cry. If occa-
sionally it sounds hysterical, I beg you to remember
that it is of the nature of such a cry to be so. If on
occasion it sounds uncomplimentary, I hope you will
understand that this is merely the result of limitations of
time. I cannot remind you at the end of every paragraph
that my purpose is to give you the highest compliment in
my power and that my incidental brutality is intended
simply to reveal in clearer light the opportunity that is
before you. For I propose to show that the educational
function of New England is to lead. My chief criticism of
you is that you are so modest that you do not realize it. I
wish to urge New England tonight to resume its rightful
and natural place at the head of American education. I do
not greatly care whether you do this from anger or ambi-
tion. I shall try to arouse both in you, in the hope that one
or the other will result in the action which the country needs.
And, first of all, I wish to enumerate the general and
pervasive contributions which New England has made.
The preparatory schools, colleges, and universities of this
region have done three things for all of us. In the first
place, they have set high standards of scholarship for stu-
dents and teachers. They have required them to meet the
standards erected and have declined to temporize or soften
under pressure. I do not say that these standards have in
all cases been the wisest; I do say that New England has
adhered to them. Its resistance to mediocrity in the staff
and in the student body has strengthened the resistance of
all other educational institutions.

70-

EDUCATIONAL FUNCTION OF NEW ENGLAND

In the second place, New England has maintained free-
dom of thought, speech, and teaching. Academic people
who have not lived outside New England may not realize
that the battle for academic freedom is a battle not yet
won. Such freedom has become a commonplace in this part
of the world. In less happy climes business men, parents,,
and men in the street often feel called on to request the
expulsion of a professor if he disagrees with them, and
sometimes succeed in securing it. The example of the New
England universities, and notably Harvard, has made it
more respectable than it once was to demand that the
teacher be permitted to say what he thinks, inside and
outside the classroom. To be sure, we must take care that
he is competent in his field; but that is to be determined
not by the general public but by his colleagues.

In the third place, New England has elevated education
throughout the country by constantly raising teachers*
salaries. Such improvement as we have witnessed in the
profession has been largely the result of this phenomenon.
The level of academic compensation on the Atlantic sea-
board is much higher than anywhere else. It would be
lower everywhere else if it were not as high as it is here.
No important university in the East has reduced salaries
during this depression. Elsewhere every university but one
has reduced them. If it had not been for New England,
that one would have done so; and the rest would have
done it more.

These three contributions of New England are of the
greatest importance. Unfortunately, however, I must also
recite New England's sins against American education.
They are sins of commission and omission.ifThe require-
ments New England has established for entrance to, prog-
ress through, and graduation from, a school, college, or
university have had a dreadful effect throughout the coun-
try. New England invented the horrid machinery com-
posed of course grades, course credits, course examinations,

-71-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

required attendance, and required residence through which
we determine by addition, subtraction, multiplication, divi-
sion, and a logarithm table the intellectual progress of the
young. Of course this machinery has nothing to do with
education and constitutes, in fact, one of the prime ob-
stacles in its path. With the exception of Harvard, New-
England retains it in all its menacing vigor and thus
makes it difficult to modify it elsewhere.

New England, too and here Harvard has been the
chief offender has extended this vicious principle into new
educational territory by requiring the Bachelor's degree
for entrance to professional schools. Such a school acquires
mystical prestige by being called "graduate." A law
school, for example, is a good school if its students have
spent four years in college. It is a poor one if they have
lingered only three. It is really not respectable if they have
devoted only two to the pursuit of the liberal arts. Of
course, there is not the slightest basis in fact or theory for
this view. In fact, students who have not spent four years
in college are likely to do better in law school than those
who have. In theory there is no reason why a student who
has completed his general education and wishes to special-
ize should not do so in professional subjects instead of
non-professional ones. Yet, New England has given impe-
tus to the adding-machine system by deciding that you
can tell whether a student will succeed in a professional
school by adding up the years he has devoted to football
and fraternities.

The influence of the College Board Examinations has,
on the whole, been pernicious. They have not been adopted
outside New England; they have been modified here.
Nevertheless, they have served to spread abroad the erro-
neous and dangerous doctrine that the purpose of the sec-
ondary school is to prepare for college. This notion has pre-
vented the high school from developing its own program in
terms of the needs of its own students. Of course this idea

.72-

EDUCATIONAL FUNCTION OF NEW ENGLAND

could not prevail indefinitely. The high school is not pre-
paratory to college. The great mass of its pupils never go
there. The high school has had at length to work out its
own curriculum; but one of the reasons why it is not a very
good one is that the high school is still confused as to what
it is about. Nor have the College Boards been without
painful repercussions on New England. The separation of
the high-school course of study from the College Board cur-
riculum is now great enough to make it most inconvenient
for a high-school boy to take the examinations. As a result
he may not go to a New England college or university.

Outside New England we are coming to the view that we
do not know very much about selecting students at en-
trance. One middle-western university, after trying vari-
ous arithmetical computations in this connection, with no
result except to admit some students who should have been
excluded and to exclude others who should have been ad-
mitted, finally announced a formula which I offer as the
best that can be constructed at this stage. The announce-
ment was as follows: "Any student will be admitted who
commends himself to the Board of Admissions by reason
of his personal qualities and scholastic aptitude." Under
this formula, age, years in secondary school, credits, grades,
and previous condition of servitude are not controlling.
The student will be enrolled if, on the whole, he deserves a
trial in college. The university knows that such a trial is
the only real test. Its formula has this important conse-
quence it leaves the secondary schools free to frame the
best course of study they can. It imposes neither the
methods nor the subject matter of their program. As one
who has prepared students for the College Boards, I can
testify to the limitations they set to education. The teacher
must prepare the pupil for the examinations first of all. In
the school I taught in, I did not dare try to educate my
charges. It would have confused their minds.

We are witnessing in the West the collapse of all formal

73-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

requirements. Our problem now is not to keep students
out of educational institutions but to find or create those
they can profitably go to. The most footless question that
university presidents have been debating in recent years
is, Who should go to colleger Where else is there to go?
Today adults cannot get jobs. Boys and girls of college
age can hope to find them only by accident. Because of the
technological improvements of recent years industry will
require in the future proportionately fewer workers than
ever before. The great problem of the high school now is
not to hold its pupils but to get rid of them. Their gradu-
ates cannot get work and demand that classes be provided
for them by an overburdened staff in overcrowded build-
ings. The public junior colleges and the state universities
in urban centers have been swamped by the tide that has
swept over them since the depression began. If these stu-
dents are forbidden to enter educational institutions, what
will become of them? All of them cannot be absorbed into
the army, navy, or Civilian Conservation Corps. We
should not encourage them to try to get into jail. The an-
swer is that we must expand the educational system of the
country to accommodate our young people up to their
eighteenth or even their twentieth year. If existing schools
and colleges are not adapted to the needs of all these stu-
dents (and they certainly are not), we must establish new
ones for them. If existing methods of selection and in-
struction cannot be employed, we shall have to invent
others.

New England's contribution to methods of selection I
have already described. Her contribution to methods of
instruction is individualized teaching. This, where it takes
the form of the small class, has had a destructive effect on
education elsewhere. All the evidence is that a small class
merely as such is no better than a large one. New England's
insistence on the small class has given even the high school
in the West the impression that only in such classes can

74-

EDUCATIONAL FUNCTION OF NEW ENGLAND

education be conducted. The diminished resources of pub-
lic education have thus been lavished on a kind of teaching
it could have done very well without. The tutorial system
is a contribution of New England which the rest of the
country cannot accept if it means that every student will
have individual instruction in every subject all the time.
The rest of the country can hope to supply able students
with individual instruction in fields in which they are par-
ticularly interested and qualified. It should not attempt,
for financial and educational reasons, to give it to every
student every hour of every day. It is far too costly; it
cannot be demonstrated that it is worth the cost. The prob-
lem of the rest of the country is not to increase the amount
of individualized teaching; it is to reduce it. We must find
some way to cut down the number of miscellaneous small
classes and discover some more economical and effective
method of teaching the large number of students with
whom we perforce must deal.

Nor can the rest of the country adopt the so-called
house plan or college plan now being introduced at Har-
vard and Yale. If this plan is a housing plan, it can of course
be imitated; it already exists in other places. If ? however,
the proposal is to conduct education in small residential
units in which faculty and students can live and study to-
gether if, in short, the plan is the plan of Oxford and
Cambridge then it can have no followers in the West.
The cost of the scheme is a fatal objection now. But,
assuming the money were available, we could not attempt
it in the western universities, where coeducation is the rule
and where 50 per cent or more of the students must live at
home if they are to attend the university at all. I do not
deny the merits of the British plan; I do assert that it
cannot be instituted in the West.

Even though the plan will not be instituted in the West,
its effects there are not likely to be salutary. It will be
taken as another evidence that New England believes that

75*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

the purpose of the higher learning is principally social and
moral. This lesson New England has taught us too well
already. It has already convinced us that athletics, archi-
tecture, personality, character, and gentlemanliness are the
essence of the intellectual life. The example of eastern col-
leges is always offered to refute a western president who
wants to make his university an educational institution.
Education and scholarship can be carried on in ramshackle
buildings, with students who live at their homes and pro-
fessors who live at theirs. Education and scholarship can
flourish even if professors and students associate with one
another only for intellectual as distinguished from social
and athletic purposes. Of course, I should not expect a
university to refuse gifts of beautiful and useful buildings.
I should not expect students and teachers to decline to
speak to one another except on subjects on which they will
later take or give examinations. Nor should I expect a
university to ignore the moral virtues. I should insist, how-
ever, that learning how to be clubly is not the highest
learning that may be achieved in a university. The empha-
sis in the house plan on the non-intellectual aspects of
university activity is not an emphasis the country needs.
The house plan will have one other effect upon the West.
It will separate it still farther from New England. The
junior college is rapidly becoming the characteristic educa-
tional institution of the country outside New England.
The depression has stimulated its growth. The junior col-
lege takes its students through to the end of the Sopho-
more year. If the student goes to a university, he will
enter it as a Junior. The house plan is built on the idea of
a solid social and educational bloc inclosing the student
from the Sophomore or even the Freshman year to grad-
uation. This means that it will be almost impossible for
the junior-college graduate to attend a university where
the house plan is in vogue; and New England will be cut
off once again from the American educational system.

.76-

EDUCATIONAL FUNCTION OF NEW ENGLAND

, /

Recent events suggest that New England is withdrawing
farther and farther into itself. General examinations and
reading periods, which the rest of the country can adopt,
hardly atone for the loss of New England's leadership in
attacking the great problems of organization and subject
matter which now confront the institutions of the South
and West. Not since Mr. Eliot presented us with the elec-
tive system, which was not an unmixed blessing, has New
England given us an important idea which we may use in
meeting such problems. Today we are in a desperate plight.
Public education in some western and southern states has
now collapsed. In many others it is on the verge of col-
lapse. The state universities have received terrible blows
from legislatures who have seen their states laid waste by
the depression. The endowed colleges and universities are,
many of them, barely able to maintain themselves. And
yet we must now reconstruct our whole program to meet
the new conditions which the economic situation has thrust
upon us. We must reorganize the educational system and
redefine the purposes of its units. We must create new
units to accommodate students whom industry can no
longer absorb but whom we have never regarded as our
responsibility before. We need ideas, courage, imagination,
now as at no earlier period ".Where shall we hope to find
them if not in New England? There are situated the
strongest institutions in the country. They can enlighten
us if they will. For forty years they have turned their
backs to us and devoted themselves to their own affairs,
The great developments of those years have occurred at
levels which New England has ignored; they have occurred
in the public schools the elementary schools, the high
schools, the junior colleges. We have been without the
leadership which only New England can give us. We can
do without it no longer. '/

With deference I venture to suggest what New England
might do for us. Nothing would advance the higher learn-

. 77 .

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

ing in America so much as an announcement from the
strong colleges and universities of New England that they
had abandoned their Freshman and Sophomore work. If
they then went on to develop a three-year coarse of study
to the Master's degree, they would do still more for us.
They would show us not only the organization we should
adopt but also the subject matter we should treat of. New
England need not take this step from philanthropic mo-
tives alone **New England faces the choice between resum-
ing the leadership of American education and becoming an
excrescence on it. If it becomes an excrescence on it, it will
lose all contact with students from outside New England
unless it bribes them to attend. If the strong colleges and
universities in this part of the world will begin their work
with the Junior year, they may expect to enlist in increas-
ing numbers the graduates of junior colleges. If Yale and
Harvard are going British, I suggest that they go the whole
way and eliminate work which in England is regarded as
of public-school grade. The first-year man at Oxford and
Cambridge is the equivalent of a Junior here. I suggest
that we make our Juniors first-year men. f

With deference I recommend that the great preparatory
schools of New England become colleges. This would mean
that they would cease to be preparatory schools. They
would take their students through to the end of what we
now call the Sophomore year. Their qualified graduates
might go on to the university if they cared to do so. If they
did not, they could feel that they had had an education.**

The location and environment of the New England pre-
paratory schools are better for collegiate work than those
of the New England universities. The preparatory schools
can do the teaching that is now done in the Freshman and
Sophomore years of universities better than the universi-
ties can do it. The object of a preparatory-school faculty
is to teach. The faculty knows how to do it and wants to
do it. A university faculty is selected to advance knowl-

-78-

EDUCATIONAL FUNCTION OF NEW ENGLAND

edge. It does not want to teach and frequently does not
know how to do it. As a result Freshman and Sophomore
teaching is relegated to youthful instructors whose one am-
bition is to get out of it as soon as possible into the more
respectable, remunerative, and rarefied atmosphere of
scholarly research. To turn the New England preparatory
schools into colleges would relieve the universities of a bur-
den they do not want, give the schools an opportunity
they are equipped to grasp, introduce some education into
the two most wasteful years of the university course, and
set an example for the country.

The object of these new colleges should be to give a
sound general education to the students in them. One of
the virtues of the organization that I foresee is that it would
compel us to find out what a sound general education is. I
cannot truthfully say that New England has done much
for us lately in helping us to find out what the curriculum
should contain. The principal differences between New
England and the rest of the country have been on the issue
of Greek and l^atin. As formulated, the issue was not worth
fighting over, The classical position degenerated into a de-
fense, not of reading and understanding the great books of
the ancient world, but of studying their language in infinite
detail and as an end in itself in such a way as to create in
the student a profound distaste for the ancient world and
all its works.

If we are going to convince our fellow-citizens that edu-
cation is an affair of the intellect, we must have a course
of study that will corroborate, instead of refute, our pre-
tensions. New England has a great intellectual tradition.
If it will now revitalize that tradition, it may discover in
the process what a general education ought to be. It may
even discover a new classicism more worth fighting about
than the old. With deference I suggest to the New England
preparatory schools (after they become colleges) a course
of study based upon ideas how to recognize them, analyze

79*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

them, develop them, and apply them. This used to be done
through what was called the "trivium": grammar^ rhet-
oric, and logic. A course of study composed of the classics
and the trivium would make the college an intellectual
enterprise and college education an intellectual experience.
The graduate would have had no vocational training. He
would have trained his mind. He would be better equipped
to meet practical situations than one whose training had
been given him through the medium of little imitation
practical situations in the classroom. I suggest also that
the graduate of such a college would be better equipped to
go into the university than one who had passed through a
preparatory school of the variety that exists today.

With colleges and universities aiming to attain these
ends, we might have an educational system in America
that would give us the trained intelligence we need, that
would furnish direction to our people, and that would pro-
duce at last an enlightened nation. To lead us to the
achievement of these ideals is the educational function of
New England.

80-

THE WESTERN UNIVERSITIES

YOU are of course of the opinion that the western
universities are the most important, delightful, and
powerful institutions in the world. In this opinion I
entirely concur. Therefore you do not need to argue with
me, and I am spared the necessity of arguing with you.
Nor can I hope to provide you, who attended these univer-
sities, with any additional light on this subject. Therefore
in the few minutes that I shall consume I shall devote my-
self to something which you may know less about, or which
through the lapse of time you may have forgotten.

I propose to discuss the peculiar responsibility of the
western universities and the limitations on their success,
influence, and prosperity. Now the peculiar responsibility
of the western universities is the responsibility for the sys-
tem of public education. With one notable exception the
eastern universities have never acknowledged any such re-
sponsibility. For one thing, most of their students come
from private schools. For another, they have most of them
been in a position to exercise a kind of discrimination in ad-
mitting students which has been denied to the western uni-
versities either because of their public character or the low
state of their finances. Finally, the eastern universities
have not had the close association with public education
which any western university has had either through being
a state institution or being surrounded by them.

The direction higher education may take in the West,
particularly in the metropolitan universities, may be to-
ward the Continental and Scottish scheme, under which
little effort is made to arrange, supervise, or control the liv-
ing habits of students, and the entire attention of the insti-

81*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

tution is devoted to giving them the best teachers than can
be found. Any such development in the West will require,
of course, some change in the attitude of our constituency.
Education in America now calls for a large amount of nurs-
ing. Universities have developed the idea in parents, or
parents have forced it upon universities, that the institu-
tion is in some way responsible for the moral, social, physi-
cal, and intellectual welfare of the student. This is very
nice for the parents; it is hard on the universities, for, be-
sides being expensive, it deflects them from their main task,
which is the advancement of knowledge. Clearly a univer-
sity ought to have a health service to protect it against
epidemics. It ought to provide every facility for the stu-
dents to participate in the advancement of knowledge.
But, sooner or later, it must take the position that the stu-
dent should not be sent to the university unless he is inde-
pendent and intelligent enough to go there. The university
cannot undertake to give him character or intellectual in-
terest. Parents whose children have neither should keep
them at home or send them to another kind of institution.
Whatever may be the responsibilities of a college, a uni-
versity is not a custodial establishment, or a church, or a
body-building institute. If it were free to stop behaving as
though it were, it would be a better university.

But this necessity of chaperonage is, after all, a limita-
tion on universities everywhere, and what I am trying to
talk about is the peculiar duties and limitations of the west-
ern universities. The improvement of the system of public
education is the peculiar duty of the western universities
because they are, many of them, parts of that system and
because the eastern universities will not or cannot bother
about it. Now the situation of public education in the West
is most precarious. The balance-the-budget-reduce-the-
cost-of-government hysteria has swept over that country
as nowhere else in the United States. This is not surpris-
ing. The Master of the National Grange told me in Janu-

-82-

THE WESTERN UNIVERSITIES

ary that teachers' salaries in his district had multiplied
seven times, measured in the price of corn. It is remarkable
that the agricultural interest has been as lenient to educa-
tion as it has. The farmers' organizations and the labor or-
ganizations, realizing the importance of the public schools
to their children, have done their best to maintain them at
the highest possible level. The attitude of other organiza-
tions, composed of business men, large taxpayers, and
those who can afford to avoid the public schools, has not
been so favorable, and has resulted in the first serious mass
attack on the system that the country has ever seen. Edu-
cation has always heretofore been the American substitute
for a national religion. Whatever the economic situation
has been, we have felt that the schools must be preserved
and even expanded. Now teachers' salaries are being re-
duced and then withheld, school terms are being shortened,
subjects are being abandoned, and the gains in public edu-
cation hardly won over twenty-five years are being swept
away.

At the same time the system faces new problems of such
a startling character that it would have difficulty in meet-
ing them in the best of times. Industry has ceased to be
the natural outlet for adolescence. The legal age for going
into employment has been steadily advancing, and with it
the normal age for leaving school. During the depression
this condition has been accentuated by the fact that the
boy who left school could not find a job. Consequently he
has remained, and high schools all over the country have
been forced to provide classes for their alumni. Moreover,
there will probably be still further advance in the legal age
for going into employment and still further difficulty in
finding employment when that age has been attained. The
National Child Labor Committee has announced that it
will take two million children out of industry. What will it
do with thenTwTien it gets them out? If we cannot put our
children to work, we must put them in school.

.83-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

The result of this situation is that we must look forward,
whether we like it or not, to accommodating the youth of
this country in educational institutions up to their eight-
eenth or twentieth year. The task of the western univer-
sities is to lead the way in the construction of the new edu-
cational institutions made necessary by these new condi-
tions. Within the next fifty years we shall see the develop-
ment of countless public junior colleges giving general edu-
cation to the local community as the high school has been
giving preparatory education to the local community.
These colleges will be terminal, in the sense that they will
prepare for life rather than for the university. They must
be numerous and they must be local, for the simple reason
that the great majority of their students could not afford to
live away from home. Parallel with these institutions must
arise technical institutes giving sub-professional, business,
technical, and home-making courses to those who do not
want and would not profit by a cultural education. With
the proper development of these two types of institutions
we should be on the way toward an educational system
adapted to the needs and capacities of the individual.

The proper development of these institutions will not be
automatic. The financial plight of public education and the
tremendous numbers with which it has to deal make it al-
most impossible for those engaged in it to do more than
administer what they are now doing. Leadership must
come from somewhere; it can come only from the univer-
sities. The universities should therefore regard the first two
years of college as experimental; there they should develop
the methods and the curriculum for the public junior col-
leges. If, in addition, they can take over technical insti-
tutes and use them as models for public education, they
will be making an even greater contribution. Nobody
knows today what a general education ought to be. No-
body knows what a sub-professional technical education

84-

THE WESTERN UNIVERSITIES

ought to be. The situation in public education requires us
to find out. Only the western universities can do it.

The limitations on the ability of the western universities
to cope with this task are three. The first two are obvious:
numbers and money. Some western universities are now so
large that they have to direct most of their attention to
finding classrooms and dormitories and dining-halls large
enough for their students. It is difficult to conceive and
execute new ideas under these circumstances. In the sec-
ond place the western universities have been hit by the de-
pression to an extent that few people realize. Of the seven
universities which in 1929-30 spent more than ten million
dollars each., three were eastern and four were western.
Three of the four were state universities, Minnesota, Mich-
igan, and California. Minnesota is an agricultural state;
Michigan's troubles are world-famous; California has late-
ly received dreadful shocks of more than one variety. The
result has been that these universities have had to struggle
to maintain what they have been doing, to say nothing of
taking on something new. And, if they are in this condi-
tion, think of the situation in places less wealthy, like the
Dakotas, Kansas, and Nebraska. At a time when the op-
portunity and obligation of the universities are greater
than ever before, their ability to meet them is at the lowest
point in history.

But these conditions may change, and the universities
may be able to press forward once again. One limitation on
the influence of the western universities will remain. It is
the inferiority complex. ^Mark Van Doren of Columbia was
lately on our campus. He was asked by a student reporter
what the difference was between the eastern and the western
universities. He replied that the principal difference "was
that the question would be asked only in a western univer-
sity>*The time has come when the western universities
must rely upon themselves. They cannot look to England
or to Europe. They cannot look to New England or New

85*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

York. They must rely upon themselves. The whole social
and educational scene which the western universities face
is vastly different from that confronted in the East. The
problems of public education to which I have already re-
ferred the junior college movement which has brought
four hundred and fifty such institutions to our doors in
forty years all these things mean that our policies must be
constructed with a view to elements of which eastern uni-
versities are quite oblivious. We cannot solve new and dif-
ferent problems by methods developed to meet conditions
remote from our own. Only through the exercise of inde-
pendent judgment can the western universities achieve the
excellence which the West demands.

In the effort to exercise such judgment our alumni can
be of the greatest assistance to us by suppressing the in-
feriority complex in themselves. They must realize that
they cannot test the standing of their Alma Mater by many
notions prevalent in the East. We have different functions,
different duties, different opportunities. Why should we
assume inferiority if we are not like a model which we
should be foolish to imitate? James Bryce said that the
most depressing feature of American cities was their uni-
formity. Still more depressing is the uniformity of our uni-
versities. The western universities must now strike out and
be themselves. If they do, you will be even prouder of
them than you are today.

86-

THE SENTIMENTAL ALUMNUS

A~ ^ alumni are dangerous. They see their Alma Ma-
ter through a rosy haze that gets thicker with the
years. They do not know what the college was
really like. They do not want to know what it is like now.
They want to imagine that it is like what they think it was
like in their time. Therefore they oppose all change. If
changes are made without their approval, they are resent-
ful. Since no useful change could ever be made with their
approval, few useful changes have been made in higher
education.

The more sentimental an alumnus is, the more danger-
ous he is. For him the rosy haze is denser; to him the good
old days were better; to him any innovation is more
scandalous than to his hazy and reactionary companions.
He sees a beautiful uniqueness about the period when he
was in college. That period has never been equaled before
or since. The sole object of the institution should be to
return to those glorious days that produced him.

All these vices you see exemplified in me; for I am the
alumnus, and the sentimental alumnus, par excellence. In
addition to the customary sentimentality which afflicts the
aging graduate when he thinks of his college, Oberlin
arouses in me that sentimentality which comes to all of us
when we think of home. Here lived my grandfather and
grandmother, my uncles and aunts, my mother and father,
my brothers and I, all in some sort of relation to this
college. Since the college dominated the town, since we
took most of our meals in a faculty boarding house, since
the hours of those meals were determined by the hours of
chapel and my father's classes, since all the occupations of

87*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

every day revolved around the College, the memories that
I have of home are memories of the College, too. It is im-
possible for me to separate the streets of Oberlin, the trees,
the buildings, the activities of the College, from my family
and my family's friends who in those surroundings were a
part of those activities years ago. And since those were the
most impressionable years of my life, those people seem to
me much more real than you whom I see before me now,
and far more gifted. University administration is a disillu-
sioning kind of thing, and I have been in it for eleven
years; but the illusion I have of Oberlin, the mirage that is
the Oberlin I knew, can never be shattered.

The inhabitants of that mirage move about against a
background that you will tell me has long since disappeared.
Indeed, you will say that they have, many of them, dis-
appeared themselves. You may even hint that neither the
place nor the people ever existed as I claim. This may be
true for you, but not for me. For me Oberlin never has
been and never can be any different from what my mirage
reveals. For me the campus still has two little red build-
ings crumbling away upon its corners. For me there is no
retiring age for members of the staff, nor any new appoint-
ments. For me the class of 1919 never went to war and
never graduated. This static, beautiful Oberlin wherein my
friends and I are forever young and forever friends de-
prives me of the powers of reason and leaves me only the
power of recollection.

The function of an administrative officer, however, is
not reminiscence but projection. The true executive finds
writing even an annual report a chore, because it takes his
mind off the future and forces him to the uncongenial task
of recalling events which, however recent, are still in the
past. The educational executive, too, thinks not only of
the future of his own institution but also of its place in the
future educational system. The sentimentality that .bur-
dens reminiscence is foreign to these projections. The

THE SENTIMENTAL ALUMNUS

sentimental alumnus cannot be the administrative officer
not, at least, at the same moment. And so today I can-
not discuss the future of the college, a subject on which I
have written with what seemed to me a very high degree
of intelligence on other occasions. I still think of Oberlin
as something isolated, independent, unique. No general
educational observations can be permitted to apply to it.
The sentimental alumnus is interested in its future only
that he may re-create the past.

I must also admit that there have vanished from my
mirage the things I wish to omit from it. With a struggle
I can remember aspects of the Oberlin of my time which
are no longer part of it to me. I can remember, for ex-
ample, that this is the hottest, coldest, wettest, flattest
part of the state of Ohio, so uninteresting and disagreeable
that Plum Creek, the arboretum, the reservoir, and even
the cemetery seemed like scenic gems glowing in a dull
setting of yellow clay. I can remember sitting every day
in this room on the most uncomfortable of all chapel seats
trying hard not to hear what the speaker was saying. I
can remember the dancing rule, the rules confining ladies
to their rooms at earlier and earlier hours in inverse propor-
tion to the time they had spent in college, and the smoking
rule, which I abhorred but was not robust enough to violate.

But these items do not disturb me very much. On the
contrary, they help me to preserve my illusion of the
uniqueness of the Oberlin of my day. It assists me to this
view to believe that my college had the worst climate, the
hardest seats, and the silliest rules of any institution in the
world. These items merge with my general picture, taking
their place with others of a more favorable nature, such as
the conviction that in my time all the athletes were heroes
and all the girls extraordinarily good looking, convictions
that neither the sight of Ohio State beating Oberlin 12.8-0
nor detached but sympathetic study of the female sex has
served to eradicate.

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

Some of these items, too, that at first seem unfavorable,
on reflection make their positive contribution to the mirac-
ulous Oberlin I remember. A pervasive element of that
miracle was independence. Oberlin cared nothing for
money and nothing for fame. By the same token it did not
object to being ridiculous on principle. In perspective the
silly regulations of my time endear Oberlin to me not for
what they were but for what they represented. They repre-
sented a spirit so independent that all Oberlin's conven-
tions were unconventional. The answer to all objections to
those conventions was simple, complete, and characteristic.
If we didn't like it, we knew what we could do. We didn't
have to come to Oberlin. If we did come, it was assumed
that we proposed to abide by the laws of the place. If we
found, on making the attempt, that we didn't have the
strength of character required, we could peacefully retire.
I remember no departures from this attitude. Once a pro-
fessor's son I knew was detected in the act of smoking with
Mr. Braithwaite, the genial engineer at the water works.
He was summarily expelled, and the community agreed
that the only thing for that boy to do was to join the navy.

The independence of the College was in some way or
other communicated to us. I do not know how it was done.
Perhaps it was through those chapel services we did not
think we heard. Perhaps it was through classes where we
were often inattentive. Perhaps and this, I think, is near
the truth it was in the air. One result was that the self-
supporting student enjoyed an elevated social standing
among us merely because he was self-supporting. It was
impossible to be a prominent undergraduate unless one was
working one's way. And this in turn, as you may imagine,
had its own repercussions on the quality of the life we led.
None of us could take the College as a matter of course
when so many of us were making sacrifices to attend it.
The tone of the College was set by those to whom educa-
tion meant opportunity rather than ritual.

90-

THE SENTIMENTAL ALUMNUS

This was not without its effects on our interests. It is
startling, and perhaps untrue, to say that the curriculum
meant even more to us than the extra-curriculum. I know
that here you will say I am romancing but nevertheless I
believe I am reporting accurately our state of mind. You
may be even more surprised to hear that to us music and
the arts and intellectual activities meant even more than
athletics. Perhaps this was because our teams were not
very good. Perhaps it was because our interest in music
could be indulged in various charmingly coeducational
ways. Whatever the cause, the interest in art and music
Oberlin gave us was one of the most valuable and lasting
of her contributions.

We acquired from Oberlin's independence not only
habits of work and respect for work and a love of the true
and the beautiful. We also absorbed that reforming spirit
which is merely another aspect of independence. In the
earliest times Oberlin had admitted women, had freed
slaves, had opened its doors to negroes, had campaigned
against the organized liquor traffic, and sacrificed its grad-
uates to the development of China. And today one cannot
associate with a group of Oberlin alumni without being
struck by the fact that, far from accepting the world, they
are all trying to improve it. If one of them is actually
engaged in making money, he is almost apologetic about it,
and usually assures you privately that his extra-curriculum
activities are devoted to civic betterment. A university
president once complained to me about an Oberlin gradu-
ate on his faculty. He said he was an excellent man in his
field, but was always stirring up trouble about public ques-
tions and the wrongs of suffering humanity. The answer
to my learned colleague was, of course, that he had never
been a student at Oberlin. If he had been, instead of deplor-
ing the activities of his professor, he would have joined in
them himself.

Another phase of Oberlin's independence appeared in its

-91-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

resistance to the educational trend of the time. In general
that was a trend toward expansion, publicity, athleticism,
ambition, and uniformity. The junior college was invented,
swept through the West like a prairie fire, and then de-
voted itself to becoming a college of liberal arts as much
like every other college as possible. The colleges of liberal
arts were moved by similar aspirations. Many of them
began to call themselves ''universities," apparently under
the impression that a change in name was a change in
character and that a university was something quite
superior to a college. In spite of the fact that the college-
teacher's business is to teach, the associations of colleges
began to require their members to appoint only individuals
who had degrees acquired by research. Except where it
was compelled by the standardizing agencies, Oberlin did
not care whether these things were going on. Perhaps it
did not know it. It directed its attention to giving young
people the best teaching that could be found in the best
environment that could be framed for them.

In a period of expansion, Oberlin limited its enrolment.
In the football era, Oberlin paid no more attention to
athletics than was required by a reasonable program of
physical education. In a period of imitation, Oberlin held
fast to the secret it had known from the first, that what-
ever the future of the college may be, it will not be found
in copying the aims, methods, curriculum, or organization
of any other institution. Oberlin remained a college.

As I have already suggested, the function of the college
is to teach. It is not to conduct scientific investigation or
professional training. It aims at transmitting to young
people an intelligible scheme of things. This is a full-time
job. It requires an excellent staff centering its attention
on teaching, on improving its teaching, on making its
scheme of things more intelligent and intelligible. The re-
sponsibility of adding to the world's knowledge does not
rest upon the college. Its object is to communicate it.

92-

THE SENTIMENTAL ALUMNUS

This the Oberlin of my day understood very well. Any
friend of any college should say to it, 'The Kingdom of
Heaven is within you." Oberlin did not need to have it
said. Intent on doing better and better teaching, it gave
us the best teaching I have seen or experienced anywhere.
With all allowances for the enthusiasm of youth and the
devotion I feel to Oberlin, it seems to me that it had
attained at that time that serenity which comes from
clarity of purpose and the certainty of its accomplishment.
In that scene of turmoil which was American education, it
knew where it was going and why.

A peculiar possession of the college of liberal arts is its
influence on character. In a university a preoccupation
with character serves to divert the institution from its
scholarly and professional tasks, and eventually dilutes its
performance of them without contributing materially to
the development of character. In the small, compact col-
lege the development of character is inseparable from the
daily association of students and teachers. All attempts
to teach character directly will fail. They degenerate into
vague exhortations to be good which leave the bored
listener with a desire to commit outrages which would
otherwise have never occurred to him. Hard intellectual
work is doubtless the best foundation of character, for
without the intellectual virtues the moral sense rests on
habit and precept alone. And it was on hard intellectual
work that Oberlin placed its emphasis. It was not until
much later that I learned that it might be respectable to
slide by with a gentleman's grade. Before that I should no
more have thought of it than I should have thought of
eating with my mouth open or failing to take rny hat off
to a lady.

The community which was Oberlin seems to me to have
achieved a synthesis of the intellectual virtues, the moral
virtues, and what we may call the vegetative, or physi-
cal, virtues. The Rational Living about which we used to

93-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

hear so much in those days required us first of all to be
rational. But it insisted, too, that we should behave our-
selves and show a due regard for our health. I can remem-
ber a speech by President King in which he told us how
ashamed he felt whenever he caught a cold. That balance
which is so difficult to obtain among an interest in the
private lives of students, a concern for their physical well-
being, and the paramount object of the college, their
intellectual development, Oberlin in those days achieved.
In my time the College was operated by thirty-two
faculty committees. How, under such a scheme, anybody
ever managed to give or get an education is a mystery to
me. But the whole educational process is still a mystery.
We know little more about it than that the traditions and
ideals of certain institutions have through the years re-
sulted in consequences moral, social, and intellectual which
our country needs now as never before. In the highest rank
of these institutions is Oberlin. If Oberlin will adhere to
Oberlin's traditions and ideals if Oberlin, in short, will be
Oberlin the future of our Alma Mater is secure.

-94-

EDUCATION AS A NATIONAL
ENTERPRISE

I WISH this morning to insist upon a paradox. The
first half of it is that there is an educational system in
the United States; and the second half of it is that the
parts of that system should be independent of one another.
There is an educational system in the United States.
The separate origin of its various parts has obscured the
fact of its existence. We have heightened the impression
of its non-existence through that mutual disdain with
which we have customarily treated one another. That you
havev asked the presidents of two privately endowed uni-
versities to address you on education as a national enter-
prise suggests that we here today, at least, realize that our
work is interdependent, that our financial interests are
identical, and that our problems are the same. In this
sense, the sense of joint occupation in a common enter-
prise, we are all parts of the educational system of the
United States.

Our work is interdependent. The universities may de-
velop ideas in higher education of striking symmetry and
beauty; they are futile unless they penetrate the public
schools. At seventeen, or eighteen, or nineteen, the student
is, from my point of view at least, far too old to effect sig-
nificant changes in his habits and attitudes. The schools
may experiment to their hearts' content; their accomplish-
ment must fall short of complete success if they are unable
to dislodge the ancient prejudices of universities. Even
privately endowed universities have been able to restrict
the scope of high schools managed by their own depart-

.95.

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

ments of education through solid indifference to their work
and rigid adherence to requirements framed as though they
did not exist. There is, moreover, a twilight zone between
the college and the high school, the zone of general educa-
tion. We do not know what to do with it. We shall never
find out unless we are prepared to engage in a co-operative
attack on its problems. The integration of the elementary
school and the high school has resulted in great savings of
time and money. Only through similar integration of the
high school and the college can the problems of general
education be solved. If we can regard the educational sys-
tem as a unit, we can expedite and direct this process.

Our financial interests are identical. If the schools are
cut to pieces this year, the state universities will be next
year. If the schools are crippled now, the colleges will be
later, either through reductions in their funds or through
gross defects in the preparation of their students. If our
work is interdependent, the universities cannot without
protest watch a major operation performed on the schools
which, to judge by its present rate and direction, seems
more likely to kill the patient than to profit him or the
community. The president of the University of North Car-
olina has taken a position for which he deserves the thanks
of everyone in education. He has said that since the Uni-
versity is part of the educational system of the state, it
must receive in this emergency the same financial treat-
ment as the public schools. This position is as sound as it
is courageous. In self-defense the universities must defend
the educational system of which they are a part.

Undoubtedly, in the hysteria of inflation the schools,
like the colleges and universities, did some things that they
can now do without. But the things that communities
propose to do to them in the hysteria of economy far sur-
pass the wildest aberrations of bull-market days. We hear
a great deal about frills. What are frills? Teachers* sal-

96-

EDUCATION AS A NATIONAL ENTERPRISE

aries appear to be frills in some cities. The health of school
children is a frill in others. Since night schools are a frill in
one community, we close them and throw seventy-five
thousand people into the streets. The plain fact is that the
schools are under attack because it is easier to get money
from them than it is to correct the fundamental iniquities
and antiquities of local government. Only a people that
had no conception of the place of education in its national
life could contemplate the ruin of the next generation as the
best remedy for governmental insolvency.

Our work is interdependent; our financial interests are
identical; our problems are the same. The present effort
of universities to solve their problems is comparatively
new. In the flood of money and students that has poured
into these institutions in the past thirty years the intel-
lectual processes of administrators have been almost wholly
directed to accommodating the students and spending the
money. As long as both continued to roll in, we did not
have to care very much what we did with them. Now that
the flow of both is diminishing, we are wondering about
our methods, our standards, our organization, our curric-
ulum, our research work, our building programs; and
some people are even beginning to wonder about athletics.
The consequence has been all kinds of experiments, studies,
and surveys. They have revealed principally how little we
know about what we are doing.

The public schools face the same problems for the same
reason. The tremendous increase in student numbers, the
vast amount of new equipment they required, the money
that came in almost unsought all these things have
diverted schools, colleges, and universities from the main
issue, which is, What are we trying to do? We must admit
that our own inability to answer this question with a
unanimous voice, our very divergent views of what we are
about, seriously weaken our efforts to enlighten the public
and to secure from it the support that education deserves.

97*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

What is the place of the private university, the state uni-
versity, the college, the junior college, the high school, the
preparatory school, and the technical institute in our edu-
cational system? We can only find out by breaking down
the barriers that separate those in charge of these various
units. We can only find out by recognizing our community
of interest and by facing our problems as the problems of
us all. We can only find out, in short, by starting with the
assumption that there is an educational system in the
United States, and that it is our business to run it as a
system for the benefit of the community as a whole.

And, yet, I must at this point insist on the second half
of my paradox: the parts of this system must be inde-
pendent of one another. Because students at different
stages require different treatment, separate organizations
of specialists have grown up, each designed to care for the
special needs of students at a given stage. Each of these
organizations requires complete freedom to work out its
own program. It must devote itself to meeting the needs
of its students rather than to meeting the demands of some
other organization.

One reason why there is confusion in universities as to
the function of the junior college, the senior college, and
the graduate school is that no one of these groups has had
this freedom to work out its ow r n program. The tendency
is always for the organization above to regard the organ-
ization below as merely preparatory to its own efforts. The
organization above, therefore, will always seek to dominate
the organization below in order to secure students who
will fit readily into its machinery. But it must be clear
that, as long as the junior college is controlled by the
senior college and the senior college by the graduate school,
no one of them can make its full contribution to the ad-
vance of education in America. No educational institution
can flourish unless it is free to determine its own ideals and
its own methods of achieving them.

EDUCATION AS A NATIONAL ENTERPRISE

It must follow that the public schools must have this
freedom. The forces of experiment and progress latent in
them can never be released if they are compelled to think
chiefly of meeting the requirements imposed upon them
by institutions of higher learning. If one thing is clear, it
is that the primary purpose of the high school is not to
prepare students for the colleges and universities. By be-
having as though it were, the colleges and universities
repress the high schools, and to that extent weaken them-
selves by weakening the educational system to which they
themselves belong. The great task of educational admin-
istration in America is to take the organization above off
the neck of the organization below. Our slogan must be
co-operation, and not domination.

The problems of education are more complex and
baffling than they have ever been before. The elaborate
structure that has been rapidly erected is in danger from
misunderstanding without and disagreement within. Much
of the misunderstanding without results from the discord
within. If we can envisage an educational system in the
United States, built on co-operation and not on rigid
central control, if we can grant to each organization that
independence which its full development requires, we shall
illuminate the educational scene for our people and for
ourselves, and in the light of a new day perform our
common task.

'99-

THE OUTLOOK FOR PUBLIC
EDUCATION

THE depression has presented educators with prob-
lems the like of which they never faced before. And
it has presented them with them at a time when
both their morale and their resources are at the lowest
point they have touched in history.

American education has, up to now, been the idol of our
people. Ever since the days of the Northwest Ordinance
we have thought of it as the foundation of our democracy
and the bulwark of our liberties. It w r as expensive, but it
was worth it. The present depression has been the first in
which education has been adversely affected. And I have
no hesitation in saying that, of all public services, educa-
tion has suffered most.

I cannot explain this reversal of form. I cannot account
for the enthusiasm with which chambers of commerce and
associations of taxpayers have clamored for a reduction in
the opportunities for their children. Perhaps the schools
were attacked because it was easy to attack them and it
was difficult to dislodge the politicians who were really
squandering the public money. Perhaps it w r as our own
fault. Perhaps we had expanded too rapidly, without
bothering to have the people understand what we were
doing. Perhaps our organization, our course of study, and
our purposes were so confused that laymen could not com-
prehend them. Perhaps we did not always comprehend
them ourselves.

Whatever the cause, the consequence was clear. The
minute the cry for the reduction of public expenditures
went up, expenditures on public education went down.
Nobody thought of revising the antiquated system of tax-

loo-

THE OUTLOOK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION

ation. Nobody thought of giving us a chance to present
programs of economy. In many parts of the country, if
money had to be saved, it was the school money that was
saved even if the schools had to be closed. With an en-
larged demand for seats in schools new school buildings
were postponed. The teachers, few of whom had got rich in
the practice of their profession, were of course reduced to
penury through the reduction of salaries and the failure to
pay them when reduced.

When the federal government began to move against the
depression, education was the last thing to occur to it.
Indeed, the group which has received the greatest atten-
tion from European governments was the one for which
our own did least. That group is youth. Upon youth every
Continental nation has centered its efforts in the last few
years. I do not say that the motives of these governments
have always been laudable; they have been anxious to
perpetuate their political philosophies and have seen that
this could only be done by concentrating on the young. I
do say that they have recognized an obvious fact which
our people have failed to notice, that the immediate future
of our nation depends upon what is done with the young
people who have had to grow up during the calamitous
years now happily drawing to a close.

An impartial observer would have supposed that the
first concern of any country would be its children. Such an
observer would have expected our people to insist with one
voice upon the maintenance, and even the improvement,
of the school system; to insist upon the enrichment of the
course of study; and to recognize that the teacher was more
important than ever. When the federal government began
to struggle against the disaster that was overwhelming us,
it was only reasonable to expect it to come first of all to
the rescue of the children. On the contrary, for three years
the federal government did not lift a finger to help the
schools. The first step which admitted the existence of the

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

adolescent unemployed was taken by the new administra-
tion in the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
But it never entered anybody's mind that it might be
better to send the boys back to school than to send them
into the woods.

Now, at last, we have an emergency plan of federal
assistance to education for which the administration de-
serves the gratitude of us all. School buildings are being
constructed. Students are completing their education.
Teachers are being employed. Adult education and nursery
schools are being developed. In seven states the federal
government is keeping the schools open, and even the
Chicago teachers have been paid.

Of course, the kind of educational program that we must
now carry through cannot be sustained without federal aid
and federal aid on a permanent basis. I have been a long
time in education, and I have yet to hear a single valid
argument against the position that education is a national
responsibility. We should regard it as inhuman to let a
fellow-citizen starve merely because he was living across
the boundary of our state. We have seen no impropriety
in letting the children of some states grow up without
schools, even though the consequences of their ignorance
may be visited on us through the United States Senate and
through their vote in national elections. The federal gov-
ernment must assume the obligation to equalize educational
opportunity within the nation.

It must do more. It must recognize the fact that edu-
cation must be one of the fundamental interests and
activities of our people. If the Cabinet is representative of
those interests and activities, then education must have a
place there. The distinguished educator who occupies the
Office of Education is a subordinate officer of the Depart-
ment of the Interior. As such he has no automatic means
of communicating the needs of education to the President,
the Cabinet, and the heads of the new administrative

102-

THE OUTLOOK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION

bureaus. If the Commissioner of Education had been of
Cabinet rank, I cannot believe that federal interest in edu-
cation would have been so inadequate or so long delayed.

On our part we must understand that, if we are going to
receive federal support, we must conform to federal stand-
ards. It is not by refusing to conform but by another route
that we must find our protection against bureaucracy.
When we observe a reaction like that we experienced in
Chicago a year ago, in which, in defiance or ignorance of
professional opinion, a small group of office-holders under-
took to throw the school system back twenty years, we
must feel that only through organizing professional opinion
can similar destructive operations be prevented in the
future. When states pass laws forbidding certain types of
teaching, they should bear the weight of organized, expert
judgment. The qualifications and practices of teachers,
the organization, presentation, and content of courses
of study, are not the proper subject of decision by the
generality of mankind. Until it can be made clear that
education is a profession, that the profession has standards,
ideals, and traditions which it is prepared to enforce, edu-
cation will at intervals be at the mercy of politicians, large
taxpayers, and cranks.

The only protection against government, visible or in-
visible, is in the professional tradition. It is fallacious to
assume that government cannot at any time dictate the
policies and personnel of education. It can. It has the
power. A tremendous outcry from the citizens did not pre-
vent the colossal damage that was done to the schools of
Chicago. The history of educational institutions from the
monasteries to the German universities shows that it is
not the issue of private or public funds, private or public
control, that determines their independence. It is the
strength of the professional tradition. Where that tradi-
tion is strongest, namely, in England, the parliamentary
grants that the private universities have received do not

103-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

lead anyone to expect that, because of them, the govern-
ment will attempt to regulate the policies of Oxford and
Cambridge.

The absolute necessity of federal support for public edu-
cation becomes apparent when we look at the task that is
now before us. That task is nothing less than the tutelage
of the entire population. If we look first at the problem of
juvenile and adolescent education, w r e see at once that the
economy of plenty upon which we have entered will require
us steadily to raise the legal age for going into industry.
One of the things we are in for is the removal of the ado-
lescent population from the labor market. By codes, by
the attitude of capital and labor, and eventually, I hope,
by the Child Labor Amendment, that population will be
prevented from getting work. This palliative of our eco-
nomic ills is so obvious that it is certain to be applied. Now
the adolescent population cannot be transported to penal
colonies, however gratifying that might be from many
points of view. Therefore it will have to be placed in edu-
cational institutions until its members can become self-
sustaining.

Although a declining birth-rate may for a time, at least,
relieve the elementary schools, the pressure we are now
feeling in the high schools and junior colleges will continue
and will grow more intense. When three new junior col-
leges were opened at public expense in Chicago, they were
rapidly crowded. The great increases in the enrolments in
the Freshman years of public colleges and universities this
year are merely symptomatic of a condition which will be
with us for many years to come. That condition is clear
and simple: the alternative to employment is education.
Since we know that there will not be employment for the
young, we must see to it that there is education for them.

Contrary to the popular belief, educators have in the
past twenty-five years been reluctant to expand and diver-
sify educational opportunity. They have often opposed

104*

THE OUTLOOK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION

the demands of parents and of industry for more courses
in more subjects. The so-called "enrichment" of the curric-
ulum, which was characteristic of our educational pro-
gram up to the depression, was largely forced upon the
schools by the public. I predict that as our economic diffi-
culties recede that pressure will be renewed, and rightly so.
Our business should be to direct intelligently the educa-
tional boom which will shortly be upon us.

That boom will carry us, no matter how we may protest,
into a field from which we have long withheld our blessing,
the field of adult education. We used to think of adult
education as the foible of the philanthropist and the social
worker. It connoted to us lectures by somewhat disorderly
individuals who were interested in reforming our social,
economic, and political system in rather disagreeable ways.
I put it to you that we have never thought of adult edu-
cation as education and that we have consequently de-
clined to accept much responsibility for it.

We know that the shorter day and the shorter week are
going to be with us long after the depression is over
People may for a time spend their new and perhaps un
welcome leisure in sleep, at the movies, or in driving back
and forth on the crowded highways, catching glimpses of
the countryside between the billboards. It is inconceiv-
able, however, that these forms of entertainment will long
satisfy our population. They will demand, and are de-
manding, some form of occupation which will assist them
to a more varied, stimulating, and important brand of
activity. They will demand education. And they will de-
mand it of us.

The exclusive preoccupation of the American education-
al system with the juvenile population is a little ridiculous,
and has been beneficial neither to the system nor to the
country. The mayor of a great city said the other day
that all anybody needed was a grade-school education.
That was all he had had. Without debating the merits oi

105*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

an abbreviated education as revealed in the life and works
of this statesman, I beg to point out that his consistent
opposition to education may perhaps be explained by the
fact that he thinks of it as something he endured in child-
hood, like the mumps, measles, chicken pox, or whooping
cough. Having had it once, he need not, and indeed can-
not, have it again. Our exclusive preoccupation with the
juvenile population has divorced us from the sustained
interest and support of adults,

We are, then, face-to-face with a tremendous task. We
must accommodate the youth of the nation up to their
eighteenth, or even their twentieth, year. There is nowhere
else for them to go. We must undertake the education of
adults, although the field is uncharted and our experience
is almost nil. All this we must do when our resources are
depleted, when our plant is inadequate, when our spirits
are low. It is bad enough to be in education at all, for it is
a mysterious business. And this mysterious business is car-
ried on by people grossly underpaid, in political units which
have proved the most unreliable in the country, subjected
to the gravest social and economic hazards. We know, too,
that when our people have recovered from their hysteria
they will turn to us again and demand that we solve their
problems for them. They will insist that we bring up their
children, because they cannot be bothered and frequently
cannot be trusted to do it themselves. They will insist that
we tell them how to spend their leisure hours and that we
stay with them while they are spending them. All these
obligations we must assume because the fate of our country
depends upon the intelligence and vision with which they
are carried through. We must have faith in education still.

We cannot hope to fulfil the wistful wishes of America
with our present educational scheme. It has not stood the
strain already placed upon it. It will not stand the strain
it will meet within the years to come. The naive faith
which our ancestors had in the processes of education can-

- 106-

THE OUTLOOK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION

not survive tremendous expansion of facilities followed by
dreadful economic collapse. A more reasoned confidence
is needed to maintain the structure in times like these. If
the American people are to understand education, we must
first understand it ourselves.

Henry James in the Preface to What Maisie Knew dis-
cussed at length what he called "the constant force that
makes for muddlement." He pointed out that the constant
force that makes for muddlement afflicts all activity all
the time. We cannot hope that education will escape its
influence. All we can do is to resist it to the end. We must
clarify for ourselves and for our fellow-citizens the pur-
poses, the organization, and the content of education.

The standard organization of education is still an eight-
year elementary school, a four-year high school, a four-year
college, and three years of graduate work. The fact that
when we describe the system we do so in terms of time is
significant. We do not think of defining it in terms of the
subject matter or purpose of its units. And yet it is entire-
ly possible that the subject matter and purpose are more
important than the period of incarceration. We are not
really interested in learning how long a pupil has been in
school. We want to find out what he knows and what he
can do. Nor can we expect to satisfy this desire by count-
ing up the number of hours he has attended classes in a
certain subject. We know that merely sitting in a room
where^a topic is being expounded does not necessarily lead
to comprehension of it. We cannot even say that the nu-
merical or literal grades presented by the pupil give us
much light on his education. They may show that he has
a good memory, that he has attended regularly, that he
was polite to his teachers, or that he had discovered that
by studying them he might avoid studying anything else.
Furthermore, a list of miscellaneous credits in everything
from stenography to solid geometry or from salesmanship
to Greek does not give us much understanding of the in-

107-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

tellectual level to which the pupil has attained. To take a
course, memorize it, take an examination given by the
teacher, pass it, forget it, and go on, seems to be the
regular cycle of student life. We may gather from these
facts that the object of the system is to develop memory
and the ability to understand those peculiar adults who
have become teachers.

Certainly *e must have methods of measurement. The
question is whether we cannot hit on something that
instead of preventing us from educating the young will
assist us in doing so. We should set up goals for the student
to reach. His manner of reaching them is immaterial. A
system of general examinations to be taken by the student
when he is ready to take them, and given, if possible, by
external examiners, seems to me to offer the best program
of measurement. Under such a system the period of incar-
ceration is irrelevant. The question is whether the student
has mastered the material.^Smce the material covers more
than one course, it is impossible to create the delusion of
mastery by mastering the teacher's habits or by memoriz-
ing little bits of information. The painful accumulation of
credits ceases to be the characteristic curse of education.

It is clear, however, that the question of measurement
leads at once into questions of organization and subject
matter, as can be seen as soon as the question is asked, How
do you know what and where you wish to measure? To an-
swer this question, you must know what the levels of edu-
cation are and what you are attempting at each one. Now
most people feel, I am sure, that the elementary school is a
perfectly obvious and obviously perfect institution. Its
task seems to be clear; it is to prepare pupils to go on into the
high school. Yet the eight-year elementary school of Ger-
many on which it was based was terminal. Here it was to
be preparatory. Its origin determined at first its course of
study and still determines its duration. It is now clear that
primary work can be completed in six years.

icS-

THE OUTLOOK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION

The purpose of the high school has been even more con-
fused. Is it to prepare pupils for life or for college? Since
most high-school graduates do not go to college, the high
school is obviously wasting its time if it acts as though they
did. Yet, in many places the high-school curriculum is still
constructed to meet collegiate requirements whose chief
distinction is their rigidity, antiquity, and remoteness from
the real world.

The high school cannot be regarded as preparatory to
college. Current economic and social developments mean
that it can no longer be regarded as terminal. The commu-
nity must extend the period of public education which the
ordinary youth is expected to enjoy by at least two years.
This will be necessary, as we have already seen, because
the ordinary youth will not be able to go to work until his
eighteenth, or even his twentieth, year. The terminus,
therefore, of public education will be advanced from about
the end of the Senior year in high school to about the end
of the Sophomore year in college.

You may say that this simply means that we must multi-
ply existing junior colleges, expecting the majority of our
adolescents to attend them. Such a suggestion compels us
to look at the situation in junior colleges. It is not clear
what the junior college is. In many places it seems to be a
continuation of high school. In others it looks like an imi-
tation of the first two years at the state university, which is
usually the weakest section of the curriculum of that insti-
tution. Since 50 per cent of its students leave it every
year, the junior college has difficulty in constructing a co-
herent program. It is, therefore, ambiguous in aim and un-
satisfactory in organization.

If we reconsider the system of public education from the
elementary school through the junior college, we see that
the normal child should be able to complete elementary
work in six years. He should then enter a secondary school,
which we may as well call the high school. This unit would

109*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

be definitely preparatory and not terminal. Its work should
be completed in four years. Some pupils might require
more time, some less. The average pupil would come to the
end of his secondary, or high-school, education at sixteen.
He would then enter one of two programs which should oc-
cupy four years, more or less. One of them should be con-
cerned with general education. The other should provide
technical or homemaking training of a sub-professional
type for those who do not want, or would not profit by, a
general cultural education. In many places these programs
can be administered most effectively by two institutions.
In that case the one administering general education might
be called a college and the one administering technical edu-
cation might be called a technical institute. In places where
both programs are under the jurisdiction of one institution,
I see no objection to calling the whole enterprise a college.

Such a scheme of public education is adjusted and diver-
sified to meet the conditions of the present day. Of course,
it cannot serve its purpose unless the colleges and technical
institutes proposed are numerous and local. They must be
numerous and they must be local because they will be in-
struments of popular education, not asylums for the few.
Each unit in the system has a definite task. Its accomplish-
ment can be tested in terms of that task. Its administra-
tion, its faculty, and the public can understand what it is
trying to do and decide to what extent it is succeeding.

Where does all this leave the colleges of liberal arts and
the universities ? They exhibit a confusion even greater than
that of the rest of the system. The college of liberal arts is
an extraordinary mixture of specialization and advanced
study, of general education and university work. It is in-
evitable that many of these organizations must abandon
their Junior and Senior years, joining their first two years
to the last two of high school. They will thus become col-
leges of the type that I am proposing, devoted to general
education, sub-professional technical training, or both. The

' IIO-

THE OUTLOOK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION

strongest of them may take another direction. They may
devote themselves to non-professional specialization in arts,
literature, and science. This might take the shape of a
three-year curriculum beginning with the Junior year and
leading to the Master's degree. I am clear that such work
may be better done in a strong college than in a university,
which from the Junior year onward should be dominated
by scholarly and professional interests.

The university is today a perfectly amazing institution.
It does everything and will do it for anybody. General edu-
cation, professional education, non-professional specializa-
tion, research, and technical work are carried on in a highly
indiscrimate and disjointed manner; and the whole is sea-
soned with the spice of college life. The result is that no-
body can tell you what a university is, and any university
can claim to be doing a wonderful job because nobody
knows what its job is or how to tell whether it is doing it.
The only possible answer to these questions is that a uni-
versity should devote itself to scholarly and professional
work; its task is the advancement of knowledge. Since edu-
cation is a branch of knowledge, a university may conduct
an experimental college or institute of the sort I have
described in order to provide ideas and information to those
laboring in the fields of general and technical education. If
a university does not wish to do this, and many of them are
not equipped to do it, it should abandon its Freshman and
Sophomore years. Thus the university may be relieved of
college life, of the burden of thousands who go there be-
cause they do not know what else to do, and may limit it-
self to research and to the education of research workers
and professional men.

It is here, at the university level, by which I mean the
beginning of the Junior year, that the principle of selection
should operate, and operate with great severity. We have
seen that we cannot exclude students below the Junior
year. Instead of selecting the students we want below the

XO FRIENDLY VOICE

Junior year, we shall have to construct the institutions they
need. The principle to be applied below the university is the
principle of differentiation. We must discriminate among
the students in order to find the institution adapted to their
needs, not in order to keep them out of education altogether.

But at the opening of the Junior year in college we can
take a stand. No student is entitled to proceed at public
expense beyond this point unless he can demonstrate that
he has the interest and ability which scholarly and pro-
fessional work requires. He is not entitled, as a matter of
right, to residence in the academic shades merely because
he does not wish to labor in more sordid surroundings or
because his parents wish to avoid the responsibility or mo-
notony of having him at home. The state has no obligation
to maintain a university as a picnic ground for the children
of citizens who, merely because of this ancestry, now claim
the right to disport themselves on the campuses of the na-
tion and to receive the Bachelor's degree for doing so.

When we turn from the problems of juvenile education
to those involved in educating adults, we find that the nu-
merous local colleges and technical institutes w^hich I hope
may arise may supply the necessary institutions to carry
on the work. They should be centers of adult education.

These institutions will find, I think, that there has been
a change in the kind of education which interests adults. If
current experience gives us any inkling of the future, we
can be reasonably confident that what they will want is not
vocational instruction (how to be a better bookkeeper, for
example) but what we call general cultural education,
education which fills in the gaps left by formal schooling or
develops artistic and literary leanings submerged by formal
schooling and the necessity of earning a living. In the
down-town branch of the University of Chicago there is a
steady trend away from vocational subjects to those which
are supposed to be of general cultural value.

So much is this the case that I think it worth while to

THE OUTLOOK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION

point out that there are dangers, as well as advantages, in
arousing professional educators about adult education. We
are used to thinking about institutions and curricula. But
adult education is in an experimental stage. It offers us
many new devices, like the radio and the motion picture,
with which we are relatively unfamiliar. It is an area, too,
in which informal, spontaneous activities activities which
w^e may regard as extra-curricular and frown upon as such
may be more rewarding than highly organized instruc-
tion. In dealing with adult education we must regard the
school, not as a place where classes are taught, but as a
center of community life, reflecting the community's inter-
est in music, art, the drama, and current affairs, as well as in
what we have been accustomed to think of as "education."
"'In all educational endeavor the basic question is, What
are we trying to do ? At present a group of able educators
in New York are attempting to convince us that what we
should be doing is preparing our pupils to bring about a
new era of collectivism. According to them, every child
born into this world alive must be not either a little liberal
or a little conservative but a little collectivism If he escapes
being born in this happy mold, it is the business of the
schools to remedy the oversight of nature and usher him
into active life fashioned after the true collectivist pattern.
I am not clear as to what that pattern is; doubtless that
will be progressively revealed to us.

Now, I take it that as far as the public schools through
the junior college are concerned they are trying to help
their pupils to be self-sustaining and to be good citizens.
Or, as Aristotle put it, "The citizen should be molded to
suit the form of government under which he lives.", Does
this mean that the teacher and the school can do noth-
ing to improve the national life? The answer is unequiv-
ocally no. The good citizen is not necessarily the one
who always votes for the party in power. The good citizen
has some understanding of the society in which he lives.

NO FRIEXDLY VOICE

and, as Jefferson put it, carries his knowledge with him to
the polls. <The first duty of the school, therefore, is to see
to it that the pupil understands the society in which he
lives. *We all know that we are doing a miserable job in this
connection at the present time. \Ve have not even the
materials through which a comprehension of the develop-
ment and current state of our society may be communi-
cated to the young. Moreover, the object of education
at higher levels ^ill not be primarily to enable the stu-
dent to earn a living or to adjust him to the political en-
vironment. Free from these obligations, the teacher and
the school may devote themselves to developing the in-
tellectual powers of the student. We must remember that
it is through the intellectual virtues that the statesman
orders means to ends and achieves the common good. The
free and independent exercise of the intelligence is the
means by which society may be improved. Proficiency in
that exercise should be the crowning achievement of the
American educational system. *

This free and independent exercise of the intelligence is
of the essence of the professional tradition, and it is now in
dreadful danger throughout the world. In our country we
are committed to the principle that the gains of civilization
shall be mass gains, diffused throughout the population. It
is inconceivable that the United States will ever depart
from this ideal. But the methods of achieving it at any
given moment must be determined by trained intelligence
and submitted to an informed and understanding people.
Without propaganda, without adherence to one ism or an-
other, the teacher may develop through the school that
universal comprehension and that individual leadership
which the national life requires. +

114*

THE SHEEP LOOK UP

MY TEXT is taken from a line of Milton: 'The
sheep look up and are not fed." When we survey
the accomplishments of education in this coun-
try in the one hundred fifty years since the Northwest Or-
dinance, we may congratulate ourselves and our predeces-
sors on what has been achieved. Nothing like it has ever
been seen anywhere. We have wrestled with a quantitative
problem of unparalleled dimensions. In an incredibly short
time we have put all the children in school, and we are
keeping them there for longer and longer periods. We have
built up state universities and state teachers colleges and
public junior colleges, accommodating young people long
after the European allotment of free education for all has
been surpassed. Now we have taken on the burden of adult
education, one w r hich will consume more and more of our
time and energy as the years go on.

Merely the housing, equipping, and staffing job of the
American educational system must fill the beholder with
awe. Its custodial job alone is enormous. In depressions,
at least, education is probably worth all it costs if it keeps
adults occupied and children off the streets. But American
educators have not been content with such negative and
partial views of their function. We have tried to find out
how to deal with young people economically and effective-
ly. We have studied buildings, finance, and administration.
We have worked on motion pictures, radio, and teaching
materials. We have done a good deal with examinations.
We probably know more about how to handle great masses
of pupils than anybody in the world.

Yet the sheep look up and are not fed. The quantitative

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

problem has been too much for us. We have not had time
to think about the quality of our students, our teachers, or
our course of study. Nor do I see any relief from the quan-
titative problem in the future. Adult education means that
vie shall have millions of new students and shall ha\ T e to
have thousands of new teachers to teach them. The ad-
vance of technology \\ ill mean, even after the depression is
over, that young people \\ill not be able to get jobs and will
have to be taken care of by us. This will mean, in turn, a
great expansion of the high school, the technical institute,
and the junior college, and a great expansion of the staff
and plant essential for them.

Only at two levels is there even temporary relief in sight.
A declining birth-rate may for a time, at least, reduce the
population of the elementary schools. But the evidence
here is quite unclear; and the prediction of sociologists that
the number of our people will be stationary by 1960 may
not be verified.

The other point at which the volume of students may be
reduced is the university, by which I mean the beginning of
the Junior year. The attitude of the public and of the uni-
versities themselves should result in limiting university
training at public expense to those who seem likely to profit
by it. Since we may expect to see a junior college or a tech-
nical institute wherever there is a high school today, we
may expect the public to revolt against the great expense
of sending any boy or girl who wants to go through the
highest degrees at the state university. The real costs of
education appear at the beginning of the Junior year in col-
lege. For work beyond that point specialized courses, small
classes, and elaborate equipment are required. All these
things are justified for students who have the interest and
ability that scholarly and professional work demands. The
taxpayer cannot afford them unless the students have this
interest and this ability.

The universities, too, are now abandoning the foolish

116-

THE SHEEP LOOK UP

attitude that more students are needed in order to obtain
larger appropriations. The added cost of added students is
far greater than any added appropriations obtained be-
cause of them. And the social and athletic character that
large numbers of students have given the universities has
done more than most things to prevent them from being
universities and to debase the higher learning in America.

There are some signs, too, that the universities may
gradually ^ipe out those competitive duplications which
can best be described as a transfer of the football spirit to
education and research. Some universities seem to have
bought books merely in order to say that they had more
books than the institution next door. Others have started
departments simply because the institution next door had
them. The present wave of enthusiasm for departments of
public administration, forestry, housing, and aeronautics
will lead to useless expenditure of the taxpayers' money by
spotting competing enterprises all over the map, when,
from the educational point of view, two or three centers are
all that the country requires. The association of Governing
Boards of State Universities has now taken this matter in
hand. The result should be a new emphasis on quality and
a restriction of the scope of the universities to what each of
them can do best.

Nevertheless, these ameliorations of the quantitative
problem at the elementary and university levels, even if
and when they are realized, will be but slight assistance to
the educational profession or the taxpayer. They will be
more than matched by the vast increases in the high school
and the junior college, which, though less expensive than
the university, are far more costly than the elementary
school. The Chicago School Board, as a measure of econ-
omy and a matter of principle, abolished the only junior
college in the city two years ago. Last fall, one year later,
they were compelled to open three junior colleges in place
of the one they had abolished. We may confidently await

-117-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

the day when every young person may, if he wishes, stay at
home and complete the work of the Sophomore year in col-
lege, and may do so if he wishes at public expense. Gradu-
ation from the local junior college will be as customary as
graduation from the local high school is today.

If, therefore, the educational profession has not had time
to think much up to now about the quality of its students,
its teachers, or its course of study, there is little reason to
expect that it w ill have more time in future. Only by delib-
erate recognition of the importance of these problems and
persistent attention to them can we hope to solve them.
And only by solving them can we hope to secure the con-
sistent support of the American people.

As we face these problems in turn and examine first what
we have done hitherto about the quality of students, we see
that most of the thinking that has been done about them
has been directed to keeping them out of education on the
ground that they were unlikely to make passing marks.
The whole College Board development has had this object.
Even if the College Board Examinations were successful in
selecting students, w T hich they are not, they are useless in
our present situation. We see now that we shall not be able
to keep students out of education not, at least, until the
Junior year in college. In the future we shall not be able to
select the fit and exclude the unfit below that point. In-
stead, we shall have to discover or create the educational
activity which is adapted to the needs and capacities of the
individual. Until industry is prepared to absorb the indi-
vidual, he will have to be engaged in some kind of educa-
tional activity. The future is certain to see various kinds of
institutions, or at least various courses of study, below the
Junior year in college, some of them designed to meet the
needs of those whom we have discarded in the past as un-
worthy of our efforts.

Of course, they were not really unworthy of our efforts
at least, I do not think they were. Education is an act of

118*

THE SHEEP LOOK UP

faith; and it is an article of my faith that no one is inedu-
cable no one, that is, above the grade of moron. There
are two classes of students for whom we have never made
provision, those who could not read and those who were not
interested in reading. In the high school of the University
of Chicago, which has a highly selected student body, not
less than 10 per cent of the pupils are functionally illiterate.
This percentage rises to about 50 in a metropolitan high
school. These pupils can read words; but, aside from the
words in the less difficult parts of the newspaper, they have
no idea what they mean. An overlapping group, and an
even larger one, is composed of pupils who will not learn
from books even if they are able to. They may be inter-
ested in mechanics, in chemical reactions, in the behavior
of animals; they are not interested in reading, or at least in
the kind of reading that we have been giving them. *>

This reading has been, broadly speaking, the kind that
New England colleges have expected of the entering Fresh-
man for many years. The fact that these pupils were not
going to a New England college, or indeed to any college at
all, has not deterred us from acting as though they were all
bound for the literary delights of a classical education.
Naturally, they have failed. They have become the
truants, the delinquents, and the young criminals. And we
have consoled ourselves with the thought that they were
stupid. They were not stupid* They could not fit into an
educational scheme that was constructed with other aims,
for other students, in other days.

The educational profession has done a good deal of scoff-
ing at the Civilian Conservation Corps. It is easy to say
that some of the five hundred thousand young men in that
organization should, since they were of school age, have
been financed in school. They should. But it is also true
that the CCC results in part from our own failure to deal
with functionally illiterate and hand-minded boys. If they
had stayed in school, we could have done little for them.

119-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

At present it would be highly beneficial to all concerned if
we could arrange a trade and send the hand-minded boys
now in school to the CCC in return for the book-minded
ones now in that organization.

I must admit that I do not know the answer to the prob-
lem of the functionally illiterate and hand-minded boy.
What I am asking for is recognition of the problem and a
change in our attitude toward it. Perhaps the work now
being conducted by the Office of Education in the CCC and
the experiments that will be tried there by the new Youth
Commission financed by the General Education Board may
give us some inkling of what the answer is. When we find
it, we must hasten to put it into effect, for the greatest
waste and the greatest failure of public education is at this
point.

When we turn from the quality of students to the quality
of teachers, we find other reasons why the sheep look up
and are not fed. It is a gross but suggestive exaggeration
to say that we do not know how to teach the three R's or
what to teach beyond them. Anybody who has read dis-
sertations for the doctorate or suffered through the exam-
inations of law students will agree with a sigh that we do
not know how to teach reading and writing, and will be
ready to assume that we have made a like failure of arith-
metic. When we look at the results of our instruction in the
fine arts, in the languages, in composition, in natural
science, and in the social sciences and history, we must
admit that our people cannot write or speak their own lan-
guage, to say nothing of any other; that they think of
science as discoveries announced on the front page of the
newspaper; and that they have little appreciation of the
arts. We must admit, too, that the current level of discus-
sion of economic and political questions reflects little credit
on our instruction in history and social science.

However diversified and expanded the curriculum below
the Junior year in college may be, the core of it must be a

120-

THE SHEEP LOOK UP

good general education. There are certain special difficul-
ties we must face, of course. We must find out how to com-
municate a general education to those who cannot read.
We must modify it for those who require technical training
of a sub-professional type. But a good general education
must be the center or basis of every educational program at
every level. We know that such a thing does not exist to-
day. We know that what we give instead is a series of short
unrelated courses composed of a smattering of miscellane-
ous facts which leave the student uneducated and, except
perhaps in the spasmodic exercise of his memory, un-
trained.

In the preparation of teachers we are thus involved in a
vicious circle. The teachers are badly educated. They edu-
cate their students badly. Some of the badly educated stu-
dents become badly educated teachers who educate their
students badly.

We have tried to improve the quality of our teachers by
w y orking for higher salaries, greater security, and academic
freedom. All these things are important. In rural counties
in Kansas an elementary-school teacher's salary is eighty
dollars a month. It is laughable to hear Americans talk
about their devotion to public education and then see them
resist any increased expenditure upon it, and particularly
any expenditure on teachers* salaries. Until adequate re-
wards are offered, we cannot hope for adequate teachers.

Nor can we hope for adequate teachers as long as teach-
ers may be hired and fired for any reason or for no reason at
all. I used to be opposed to permanent tenure for univer-
sity professors. I thought it was an invitation to medi-
ocrity and had a debasing effect on salaries. I am now con-
vinced that the greatest danger to education in America is
the attempt, under the guise of patriotism, to suppress
freedom of teaching, inquiry, and discussion. Consequent-
ly, I am now in favor of permanent tenure, with all its
drawbacks, as by far the lesser of two evils. We cannot ex-

- 121

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

pect to get good teachers without decent salaries and
security,

Nor can we expect to get good teachers unless they are
free to teach* I know, of course, that everybody in this
country knows all about education. Everybody has either
had an education or not had one. If he has had one, he
knows \\hat was wrong with it; if he has not had one, he
knows what is wrong with everybody else's. Xo American
ever breathed who cannot and will not tell any educator or
any group of educators exactly what and how to teach.
But if this deplorable national characteristic is allowed to
run riot, nobody with any intelligence or independence will
join the ranks of the teaching profession. Particularly is
this the case if his behavior and opinions outside the class-
room are to be made the basis of his continuance in, or ex-
pulsion from, his post. The general assumption nowadays
seems to be that when a teacher becomes a teacher he sur-
renders some of the rights which the Constitution guaran-
tees to everybody else. Freedom of thought, freedom of
speech, freedom of assembly these are in some mysterious
way taken away from him. He is a teacher. As such he
cannot do or say outside the classroom, to say nothing of
inside it, anything which is objectionable to the most nu-
merous, the most powerful, or the most vocal group in his
community.

To add insult to injury, a dozen states have reflected on
the patriotism of teachers by requiring them to take an
oath to support the Constitution. Has anybody ever heard
anything against the patriotism of teachers which would
justify singling them out for this distinction? On the con-
trary, nobody who has had anything to do with education
will hesitate to assert that teachers as a w r hole are the most
earnest, hard-working, and loyal group in the entire coun-

try '

But, it is said, teachers have great influence on the

young; and we must be sure that the young are under

122-

THE SHEEP LOOK UP

proper care. Very well. If we are to insure the patriotism
of those who have influence over the young, let us do so.
Let us begin with parents and have them take an oath to
support the Constitution. Let us include newspaper men,
and especially the designers of comic supplements. Let us
line up all the movie stars. Let us insist on an oath of alle-
giance from radio performers. If the teachers are to take
an oath, Amos and Andy should be required to salute the
flag and sing the "Star Spangled Banner" twice a day.

No, there is nothing rational about the present excite-
ment over radicalism in the schools. It is a hysterical re-
action from the depression. Somebody has to be blamed or
criticized when things go wrong. The teachers are easy
marks. Why should they take an oath? Why, because they
can be forced to take one and other groups cannot. All over
this country when there w T as a cry for reduction of public
expenditures, school expenditures were cut first and deep-
est. The reason was the same; other groups spending pub-
lic funds were strongly intrenched. It would have been
difficult and unpleasant to dislodge them. School expendi-
tures could be reduced with only a feeble outcry from dis-
organized teachers and scattered parents.

If we are not to pay decent salaries, if we are not to give
some sort of security to the teacher, if we are to tell him in
detail how and what he is to teach, if we are to deprive him
of his rights as a citizen, we may abandon now our hope of
improving the teaching profession and hence the education
of our children. Only spiritless drudges will teach on terms
like these. Salaries, security, and freedom will not make a
good educational system. But we can never make one with-
out them. They are the indispensable prerequisites to any
development of American education.

None of them, however, will supply the fatal lack of an
educated teaching staff. Nor will that gap be filled by all
our splendid achievements in the realm of administration,
organization, and finance. The best paper scheme carried

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

on in the best building in the best organization \\ith the
most up-to-date materials is nothing in the hands of callow
and uncultivated teachers.

Most of the argument about teacher- training is beside
the point. The argument revolves around the question
whether a prospective teacher should take a lot of courses
in the school of education or take a lot of courses in the sub-
ject-matter departments. The answer is that the teacher
should understand his subject and should understand edu-
cation; but, first of all, he should himself be educated. He
should have a good general education. He should then have
a mastery of the ideas in his chosen field, which the require-
ments of the schools and of common sense suggest should
be a broad one. He should have a grasp of what the depart-
ments of education and psychology have to communicate
about the theory of learning. But, counting courses and
\\riting exercises euphemistically called "theses," either in
education or in subject matter, are useless without, first, a
general education and, second, a radical revision of the
course of study both in education and in the subject-matter
departments. And that revision should be designed to
transmit to the student the intellectual content of the sub-
ject instead of its trivial details.

You will have long since observed that the refrain that
runs through these remarks is the insistence on a good gen-
eral education. \Ve must develop it for all students; it is
especially important for students who are going to be
teachers. And we are discovering, too, that it is the an-
swer to the question of adult education. In England the
\Yorkers* Educational Alliance has 65,000 adults en-
rolled in its classes. Eighty-five per cent of them are taking
courses which have no vocational tinge whatever. These
laboring people are trying to get a general cultural educa-
tion. When the University of Chicago started to offer
courses for Freshmen and Sophomores which were intended
to amount to a general education, it found that it was these

-124-

THE SHEEP LOOK UP

very courses which the adults in the University's afternoon
and evening classes were most anxious to have. If we can
find out what a general education ought to be, we can solve
the most pervasive and ubiquitous problem of education.

But before tackling this question perhaps we ought to
decide at what point a general education may best be
offered to the young. I think we shall find that the four
years between the beginning of the Junior year in high
school and the end of the Sophomore year in college consti-
tute the logical period for this type of educational experi-
ence. Everywhere else in the world, in every country ex-
cept America, general education is the primary object of
the school system at this age level. The practice of other
nations suggests that here is a natural social, biological, and
intellectual unit.

We see, also, that the creation of such an educational unit
might make our whole program more intelligible. The pur-
poses of both the high school and the university, now be-
fogged by the accidental complexity of our system, would
be clarified and corrected. The high school would prepare
all students for general education; the university would be
limited to those who had demonstrated in the period of
general education that they were capable of scholarly and
professional work. The great mass of students would end
their formal education at the end of what we now call the
Sophomore year in college. Since American students are
the most degree-conscious in the world, except the Chinese,
it may be necessary to grant the Bachelor's degree at the
end of the Sophomore year in order to induce them to leave
us. This arrangement is desirable anyway, for the Bach-
elor's degree, which now stands for nothing but four years
in college, might thus be made intelligible by representing
a sound general education.

We should see to it, of course, when we know what a
general education is, that arbitrary time requirements do
not affect our decision as to whether a given student has

125

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

acquired one. We should formulate examinations designed
to discover whether the student has a general education;
we should permit him to take those examinations whenever
in his opinion he is ready to take them, no matter how long
he has been in school or what methods he has used to edu-
cate himself. Thus we could break up the lock step of the
credit system and succeed at last in adjusting education to
the capacities of the individual.

What do \ve mean, then, by a general education: In the
first place, we do not mean scholarly or professional train-
ing. What we are talking about is a program for all stu-
dents, for the whole of American youth. That program
may and should serve as the basis for professional or schol-
arly study. But that is not its object. Its object is to pro-
vide the kind of education that every citizen should have.

In the second place, a general education has nothing to
do with vocational training. This is not to say that those
who have had a general education should not and would
not be assisted by it in the business of earning a living. The
question is one of method and one of emphasis, I believe
that vocational emphasis and vocational method lead
neither to education nor vocational fitness. It is paradox-
ical, but true, that the best practical education is the most
theoretical one.

The University of Minnesota asked thirty-seven indus-
tries in the Twin Cities what specific training they w r anted
high-school boys to have if they were going to work for
them. The whole thirty-seven unanimously replied that
they w r anted them to have no specific training at all. The
machines the schools could train them on were already
antiquated. The teachers were more antiquated still. The
industries themselves could train the boys on the machines
actually in use in about two weeks.

Our experience in professional education is illuminating.
In engineering the usual program has been two years of
theoretical work followed by two years of detailed instruc-

-126-

THE SHEEP LOOK UP

tion in some vocational field. If you elected steam turbine
design, you spent two years in doing nothing but designing
steam turbines. If, when you graduated, you had to go to
work making light bulbs for the General Electric Company,
you did so in the disturbing consciousness that two years of
your engineering education had been thrown away. If you
had spent the last two years, as well as the first two, in the
fundamental sciences, you could have worked out your own
formulas for either steam turbines or Mazda lamps as
necessity required. The whole trend of engineering educa-
tion is now away from vocational courses and towards in-
creasing emphasis on physics, chemistry, and mathematics.
The best practical education is the most theoretical one.

Education is not a substitute for experience. It is prep-
aration for it. There is no substitute for experience. The
way to get experience in a specific activity is to engage in
that activity. Thus, we are likely to see in professional edu-
cation an extension of the principle of internship that has
worked so well in medicine. Even the law schools may
eventually abandon the attempt to prepare students for
the practice by putting them through little fake experi-
ences in the classroom and in moot courts and may insti-
tute a system of interning law students under practicing
lawyers after a sound and careful education in the theory
and principles of the law.

In these examples we may discern the dangers in the
slogans of the progressive educators and the sociologists.
The progressive educators with a capital P have made great
contributions to the method of education. They have
shown us, as Plato suggested long ago, that we can and
must free the student from arbitrary restrictions on his way
of educating himself. Thus they have cleared away obsta-
cles to giving and getting an education. They have freed
the student so that he may get an education if there is one
to get; they have freed the teacher so that he may give an
education if he knows what to give. But the serious, the

. 127*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

difficult, the important question about education is the
question of content. Assuming that you have sound meth-
ods, so that you can actually help the pupil to get an edu-
cation, what is the education that you are going to help him
to get? The ideas that the progressive educators have had
about content have been either misconceived or mis-
applied.

The progressive educators say that the object of educa-
tion is to fit the child for the contemporary scene. The
sociologists say it is to adjust the student to his environ-
ment. Both slogans contain elements of truth. But the
first danger into which they lead us is that of preparing
students for the status quo. That becomes the scene for
which we fit our students; that becomes the environment
to which we seek to adjust them. But we have no idea
whether the status quo or some other status will confront
the student when he is graduated. Efforts to fit him for the
status quo may merely succeed in unfitting him for the
actual situation in which he will have to live.

Another difficulty with the slogans of the progressive
educators and the sociologists is that they are likely to lead
to a course of study composed almost wholly of current
facts. In the effort to fit the student for the contemporary
scene he is crammed full of miscellaneous information
which he is expected to regurgitate on the examinations.
The facts of science and of history, unrelated and unas-
similated, serve simply to bewilder the student wander-
ing through the mazes of this present world. He does not
understand them. They have little meaning for him. Un-
til he forgets them, as fortunately he does soon, they may
give an air of erudition to his conversation; they have no
effect upon his intellectual development. And the conse-
quences to education of framing such a course of study are
nothing short of horrendous. My distinguished friend and
colleague. Professor Ogburn, has suggested that since the
mass of our information is increasing so rapidly, we shall

-128-

THE SHEEP LOOK UP

have to prolong adolescence at least until age forty-five in
order to have time to pour it all Into the student.

Lately a new school of progressive educators and sociolo-
gists has arisen. They appreciate the inadequacy of a curric-
ulum composed of lots of information about the contem-
porary scene. They propose one, instead, composed of lots
of information about the scene they think the pupil will
. face when he emerges from school a scene not contempo-
rary but future. They have gone so far as to say that they
know what kind of scene the pupil is going to face: it is one
dominated by what they call "collectivism." This program
seems to me even worse than the one that springs from
John Dewey and the earlier progressives. It has all its de-
fects and, in addition, is egregiously conceited. It implies
that its sponsors can tell exactly what kind of social order
the child now from one to sixteen years old will have to fit
into in the next two to eighteen years. With deference to
the learning and ability of these gentlemen, I do not be-
lieve that anybody knows what the social order is going to
be two to eighteen years from now. My own impression is
that within twenty-five or fifty years we shall be about
where England is today. Whatever England is today, it is
certainly not collectivism But, whatever I think it is, I
should not dream of recommending a course of study based
upon my opinion, for that opinion hardly rises above the
dignity of a hunch.

Nor is the object of general education the development
of personality or character. We trust that an integrated
personality and a rugged character may result from it.
But, if we place personality and character before us as the
aim of education, we shall get neither personality, charac-
ter, nor education. Character is a by-product a by-prod-
uct, as Woodrow Wilson used to say, of hard work well
done. The courses in character and personality that I have
heard about seem to me calculated to produce in the stu-
dent a burning desire to commit the most outrageous

129*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

crimes. The moral virtues are habits. The environment of
education should be favorable to them. But only a diffused
sentimentality will result from the attempt to make in-
struction in the moral virtues the object of education. And,
in addition, resources that might go into intellectual train-
ing will be lavished on athletics, social life, and student
guidance, a kind of coddling, nursing, and pampering of
students that is quite unknown anywhere else in the world,

If the object of general education is not scholarly, pro-
fessional, or vocational; if its primary purpose is not the
development of character or personality; if it should not
be composed of current information about the status quo or
imaginary information about the future, what is its object
and of what should it be composed? Clearly, the object of
general education is the training of the mind. Clearly, too,
the mind should be trained for intelligent action. Or, to put
it another w r ay, the object of general education is to pro-
duce intelligent citizens. Facts, data, and information, pres-
ent and prospective, cannot be ignored. But the emphasis
must be on the training of the mind. Facts, data, and in-
formation should be used to exemplify and enforce the
principles upon w r hich intelligent action must rest.

Such a program of general education proceeds on two
assumptions: First, it assumes that everybody has a mind
and that we must find out how to train it. Second, it
assumes that it is a good thing to train it. Certainly I
should be put to it to argue that a trained mind will result
in a large income. I have no difficulty in holding that it
will result in a happy and useful life. It will result in bene-
fit to the individual and to the community.

It will do more. A program of general education result-
ing in trained minds will facilitate social change and make
it more intelligent. The educational system cannot bring
about social change. It cannot work out and impose on the
country a blueprint of the social order desired by the
teachers colleges. But the educational system can facilitate

-130*

THE SHEEP LOOK UP

social change; it can make it more intelligent. A program
of general education which is based on ideas, which leads
the student to understand the nature and schemes of his-
tory, to grasp the principles of science, to comprehend the
fine arts and literature,, and to which philosophy contrib-
utes intelligibility at every stage, is the kind of program that
we must now construct. It may seem, at first glance, re-
mote from real life, from the facts, and from the social
order. On the contrary, if we can construct it, we shall find
that it may give us at last a land fit to be free.

I realize that the suggestions I have made are both vague
and violent. What I have been trying to do is to hold be-
fore you the dazzling vision of millions of young Americans
receiving an education adapted to their needs at the hands
of teachers who are truly educated themselves. This is the
goal before us. Only if we can achieve it will the sheep,
when they look up, be fed.

THE Y.M.C.A.

MY SOLE qualification for addressing you this morn-
ing is a very hot summer spent as assistant mem-
bership secretary of the Cleveland Y.M.C.A.
At the conclusion of that experience I chose to join the
army. And yet those were the palmy, the halcyon days.
The Association had what seemed to me a magnificent
building with facilities that looked to a boy from the coun-
try like those of a splendid club. It had a large staff; so
large that most of the members of it found it possible to
escape the heat by lingering in the swimming pool or
attending the baseball games. I asked myself then what
the Y.M.C.A. was for. As far as I could see, it was provid-
ing decent and respectable accommodations for young men.
It was conducting some classes; I do not know how effec-
tive they were. Certainly at that date, or at least that
summer, its activities seemed to be largely recreational and
athletic.

This is an unfair picture. I was eighteen years old. It
was summer time. Because of my youth and because of the
season, I could expect to gain very little insight into what
the Y.M.C.A. was actually doing. I mention that summer
only to explain to you that, in spite of my father's very
close connection with the movement for many years, in
spite of the very large number of my friends who have
played a prominent role in it, and in spite of numerous per-
sonal courtesies that I have received from the organization,
I have for fifteen years been slightly disturbed about the
Y.M.C.A. I gather that you are somewhat disturbed about
it too.

It is customary to attribute the prevalent mood of heart-

THE Y.M.C.A.

searching to the depression. In large measure this is justi-
fied. When everything is booming, we do not bother to
scrutinize very carefully what we are doing. Universities,
for example, will take new money and spend it on new men
and new departments without asking themselves whether
the old men and the old departments might not be assisted
first of all Nevertheless, although the depression may be
the occasion for self-criticism, the plans that result from it
should be long-term plans, and not merely short-run de-
vices to tide us over a financial emergency. The questions
that I propose to ask about the Y.M.C.A. are questions
that could have been asked in 1917 and doubtless were
being asked at that time. The financial situation serves
merely to make them more pressing and to induce people to
join in the effort to find the answer to them.

The fundamental problem that confronts any organiza-
tion at the present time is the problem of clarification. Any
permanent institution sees the world change about it and
must, sooner or later, attempt to determine whether those
changes have rendered its own activities less useful or even
useless. If we can determine analytically the function of
the Y.M.C.A., subsidiary problems will settle themselves;
we can test the performance of the organization and sug-
gest its future. And in the first place, I should observe that
the Young Men's Christian Association is not a business.
It is not an investment trust or a bank or a hotel company.
Its investments, its property, its hotels can be justified
only as assisting it to carry out its main function what-
ever that may prove to be. If we are not yet in a position
to affirm what the function of the Y.M.C.A. is, we are at
least in a position to deny that it is a business. Conse-
quently, emphasis on the business aspects of the organiza-
tion is a false emphasis. Whatever values the Association
was formed to propagate, they were certainly not property
values. Laymen, and particularly those who become mem-
bers of boards of trustees, quite naturally think in terms of

133*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

the tangible assets of the organization. They easily under-
stand these things. It is not surprising that sometimes they
seem to regard these things and the preservation of these
things as the sole object of the institution. It is the per-
petual task of professional leadership to direct the mind of
the public and of boards of trustees to the real function for
which such institutions were established. This problem is
particularly serious now and has been for the past three
years. Professional leadership must demonstrate to lay
boards that what is "sound" finance in business may not be
sound in philanthropic activities. It must insist upon the
maintenance of the excellence of the institution and present
that ideal as a foil to the constant insistence of the business
man on the conservation of assets.

The Y.M.C.A., like the universities, is now afflicted with
large properties. The operation of those properties under
present conditions is a task of the greatest difficulty. The
temptation is strong to think only of the property, not of
the purposes it was accumulated to serve. Like the univer-
sities, the Y.M.C.A. should stop worrying about its budget
and think about its program. If the program is a good one,
support for it will be forthcoming. If the program is bad or
non-existent, the properties are useless anyway.

Preoccupation with property seems to me even more
serious in the case of the Y.M.CA. than in the case of the
universities. The universities have fairly well established
the idea that a professor can say and think and teach what
he likes. This has been a long, hard struggle, not yet com-
pletely won. Nevertheless, boards of trustees always find
it necessary to apologize when a professor is removed. I am
not clear that Y.M.C.A. secretaries have yet acquired this
freedom. If they have not, too great emphasis on finance
and the plant will make them the slaves of the American
business man. If professional leaders must always think
whether their remarks will strike responsive chords or jan-
gling notes in the breast of business, professional leadership

THE Y.M.C.A.

will not realize one of its greatest opportunities in the com-
munity. A professional leader who is compelled to think
first about money and second about professional ideals is
not likely to make a strong fight for those ideals when they
come in conflict with vested interests. Particularly is this
true if he may be removed for expressions or activities
which may run counter to the views of the ruling class.
Since, as will appear later, a function which I assume for
the Y.M.C.A. may at times run counter to the views of the
ruling class, I urge the subordination of budget to programs
and academic freedom for secretaries.

If the Y.M.C.A. is not a business, neither is it a club nor
the Boy Scouts nor a gymnastic organization. Although I
subscribe heartily to the doctrine of mens sana in corpore
sano y we must agree, I suppose, that the physical aspects of
the Association's program have the same relation to it that
we have already allocated to the physical plant. That is,
these items go to make up a rounded development; they are
not, and ought not be, central. In general the American
public is overexercised and overbathed. The vast resources
of the Y.M.C.A. should not be directed primarily to aggra-
vating this great evil. Since the Y.M.C.A. was founded,
many other institutions have taken to providing recrea-
tional facilities for our people. I do not urge the withdraw-
al of the Y.M.C.A. from a field in which it has provided
leadership and pre-eminent service. I do urge that these
things be relegated to their proper place and subordinated
to the primary aim of the movement.

You are now entitled to ask me what I think the primary
aim of the movement is. And my reply is that the primary
aim of the movement is religious. It is a Christian move-
ment. Still, it is not a church or a denomination. There-
fore it must conduct activities different from theirs. This
brings me to add that the Y.M.C.A. is a Christian educa-
tional movement. But it is not a college or a university. It
must conduct activities different from theirs. Now, what

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

are the Christian educational functions of an organization,
which neither churches nor colleges can perform? Doubt-
less there are many. But there is one great and pressing
one, adult education. We may be quite confident that the
present trend toward a shorter day and shorter week \\ ill
be maintained. Whether the six-hour day comes this year
or next, whether it comes by legislation or not, we may be
sure it will come. Yet, we are not equipped to cope vath
the problem of adult education under present conditions,
to say nothing of those that we shall confront in the future.
The universities and colleges, absorbed in the difficulties of
resident instruction for youth, \\ ill never, in my opinion, do
more than handle a small section of the problem. They
may be relied upon in addition for certain experimental
work and for studies that will assist those who are admin-
istering work in this field. But the great burden must rest
upon others; and upon w T hom principally if not upon the
Y.M.C.A.? The Y.ALC.A. has been engaged in adult edu-
cation by that name or by some other since its foundation.
Its principal task has been a task of individual guidance.
It has assisted in the adjustment of the millions of young
men who have come in from the farms and taken up indus-
trial occupations. The need for this type of individual
guidance is now, in my opinion, passed. The movement of
young men is the other way; they are returning to the
farms. But the problem of adjusting youth to a new leisure
is one of even greater importance and even greater com-
plexity. The experience of the Y.M.C.A. in adjusting
the farmer boy to an industrial civilization equips it with
a point of view and a background w T hich enable it to step
into the present breach more readily and effectively than
any other existing organization. If the Y.M.C.A. can at-
tack the problem of adult education, which no one else is
so well prepared to deal with, it will justify its millions, jus-
tify its properties, justify its facilities, and justify the faith
of its founders and supporters.

136-

THE Y.M.C.A.

Even if I were competent, I could not here explore all the
various possibilities in adult education for the Y.M.C.A. I
merely wish to call your attention to three points. In the
first place, not only the experience of the Y.M.C.A., but
also all its equipment, admirably qualifies it to take a lead-
ing place in the organization of leisure. I can think of noth-
ing that the Y.M.C.A. owns which would not contribute to
a program of adult education.

In the second place, the Y.M.C.A. seems to me ideally
situated to carry on a type of adult education on a national
scale which no other organization can attempt. Certainly
the mission of professional leadership is to lead. The pro-
fessional leader is not interested in maintaining the status
quo; he is interested in improving it. He must have ideas as
to how it may be improved; he must also have the means of
communicating his ideas to the people. A resident of Chi-
cago is naturally somewhat skeptical about the newspaper
as a means of adult education. To put it mildly, the radio
leaves something to be desired. Local forums are frequent-
ly limited by local fears and petty politics. But it is possi-
ble for the Y.M.C.A. on a national basis to plan and exe-
cute discussion of important and pressing problems under
competent professional leadership. In general the forces
that go to make up public opinion in this country are nar-
row and selfish. They can be called Christian only by cour-
tesy. Yet, no one will venture to express a doubt that the
message of Christ is more necessary to the world today
than at any earlier period in our history. Issues must be
discussed precisely because they are controversial. Posi-
tions must be taken even if they are unpopular. Forces
must be opposed even though they seem overwhelmingly
rich and powerful. An organization can attempt such a
campaign of public education only if it is ready to declare
its independence and guarantee to its professional leader-
ship adequate security as long as it is honest and compe-
tent. The problems that lie ahead require honesty and

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

competency. But they require, most of all, the courage to
face them. If the Y.M.C.A. has that courage, it may make
for itself a unique place in the structure of our society.

But, finally, I am constantly driven back to the basic
assumption of these remarks, which is that the Y.M.C.A. is
a religious movement. If this assumption is correct, and if
one of the great opportunities of the Association is in adult
education, it must follow that the Association will devote
great attention to religious education on the adult level.
You will not misunderstand me when I say that it seems to
me that most of the work that is called religious educa-
tion does not deserve either name. Education in general
is a highly technical profession. We no longer believe that
anybody who has read a book can teach what it contains.
Moreover, education is changing very rapidly. Its meth-
ods, its organization, and its content are quite different now
from what they were when you and I were educated. And
because of changed economic and social conditions, those
changes in education are likely to proceed at an acceler-
ated, rather than a retarded pace. Now in my opinion
adult education is the most complicated problem In the
whole educational field. Men cannot be expected to exert
professional leadership in it without having a broad and
thorough knowledge of education in general and of adult
education in particular. I am satisfied therefore that train-
ing schools for secretaries must alter their courses of study
to provide for the next generation a type of leadership in
this field which is now almost wholly lacking.

I feel even more keenly the inadequacy of the religious
aspect of religious education. A vague, sentimental desire
to do good and be good does not seem to me to constitute
religion. Still less does it seem to me to constitute at the
present day a challenge to youth. The old methods of emo-
tional appeal have lost their effectiveness. I doubt if they
ever had much permanent influence. Certainly they will
not bring young men to Christ today. The appeal that

-138-

THE Y.M.C.A.

must be made to them is the appeal to reason. A process of
conversion to be worthy of that name must be an intellec-
tual process. Faith is intellectual assent. You will remem-
ber that St. Augustine, one of the most powerful minds of
history, had for fifteen years to struggle with the intellec-
tual problems raised by Christianity before he could be-
come a Christian. The approach to God upon which young
men today may come to him is not sociological or aesthetic;
it is intellectual The faith that you represent must com-
mand the intellectual respect of youth. Nor do we need to
worry if this kind of education does not conform to what
we ordinarily call "character education/' Education that
sets as its stated and obvious aim the development of char-
acter is likely to degenerate into sloppy sentimental talk
about character. The result is neither character nor edu-
cation. Rigorous intellectual activity remains the best
character education; and the less said about character in
the process the better.

Professional leadership must therefore be intellectual
leadership. That kind of leadership the Y.M.C.A. has pro-
vided in the past; it must provide it in the future. My re-
marks are not intended to suggest that I think new ele-
ments should be introduced into the movement. Instead, I
believe that those elements which the movement needs are
already characteristic of it and must not be lost because of
economic pressure or because of other obligations which
may seem at the moment more important. I suggest, in
short, that the Y.M.C.A. should be the Young Men's
Christian Association.

139.

RADIO AND PUBLIC POLICY

*

MY QUALIFICATIONS for discussing the impos-
ing title assigned to me are so meager that I am
afraid I must disregard it altogether. Aside from
a very limited association with educational broadcasting, I
am simply a consumer of radio. And, 1 must confess to you
in the privacy of this gathering that my functions in edu-
cational broadcasting and in consumption are quite dis-
tinct. I never consume an educational program if I can
help it. My attitude toward such programs is the same as
my attitude toward exercise. I believe in it for others.

The difficulties of radio are easy to state: the medium is
new, the companies must make money, and we are still
having a depression. The newness of the medium means
that mistakes must occur in the process of learning how to
use it. Some of these mistakes have been corrected; and
doubtless many more of them would have been corrected
if it had not been for the two other difficulties I have men-
tioned: the necessity of making money and of doing so at
this time. We should have a very different situation in
radio today if the stations and chains were corporations not
for profit. We should have a much better situation than
the present one if the companies and stations had not been
under such terrific pressure for the past four years.

It is presumptuous for a layman who never made any
money to discuss the problems of an industry and to
attempt to prescribe for it. I face these problems not as a
critic of business but as a member of the educational pro-
fession and the consuming public anxious to make radio
more effective in education and more satisfactory to the
public. I hazard the guess that unless broadcasting can be

* 140*

RADIO AND PUBLIC POLICY

made more successful in these respects, it will find itself in
immediate danger of more drastic regulation, of taxation,
of competition with publicly owned stations, and even of
government ownership.

I have never met anybody who wanted any of these
things as an end in itself. Certainly as far as government
ownership is concerned, everybody recognizes the grave
danger of the political abuse of radio. Proposals of this sort
are presented not because of the virtues of greater public
control but because of the vices which have so far attended
private management. Those who present such proposals
see no way of eradicating those vices short of the measures
they advance.

The question is whether those vices are inherent in pri-
vate management or whether they can be overcome by the
adoption of policies by private management which will con-
vince the public that private management recognizes its
public responsibility.

If I may take educational broadcasting as an illustration,
the charges that can be substantiated are these: the claims
of minorities have been disregarded, the best hours have
been given to advertising programs, the hours assigned to
education have been shifted without notice, censorship has
been imposed, experimentation has been almost non-exist-
ent, and the financial support of educational broadcasting
has been limited and erratic.

Although I should not go so far as Mr. EL L. Mencken in
condemning the entire American public as boobs and mor-
ons, I am ready to admit that most of them have as little
interest in educational programs as I have, though for dif-
ferent reasons. Still, I suppose even Mr. Mencken would
concede, in his saner moments, that there is a large minor-
ity in this country eager to use the great new device that
science has given them to continue their education. When
all the Chicago stations of one company devoted all of
every afternoon to the World Series, a lecture course broad-

141-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

cast from my University suffered serious dislocation. When
I protested mildly to one radio executive, he gave what he
thought was a complete answer by asking, "How many
people are there in Chicago who would rather listen to the
Humanities course at the University than to the World
Series ?" I did not deny that the overwhelming majority of
my fellow-citizens would prefer hearing about a current
home run to learning of the relatively remote accomplish-
ments of Aristotle and Augustus. I did and do assert that
some of them had entered upon the course in the simple
faith that it would be given four days a week at the same
hour, and that to disrupt this program because the listeners
were few was to disregard the claims, if not the rights, of
this minority.

The appeal of the advertiser of soap and tooth paste
must be to the great unwashed. Their constant association
with these advertisers has apparently created in broad-
casters the delusion that a mass audience is the only audi-
ence, I admit that there is no use in broadcasting a pro-
gram to which no one listens. But the radio cannot pre-
tend, as all broadcasters pretend it is, to be an educational
instrument if the sole test of every program is the number
of people gathered around the receiving sets. Insistence
upon this standard means that educational broadcasting
must be confined to the most popular presentation of the
most ephemeral topics. In other words, insistence upon
this standard may mean that educational broadcasting will
cease to be educational at all.

The pressure upon the stations to make money has fre-
quently forced the shifting or even the cancellation of a
non-paying program as soon as a paying client could be dis-
covered for the time. Educational broadcasting has to be
carried on very largely by volunteers. They sacrifice their
time and effort without any compensation except the feel-
ing that they are participating in a good cause. Few things
have done so much to dishearten these people as the cava-

142-

RADIO AND PUBLIC POLICY

Her way in which carefully prepared plans have been pushed
around in the interest of increasing station revenues. It is
impossible to develop educational broadcasting in this
country with the present organization of radio unless the
broadcasters will guarantee the time that has been allotted
to it. In the last year or so, marked progress has been
made, particularly by the chains, in dealing with this cru-
cial problem. That it is crucial anyone will agree who
knows the infinite labor that goes into the construction of
an educational series and the catastrophe that is caused by
an arbitrary change of plans.

One cannot escape the impression that broadcasters have
used so-called educational programs either for political
reasons to show how public spirited they are or as stop-
gaps in the absence of paying material. This has resulted
not only in the frequent change of hours but also in the
donation of the poorest hours. It is natural, particularly in
times like these, that the best hours should be sold; they
bring the best price. But the hours that are best are best
because most people are not free at other times. The finest
educational programs in the world will not diffuse much
education if the people who want education are occupied
earning a living while the programs are on the air. If radio
is to perform its educational function under private man-
agement, the stations must guarantee time, and good time,

Education must have guaranteed time; it must have
good time. It must also have more time. The proportion
of the broadcasting day devoted to education in the United
States is far smaller than in England. I cannot believe that
there is less need, or even less demand, for education here
than there is abroad. The only conclusion is that our sys-
tem does not do for education what has been found desir-
able and necessary elsewhere. The sacrifice of any time to
education, assuming it could be sold, involves, of course,
the loss of revenue. But as long as the American people
cannot secure from radio the essential services they require,

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

there will be profound dissatisfaction with it; and this must
eventually lead to consequences far more serious than a
slight reduction in income.

I must take this opportunity to congratulate the chains
on the courageous and intelligent stand they have taken as
to the content of educational programs. I have never heard
of a single case of censorship on the part of the great com-
panies. A professor has the same freedom on the air that he
has in his classroom, and in any good university that is
freedom absolute and complete. The chains deserve the
thanks of all friends of free discussion for an attitude that
is basic to educational broadcasting.

Not so much can be said of the conduct of many local
stations. They are sometimes obsessed with the idea of
pleasing everybody and shudder at the political, social, and
economic enormities uttered by professors. The executive
of a Chicago station in the closing months of the last ad-
ministration wanted me to silence or reform one of our pro-
fessors who in his radio talks was actually demanding fed-
eral relief of the unemployed. Of course, education in a
democratic community can only be conducted on the
theory that through the free and untrammeled exercise of
the intelligence the truth can be discovered. Business men
in radio who wish to prevent the use of their facilities for
free discussion may be in business; they cannot pretend to
be in education.

The rights of minorities, definite and adequate time for
education, and free speech can all be protected without im-
pairing the earnings of the stations and the chains unduly.
These things are part of the price that must be paid for the
franchises these corporations enjoy, and the price is not
high. The remaining questions are more complicated and
serious. Who shall finance educational programs? And
who shall promote and support experimental work in edu-
cational broadcasting?

The reason these questions are troublesome is that they

144-

RADIO AND PUBLIC POLICY

lead to so many more. Is radio really an educational de-
vice? What role should it play in our school, college, and
university scheme? What is its place in adult education?
What is adult education? And if it comes to that what is
education? These questions I cannot pretend to answer.
But they must be answered because they are the funda-
mental questions. What is needed is a comprehensive
study of the educational possibilities of radio by a group of
competent educators (not university presidents) which
should attempt to discover what can and cannot be done
with the medium and what part is to be taken by the in-
dustry, by the government, by the educational institutions,
and by philanthropy in its development. All that I can do
here is to indicate in an abbreviated and amateurish way a
possible approach to a few of the problems.

To listen to the broadcasters, you would suppose that all
non-commercial broadcasting is educational broadcasting.
If a thing is not humor or jazz, it is education. An analysis
of these non-commercial programs does not support the
claims made for them. Yet some of them are very expen-
sive. If part of the money devoted to them were spent for
real education (assuming we could discover what that is),
there would be all the education, on the chains at least, that
anybody could desire. Clearly the chains must confine
themselves in education almost entirely to adult education.
With the money they are now spending on what they term
education, they can support an adequate program in this
field.

I am not impressed by the reply that the companies will
get into trouble if they pay educators to broadcast. Ameri-
can education has an infinite capacity for taking tainted
money and washing it. Far from getting into trouble, the
companies will find that an indispensable condition of re-
maining in business is a good educational plan; and they
will find that such a plan cannot be indefinitely maintained
by the efforts of professional volunteers, dragooned into

US'

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

speaking by Mr. Tyson or the administrations of their uni-
versities. Some of the time donated by the companies is
very valuable, it is true. But that makes little impression
on teachers who are already fully occupied and who regard
publicity as an annoyance and not as a reward. The com-
panies frequently complain that they cannot find good edu-
cational programs and that educators have not done their
part. They cannot be expected to unless the broadcasters
provide good time, guarantee it, and offer some slight com-
pensation to those participating.

I hasten to say that I do not want for education any ad-
ditional broadcasting facilities whatever. What could we
do with them if we had them ? Time and support are one
thing; facilities are quite another. We haven't the money,
the staff, or the technical competence to make use of more
wave-lengths and equipment. To put it bluntly, I want the
stations and the chains to provide the facilities, the time,
and some part of the support, and to leave us to do what we
are supposed to know how to do and what we may some-
time learn how to do, namely, the educating. Is this fair?
I do not know. That seems to me a matter of degree. Cer-
tain educational work must be regarded as part of the
obligation of the industry to the public. The rest should be
assumed by the educational institutions, the government,
and the foundations.

The only division of responsibility between the industry
and other agencies that I have been able to think of is, I
admit, a very rough and unsatisfactory one. I submit it
merely as a subject for study. It seems to me that the pub-
lic and the educational profession are entitled to expect the
industry to conduct as a part of its normal activities an ade-
quate program of education, adolescent and adult, if and
when such a program has been worked out by a group prop-
erly representative of education and the public. Educa-
tion and the public should now receive a declaration from
the industry that it will give support, moral and financial,

146-

RADIO AND PUBLIC POLICY

to such a program when it is formulated. On the other
hand, the costly and complicated experimental work that
needs to be done should be paid for by education, by gov-
ernments, and by private philanthropy. We do not know,
for example, what can be done with radio in the school-
room. We do not know what can be done with short-wave.
We do not know what can be done with wired broadcast-
ing. I am clear that the future of radio in education will
depend chiefly on our success in developing local centers.
The methods of developing them are now unknown and
will require for their discovery infinite pains and consider-
able expense.

One of my professors in law school used to reply when
anybody asked him a question: "That is a very difficult
problem." I am afraid that is my contribution to the dis-
cussion of educational broadcasting under private manage-
ment in America at the present time. Yet, the problem is
surely not insoluble; the difficulties are not insuperable. If
the industry will recognize unequivocally its responsibility
to education, if educators will work out a national plan that
meets the needs of our people, I believe that the industry
will prosper still, that education will be able to use at last
the new tool that technology has given it, and that together
we may take a significant step toward the civilization of
the United States.

-147-

THE PROFESSOR PAYS

I CONSIDER it very gracious of you to admit one who
has been all his life ineligible for membership in this
Association to your company this evening and to
throw a good dinner in with it. I have always wondered
why you excluded administrative officers from your coun-
cils. In so far as I had an explanation, it was that you did
not wish spies from the enemy's camp to discover and be-
tray your secrets. A careful inspection of your persons and
procedures now leads me to suspect that you have scorned
administrative officers, not feared them; that your attitude
toward them is one of superiority; and that you have re-
fused to have anything to do with them merely because you
did not wish them to muddy the waters of your thinking.

With this point of view I am in entire accord. Nor can I
consider administrative intellectual processes as deserving
much attention at the hands of a group like this. The pub-
lic expressions of a college president are merely the expres-
sions of his faculty, for which he is taking the credit. He is
vox et praeterea nihil. Here you are the corpus; you need no
vox but your own.

And so I should not have the temerity to address you as
an administrative officer. Rather I appear simply as an
individual who has been hanging around educational insti-
tutions in one capacity or another as long as he can remem-
ber. For twenty-eight years, except for a siesta of two in
the army that were not wholly devoid of educational fea-
tures, I have not been outside of some sort of school or
other. I have been in a Sunday school, a kindergarten, two
grade schools, two preparatory schools, a tutoring school, a
law school, a college, and two universities, either among the

-148*

THE PROFESSOR PAYS

administering or those who were being administered. And,
as if this were not enough, through a sort of congenital
weakness of character all the members of my family may be
found lurking about various educational enterprises. One
of my brothers is a master in a preparatory school; the
other is a teacher in China; and my father, after a long and
honorable career as a professor, has disgraced us all by be-
coming a college president. Under these circumstances,
you will understand that if I talk tonight as though I
thought I knew something about education, it is not from
conceit but from compulsion. It is not that I know educa-
tion well; it is simply that I know nothing else at all.

No one who has the slightest connection with education
can fail to observe and applaud the work of this Associ-
ation. Great progress has been made in the past twenty-
five years in establishing the idea of academic freedom. To
this Association must go the credit for the progress. Yet,
this progress should not blind us to the fact that academic
freedom is not yet an academic question. It is an issue that
is never settled, a battle that is never won. Four times in
two years Chicago interests have raised with me the pro-
priety of private or public utterances of members of our
staff. On this point we must make ourselves entirely clear.
The only question that can properly be raised about a pro-
fessor with the institution to which he belongs is his compe-
tence in his field. His private life, his political views, his
social attitudes, his economic doctrine, these are not the
concern of his university; still less are they the concern of
the public. I have no patience with the philosophy of "Yes,
but" as applied to this matter. Any position short of the
one I have stated will be found to involve such compro-
mises that nothing is left of academic freedom.

A corollary of academic freedom with which the Associ-
ation has concerned itself is the problem of tenure. But I
think those who discuss this topic frequently overlook the
fact that security of tenure is merely a corollary of aca-

-149.

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

demic freedom. If academic freedom were guaranteed, we
should not have to worry about tenure. Tenure is what w r e
use as a substitute for such guarantees. Tenure should not
be more than this. If it is more than this, it is a protection
for incompetence; and nobody., I judge, is much interested
in protecting that. Nevertheless, w T e may be permitted an
incredulous smile when business men attack permanent
tenure as a educational idiosyncrasy that they would not
tolerate for a moment. Indeed, one of the benefits of the
depression is that we are less frequently urged to be busi-
ness-like. The fact is that in most large businesses there is
permanent tenure for men who have served faithfully over
a long period. I have no thought of urging the abolition of
permanent tenure. It is doubtless necessary now to protect
liberty of thought and teaching; but I am certain that it
should be restricted as far as possible, and not expended.
And my reason is the reason for all that I have to say: The
professor pays.

It is generally supposed that there is some conflict
some inevitable conflict between presidents and profes-
sors. The appearance of reality is given this supposition by
the organization of our universities. Under that organiza-
tion the president is the only individual who can see the
institution as a whole: its education, its research, its finan-
cial position, and its public relations. A dean is concerned
primarily with his school; a chairman, primarily with his
department; and a professor, primarily with his subject. In
attempting to serve what he conceives to be the interests of
the whole institution, the president may differ with dean,
chairman, or professor as to things they regard as impor-
tant to the university. On the other hand, the dean knows,
or ought to know, more than the president about his
school; the chairman, more than either about his depart-
ment; and the professor, more than all three about his sub-
ject. In their efforts to carry them on, they may differ with
the president as to the things he regards as important to

THE PROFESSOR PAYS

their school, their department, or their work. Nevertheless,
if we assume an honest and intelligent president, like all the
presidents I have known, and an honest and intelligent fac-
ulty, like all the faculties I have known, these difficulties
become minor and insignificant, provided there is mutual
understanding of one fact: the professor pays.

It is important to both presidents and professors to learn
to regard the income of the university as one fund. If it is
spent for one purpose, it cannot, oddly enough, be spent for
another. Even where new funds are made available for new
enterprises, they never cover their cost. They may cover
all the obvious costs; but they cannot pay for the admin-
istrative and professorial attention they demand, which is
taken away from the existing operations. Where additional
funds are not provided for additional undertakings, we
have a clear case where money is diverted from the better-
ment of present work for the sake of something new. The
money of a university is not money for this and money for
that. It is the money of the university. If spent for this, it
cannot be spent for that.

Now the principal aim of an American university today
should be to improve and dignify the status of the pro-
fessor. It is now a truism so true that it has found its way
into the editorial columns of the press that a university
depends on men, and, I may add, on women. In attempt-
ing to bring good men and women into the profession and
keep them there, we must give first consideration to their
salaries. Their salaries and increases in their salaries should
be a first charge on that single fund which is the univer-
sity's income. For everything else that is done with it the
professor pays. Indeed, it is not too much to say that for
everything that goes on in the university the professor
pays.

He certainly pays for the permanence of his tenure. Per-
haps it is worth the price. He pays if the university permits
or encourages him to do extension and summer teaching to

-151-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

get enough to live on, when it ought to pay him a regular
salary adequate for that purpose. As the Yale chapter has
shown, he pays for the multiplication of the staff. I have
never been able to determine whether the multiplication of
the staff causes the multiplication of courses or whether the
multiplication of courses causes the multiplication of the
staff. In any case, the consequences are clear. In the ab-
sence of additional endowment specifically for additional
work, suggestions that additional work be done amount to
suggestions that the salaries of the present staff remain as
nearly constant as possible. It does not seem to me indis-
pensable that every university cover every section of every
field all the time. The university with the longest list of
courses is not necessarily the greatest. Until a university
can say that its professors are receiving salaries of which it
need not be ashamed, it can derive little satisfaction from
the thought that its faculty is getting larger every year.
The professor pays for the enlargement.

Particularly does he pay if new appointments are poorly
made and made without regard to the interests of the uni-
versity as a whole. The excellence of the entire staff is of
concern to the professor, for their compensation is a charge
on that fund from which he derives his own. A bad perma-
nent appointment is a permanent drain on that fund, and
he should insist that each department exercise extreme care
in making one. In his own department he should, then, ask
whether a new appointment is needed at all; and,, if so, he
should rigorously inquire into the qualifications of the
candidate.

The professor pays, not only for additional personnel and
incompetent personnel, but also for the wasteful organiza-
tion of instruction and research. At one university with
which I was once connected we had eight separate psycho-
logical shows on the campus for which the professor direct-
ly or indirectly paid. Under the old two-major rule at Chi-
cago, if fifty men were added to the staff, three hundred

152-

THE PROFESSOR PAYS

new courses were automatically added. The professor paid
for that rule. The difficulties involved in revising the curric-
ulum in any university result from the vested interests of
the staff. Courses have always been given. Research funds
have always been available. Even though courses are du-
plicated many times and research workers have long since
expired, what has been must always be. Yet, if the status
of the professor is to be dignified and improved, the admin-
istration and the faculty must constantly study the educa-
tional and research program of the institution with a view
to promoting simplicity, efficiency, and economy. The pro-
fessor pays for his vested interests.

For some things, as I have suggested, the professor can-
not pay too high a price. He cannot pay too high a price
for freedom. Perhaps he is not paying too high a price for
the permanence of his tenure. For some things he can pay
and is paying far too high a price. Consider what any uni-
versity at this moment is paying for superfluous personnel,
incompetent personnel, and the wasteful organization of
instruction and research, and ask yourselves what would
happen to the salaries of the professors in that university if
all that money were available to increase the compensation
of those that deserved it. The truth is that the resources of
almost any great university would be today adequate to
place the American professor on the economic plane which
he should inhabit if they could be freely directed to that
end. They cannot be directed to that end by presidents
and boards of trustees alone. In that effort the faculties
must themselves co-operate.

I am not so naive as to assume that I have told you any-
thing new. At any rate, it is an attitude that I am seeking
to express, and not a program. But if that attitude is one
that finds favor in your sight, I suggest that it may have
some effect upon your program. The constructive effort
that the Association has made to establish academic free-
dom may perhaps be duplicated in the preachment of the

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

gospel that the professor pays. I can think of no greater
service that your various chapters could render their insti-
tutions and education generally than the study in their
own colleges and universities of the organization of educa-
tion and research, in the effort to recommend to the ad-
ministration and the faculty methods by which their effi-
ciency may be increased without reducing their effective-
ness.

The present economic crisis is certain to produce great
changes in the resources of our universities. It is important
that you who have long safeguarded the professor should
safeguard him still by seeing to it that we do not meet this
crisis by reducing his income and lowering his status. Only
the professors can save him from this fate.

154.

THE PROFESSOR IS SOMETIMES RIGHT

*

MY BRIEF remarks this afternoon are entitled
"The Professor Is Sometimes Right/' I propose
to tell you why he is right and how he is right.
In addition I shall also indicate from time to time that
there have been occasions on which he has been wrong.
These I shall explain to your complete satisfaction, and
leave you with the gratifying conviction that the professor
is sometimes right.

We must first inquire who the professor is. And in this
investigation I must urge you to banish from your minds
the picture of him which you have cherished since your col-
lege days, or which you have constructed from a regular
perusal of the funny papers. The charmingly eccentric old
gentlemen who were on the verge of retirement when you
were in college have long since passed that boundary, and
most of them have passed another still more serious. Their
places have been taken by men about your age, many of
them your classmates. Unless you are prepared to think of
yourselves as delightful antiques with long white beards,
you cannot make that particular caricature of your con-
temporaries who have become professors.

Nor can you embrace the vain delusion that professors
are cloistered theorists who know nothing of what is going
on in the world. I ani prepared to make, if necessary, an
extended oration in defense of theory, and to prove to you
that a preoccupation with facts, which can seldom be fully
known and which are always in change, will lead to nothing
but confusion unless ideas, which are immutable and which
can be understood, receive their proper share of attention.
This oration, you will be relieved to know, is quite untieces-

.155-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

sary, because the professor is no longer a mere theorist if,
indeed, he ever was. The great developments in the study
of the law and the social sciences in the last fifteen years
have resulted from the effort to understand the law in
action and society in operation. The work of Merriam in
political science, of Ogburn in sociology, of Mitchell in eco-
nomics, of the Yale Law School on the administration of
justice has all rested on the study of observable phenom-
ena. Indeed, if this work can be criticized, it is only from
the standpoint that rigorous theoretical analysis plays too
small a role in it. Today I do not know a single social
scientist who is not studying, and studying hard, the world
in which we live. You may say, as too many people do, that
they do not agree about the results of their study. This is
true as to details; but I should say that professors have
been exhibiting remarkable unanimity on basic issues af-
fecting our government and our society.

By this I do not mean to imply that the professor
has now become a practical man. As has been amply dem-
onstrated and frequently asserted in recent years, practical
men are those who practice the errors of their forefathers.
The professor who is sometimes right studies the practices
of practical men; if he wishes to stay right, he does not
practice them. The reason why few sound economists will
today venture a prediction as to what the government's
inflationary program will accomplish is that its conse-
quences depend upon the mass psychology of business men.
The predictions of economists in the past three years have
many times gone wrong because they have assumed that
business men in a given situation would behave in a reason-
ably intelligent manner. The economist can sometimes
tell the business man what is the intelligent thing to do. He
cannot make him do it. If enough business men do not do
it, it may cease to be the intelligent thing to do.

Now, why is the professor sometimes right? In the first
place, he is likely to be right because his sole desire is to be

156-

THE PROFESSOR IS SOMETIMES RIGHT

right. He has entered the profession because he is inter-
ested in the pursuit of truth for its own sake. He has no
vested interests which he is struggling to protect. His in-
come is small. He knows it always will be, and he knew
it when he decided to become a professor. The average
professor of full rank in this country receives less than five
thousand dollars a year, and the most that any of them
can hope to achieve is ten. Professors' salaries should be
raised so that we may offer a decent living wage to those
whom we are trying to press into a life of scholarship. But
they will never reach such heights that the professor will
lose that fine impartiality with which he customarily re-
gards the things of this world. Finally, the professor is ab-
solutely independent. When he attains full rank, he attains
permanent tenure. From this position he can be dislodged
only for misconduct or incompetence. And the interpreta-
tion of these words is so strict that it is news whenever a
professor is removed. Against the onslaughts of a hostile
president, a nervous board of trustees, or a distrustful pub-
lic the professor is secure. He is free to exercise his reason
even though it leads him to criticize established policies or
institutions, including the institution he serves and the
policies thereof.

There are some qualifications on this, of course. An in-
telligent person is more likely to be right than a stupid one;
and not all professors are intelligent. In the second place,
the reasons which make it almost inevitable that the pro-
fessor should be right about the world, the country, or
other people's business have no application to his own.
The professor is not always right about education, because
there he has vested interests, personal ambitions, and an-
cient habits, all of which he wishes consciously or otherwise
to protect. Every great change in American education has
been secured over the dead bodies of countless professors.
In education the professor is a practical man. Education

-157-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

needs nothing so much as to have a group of experts study-
ing it who are not parts of the system and who will examine
it with the same cold and penetrating glance that the pro-
fessor directs at the world about him. Finally, the profes-
sor loses his potential Tightness if and when he becomes a
business man. He may be a good business man but he
abandons pro tanto the detachment and the love of truth
which assist him to be right in his professorial capacity. In
other words, the professor is sometimes right as long as he
remains a professor. To the extent to which he becomes
something else he must become less frequently right.

You will say that all this may be true in theory but that
it has nothing to do with the facts of life. And I will admit
that if these suggestions had been made seven years ago
they would have been regarded as the grossest heresy.
Those were the days when the New Era cast its rosy glow
over the operations of practical men, and when intelligence
was a positive handicap to success. Professors who ven-
tured at that day to suggest that all was not well with our
society were put down by the deafening silence which
greeted ideas in the Coolidge administration. They were
Reds or Pinks but they could be disregarded. Some of
them actually thought that "take the government out of
business" was a silly slogan. Obviously, they were insane.
In this period almost all the professors of economics in the
country urged Mr. Hoover not to sign the Hawley-Smoot
tariff bill. He signed it, and gave new impetus to the world-
depression. The first phase of that depression produced a
different attitude, and, I think, a hostile one. Professors
were now dangerous. Admittedly, things were bad; but the
less said the better. This was the period in which Mr.
Hoover was preaching the doctrine of salvation by incanta-
tion. We were going to whistle ourselves into prosperity,
with stiff upper lips, chins thrust forward, and various
other facial distortions symptomatic of rugged American
individualism. The phrase I used to hear most frequently

.158-

THE PROFESSOR IS SOMETIMES RIGHT

then was: "Don't rock the boat." At this stage business
men were shocked to hear that professors believed that the
federal government must assist the states in relieving the
unemployed. Now, many of them spend much of their time
in Washington demanding federal funds for the unem-
ployed in their local communities.

As recently as last January, some professors urged on the
President's Conference on the Crisis in Education a resolu-
tion calling for immediate efforts to raise the level of com-
modity prices. The next day a leading New York news-
paper published an editorial entitled "Educators Adrift."
Three months later our most prominent private banker
publicly commended Mr. Roosevelt's action designed to
secure the exact result the educators had urged. I have yet
to see an editorial entitled "J. P. Morgan Adrift."

The most recent phase of the depression came with the
realization that after three and a half years of psalm-sing-
ing the boat was sinking more rapidly than ever, and per-
haps some new devices for saving it might be tried. In this
period we now find ourselves. The new devices which are
being tried have, many of them, originated with professors;
and some of them are being tried under their personal
supervision.

Now, for all I know, some things may be said against
these gentlemen. I know few of them personally. I cannot
speak of their social graces, their individual talents, or
their domestic habits. They may be open to criticism in
some or all of these important areas. But I do feel compe-
tent to pass on the principal criticism that I have heard
since Mr. Roosevelt moved the government to Washing-
ton, which is, that his advisers are professors. It is precise-
ly because they are professors that they have something to
contribute which neither business men nor politicians have
yet offered. As long as they remain professors and become
neither politicians nor business men, they will make this
contribution. And that contribution is the application of a

-159-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

clear, disinterested, honest, trained intelligence to the great
problems that confront us. Such intelligence some politi-
cians and business men possess; it is not the outstanding
characteristic of their craft. Xor can it be suggested that
many of those who have ruled us in the past ten years have
given much evidence of it. In Plato's Utopia philosophers
were kings, and kings philosophers. I see no reason to be
downhearted if America is moving toward the Platonic
ideal.

Unless we believe that we know all about our society,
and unless we are entirely satisfied with it as it is today, we
may count it wise to provide for the presence in it of men
whose sole task it is to study it with a critical eye. Some-
times they may be right. At present there is not a single
great center of social research in the United States. Indi-
viduals here and there are carrying on their investigations
with remarkable fruitfulness and skill. \Ye need more of
them, and we need to supply them with the facilities and
associations which the best results require.

But we cannot expect to secure the full benefits of their
endeavors if we decline to permit them to tell us the truth
when it is disagreeable. The Chicago Tribune has said edi-
torially, 1 "Academic freedom will be preserved where men
who have the power to discipline professors deliberately re-
frain from doing so in the belief that the search for truth
should be unhampered." Surely, if the light of reason is
ever to guide our people, the search for truth must go on
unabated; and the truth, when found, must be revealed to
us. The professors are our delegates, conducting this great
enterprise in behalf of all the nation.

*May 14, 1933

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
TO THE STUDENTS

IN ADDRESSING myself to the graduating class this
morning, I wish specifically to apply to you and to
this University those familiar phrases which consti-
tute all that can be said to a graduating class. It is far eas-
ier to talk about the economic crisis, about the political
situation, or about the educational program of the Univer-
sity of Chicago than it is to face the dreadful task of utter-
ing once again those ancient platitudes which from time
immemorial have been showered on the heads of departing
students. To tell you that you stand on the threshold of
life, that this is commencement and not termination, that
the University is a miniature of that great world in which
everyone of you is expected to do his duty cannot be news
to any of you. Yet all these things are true. Our business
is to give them life and content by considering them in rela-
tion to the University of Chicago and to you, its graduates
of today.

This process requires us to ask what the distinguishing
characteristics of the University of Chicago are. And we
observe in the first place that the University has always
been devoted to inquiry. When Mr. Harper was asked to
be its first president, he made it clear that he had no inter-
est in the project if the founders proposed another college.
If, however, their purpose was to establish a great univer-
sity in the Middle West, he was prepared to devote his life
to it. On the day on which the University opened, it was
obvious that it was and was to be a university. The char-
acter and interests of the faculty, the character and back-
ground of the students, indicated that this was not simply

161*

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

another institution for the instruction of the young. It was
an institution for the advancement of knowledge. We
know the result. We know that the roster of great sci-
entists, investigators, and discoverers is filled with those
who, either as teachers or students, have borne the name
of this University. No institution in so short a time has
made such contributions on so vast a scale. The fact that
today half its students are college graduates carrying on
advanced work reflects the continuation since 1892 of that
spirit of inquiry with which the University opened.

That spirit has informed the University's teaching. The
changes that Mr. Harper introduced were the result of an
attempt to inquire once again into the processes of the
higher learning. The fresh view that he took of university
aims and methods produced a reconstruction in education-
al institutions the influence of which is still felt. The busi-
ness of taking a fresh view is one in which the University
has been almost continuously engaged since Mr. Harper's
day, and one in which it will always be engaged. Its new
educational program is not, therefore, a violent eruption on
its placid surface. It is the result of that spirit of inquiry in
education which has characterized the University from the
beginning. And so I hope that this present program will
not be the last word the University will utter on education
in America. It cannot be. The tradition of inquiry will
compel the constant investigation of education as it has
compelled the investigation of everything else.

Inquiry at the University of Chicago has been free in-
quiry. The University has been independent. From the
outset it has been free from state or municipal domination.
From the outset there was no religious qualification for
membership in its faculty. The religious organization that
founded it has now voluntarily relinquished its formal con-
trol. At no time has the denomination as such attempted
to exert actual control. The constitution of the University
therefore has given it independence. The attitude of the

162-

TO THE STUDENTS

Trustees, the faculty,, and the administration has been
independent. At the beginning Mr. Harper left no room
for doubt on this question: there could be no interference
with freedom of thought, speech, or teaching as long as he
was president. This attitude the University has consistent-
ly maintained in times of hardship and prosperity, in the
face of criticism and pressure.

That the University believes in independence is evi-
denced anew by its present educational scheme. The stu-
dent is offered the realms of learning to explore at will. He
is not required to do anything. At entrance he stops being
taught and begins to learn. His education depends upon
himself. He does not have to accept the views of his pro-
fessors or conform to any social, religious, or political creed.
The University believes in independence for others as well
as for itself.

The third characteristic of the University of Chicago is
enthusiasm. The University has believed that something
can be done. It has enthusiastically entered into the life of
the community. It has enthusiastically developed or ac-
cepted new ideas. There has never been anything contemp-
tuous, defeatist, or indifferent about it. It has never cared
to be conventional. It was founded by young men in a hur-
ry. The University has been unwilling to indulge in calm
contemplation of a suffering world. At Hull-House, at the
University Settlement, in public affairs in Chicago, on
national commissions, in surveys of school systems the
country over, the members of the faculty have partaken of
the woes and struggles of our people. Today you find them
here and everywhere directing, advising, participating in
movements designed to advance the welfare of mankind.
The University's interest in ideas has prevented it from be-
coming a stronghold of reaction like the English univer-
sities in the eighteenth century, which, as Lecky shows,
opposed every great step demanded by the English intel-
lect. By the same token the University has declined to re-

163-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

main self-satisfied in the knowledge of its own deficiencies.
When generations of experience have convinced the faculty
that something ought to be done, it has done it, even
though vested interests were dislodged and old idols de-
stroyed. We have heard ever since I can remember, for ex-
ample, that the credit system was the curse of education in
America. I have never met anybody who had a good word
to say for it. Nobody had ever done anything about it.
Nothing could be done about it. The University of Chi-
cago decided that if the system was bad it ought to be
changed. The University abolished it. That great academ-
ic characteristic of suspended judgment, of not doing any-
thing until nobody wants it done, or until it ought not to
be done, or until something radically different ought to be
done has not infected this University. This University has
behaved as a pioneer university ought to behave. It has
enthusiastically determined that something could be done,
and it has done it.

The fourth characteristic of the University of Chicago
has been its perpetual agreement with Cardinal Newman
that the object of a university is intellectual, not moral.
This is not to disagree with the attitude that moral values,
high ideals, and strong principles must be among the re-
sults of education. The history of the University and this
building are the best guaranty of this University's belief in
these things. But universities are founded as places where
scholars and their students may develop or exercise their
intellectual powers. In universities, and only in universi-
ties, may this be done on the highest level A university
provides its students with rigorous intellectual training at
the hands of stimulating individuals, surrounded by able,
industrious, and intelligent contemporaries. It sets a stand-
ard of intellectual attainment that can only be achieved
through those qualities that are commonly called "char-
acter/* Character is the inevitable prerequisite and the in-
evitable by-product of university training. A system of

164-

TO THE STUDENTS

education that produced graduates with intellects splen-
didly trained and no characters would not be merely un-
deserving of public support; it would be a menace to so-
ciety. In a real university, however, such a result is impos-
sible. The business of education in a real university is too
exacting, too strenuous, and puts too high a premium on
character for the student to be affected intellectually alone.
Consider the implications of the new Chicago plan. The
student is now free, and to learn how to be free may be said
to be the first duty of the^ educated man. The student who,
by his own efforts in the face of the distractions of college
life and a large city, has prepared himself for the general
examinations under the New Plan has had an experience
that will do more for his character than years of lectures on
character-building.

If we are to make our people understand what a univer-
sity is, we must insist on that intellectual emphasis which
distinguishes it from all other institutions. The universi-
ties have only themselves to blame if the public confuses
them with country clubs, reformatories, and preparatory
schools. As long as the conversation of universities is ex-
clusively about athletics, dormitories, and the social life of
students, they can hardly expect the citizen to understand
that these things are merely incidental to a university pro-
gram and do not at all affect its principal task. Indeed, I
should go so far as to say that the reason why the universi-
ties are successful in developing character is that they do
not go about it directly. If a university informed the world
and its students that it would improve the morals, inflate
the physique, and enhance the social graces of all who
entered there, it would in my opinion fail in these under-
takings and it would also fail to provide a sound education.
Character comes as a by-product of a sound education.
The university method of developing it is to train intelli-
gence.

These are, I think, some of the distinguishing character-

.165-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

istics of your University. They are rather splendid char-
acteristics. You could wish no better ones for yourselves.
Devotion to truth, the courage to be independent, an en-
thusiastic interest in the community and in new ideas, an
intellect rigorously trained and being trained these things
in law, in medicine, in teaching, in preaching, in citizenship
will distinguish you as they have distinguished your Alma
Mater. These qualities have never been in such demand as
they are today. We know that cowardice, selfishness, and
stupidity have brought the world to its present low estate.
In opposition to these forces your University offers you the
example of those qualities which it has displayed from the
beginning. They are the qualities of leadership. For lack
of leadership the whole world is in despair. How can it ever
hope to find it if honest, courageous, unselfish, inventive,
intelligent men and women do not emerge from universi-
ties like this?

You will, most of you, become citizens of that great
region of which this city is the capital. This is the Middle
Empire. Its development has hardly begun. Its signifi-
cance as a cultural area is not yet appreciated. But its in-
fluence already determines national policy and will con-
tinue to do so. Here the qualities of leadership will be most
telling. Here their absence will be most damaging to the
country and to the world. If in this formidable territory at
this formidable time you are to do your part, the character-
istics of the University of Chicago must become your own.

166-

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO TO
THE FACULTY AND TRUSTEES

TONIGHT for the first time since I can remember
I can wish you a happy new year with some hope
that we may have one. For five years, although we
have sought to divert ourselves by talking about other sub-
jects, our chief concern has been the financial position of
the University. Now we are beginning to think that it may
survive after all. The actual deficit in the general budget
last year was 10 per cent of the deficit estimated when that
budget was made up, and the deficit estimated for this year
is being steadily diminished by the gradual improvement in
our income. This improvement is so gradual that we can
expect to make no grandiloquent gestures. But we can
move toward some of the objects that are most essential,
such as putting the support of research on a better basis
and correcting the grossest injustices that have been done
the younger men. To this general program the Board of
Trustees has already shown a friendly spirit. Of course, the
rate at which it can be realized depends upon the rate at
which recovery proceeds; but it does begin to look as
though after five years of thinking about little but budgets
we might be able to devote ourselves to the improvement
of education and research.

We may take some consolation, too, in the fact that the
reorganization of the University which began in 1930 is
now substantially complete. Of the scheme that we had in
mind originally, only the combination of the College and
the last two years of the High School remains to be made
effective; it is now a paper consolidation. Other develop-
ments, such as proposals for the teaching of statistics and

167-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

some relating to home economics will be presented from
time to time. Among other things, we must finally settle
the place of the University of Chicago in medical education
and the part to be played by our medical enterprises now
on different sides of the city. Nor can I assure you that you
will not be perpetually harried about the inadequacies, if
any, of the curriculum. A good deal needs to be done, in
spite of the great advances already made, to work out a
general education in the College. Some of the divisions and
professional schools have failed to take complete account
either of the advances in the College or of the opportunities
offered by their own organization. But changes in these
respects must come as the result of unremitting effort
through the years. They are the product of the normal
activity of any faculty that has any interest in its work;
they should not involve a general upheaval such as that
which began five years ago.

In the third place, we may hope for a happy new year
because we have routed, or at least repulsed, the forces of
darkness. Repulsed is probably the proper word, for we
cannot be sure that the ignorant and misguided will not
return to the charge. If eternal vigilance is not the price of
academic liberty, certainly eternal patience is. Although I
was occasionally in favor of more violent methods, I am
satisfied now that the course we pursued in the senatorial
investigation was as successful as it was dignified. Even in
LaSalle Street you can hardly find a person who is willing
to repeat the stupidities popular last year. Outside Chi-
cago the University's reputation is greater than ever.
Other universities feel that we have fought and won a
battle for them all. The alumni have been aroused to a new
interest in their Alma Mater. The Trustees have borne the
burden of our defense with courage, vigor, and even with
cheerfulness. They have done more: every one of them, in
addition to his usual gifts, has subscribed to the fund cele-
brating the University's birthday; the Trustees have given

-168-

TO THE FACULTY AND TRUSTEES

to this fund since the beginning of the year more than
$50,000. Because of our trials of last year, the faculty has
been united for the first time in this administration and
probably in any other. And the students have had the time
of their lives.

We have, then, a hopeful financial outlook, an organiza-
tion almost perfected, and academic freedom established
more securely than ever. But the important question is
what are we going to do with our money, our organization,
and our freedom? Suppose we had a real investigation of
the University. Suppose we had an investigation of the
things that really matter. Could we say that all our money
was wisely spent, that all our courses were needed, that
they were all as intelligent as they should be, that all our
research was significant, and that without regard to self-
interest we had single-mindedly pursued the purposes for
which the University was founded ? We know that we could
not. At this moment we can conscientiously say that this
is one of the best universities in the country. We cannot
say that it is as good as we can make it.

How can we use our funds, our organization, and our
freedom to make the University as good as it can be? We
can only do it by continuing the campaign that has been
going on here for forty-five years against triviality, which,
with its close relatives vocationalism and mediocrity, is the
greatest enemy of the higher learning in America.

In a sense it was the triviality of university life that pro-
duced the senatorial investigation. Why should our people
fail to see any difference between a university and a girls'
finishing school? The answer must be found in the fact that
the universities have made themselves unintelligible. They
are understood only in terms of social life or vocational
training. The popular conception is that the student,
through athletics, fraternities, and indoctrination with
"sound" principles, is taught to fit into our society in an
unobnoxious way. In addition he may acquire, if he wants

169-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

it, specific preparation for a job, which, it is thought, will
be a better job than he would otherwise get. When a busi-
ness man finds that the university in which he has placed a
young relative does not live up to this picture, you cannot
blame him for being annoyed.

For the design and coloring of this picture we have only
ourselves to blame. Every university president bemoans
the "overemphasis" on football; and every stadium in the
Big Ten was built on the recommendation of the president
of the institution around whose neck it is now hanging.
Wherever I have met with educational people, from Hawaii
to Rhode Island and from Minnesota to Texas, I have been
struck by their unwillingness to discuss the only important
question about education and research, and that is the
question of content. They want to talk about methods, the
size of classes, organization, administration, student super-
vision, degrees, and buildings. The program of the Associ-
ation of American Universities is a list of topics so trifling
that one wonders how anybody managed to think of them;
and each issue of the Journal of Higher Education brings us
fresh evidence of the preoccupation of the profession with
matters of no consequence whatever.

The New England universities, to which because of their
age, prestige, and wealth the country might naturally have
looked for the true meaning of a university, seem likely to
confuse the issue further. It will be interesting and impor-
tant to see whether any way can be found of making the
new colleges or houses of these universities into real educa-
tional units. If this cannot be done, they will merely serve
to illustrate on a grand scale the trivial aspects of American
education. They will emphasize social life, making friends,
table manners, and architecture, with some passing refer-
ences to the development of character and personality.

We may raise the same kind of questions about the new
professional schools in various fields that are now being
established. If they turn out to be vocational schools, they

170*

TO THE FACULTY AND TRUSTEES

will give new impetus to vocationalism and end in trivial-
ity as disappointing as the new courses to train safe drivers
that are now appearing. Professional education deals with
the subject matter with which the profession deals. But
the attitude of professional teaching and research in a uni-
versity should be that of studying the subject for its own
sake. And this is true whether the object is to educate a
professional archaeologist, historian, chemist, lawyer, or
engineer. Vocational training, on the other hand, deals
with technical procedures and good advice. Both proce-
dures and advice are frequently outmoded before the stu-
dent has a chance to use them; but the time consumed in
elaborating them in the university may interfere with, or
even prevent, the acquisition of a true professional educa-
tion. It is important for any lawyer, and would be useful to
many citizens, to understand procedural law. But courses
in New York Practice and Connecticut Practice, such as we
used to give at Yale to help the boys through the bar exam-
inations, are trivial. So were those we gave in Office Prac-
tice and Drafting Legal Instruments. It is probably im-
portant for the prospective teacher to understand what we
know about measuring the educational progress of the indi-
vidual. But a course in how to administer psychological
tests is trivial. The most enlightened engineers and engi-
neering teachers now favor as the best preparation for their
profession first a good general education and second a- pro-
gram of theoretical studies almost indistinguishable from
non-professional work in chemistry, physics, and mathe-
matics.

The trivial results of vocationalism have given rise to the
exaggerated view that in a university nothing useful should
be taught. And this is not an exaggeration if what it means
is that the pursuit of truth for its own sake is the most use-
ful occupation in which we can engage. Attempts to en-
cumber the higher learning with vocational techniques,
moral lessons, and political dogma will all end in triviality.

171-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

The University of Chicago has been happily free from
many of these manifestations. Vocationalism has suffered
no more signal defeat than the abolition of our School of
Education and the creation of the University Committee
on the Preparation of Teachers. The faculty of the Depart-
ments of Education wanted to study education, not to get
teachers ready for jobs. The Committee on the Prepara-
tion of Teachers has decided that the best way to prepare
them is to see to it that they have a good education and
that they understand something of the educational process.
The Committee has succeeded in working out a plan in
which the vocational elements are limited to those pre-
scribed by state laws. We have had like success in resisting
other temptations to triviality. We have insisted that the
student was here to study; and this policy, together with
the fortunate weakness of our football teams, has helped us
to keep our eyes, and even those of the public, fixed on the
real objects of the University. The abolition of the credit
system, of required attendance, and of much of the para-
phernalia that went with them have served to suggest that
we regarded education as a serious occupation for serious
people, and not as recreation or punishment for the im-
mature.

The kind of triviality that we have had to contend with
has resulted from the atmosphere of American universities,
which we have been almost powerless to correct by our-
selves. Higher degrees have come to be tags with a definite
market value. As such they have attracted many people
who had little interest in them but the appointments or
promotions they might bring. Then it has been felt that in
order to maintain the standard of these degrees the candi-
date, even for the Master's, must be required to make an
original contribution to knowledge. The result of all this
has been trivial research. When a man secures an appoint-
ment in a university, he is made to believe that he must
"produce," as the saying is, in order to be retained or ad-

172-

TO THE FACULTY AND TRUSTEES

vanced. The result has been trivial research. Since any
kind of information about anything is regarded as an ad-
dition to knowledge, the collection of miscellaneous, insig-
nificant information is called independent investigation; of
course, it is really trivial.

In a university composed of strong and numerous de-
partments, as a department grows and splits into two or
more departments, and as each department tends to de-
mand more and more of its students, the education of the
student may become narrower and narrower. Nor is the
remedy to be found in putting three or a dozen narrow or
trivial courses into one and calling it a survey course. In
fact, a course composed of a large number of trivial items
hastily covered during the year may have less value than
several courses treating minute sections of the field in a less
superficial manner. General courses in which the leading
ideas in a large field are presented to and mastered by the
student are the ideal we have held before us in the College.
No university course, general or departmental, can be jus-
tified unless it has intellectual content. And no research
can aspire to that name unless it has an intellectual basis.

The triviality produced everywhere by the proliferation
of courses was accentuated here by the rule which required
every member of the faculty to teach two majors a quarter.
The natural result was a lot of academic boondoggling.
Though the two-major rule was abolished years ago; its dis-
embodied spirit still rules over us. Men who should teach
less teach as much as those who should teach more. The
absence of the courses eliminated during the depression, to
the number of three or four hundred, is hardly noticed by
anybody. We should continue the process of elimination
until we are sure that every course in the catalogue is worth
giving. In addition the faculties should accept the offer
that was made two years ago and reduce the periods of
formal instruction as the Social Science Division has done,
or in any other way that will accomplish the same purpose.

. I73 .

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

If they do not do this, it will be difficult for me to convince
anybody that we need more money for research or to take
very seriously the complaint that the administration is not
interested in it.

Institutions that have larger assets than we can perhaps
afford to indulge in irrelevant and unprofitable activities.
Perhaps they can do so and still hold their position relative
to us. We cannot do so and hold our position relative to
them. And that means that every course, every project,
and, above all, every appointment must be worthy of the
great tradition of the University. If we can put down once
and for all triviality, vocationalism, and mediocrity, we
can preserve the place of leadership we have inherited and
show our fellow-citizens at last what a university can be.

174-

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH. I

AJNIVERSITY may be a university without doing
any teaching. It cannot be one without doing any
research. But there is an essential conflict between
teaching and research. Education is synthetic and general-
ized. Research is analytical and detailed. Education is be-
coming more generalized. Research is becoming more spe-
cialized. The college teacher, after intensive training in a
minute field of physics, is expected to teach a general course
in the natural sciences. The teacher aims at comprehen-
sion. But in the natural sciences in this country alone,
20,000 research workers are digging up important new facts
and announcing new discoveries, some of which are as yet
incomprehensible to their sponsors, to say nothing of those
who are compelled to fit them into an intelligible scheme
which may be communicated to the rising generation.

Nor is this all. American education confronts certain
national peculiarities which present almost insoluble prob-
lems. A much larger proportion of our population gets into
higher education than in any other country on earth.
Enormous numbers of students have poured into the col-
leges and universities since the beginning of the century.
Such numbers mean that you must have elaborate machin-
ery; and before you know it, the machinery becomes an end
in itself, cherishing its own special sanctity, and standing
between you and education like a lattice-work screen, ob-
scuring the vision and blocking the path.

The number of students has been swelled in recent, years
by the association of the formal indicia of education with
certain vocational opportunities. We shall shortly see the
Bachelor's degree required for elementary teachers and the

175-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

Master's for high-school teachers, as the doctorate is now
almost universally demanded for teachers at the higher
levels* Thanks to such requirements and to similar ones
for entrance to professional schools, American students
have in the last forty years become the most degree-con-
scious in the world. They are not to blame. Colleges and
universities have themselves informed them that nobody
can get anywhere in teaching, research, or the so-called
"learned" professions without an appropriate alphabetical
series after his name. And, when to this is added the abso-
lute necessity of having the Bachelor's degree in order to
pass the sacred portals of the local university club, we can
see that the forces of both social and economic life conspire
to exalt degrees at the expense of education.

When we add to the essential opposition between educa-
tion and research the present singular confusion in the edu-
cational world and the great changes impending in it, we
discern the dangers to a university in having anything to do
with education at all. The problems of education are so im-
mediate and far-reaching, the limitations of time and money
are so serious, the demands of research are so great, that any
university might well shrink from the task of straighten-
ing out American education and confine itself to research.

A university is either in education or out of it. The main-
tenance of educational work, and especially the Freshman
and Sophomore years, cannot be justified on the theory
that it provides preliminary training for research workers.
Only 17 per cent of the Ph.D/s at this convocation received
their Bachelor's degrees at this University. For that mat-
ter, only 33 per cent of the Bachelors at this convocation
entered this University as Freshmen four years ago. And
not less than half the Bachelors at this convocation never
attended our College at all. A recent survey of the 532
Bachelors at this convocation (the largest number we ever
had) indicated that 8 of them, or if per cent, expect to go
into research. I am not talking here about graduate work

176*

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

or teaching; I am talking about research. The education of
Masters is, with few exceptions, as much an educational
problem as the education of Freshmen. They are not going
into research any more than the Freshmen are. The educa-
tion of Ph.D/s is, as to 75 per cent of them, as much an
educational problem as the education of Masters. They
are not going into research either. If a university is to de-
vote itself exclusively to research, it must eliminate its
undergraduates, its professional students, its prospective
Masters, and the greater part of its Ph.D.'s.

On the other hand, a university that decides to make the
attempt to conduct both teaching and investigation can
find no way of dodging the responsibilities which such a
decision imposes. The first is the responsibility of doing a
good teaching job for its own students. The University of
Chicago cannot be said to have complied with this condi-
tion when, as in 1920, over 150 graduate students were giv-
ing instruction in the Freshman and Sophomore years. In
the second place, a university must understand what the
educational needs and the consequent educational develop-
ments of the country are and are going to be. That some of
the New England universities are moving in a direction
exactly opposite to that of the United States outside New
England may be attributed to the fact that they have re-
mained oblivious of what has been going on beyond their
borders, and particularly to one of the most remarkable
phenomena of our time, the junior-college movement. Fi-
nally, any self-respecting university must ask itself whether
in view of the emergency in American education it has not
some responsibility beyond the education of its own stu-
dents and the protection of its own educational skin. When
we survey the scene of turmoil which American education
presents, when we think of the pressure put on the system
by the universities both through their requirements and
their prestige, when we consider the limits that numbers,
politics, and meager resources set to the efforts of the sys-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

tern, when we reflect on the importance of education to the
preservation and improvement of our people, we can only
conclude that those universities that are free and powerful
must exert such intelligence as they have to lead education,
and hence the country itself, out of chaos, bewilderment,
and despair.

Is there no way in which a university can make this con-
tribution and still accomplish the purpose for which it ex-
ists, the advancement of knowledge? I think there is. If
you will permit me to cast, like Orpheus toward Eurydice,
or if you prefer, like Lot's wife toward Sodom, a brief back-
ward glance at a departed object of my affections, without
inflicting on it the fatal consequences those looks produced
in legend, I shall point out that the proposed consolidation
of the University of Chicago and Northwestern University
was designed to resolve exactly those great and fundamen-
tal difficulties that I have here been discussing. The con-
centration of all essentially educational work on campuses
other than this one and the concentration of all essentially
investigative work on this campus would, I believe, have
supplied the framework in which both teaching and re-
search might have been enriched and reconciled. Never-
theless, I do not wish to be understood as saying that it is
only through such amalgamations that such enrichment
and reconciliation may occur. I believe that even without
massive changes, afflicting alike to the sentiments and the
interests of those affected by them, it is possible for a uni-
versity to achieve the three objects which in my opinion
any self-respecting university will wish to achieve today.

You will remember that those objects are, in ascending
order of importance, first, to do a good job of teaching the
university's own students; second, to provide some leader-
ship for American education; and third, to advance knowl-
edge. It is exactly these objects that the gradual and al-
most continuous reorganization of this University since
1930 has been designed to accomplish.

178-

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

I believe we must go farther still. The essential conflict
between education and research is revealed in the depart-
mental organization. The Department of Anatomy, for ex-
ample, does not do research in anatomy. Its investigations
are in various sections of the biological field. The depart-
ment as such exists for teaching purposes: to educate doc-
tors and teachers of anatomy. On the other hand, there is
probably no such thing as research in English. There is re-
search in the English language, in literature, in philology,
and in the ideas which English-speaking individuals have
from time to time entertained. The inquiries of the Depart-
ment of English are united only by the fact that they
usually begin with books written in English. The depart-
ment is, however, a unit for professional purposes. As such
it prepares people to teach in departments of English. And
it is clear that for many years departments must prepare
people to teach in departments. In establishing the Uni-
versity Committee on the Preparation of Teachers, the
University recognized this fact and accepted for the whole
institution an obligation that had formerly been remitted
to the School of Education. The staff has been torn be-
tween the demands of investigation and the demands of in-
struction. The students who intend to be teachers have
failed to receive the type of education they need. The stu-
dents who intend to be research workers have been treated
as though they planned to be teachers. We have only just
begun to realize that the same cross-purposes pervade the
divisions and professional schools that used to obtain in the
College.

I think we should proceed gradually and experimentally
to establish in the divisions and professional schools, and in
some cases between them, research institutes without teach-
ing obligations of any kind. Members of the faculty would
be assigned to them for such portions of their time as they
wished to give to research. Only those students would be
admitted to the institutes who were interested in research

179.

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

and qualified to become research workers. Once admitted,
they would act as research assistants and secure their train-
ing as apprentices. In the institutes departmental lines
would be obliterated. The departments and professional
schools would remain for professional teaching purposes.

I should hope that students in the institutes would be
content without degrees. If they had to have them, I
should reluctantly be willing to try to think up some spe-
cial insignia for them. I see the departments and profes-
sional schools continuing to recommend candidates for the
professional degrees and the MA. and Ph.D. I see them
continuing to require a certain amount of research for the
doctorate. But what I see most clearly is that the institute
plan would disentangle the last remaining complexities
raised by the attempt to conduct education and research in
the same institution.

We should then, I think, have completed the task of
organizing a university. We should have erected a sound
and rational structure in which with clear knowledge of
what we were attempting at each stage we could proceed to
improve the education of our own students, to make our
contribution to the changes imminent in American educa-
tion, and, most of all, to protect and develop the advance-
ment of knowledge at a time when the reduction of re-
sources and the demands of education threaten to extin-
guish it. Without the handicap of an organization at odds
with our purpose we could then press forward to face far
more perplexing questions, the aims and content of educa-
tion and the aims and standards of research.

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH. II

I MAKE no apology for asking the members of the grad-
uating class to consider briefly one or two educational
questions. Aside from the fact that many of you are
going to be teachers, you are now very highly educated.
And, what is more important for my purposes, you are
probably thinking today more intently about education
than you ever have before or ever will again. While you are
in this propitious frame of mind therefore, I cannot refrain
from taking advantage of you to discuss some things about
education that may perplex you, and that have certainly
perplexed your instructors.

In some divisions of the University there has been a feel-
ing more potent than a rule that distinction in research in
subject matter should be the sole prerequisite to recogni-
tion in any university. This seems to me to overlook the
fact that a university is an educational institution. I do
not say it ought to be; I say it is. Since it is, it should, I
suppose, attempt to be the best kind of educational institu-
tion possible. Unless people who are interested in educa-
tion can believe that their interest will lead to advance-
ment, they will not retain it long, and the education ad-
ministered will be mediocre at best. Of course, it is a fair
question whether a university ought to be an educational
institution. Perhaps it ought to be a research institution.
But the change in title is not important for a university like
this. If the purpose of a university is inquiry, it will hardly
be able to avoid inquiry into education, one of the most
significant activities of mankind. And inquiry into educa-
tion will show on the college and university level that most
of its major problems whom to teach, how to teach, and

181-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

what to teach are still unsolved. Since it is doubtful if
they can be solved by armchair meditation, it follows that
a complete collegiate organization is necessary in the uni-
versity for the study of these problems as they present
themselves in real life.

This is particularly true here, for we are surrounded by
other universities not so free to experiment as we are. We
have an unusual opportunity to show the way. But we
shall not be able to do so unless we are willing to differenti-
ate the individuals on our staff, to provide different kinds
of opportunity for different men, to adjust the content and
amount of each scholar's work to his individual capacity,
and to rew r ard him for contributing to our knowledge of
education as we should reward him if he contributed to our
knowledge of any other subject.

In dealing with students the same lack of adjustment of
the university to the individual appears, and apparently
for the same reason : there are so many of them that to deal
with them at all we have to deal with them as though they
were identical. Professional work may well be started, pre-
sumably, at the end of a good general education. But we
have assumed, first, that all of college work was genera
education and, second, that the longer a man stayed in col-
lege the better his education was. And consequently, in the
effort to get better students in professional schools we have
constantly raised the number of years in college required
for entrance to them. But it must be clear that the great
advantage of the graduate professional school is not in the
maturity of students, or in the preparation of students, but
in the segregation of students. Segregation into a serious
professional group has turned many a collegiate loafer into
a first-rate professional man. But it has in many profes-
sions extended the period of training to quite dispropor-
tionate lengths. The graduates of some of the so-called
"best" law schools cannot start practice before they are
twenty-five; and the graduates of some medical schools of

182-

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

the same grade cannot begin to earn a living until they are
past twenty-seven. It has never been established that there
was anything mystical about these particular ages or this
particular background. In the effort to find an arbitrary
automatic yardstick that would have the effect of reducing
numbers and producing a homogeneous group, we have re-
quired and have sometimes succeeded in getting embalmed
in law mere temporal qualifications that have small rela-
tion to individual competence.

And since we have had no standard in some professional
schools but the number of college years, we have felt that
the larger that number the higher our standard. I have al-
ways been interested in the discussions of law-school deans
to observe the embarrassed blushes of one of them when he
discovered that another school of which he had not hitherto
had much opinion actually had higher standards, by which
he meant longer collegiate requirements, than his own.
About the only way in which a law school could attain pres-
tige and aspire to leadership was to require more not
better, but more college work of all not some, but all
its prospective students. And so between our desire for a
simple test of qualifications for entrance and our desire for
prestige we have committed ourselves in some institutions
to a system of pre-professional requirements which dimin-
ishes the student's opportunities without necessarily pro-
ducing counterbalancing benefits to him, to the commu-
nity, or to us.

Our whole system is set up for the average student. The
result is that in any well-organized college there probably
is not a single regulation governing the curriculum that a
really excellent student should not break. Whatever one's
view of a university, one may well doubt the value of such
restrictions.

A university which aims to forward inquiry is naturally
concerned about the production of men and women compe-

183-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

tent in and devoted to such inquiry. No one can be long in
university work without becoming aware of the present
scarcity of such individuals. Although the low level of fac-
ulty salaries is undoubtedly in large part responsible, there
is another factor at work, and that is the method and con-
tent of collegiate instruction. Many people go to college
with a real and even remarkable excitement about scholar-
ship. Still more could be excited if they could believe that
there was anything important or vital in what the scholar
does. In far too many cases this present or potential excite-
ment dies in the face of the peculiarities of the American
collegiate system. The first duty of a college in a univer-
sity is to organize itself so that a student who wishes to be-
come a scholar will not have insuperable obstacles put in
his path.

Such organization in both the university and college is
not as impossible as it may appear. It does not necessarily
follow that as numbers rise standards must fall. In many
places as numbers have risen standards have fallen. But
this is rather because we have not had time to think than
because of any inevitable connection between numbers and
standards: If we had time to think about education, in-
stead of being forced to provide something that would look
like it for the multitudes who suddenly demanded it, we
should direct our attention in the first instance to the
achievements of individuals. In order to test those achieve-
ments we should work out criteria applicable at the various
levels. Instead of asking how many years in high school a
student had had, we should determine what kind of train-
ing we should require for entrance to a college. We should
next have to determine what accomplishments a man leav-
ing the junior college should possess to show that he has
finished his general higher education. As a person sought
entrance to the university for either senior college or pro-
fessional and graduate work, he should be required to sub-
mit evidence of his power to deal with it, and should be

-184-

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

graduated only after he had met tests indicating that he
had the knowledge and ability that reflected the criteria
previously established for graduation.

You will say that this is exactly what is done at the pres-
ent time. At every stage students are required to submit
evidence of their previous training, showing either that
they are ready to go on with their education or that it is
complete. The trouble is that all this is stated in terms of
what a student has been through, instead of in terms of
what he has learned and what he can do. We have been un-
willing to go behind the record. We take that record with
its courses and grades, forgetting that these give slight in-
dication of the permanent information or inspiration de-
rived from the schooling they represent. We have talked
in the language of time, forgetting that we must therefore
talk of the average student, and that, by insisting on tem-
poral requirements, we do our best to compel the best stu-
dents to be average, too.

The time that is wasted by good men and women through
this insistence on time spent as the principal indication of
intellectual attainment is enormous^* Particularly does this
waste occur in the process of passing from one institution
to another, where the high school duplicates the grades, the
college duplicates the high school, and the university dupli-
cates the college. If it is impossible to articulate the grades,
the high school, the college, and the graduate and profes-
sional school by general categorical rules, it ought to be
possible to articulate them by articulating the work of the
individual. In the college and university if we develop first
the criteria of entrance to and completion of general higher
education, if we then develop the criteria of entrance to and
completion of non-professional and professional specialized
educations, and if we at each stage employ general exami-
nations with such other devices as may be necessary to be
taken by the student when in his opinion he is ready for
them, we eliminate for any given individual the loss of time

185-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

and the loss of initiative which at present curse our educa-
tional system. If then an individual remains at any level
longer than the average student, it will be because he needs
to remain there; if he goes on earlier, it will be because he is
qualified to go on.

Such a system, eliminating or minimizing course exami-
nations, course credits, course grades, and time require-
ments, is open to two serious objections. In the first place,
the educational criteria and the testing devices to which I
have glibly referred are very difficult to work out. But this
amounts simply to saying that education is a hard job and
a good deal harder than we may have thought. Since we
must admit that our present methods are defective, we
shall have to admit that we should exert what intelligence
we have to improve them. The successful installation of
such a scheme, or of a better one designed to accomplish
the same objectives, will require long and painstaking
thought. But thought is what education today requires;
and, if we are in education, it is our business to put it forth.

In the second place, there is an economic problem. No
matter how many controlled experiments may seem to sug-
gest the contrary, we shall always have a vague feeling that
individual instruction of the poorest students by the best
teachers will be better for the student than mass instruc-
tion by the same or poorer teachers. But we simply can't
afford to deal with our poorest students that way. There
aren't enough good teachers to go around; why should we
wear them out in the hope of rescuing a few men and wom-
en who at best will never do more than take a harmless
place in the community? If we can afford individualized
instruction at all, we can afford it first for those who can
profit by it most and who will most amply repay the effort
and expense devoted to them. The question before any
university therefore is, not whether individualized educa-
tion is desirable, but whether the university, in view of the
other demands upon it, can afford to give individualized

186-

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

education at all. Still, if we take the large lecture course as
a base and select from it only those who are particularly
interested and qualified for more individual instruction,
without assuming the necessity of small classes and quiz
sections in all courses for all students, we can accomplish
everything I have in mind without additions to our facul-
ties. And when we are ready to concede that even some
Freshmen in some fields are able to learn something by
themselves and are likely to develop powers of independent
thought and effort only as we permit them to do independ-
ent work, we shall again revise our notions of the number
of professors that a given number of students require for
the best development of their individual talents.

By much thought and much patience, therefore, in spite
of the economic problem and the present vagueness of the
criteria we must ascertain, we may in some such ways as
these adjust the university to the individual and the indi-
vidual to the university. In some such ways as these we
may make the college a place for the exploration of the
realms of knowledge and the university a place for the
beginning of a life of learning and inquiry. Then perhaps
even the learned professions may become learned. And we
may produce a generation more educated than our own and
individuals better educated than ourselves.

THE CHICAGO PLAN

BEFORE reviewing the recent developments at the
University of Chicago, there are a few general state-
ments that I should like to make about them. In
the first place they have none of them been revolutionary
or even highly original. They are, almost all of them, mat-
ters upon which educators at the University of Chicago and
elsewhere have agreed for years. If there is anything start-
ling about them, it is in the fact that all of them have not
been tried before. And so the word "experimental" can be
applied to them only in a restricted sense. The attitude of
the University is experimental because it is willing to try
some things when success is not guaranteed. It is willing to
change if change seems, on reflection, to be desirable. But
it is not striking out blindly in the effort to do something
new merely because it is new. I may say in passing that
almost everything in education is experimental, for we can
seldom prove that anything we do is conclusively better
than something else we might do, or indeed than nothing
at all.

I wish to indicate at the outset that the measures lately
taken at Chicago have been taken on the recommendation
of the University Senate, which consists of all professors of
full rank, and have been approved by the Board of Trus-
tees. In the whole program, which has been presented step
by step to the Senate and the Board, we have almost never
had a close vote. The plans have represented the judgment
of the overwhelming majority of the faculty and the Board.
It is further important to notice that these plans have not
been confined to any one school or to any single aspect of
the University's life. They have affected the whole institu-

THE CHICAGO PLAN

tion its administration, its methods, its curriculum, and
its organization. Although the process is still far from com-
plete, we can give the main outlines of the program as it
seems likely to proceed during the next few years.

Before 1930 the organization of the University of Chi-
cago did not differ materially from the customary scheme
except that the institution was perhaps more highly depart-
mentalized than most. During the first seventeen years of
its history, heads of departments held office for life. Under
this system departmental autonomy flourished. Heads of
departments dealt chiefly with the President, and very
little with the deans. The deans advised students, awarded
fellowships, and looked after other interdepartmental af-
fairs. But budgets and appointments were departmental
matters, on which the deans advised, but which they did
not control. The result was that in 1929 the President had
the task of co-ordinating 72 independent budgets.

It was clear, also, that each departmental budget repre-
sented at least two different interests the interests of gen-
eral education and of advanced study and research. These
differences were not reflected in the organization of the
University. The University consisted of the professional
schools and the graduate schools and Colleges of Arts, Liter-
ature, and Science. It was becoming increasingly apparent
that the Junior Colleges were concerned with a different
problem from the Senior Colleges, and that the problem of
the Senior Colleges was similar to that of the graduate
schools. The graduate schools, however, had differences
among themselves. There were strong groups in the hu-
manities and the social sciences nominally united in the
Graduate School of Arts and Literature. There were strong
groups in the biological and physical sciences nominally
united in the Graduate School of Science.

To accomplish at one stroke an administrative simplifi-
cation and an organization that reflected the real activities
of the University, the Senate recommended in the fall of

189-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

1930 that the graduate schools, the Senior Colleges, and the
Junior Colleges be abolished and that in their places there
be established five divisions: the Biological Sciences, the
Physical Sciences, the Social Sciences, the Humanities, and
the College. The College was to do the work of the Univer-
sity in general education; the divisions were to be devoted
to advanced study and research and were to award all de-
grees. The deans of the divisions were to be vice-presidents
in charge of their organizations, reviewing the department-
al budgets and co-ordinating them into divisional budgets
before sending them to the President. They were also em-
powered to recommend appointments, promotions, and in-
creases in salary. In this way the number of independent
budgets handled by the President was reduced from 72 to
24, and the organization of the University was related more
nearly to its educational activities.

It was soon observed that the new responsibilities thrown
on the deans would make it difficult for them to perform
many of the tasks that they had carried hitherto. It was
noticed also that the problem of educational and vocational
guidance was one that we were treating in a very cavalier
fashion. Some twelve separate units were concerned with
student problems. In view of the methods of measurement
that we proposed, adequate attention to guidance was more
necessary than ever before. The Senate therefore recom-
mended that a Dean of Students should be appointed who
should have charge of the twelve organizations concerned
with student affairs and who should relieve the deans of the
burden of dealing with student problems. By this arrange-
ment the number of independent budgets handled by the
President was reduced from 24 to 12.

Since we were in the business of reorganizing, it was con-
sidered a propitious time to put into effect the results of
deliberations that had been going on since 1927 affecting
the methods of measuring the progress of students. We de-
cided to get rid of credits and course examinations for them,

190*

THE CHICAGO PLAN

to abolish compulsory class attendance, and to reduce arbi-
trary residence requirements. In place of these various
methods of detecting a student's intellectual development
we provided for general examinations as the sole criterion
of progress from one unit to another, except for those de-
grees where a dissertation has always been demanded.
These examinations the student may take when in his
opinion he is ready to do so. The object of this arrange-
ment is not to speed up the educational process but to per-
mit the student to keep constantly in contact with material
that is stimulating and challenging to him.

A system of general examinations had to be adminis-
tered. The Senate therefore recommended the appoint-
ment of a University Examiner who should be chairman of
a Board of Examinations composed of nine members repre-
senting the various faculties. All examinations which were
to count for anything were to be given by the Board. The
Board's technical staff prepares the examinations on the
basis of material supplied by the teaching staff. The Board
then administers and tests the examinations.

These actions of the Senate and the Board of Trustees
complete what may be called the first phase of the Uni-
versity's reorganization. They were taken in the fall of
1930. The College faculty offered in the fall of 1931 an en-
tirely new course of study centering around four large lec-
ture courses in the physical, social, and biological sciences,
and the humanities. Many departmental courses for Fresh-
men and Sophomores disappeared entirely. The object was
to give a general education and to eliminate, wherever pos-
sible, courses with a professional aim. In the general courses
the student attends lectures, if he wishes, three times a
week, and a discussion group once a week. Ordinarily, he
attends two of the general courses in his Freshman year and
two in his Sophomore year. Thus he has time left to attend
courses that will give him those tools that he will need if he
is going on into the upper divisions.

191 -

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

The other divisions and the professional schools are most
of them still at work on their courses of study. In general
the Bachelor's degree will be conferred on the basis of gen-
eral examinations given on the theory that the student will
spend one-third of his time in a department, one-third in a
division, and have one-third of it free. The courses leading
to the higher degrees will be still more specialized. The
tendency in the divisions is essentially that manifested in
the College to drop as many departmental courses as pos-
sible and to consolidate their subject matter in divisional
courses designed to give the student, first of all, a thorough
understanding of the divisional field as a whole. The struc-
ture of the curriculum is thus pyramidal, proceeding from
general courses in the College to divisional courses and then
departmental courses in the divisions.

Almost simultaneously with the divisional organization
the faculty began to make provision for interdepartmental
and interdivisional co-operation in research and in teach-
ing. Such a university activity is the preparation of teach-
ers. Almost all departments are engaged in it* Many of
them are engaged in little else. Yet the formal training of
teachers has been accidentally relegated to one depart-
ment, the School of Education. The effect of this has been
to dimmish the sense of responsibility felt by all the depart-
ments, to prevent the Department of Education from de-
voting itself to its proper field, the science of education, and
to promote a certain degree of disharmony between that
department and the rest. In recognition of the fact that the
education of teachers is an undertaking of the entire insti-
tution we now propose to place that task upon a University
committee composed of representatives of all divisions and
schools, and to relieve the School of Education of the bur-
den. The result will be clarification of the functions of that
department and definite assumption by the whole Univer-
sity of a responsibility which belongs to all of it.

As we have studied for the past two and a half years the

192*

THE CHICAGO PLAN

problems of general education, we have become convinced
that they cannot be readily solved by an organization with
divided loyalties. We are certain, too, that an organization
which has its students for only two years will always face
great difficulties in the construction of a program designed
to give a general education. In addition we have observed,
like everybody else, the duplication and overlapping that
have afflicted the last two years of high school and the first
two years of college. Our College became a two-year unit
in 1930. Our College faculty has been composed of mem-
bers of the upper divisions, and has been to a certain ex-
tent, a faculty of divided loyalties. The members of it have
been concerned with general education in the College and
with research and advanced study in the divisions. They
could not be appointed in the College without the approval
of chairmen of departments whose interests might be ex-
clusively in advanced work. Our high school has been a
laboratory school of the Department of Education, under
an administration separate from that of the College.

On January 12 the Board of Trustees on the recommend-
ation of the Senate approved two important proposals, one
to incorporate the last two years of the University High
School in the program of the College, and the other to per-
mit the appointment of members of the College faculty
without the concurrence of departmental chairmen or divi-
sional deans. The first action gives us a four-year unit de-
voted to general education. The second gives us the chance
to build up a faculty chosen because of its special interest
and ability in this field. The four years devoted to general
education will be under the administration of the College
Dean; the Principal of University High School has become
Associate Dean of the College.

The purpose of these actions is to provide an organiza-
tion and a curriculum for the American system of public
education if not for it to use, at least for it to consider. It
will be clear, however, that this purpose cannot be accom-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

plished if the University limits its experiment to general
education. Although I believe that we underestimate the
significance of general education for all citizens, although I
am convinced that any terminal course of study must give
large attention to the cultural heritage of the race, I am
sure also that beside the College there must grow up paral-
lel institutions or programs which will meet the needs of
graduates of junior high schools who should be prepared
for business or technical activity. The needs of all gradu-
ates of all junior high schools cannot be met by general edu-
cation alone. Therefore, as soon as possible the University
of Chicago, if it wishes to construct a program useful to the
system of public education, must experiment with terminal
courses of study of a technical or business character which
will parallel the new four-year organization devoted to
general education.

This, then, is in outline the program of the University
of Chicago. From the administrative point of view I should
say unqualifiedly that the changes we have made have pro-
moted efficiency and economy. The reduction of the num-
ber of budgets from 72 to 12 and the grant of real authority
to the deans have given us an administrative scheme with-
out which we could not have met the rapid decline in our
income since 1930.

From the standpoint of attracting, retaining, and edu-
cating students my impressions are equally favorable. Our
applications increased in the first year of the New Plan and
have kept on increasing. The students admitted have been
markedly superior to any that we have had before, by all
tests that we could apply. They appear to understand and
value the opportunities offered to them by the new regula-
tions or lack of them. Thirty-nine Freshmen in the first year
presented themselves for general examinations in subjects
which they had studied by themselves, without benefit of
instruction. They all passed, and passed with an average
higher than the general average of the class. Although

194.

THE CHICAGO PLAN

these are times in which we should expect no program to
assist in the retention of students, we find that the holding
power of the New Plan is 5 per cent greater than that of
the old.

The faculty has been notably successful, I believe, in hu-
manizing the sciences, in de-professionalizing Freshmen
and Sophomore instruction in these fields and making the
science courses contribute to a general education. The mu-
seum developed at the Quadrangles in co-operation with
the Museum of Science and Industry has largely replaced
laboratory work. The new sound pictures in the physical
sciences have greatly simplified and improved the ordinary
demonstration-lecture technique. Attendance at classes
under the New Plan, where it is not required, has been
higher than attendance under the Old Plan, where it was
required. In general, good students seem to come to the
University because of the New Plan; they seem to stay
there because of it; and they seem to flourish under it.

Although the curriculum, the examination system, and
the advisory service all leave something to be desired, I am
satisfied that they are all definitely superior to anything we
had before 1931. The examinations have proved a tremen-
dous labor to the teaching and examining staff. Since the
examinations are published and distributed, new ones will
have to be prepared each time they are given, so that the
labor will never end. Nevertheless, we are developing a
group of examiners who understand the curriculum and a
group of instructors who understand examinations; this
will mean the gradual elimination of much waste motion
that has beset us in the past two years.

From the point of view of the organization of education
elementary, secondary, collegiate, and university I am
clear that Chicago has taken some suggestive steps. But
here, I must admit, I have little but faith to sustain me. I
believe I do not know that a six-year primary school, a
three- or four-year secondary school, a three-or four-year

195-

NO FRIENDLY VOICE

college, paralleled by three- or four-year technical insti-
tutes, and followed by the university I believe, I do not
know, that this is a sound, efficient, and economical organ-
ization of education. At any rate, I think it is worth try-
ing. Certain impressions from our experience may be rele-
vant. Our experience seems to show that the natural asso-
ciation of students is not in a group covering the four years
of the typical college of liberal arts, but rather in two
groups which separate in the middle of that college. Our
divisional students, who are Juniors, Seniors, and graduate
students, have developed a divisional consciousness and a
community of interest quite distinct from those of the
Freshmen and Sophomores, who constitute our College.
The natural associates of the Freshmen and Sophomores,
on the other hand, seem to be the Juniors and Seniors in
high school. Certainly the faculties of the upper divisions
have developed a divisional consciousness; and the faculty
of the College is coming more and more to see that its prob-
lems are distinct from those of the upper divisions and
allied with those of the last two years of the high school.

The development of divisional consciousness has been a
striking phenomenon, for it has marked a change in the
traditional departmental feeling of the University of Chi-
cago. The construction of divisional courses of study, of
divisional examinations, of divisional requirements, and of
divisional research projects has brought allied departments
together for the good of the students and of one another. In
the biological sciences this change has been of peculiar sig-
nificance, for there the clinical medical departments have
become members of the division along with the pre-clinical
and non-clinical biologists. The group is therefore a unique
association of biologists, who, because of a common admin-
istration and a common purpose, are likely to have some in-
fluence on the course of education and research in medicine
and in biology as a whole.

In the same way the inclusion of the School of Education

196'

THE CHICAGO PLAN

in the Division of the Social Sciences seems to me fraught
with important consequences for the science of education
and for the social studies. The tendency of American uni-
versities to regard educational specialists as people who
had the queer idea that they could and would train public-
school teachers has done the greatest damage to universi-
ties and to scholars in education. The social sciences have
missed association with one of the most important, if not
the most important, of the social studies; departments of
education have sometimes had a professional, or even a
vocational, cast thrust upon them. At Chicago, the De-
partment of Education is an integral part of the Division of
the Social Sciences, to the advantage of both.

I do not offer this description of what the University of
Chicago is doing because these things are the only things
that are being done in the university area. It is only neces-
sary to refer to the great contributions that are being made
by the great university situated in this city to remind you
that even we at Chicago are conscious that other institu-
tions, and notably the University of Minnesota, are en-
gaged in work of fundamental importance to the future of
education. It may well be that everything that we are do-
ing is wrong. I do not greatly care if it is, for I trust to the
intelligence of educators to point out our errors and thus
save both themselves and us from the final fatal conse-
quences of our mistakes. So the Chicago Plan is not the
only plan. It may not be the best plan. It is not apian that
we recommend to anybody else. It may have no ultimate
significance whatever. The only reason that I think it
worth while to present it here is that it may serve to remind
us that even in times of great financial distress it is possible
for us to direct some attention to what is, after all, our
main task, the improvement of education in the United
States.

IT PRINTED!

|LlN USAj