The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities ...

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Dav id Fr i day

DAVrU FRIDAY

UNIVEPSITYOF MICHIGAN

ANN AP10OR, MICH.

Davi d Fr i day

)l%(l3f DAVIU FRIDAY

. / UNIVERSITYOF MICHIGAN

V ANN ARSOR, MICH.

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BOOKS BY THORSTEIN VEBLEN

THE THEORY OP THE LEISURE CLASS

THE THEORY OP BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

THE INSTINCT OP WORKMANSHIP

IMPERIAL GERMANY

AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

THE NATURE OP PEACE

AND THE TERMS OP ITS PERPETUATION

THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA

THE HIGHER LEARNING
IN AMERICA

A MEMORANDUM ON THE CONDUCT
OF UNIVERSITIES BY BUSINESS MEN

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THORSTEIN ^EBLEN

NEW YORK

B. W. HUEBSCH

MCMXVIII

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COPYRIGHT, 1918. BT

B. W. RUEBSGH

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PREFACE

It is something more than a dozen years since the fol-
lowing observations on American academic life were first
assembled in written form. In the meantime changes
of one kind and another have occurred, although not such
as to alter the course of policy which has guided Ameri-
can universities. Lines of policy which were once con-
sidered to be tentative and provisional have since then
passed into settled usage. This altered and more stable
state of the subject matter has permitted a revision to
avoid detailed documentation of matters that have be-
come commonplace, with some resulting economy of
space and argument. But, unhappily, revision and abridg-
ment carries its own penalties, in the way of a more
fragmentary presentation and a more repetitious conduct
of the argument ; so that it becomes necessary to bespeak
a degree of indulgence on that ground.

Unhappily, this is not all that seems necessary to plead
in extenuation of recurrent infirmities. Circtmistances,
chiefly of a personal incidence, have repeatedly delayed
publication beyond what the run of events at large would
have indicated as a propitious date ; and the same circum-
stances have also enjoined a severer and more repressive
curtailment in the available data. It may not be out of
place, therefore, to indicate in the most summary fashion
what has been the nature of these fortuitous hindrances.

In its earlier formulation, the argument necessarily
drew largely on first-hand observation of the conduct of
affairs at Chicago, under the administration of its first

vi Preface

president. As is well known, the first president's share
in the management of the university was intimate, mas-
terful and pervasive, in a very high degree ; so much so
that no secure line of demarcation could be drawn be-
tween the administration's policy and the president's per-
sonal ruling. It is true, salient features of academic
policy which many observers at that time were inclined
to credit to the proclivities of Chicago's first president,
have in the later course of things proved to belong to
the impersonal essence of the case ; having been approved
by the members of the craft, and so having passed into
general usage without abatement. Yet, at the time, the
share of the Great Pioneer in reshaping American aca-
demic policy could scarcely have been handled in a de-
tached way, as an impersonal phenomenon of the unfold-
ing historical sequence. The personal note was, in fact,
very greatly in evidence.

And just then, presently, that Strong Man's life was
brought to a close. So that it would unavoidably have
seemed a breach of decorum to let these observations
seek a hearing at that time, even after any practicable
revision and excision which filial piety would enjoin.
Under the rule of Nihil nisi bonum, there seemed noth-
ing for it but a large reticence.

But swiftly, with the passage of years, events proved
that much of what had appeared to be personal to the
Great Pioneer was in reality intrinsic to the historical
movement; so that the innovations presently lost their
personal colour, and so went impersonally to augment the
grand total of human achievement at large. Meanwhile
general interest in the topic had nowise abated. Indeed,
discussion of the academic situation was running high
and in large volume, and much of it was taking such a
turn — controversial, reproachful, hortatory, acrimonious

Preface vii

— that anything in the way of a temperate survey shotdd
presumably have been altogether timely.

But fortuitous circumstances again intervened, such
as made it seem the part of insight and sobriety again to
defer publication, until the colour of an irrelevant per-
sonal equation should again have had time to fade into
the background. With the further passage of time, it is
hoped that no fortuitous shadow will now cloud the issue
in any such degree as to detract at all sensibly from what-
ever value this account of events and their causes may
have.

This allusion to incidents which have no material bear-
ing on the inquiry may tolerantly be allowed, as going to
account for a sparing use of local information and, it is
hoped, to extenuate a degree of reserve and reticence
touching divers intimate details of executive policy.

It goes without saying that the many books, papers and
addresses brought out on the academic situation have
had their share in shaping the essay. More particularly
have these various expressions of opinion and ooncem
made it possible to take many things for granted, as
matter of common notoriety, that would have appeared
to require documentation a dozen or fifteen years ago, as
lying at that time still in the field of surmise and fore-
cast. Much, perhaps the greater bulk, of the printed
matter issued on this head in the interval has, it is true,
been of a hortatory or eloquently optimistic nature, and
may therefore be left on one side. But the academic
situation has also been receiving some considerable at-
tention with a view to getting an insight into what is
going forward. One and another of these writers to
whom the present essay is in debt will be found referred
to by name in the pages which more particularly lean on

viii Preface

their support ; and the like is true for various utterances
by men in authority that have been drawn on for ilIus->
trative expressions. But a narrow scrutiny would doubt-
less make it appear that the unacknowledged indebted-
ness greatly exceeds what so is accredited and accounted
for. That such is the case must not be taken as show-
ing intentional neglect of the due courtesies.
March 1916.

In the course of the past two years, while the manu-
script has been Ijring in wait for the printer, a new situ-
ation has been forcing itself on the attention of men who
continue to take an interest in the universities. On this
provocation a few paragraphs have been added, at the
end of the introductory chapter. Otherwise there ap-
pears to be no call for a change in the general argu-
ment, and it has not been disturbed since the earlier date,
which is accordingly left as it stands*

June 1918.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

PAGB

Introductory . . i

CHAPTER II
The Governing Boards 59

CHAPTER III
The Academic Administration ••••••• 85

CHAPTER IV
Academic Prestige and the Material Equipment • 135

CHAPTER V
The Academic Personnel < » • 148

CHAPTER VI
The Portion of the Scientist ....... . . 170

CHAPTER VII
Vocational Training 191

CHAPTER VIII
Summary and Trial Balance ...••••• 219

THE HIGHER LEARNING

IN AMERICA

CHAPTER I

Introductory: The Place of the University

IN Modern Life

In any known civilization there will be found something
in the way of esoteric knowledge. This body of knowl-
edge will vary characteristically from one culture to an-
other, differing both in content and in respect of the
canons of truth and reality relied on by its adepts. But
there is this common trait running through all civiliza-
tions, as touches this range of esoteric knowledge, that
it is in all cases held, more or less closely, in the keeping
of a select body of adepts or specialists — scientists,
scholars, savants, clerks, priests, shamans, medicinemen
— whatever designation may best fit the given case.

In the apprehension of the given society within which
any such body of knowledge is found it will also be
found that the knowledge in question is rated as an
article of great intrinsic value, in some way a matter
of more substantial consequence than any or all of the
material achievements or possessions of the community.
It may take shape as a system of magic or of religious
beliefs, of m)rthology, theology, philosophy or science.
But whatever shape it falls into in the given case, it

z

2 The Higher Learning

makes up the substantial core of the civilization in which
it is found, and it is felt to give character and distinction
to that civilization.

In the apprehension of the group in whose life and
esteem it lives and takes effect, this esoteric knowledge
is taken to embody a systematization of fundamental and
eternal truth ; although it is evident to any outsider that
it will take its character and its scope and method from
the habits of life of the group, from the institutions with
which it is bound in a web of give and take. Such is
manifestly the case in all the historic phases of civiliza-
tion, as well as in all those contemporary cultures that are
sufficiently remote from our everyday interests to admit
of their being seen in adequate perspective. A passably
dispassionate inquiry into the place which modern learn-
ing holds in modem civilization will show that such is
also the case of this latest, and in the mind of its keepers
the most mature, system of knowledge. It should by no
means be an insuperably difficult matter to show that
this " higher learning " of the modern world, the current
body of science and scholarship, also holds its place on
such a tenure of use and wont, that it has grown and
shifted in point of content, aims and methods in response
to the changes in habits of life that have passed over the
Western peoples during the period of its growth and
ascendancy. Nor should it be embarrassingly difficult
to reach the persuasion that this process of change and
supersession in the scope and method of knowledge is
still effectually at work, in a like response to institutional
changes that still are incontinently going forward.^

To the adepts who are occupied with this esoteric

lAn inquiry of this kind has been attempted elsewhere: CI
The Instinct ^f Workmanship, chapter vii, pp. 321-340; "The
Place of Science in Modem Civilisation," *i4f«mco» Journal of

Introductory 3

knowledge, the scientists and scholars on whom its keep*
ing devolves, the matter will of course not appear in
just that light; more particularly so far as regards that
special s^ment of the field of knowledge with the keep*
ing and cultivation of which they may, each and several,
be occupied. They are, each and several, engaged on
the perfecting and conservation of a special line of in*
quiiy, the objective end of which, in the view of its
adepts, will necessarily be the final and irreducible truth
as touches matters within its scope. But, seen in per-
spective, these adepts are themselves to be taken as crea-
tures of habit, creatures of that particular manner of
group life out of which their preconceptions in matters
of knowledge, and the manner of their interest in the
run of inquiry, have sprung. So that the terms of finality
that will satisfy the adepts are also a consequence of
habituation, and they are to be taken as conclusive only
because and in so far as they are consonant with the
discipline of habituation enforced by that manner of
group life that has induced in these adepts their par*
ticular frame of mind.

Perhaps at a farther remove than many other current
phenomena, but none the less effectually for that, the
higher learning takes its character from the manner of
life enforced on the group by the circumstances in which
it is placed. These constraining circumstances that so
condition the scope and method of learning are primarily,
and perhaps most cogently, the conditions imposed by
the state of the industrial arts, the technological situa-
tion; but in the second place, and scarcely less exacting
in detail, the received scheme of use and wont in its

Sociology, Vol. XI (March, 1906), pp. 585-609; "The Evolution
of the Scientific Point of View," University of California Chronic
cle (1908), Vol. X, No. 4, pp. 395-416.

4 The Higher Learning

other bearings has its effect in shaping the scheme of
knowledge, both as to its content and as touches the
norms and methods of its organization. Distinctive and
dominant among the constituent factors of this current
scheme of use and wont is the pursuit of business, with
the outlook and predilections which that pursuit implies.
Therefore any inquiry into the effect which recent insti-
tutional changes may have upon the pursuit of the higher
learning will necessarily be taken up in a peculiar de-
gree with the consequnces which an habitual pursuit of
business in modern times has had for the ideals, aims
and methods of the scholars and schools devoted to the
higher learning.

The Higher Learning as currently cultivated by the
scholars and scientists of the Western civilization differs
not generically from the esoteric knowledge purveyed
by specialists in other civilizations, elsewhere and in
other times. It engages the same general range of apti-
tudes and capacities, meets the same range of human
wants, and grows out of the same impulsive propensi-
ties of human nature. Its scope and method are different
from what has seemed good in other cultural situations,
and its tenets and canons are so far peculiar as to give it
a specific character different from these others; but in
the main this specific character is due to a different
distribution of emphasis among the same general range
of native gifts that have always driven men to the pur-
suit of knowledge. The stress falls in a somewhat obvi-
ously different way among the canons of reality by re-
course to which men systematize and verify the knowl-
edge gained; which is in its turn due to the different
habituation to which civilized men are subjected, as
contrasted with the discipline exercised by other and
earlier cultures.

Introductory 5

In point of its genesis and growth any system of knowl-
edge may confidently be run back, in the main, to the
initiative and bias afforded by two certain impulsive traits
of human nature : an Idle Curiosity, and the Instinct of
Workmanship.*

In this generic trait the modem learning does not de-
part from the rule that holds for the common run. Men
instinctively seek knowledge, and value it. The fact of
this proclivity is well summed up in sa)ring that men are
by native gift actuated with an idle curiosity, — ** idle " in
the sense that a knowledge of things is sought, apart from
any ulterior use of the knowledge so gained.* This, of
course, does not imply that the knowledge so gained will
not be turned to practical account. In point of fact,
although the fact is not greatly relevant to the inquiry here
in hand, the native proclivity here spoken of as the in-
stinct of workmanship will unavoidably incline men to
turn to account, in a system of ways and means, whatever
knowledge so becomes available. But the instinct of
workmanship has also another and more pertinent bearing
in these premises, in that it affords the norms, or the
scheme of criteria and canons of verity, according to
which the ascertained facts will be construed and con-
nected up in a body of systematic knowledge. Yet the
sense of workmanship takes effect by recourse to divers
expedients and reaches its ends by recourse to varying
principles, according as the habituation of workday life
has enforced one or another scheme of interpretation for
the facts with which it has to deal.

tt Cf. The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the In-
dustrial Arts, ch. i and pp. 39-45, 52-62, 84-89.

2 In the crude surmises of the pioneers in pragmatism this
proposition was implicitly denied; in their later and more ad-
visedly formulated positions the expositors of pragmatism have
made their peace with it.

6 The Higher Learning

The habits of thought induced by workday life impose
themselves as ruling principles that govern the quest of
knowledge ; it will therefore be the habits of thought en-
forced by the current technological scheme that will have
most (or most immediately) to say in the current sys-
tematization of facts. The working logic of the current
state of the industrial arts will necessarily insinuate itself
as the logical scheme which must, of course, effectually
govern the interpretation and generalizations of fact in all
their commonplace relations. But the current state of
the industrial arts is not all that conditions workmanship.
Under any given institutional situation, — and the modem
scheme of use and wont, law and order, is no exception, —
workmanship is held to a more or less exacting conformity
to several tests and standards that are not intrinsic to the
state of the industrial arts, even if they are not alien to it ;
such as the requirements imposed by the current system of
ownership and pecuniary values. These pecuniary con-
ditions that impose themselves on the processes of indus-
try and on the conduct of life, together with the pecuniary
accountancy that goes with them — the price system —
have much to say in the guidance and limitations of work-
manship. And when and in so far as the habituation so
enforced in the traffic of workday life goes into effect as a
scheme of logic governing the quest of knowledge, such
principles as have by habit found acceptance as being
conventionally salutary and conclusive in the pecuniary
conduct of affairs will necessarily leave their mark on the
ideals, aims, methods and standards of science and
scholarship. More particularly, those principles and
standards of organization, control and achievement, that
have been accepted as an habitual matter of course in
the conduct of business will, by force of habit, in good
part reassert themselves as indispensable and conclusive

Introductory 7

in the conduct of the affairs of learning. While it re-
mains true that the bias of workmanship continues to
guide the quest of knowledge, under the conditions im-
posed by modern institutions it will not be the naive con-
ceptions of primitive workmanship that will shape the
framework of the modem system of learning; but rather
the preconceptions of that disciplined workmanship that
has been instructed in the logic of the modern technology
and sophisticated with much experience in a civilization
in whose scheme of life pecuniary canons are definitive.

The modern technology is of an impersonal, matter-of-
fact character in an unexampled degree, and the account-
ancy of modem business management is also of an ex-
tremely dispassionate and impartially exacting nature. It
results that the modem learning is of a similarly matter-
of-fact, mechanistic complexion, and that it similarly leans
on statistically dispassionate tests and formulations.
Whereas it may fairly be said that the personal equation
once — in the days of scholastic learning — was the cen-
tral and decisive factor in the systematization of knowl-
edge, it is equally fair to say that in later time no effort is
spared to eliminate all bias of personality from the tech-
nique or the results of science or scholarship. It is the
" dry light of science " that is always in request, and great
pains is taken to exclude all color of sentimentality.

Yet this highly sterilized, germ-proof system of knowl-
edge, kept in a cool, dry place, commands the affection of
modem civilized mankind no less unconditionally, with
no more afterthought of an extraneous sanction, than
once did the highly personalized mythological and philo-
sophical constructions and interpretations that had the
vogue in the days of the schoolmen.

Through all the mutations that have passed over this
quest of knowledge, from its beginnings in puerile myth

8 The Higher Learning

and magic to its (provisional) consummation in the
"exact" sciences of the current fashion, any attentive
scrutiny will find that the driving force has consistently
been of the same kind, traceable to the same proclivity
of human nature. In so far as it may fairly be accounted
esoteric knowledge, or a " higher learning," all this enter-
prise is actuated by an idle curiosity, a disinterested pro-
clivity to gain a knowledge of things and to reduce this
knowledge to a comprehensible system. The objective
end is a theoretical organization, a logical articulation of
things known, the lines of which must not be deflected by
any consideration of expediency or convenience, but must
run true to the canons of reality accepted at the time.
These canons of reality, or of verity, have varied from
time to time, have in fact varied incontinently with the
passage of time and the mutations of experience. As the
fashions of modern time have come on, particularly the
later phases of modem life, the experience that so has
shaped and reshaped the canons of verity for the use of
inquiring minds has fallen more and more into the lines
of mechanical articulation and has expressed itself ever
more unreservedly in terms of mechanical stress. Con-
comitantly the canons of reality have taken on a mechan-
istic complexion, to the neglect and progressive disuse of
all tests and standards of a more genial sort ; until in the
off-hand apprehension of modern men, " reality " comes
near being identified with mechanical fact, and " verifica-
tion" is taken to mean a formulation in mechanical terms.
But the final test of this reality about which the inquiries
of modern men so turn is not the test of mechanical serv-
iceability for human use, but only of mechanistically
effectual matter-of-fact.

So it has come about that modem civilization is in a

Introductory 9

very special degree a culture of the intellectual powers, in
the narrower sense of the term, as contrasted with the
emotional traits of human nature. Its achievements and
chief merits are found in this field of learning, and its
chief defects elsewhere. And it is on its achievements
in this domain of detached and dispassionate knowledge
that modem civilized mankind most ingenuously plumes
itself and confidently rests its hopes. The more emo-
tional and spiritual virtues that once held the first place
have been overshadowed by the increasing consideration
given to proficiency in matter-of-fact knowledge. As
prime movers in the tide of civilized life, these senti-
mental movements of the human spirit belong in the past,
— at least such is the self-complacent avowal of the mod-
em spokesmen of culture. The modem technology, and
the mechanistic conception of things that goes with that
technology, are alien to the spirit of the " Old Order."
The Church, the court, the camp, the drawing-room,
where these elder and perhaps nobler virtues had their
laboratory and playground, have grown weedy and gone
to seed. Much of the apparatus of the old order, with
the good old way, still stands over in a state of decent re-
pair, and the sentimentally reminiscent endeavors of cer-
tain spiritual " hold-overs " still lend this apparatus of
archaism something of a galvanic life. But that power
of aspiration that once surged full and hot in the cults of
faith, fashion, sentiment, exploit, and honor, now at its
best comes to such a head as it may in the concerted adula-
tion of matter-of-fact.

This esoteric knowledge of matter-of-fact has come to
be accepted as something worth while in its own right, a
self-legitimating end of endeavor in itself, apart from
any bearing it may have on the glory of God or the good
of man. Men have, no doubt, always been possessed of a

lo The Higher Learning

more or less urgent propensity to inquire into the nature
of things, beyond the serviceability of any knowledge
so gained, and have always been given to seeking curious
explanations of things at large. The idle curiosity is a
native trait of the race. But in past times such a disin-
terested pursuit of unprofitable knowledge has, by and
large, not been freely avowed as a legitimate end of en-
deavour; or such has at any rate been the state of the case
through that later segment of history which students com-
monly take account of. A quest of knowledge has overtly
been rated as meritorious, or even blameless, only iii so
far as it has appeared to serve the ends of one or another
of the practical interests that have from time to time
occupied men's attention. But latterly, during the past
few generations, this learning has so far become an
avowed " end in itself *' that " the increase and diffusion
of knowledge among men " is now freely rated as the most
humane and meritorious work to be taken care of by any
enlightened community or any public-spirited friend of
civilization.

The expediency of such " increase and diffusion " is no
longer held in doubt, because it has ceased to be a question
of expediency among the enlightened nations, being itself
the consummation upon which, in the apprehension of
civilized men, the advance of culture must converge.
Such has come to be the long-term commonsense judg-
ment of enlightened public opinion. A settled presump-
tion to some such effect has found lodgment as a common-
place conviction in the popular mind, in much the same
measure and in much the same period of time as the cur-
rent body of systematic knowledge has taken on the
character of matter of fact. For good or ill, civilized
men have come to hold that this matter-of-fact knowl-
edge of things is the only end in life that indubitably justi-

' Introdtictory 1 1

fies itself. So that nothing more irretrievably shameful
could overtake modem civilization than the miscarriage of
this modem learning, which is the most valued spiritual
asset of civilized mankind.

The truth of this view is borne out by the professions
even of those lieutenants of the powers of darkness who
are straining to lay waste and debauch the peoples of
Christendom. In high-pitched concert they all swear by
the name of a " culture " whose sole inalienable asset is
this same intellectual mastery of matters of fact. At the
same time it is only by drawing on the resources of this
matter-of-fact knowledge that the protagonists of reac-
tion are able to carry on their campaign of debauchery
and desolation.

Other interests that have once been held in higher
esteem appear by comparison to have fallen into abeyance,
— religious devotion, political prestige, fighting capacity,
gentility, pecuniary distinction, profuse consumption of
goods. But it is only by comparison with the higher
value given to this enterprise of the intellect that such
other interests appear to have lost ground. These and
the like have fallen into relative disesteem, as being sordid
and insubstantial by comparison. Not that these
" lower " human interests, answering to the " lower "
ranges of human intellect, have fallen into neglect;
it is only that they have come to be accounted " lower,"
as contrasted with the quest of knowledge; and
it is only on sober second thought, and perhaps only
for the ephemeral present, that they are so accounted by
the common run of civilized mankind. Men still are in
sufficiently hot pursuit of all these time-worn amenities,
and each for himself is, in point of fact, more than likely
to make the pursuit of such self-seeking ends the burden

12 The Higher Learning

of his life; but on a dispassionate rating, and under the
corrective of deliberate avowal, it will appear that none
of these commend themselves as intrinsically worth while
at large. At the best they are rated as expedient conces-
sions to human infirmity or as measures of defense against
human perversity and the outrages of fortune. The last
resort of the apologists for these more sordid endeavours
is the plea that only by this means can the ulterior ends
of a civilization of intelligence be served. The argument
may fairly be paraphrased to the effect that in order to
serve God in the end, we must all be ready to serve the
Devil in the meantime.

It is always possible, of course, that this pre-eminence
of intellectual enterprise in the civilization of the West-
em peoples is a transient episode ; that it may eventually
— perhaps even precipitately, with the next impending
turn in the fortunes of this civilization — again be rele-
gated to a secondary place in the scheme of things and
become only an instrumentality in the service of some
dominant aim or impulse, such as a vainglorious patriot-
ism, or dynastic politics, or the breeding of a commercial
aristocracy. More than one of the nations of Europe
have moved so far in this matter already as to place the
primacy of science and scholarship in doubt as against
warlike ambitions; and the aspirations of the American
community appear to be divided — between patriotism in
the service of the captains of war, and commerce in the
service of the captains of finance. But hitherto the
spokesmen of any such cultural reversion are careful to
declare a perfunctory faith in that civilization of disinter-
ested intellectual achievement which they are endeavour-
ing to suborn to their several ends. That such pro forma
declarations are found necessary argues that the faith in

:i

Introductory 13

a civilization of intelligence is still so far intact as to re-
quire all reactionaries to make their peace with it.

Meantime the easy matter-of-course presumption that
such a civilization of intelligence justifies itself goes to
argue that the current bias which so comes to expression
will be the outcome of a secure and protracted experience.
What underlies and has brought on this bent in the temper
of the civilized peoples is a somewhat intricate question of
institutional growth, and can not be gone into here; but
the gradual shifting of this matter-of-fact outlook into
the primacy among the ideals of modern Christendom is
sufficiently evident in point of fact, to any attentive stu-
dent of modem times. Conceivably, there may come an
abrupt term to its paramount vogue, through some precip-
itate sweep of circimistances ; but it did not come in by
anything like the sudden intrusion of a new invention in
ideals — after the fashion of a religious conversion —
nor by the incursion of a hitherto alien element into the
current scheme of life, but rather by force of a gradual
and imintended, scarcely perceptible, shifting of emphasis
between the several cultural factors that conjointly go to
make up the working scheme of things.

Along with this shifting of matter-of-fact knowledge
into the foreground among the ideals of civilized life,
there has also gope on a similarly unpremeditated change
in the attitude of those persons and establishments that
have to do with this learning, as well as in the rating
accorded them by the community at large. Again it is a
matter of institutional growth, of self-wrought changes
in the scheme of use and wont ; and here as in other cases
of institutional growth and displacement, the changes have
gone forward for the most part blindly, by impulse, with-
out much foreknowledge of any ulterior consequences to
which such a sequence of change might be said to tend.

14 The Higher Learning

It is only after the new growth of use and wont has
taken effect in an altered range of principles and stan-
dards, that its direction and ulterior consequences can be
appreciated with any degree of confidence. But this
development that has thrown up matter-of-fact knowl-
edge into its place of paramount value for modern culture
has in a peculiar degree been unintended and unforeseen ;
the like applies to the case of the schools and the person-
nel involved ; and in a peculiar degree the drift and bear-
ing of these changes have also not been appreciated while
they have been going forward, doubtless because it has
all been a peculiarly unprecedented phenomenon and a
wholly undesigned drift of habituation. History records
nothing that is fairly comparable. No era in the historic
past has set a pattern for guidance in this matter, and the
experience of none of the peoples of history affords a clue
by which to have judged beforehand of the probable
course and outcome of this specifically modern and occi-
dental phase of culture.

Some slight beginnings and excursions in the way of
a cultivation of matter-of-fact learning there may have
been, now and again, among the many shifting systems
of esoteric lore that have claimed attention here and
there, early and late ; and these need by no means be ac-
counted negligible. But they have on the whole come to
nothing much better than broken excursions, as seen from
the point of view of the latterday higher learning, and
they have brought into bearing nothing appreciable in the
way of establishments designed without afterthought to
further the advance of disinterested knowledge. Any-
thing like a cultural era that avowedly takes such a quest
of knowledge as its chief and distinctive characteristic is
not known to history. From this isolated state of the
case it follows, unfortunately, that this modem phase is

Introductory 15

to be studied only in its own light; and since the sequence
of development has hitherto reached no secure consumma-
tion or conclusion, there is also much room for conflicting
opinions as to its presumptive or legitimate outcome, or
even as to its present drift

II

But notorious facts make this much plain, that civilized
mankind looks to this quest of matter-of-fact knowledge
as its most substantial asset and its most valued achieve-
ment, — in so far as any consensus of appreciation or of
aspirations is to be found among civilized mankind ; and
there is no similar consensus bearing on any other feature
of that scheme of life that characterizes modern civiliza-
tion. It is similarly beyond dispute that men look to the
modem system of schools and related establishments of
learning for the furtherance and conservsition of this in-
tellectual enterprise. And among the various items of
this equipment the modern university is, by tradition,
more closely identified with the quest of knowledge than
any other. It stands in a unique and peculiarly intimate
relation to this intellectual enterprise. At least such is
the current apprehension of the university's work. The
university is the only accepted institution of the modern
culture on which the quest of knowledge unquestionably
devolves ; and the visible drift of circumstances as well as
of public sentiment runs also to making this the only un-
questioned duty incumbent on the university.

It is true, many other lines of work, and of endeavor
that may not fairly be called work, are undertaken by
schools of university grade ; and also, many other schools
that call themselves " universities " will have substantially
nothing to do with the higher learning. But each and

1 6 The Higher Learning

several of these other lines of endeavor, into which the
universities allow themselves to be drawn, are open to
question. Their legitimacy remains an open question in
spite of the interested arguments of their spokesmen, who
advocate the partial submergence of the university in such
enterprises as professional training, undergraduate in-
struction, supervision and guidance of the secondary
school system, edification of the unlearned by " university
extension " and similar excursions into the field of public
amusement, training of secondary school teachers, en-
couragement of amateurs by "correspondence," etc.
What and how much of these extraneous activities the
university should allow itself is a matter on which there
is no general agreement even among those whose inclina-
tions go far in that direction; but what is taken for
granted throughout all this advocacy of outlying detail is
the secure premise that the university is in the first place
a seminary of the higher learning, and that no school can
make good its pretensions to university standing except
by proving its fitness in this respect.^

The conservation and advancement of the higher learn-
ing involves two lines of work, distinct but closely bound
together: (a) scientific and scholarly inquiry, and (b)
the instruction of students.^ The former of these is pri-
mary and indispensable. It is this work of intellectual
enterprise that gives its character to the university and

1 The essential function of the university is to bring together,
for the transmission of experience and impulse, the sages of the
passing and the picked youths of the coming generation. By the
extent and fulness with which they establish these social con-
tacts, and thus transmit the wave of cumulative experience and
idealist impulse — the real sources of moral and intellectual
progress — the universities are to be judged. — ^Victor Branford,
Interpretations and Forecasts, ch. VI. " The Present as a Transi-
tion," p. 288.

2 Cf. Geo. T. Ladd, University Control, p. 349.

Introductory 17

marks it oflF from the lower schools. The work of teach-
ing properly belongs in the university only because and in
so far as it incites and facilitates the university man's
work of inquiry, — and the extent to which such teaching
furthers the work of inquiry is scarcely to be appreciated
without a somewhat extended experience. By and large,
there are but few and inconsequential exceptions to the
rule that teaching, as a concomitant of investigation, is
distinctly advantageous to the investigator; particularly
in so far as his work is of the nature of theoretical in-
quiry. The instruction necessarily involved in univer-
sity work, therefore, is only such as can readily be com-
bined with the work of inquiry, at the same time that it
goes directly to further the higher learning in that it trains
the incoming generation of scholars and scientists for the
further pursuit of knowledge. Training for other pur-
poses is necessarily of a different kind and is best done
elsewhere; and it does not become university work by
calling it so and imposing its burden on the men and
equipment whose only concern should be the higher learn-
ing.

University teaching, having a particular and special
purpose — the pursuit of knowledge — it has also a par-
ticular and special character, such as to differentiate it
from other teaching and at. the same time leave it rela-
tively ineffective for other purposes. Its aim is to equip
the student for the work of inquiry, not to give him facil-
ity in that conduct of affairs that turns such knowledge to
" practical account." Hence the instruction that falls
legitimately under the hand of the university man is
necessarily subsidiary and incidental to the work of in-
quiry, and it can effectually be carried on only by such a
teacher as is himself occupied with the scrutiny of what
knowledge is already in hand and with pushing the inquiry

1 8 The Higher Learning

to further gains. And it can be carried on by such a
teacher only by drawing his students into his own work of
inquiry. The student's relation to his teacher necessarily
becomes that of an apprentice to his master, rather than
that of a pupil to his schoolmaster.

A university is a body of mature scholars and scientists,
the " faculty," — with whatever plant and other equipment
may incidentally serve as appliances for their work in any
given case. The necessary material equipment may un-
der modern conditions be very considerable, as may also
the number of care-takers, assistants, etc. ; but all that is
not the university, but merely its equipment. And the
university man's work is the pursuit of knowledge, to-
gether with whatever advisory surveillance and guidance
he may consistently aiford such students as are entering
on the career of learning at a point where his outlook and
methods of work may be of effect for them. No man
whose energies are not habitually bent on increasing and
proving up the domain of learning belongs legitimately on
the university staff. The university man is, properly, a
student, not a schoolmaster. Such is the unmistakable
drift of sentiment and professed endeavour, in so far as it
is guided by the cultural aspirations of civilized mankind
rather than by the emulative strategy of individuals seek-
ing their own preferment.*

1 Cf., c. g., J. McKeen Cattell, University Control, Part III,
ch. v., " Concerning the American University." " The university
is those who teach and those who learn and the work they do."
"The university is its men and their work. But certain exter-
nals are necessary or at least usual — buildings and equipment,
a president and trustees."

The papers by other writers associated with Mr. Cattell in this
volume run to the same effect whenever they touch the sam«
topic; and, indeed, it would be difficult to find a deliberate ex-
pression to the contrary among men entitled to speak in these
premises. [Footnote continued on p. 19.]

Introductory 19

An this, of course, implies no undervaluing of the
work of those men who aim to prepare the youth for cit-
izenship and a practical career, ^t is only a question of
distinguishing between things tKkt belong apart. The
scientist and the scholar on the one hand, and the school-
master on the other hand, both belong within the later
growth of civilization; but a differentiation of the two
classes, and a division of their work, is indispensable if
they are to do their work as it should be done, and as the
modem community thoughtfully intends that it should be
done. And while such a division of labour has hitherto
not been carried through with any degree of consistency,
it is at least under way, and there is nothing but the pre-
sumption of outworn usage that continues to hold the two
lines of work together, to the detriment of both ; backed,
it is true, by ambitions of self-aggrandizement on the part
of many schools and many of their directorates.

The schoolmaster and his work may be equally, or
more, valuable to the community at large — presumably
more rather than less — but in so far as his chief interest
is of the pedagogical sort his place is not in the university.
Exposition, instruction and drill belong in the secondary
and professional schools. The consistent aim there is,
and should be, to instruct, to inculcate a knowledge of
results, and to give the pupil a working facility in applying
it On the university level such information and training
is (should be) incidental to the work of research. The
university man is almost unavoidably a teacher, by precept
and example, but he can not without detriment to his work
as scientist or scholar serve as a taskmaster or a vehicle

It may be in place to add here that the volume referred to,
on University Control, has been had in mind throughtout the fol-
lowing analysis and has served as ground and material for much
of the anpiment

20 The Higher Learning

of indoctrination. The student who comes up to the uni-
versity for the pursuit of knowledge is expected to know
what he wants and to want it, without compulsion. If
he falls short in these respects, if he has not the
requisite interest and initiative, it is his own misfortune,
not the fault of his teacher. What he has a legitimate
claim to is an opportunity for such personal contact and
guidance as will give him familiarity with the ways and
means of the higher learning, — any information imparted
to him being incidental to this main work of habituation.
He gets a chance to make himself a scholar, and what he
will do with his opportunities in this way lies in his own
discretion.

The difference between the modern university and the
lower and professional schools is broad and simple; not so
much a difference of degree as of kind. There is no
difficulty about apprehending or appreciating this differ-
ence ; the dispute turns not on the practicability of distin-
guishing between the two, but on the desirability of letting
such a distinction go into effect. It is a controversy be-
tween those who wish to hold fast that which once was
good and those who look to make use of the means in
hand for new ends and meet new exigencies.

The lower schools (including the professional schools)
are, in the ideal scheme, designed to fit the incoming gen-
eration for civil life; they are therefore occupied with
instilling such knowledge and habits as will make their
pupils fit citizens of the world in whatever position in the
fabric of workday life they may fall. The university on
the other hand is specialized to fit men for a life of
science and scholarship; and it is accordingly concerned
with such discipline only as will give efficiency in the
pursuit of knowledge and fit its students for the increase
and diffusion of learning. It follows that while the lower

Introductory 21

schools necessarily take over the surveillance of their
pupils* everyday life, and exercise a large measure of
authority and responsible interference in that behalf, the
university assumes (or should assume) no responsibility
for its students' fortunes in the moral, religious, pecimi-
ary, domestic, or hygienic respect.

Doubtless the larger and more serious responsibility
in the educational system belongs not to the university but
to the lower and professional schools. Citizenship is a
larger and more substantial category than scholarship;
and the furtherance of civilized life is a larger and more
serious interest than the pursuit of knowledge for its
own idle sake. But the proportions which the quest of
knowledge is latterly assuming in the scheme of civilized
life require that the establishments to which this interest
is committed should not be charged with extraneous du-
ties; particularly not with extraneous matters that are
themselves of such grave consequence as this training for
citizenship and practical affairs. These are too serious a
range of duties to be taken care of as a side-issue, by a
seminary of learning, the members of whose faculty, if
the^' are fit for their own special work, are not men of
affairs or adepts in worldly wisdom.

Ill

In point of historical pedigree the American universi-
ties are of another derivation than their European coun-
terpart; although the difference in this respect is not so
sharp a matter of contrast as might be assumed at first
sight The European (Continental) universities appear
to have been founded, originally, to meet the needs of
professional training, more particularly theological (and
philosophical) training in the earlier times. The Amer-

22 The Higher Learning

lean universities are, historically, an outgrowth of the
American college ; and the latter was installed, in its be-
ginnings, largely as a means of professional training;
chiefly training for Divinity, secondarily for the calling of
the schoolmaster. But in neither case, neither in that of
the European university nor in that of the American Col-
lege, was this early vocational aim of the schools allowed
to decide their character in the long run, nor to circum-
scribe the lines of their later growth. In both cases,
somewhat alike, the two groups of schools came to their
mature development, in the nineteenth century, as estab-
lishments occupied with disinterested learning, given over
to the pursuit of intellectual enterprise, rather than as
seminaries for training of a vocational kind. They still
had a vocational value, no doubt, and the vocational needs
of their students need not have been absent from the con-
siderations that guided their directorates. It would par-
ticularly be found that the (clerical) directorates of the
American colleges had more than half an eye to the needs
of Divinity even at so late a date as when, in the third
quarter of the century, the complexion of the American
college situation began seriously to change. It is from
this period — from the era of the Civil War and the
Reconstruction — that the changes set in which have re-
shaped the academic situation in America.

At this era, some half a century ago, the American
college was, or was at least presumed to be, given over
to disinterested instruction, not specialized with a voca-
tional, or even a denominational, bias. It was coming to
take its place as the superior or crowning member, a sort
of capstone, of the system of public instruction. The life-
history of any one of the state universities whose early
period of growth runs across this era will readily show
the effectual guidance of such an ideal of a college, as a

Introductory 23

superior and definitive member in a school system de-
signed to afford an extended course of instruction looking
to an unbiassed increase and diffusion of knowledge.
Other interests, of a professional or vocational kind, were
also entrusted to the keeping of these new-found schools ;
but with a conclusive generality the rule holds that in
these academic creations a college establishment of a dis-
interested, non-vocational character is counted in as the
indispensable nucleus^ — that much was at that time a
matter of course.

The further development shows two marked features :
The American university has come into bearing; and the
college has become an intermediate rather than a terminal
link in the conventional scheme of education. Under the
names " undergraduate " and " graduate," the college and
the university are still commonly coupled together as sub-
divisions of a complex whole ; but this holding together of
the two disparate schools is at the best a freak of aimless
survival. At the worst, and more commonly, it is the
result of a gross ambition for magnitude on the part of
the joint directorate. Whether the college lives by itself
as an independent establishment on a foundation of its
own, or is in point of legal formality a subdivision of the
university establishment, it takes its place in the educa-
tional scheme as senior member of the secondary school
system, and it bears no peculiarly close relation to the
university as a seat of learning. At the closest it stands
to the university in the relation of a fitting school ; more
commonly its relations are closer with the ordinary pro-
fessional and vocational schools; and for the most part it
stands in no relation, beyond that of juxtaposition, with
the one or the other.

The attempt to hold the college and the university
together in bonds of ostensible solidarity is by no means

24, The Higher Learning

an advisedly concerted adjustment to the needs of scholar-
ship as they run today. By historical accident the older
American universities have grown into bearing on the
ground of an underlying college, and the external connec-
tion so inherited has not usually been severed ; and by ill-
advised, or perhaps unadvised, imitation the younger uni-
versities have blundered into encumbering themselves
with an undergraduate department to simulate this pre-
sumptively honourable pedigree, to the detriment both of
the university and of the college so bound up with it.
By this arrangement the college — tmdergraduate depart-
ment — falls into the position of an iappendage, a side
issue, to be taken care of by afterthought on the part of a
body of men whose chief legitimate interest runs — should
run — on other things than the efficient management of
such an undergraduate training-school, — provided always
that they are a bona fide university faculty, and not a body
of secondary-school teachers masquerading under the
assumed name of a university.

The motive to this inclusion of an undergraduate de-
partment in the newer universities appears commonly to
have been a headlong eagerness on the part of the corpo-
rate authorities to show a complete establishment of the
conventionally accepted pattern, and to enroll as many
students as possible.

Whatever may have been true for the earlier time, when
the American college first grew up and flourished, it is
beyond question that the undergraduate department
which takes the place of the college today cannot be rated
as an institution of the higher learning. At the best it is
now a school for preliminary training, preparatory to
entering on the career of learning, or in preparation for
the further training required for the professions; but it
is also, and chiefly, an establishment designed to give the

Introductory 2$

concluding touches to the education of young men who
have no designs on learning, beyond the close of the col-
lege curriculum. It aims to aflford a rounded discipline to
those whose goal is the life of fashion or of affairs.
How well, or how ill, the college may combine these two
unrelated purposes is a question that does not immediately
concern the present inquiry. It is touched on here only
to point the contrast between the American college and
the university.

It follows from the character of their work that while
the university should offer no set curriculum, the college
has, properly, nothing else to offer. But the retention or
inclusion of the college and its aims within the university
corporation has necessarily led to the retention of college
standards and methods of control even in what is or pur-
ports to be university work ; so that it is by no means un-
usual to find university (graduate) work scheduled in the
form of a curriculum, with all that boarding-school cir-
cumstance and apparatus that is so unavoidable an evil in
all undergraduate training. In effect, the outcome of
these short-sighted attempts to take care of the higher
learning by the means and method of the boys' school,
commonly is to eliminate the higher learning from the case
and substitute the aims and results of a boys' training-
school.

Undergraduate work being task work, it is possible,
without fatal effect, to reduce it to standard units of time
and volume, and so control and enforce it by a system of
accountancy and surveillance; the methods of control,
accountancy and coerdon that so come to be worked out
have all that convincing appearance of tangible efficiency
that belongs to any mechanically defined and statistically
accountable routine, such as will always commend itself
to the spirit of the schoolmaster ; the temptation to apply

26 The Higher Learning

such methods of standardized routine wherever it is at all
feasible is always present, and it is cogently spoken for by
all those to whom drill is a more intelligible conception
than scholarship. The work of leamii^, which distinc-
tively belongs in the university, on the other hand, is a
matter of personal contact and co-operation between
teacher and student, and is not measurable in statistical
units or amenable to mechanical tests; the men engaged
in this work can accordingly offer nothing of the same
definite character in place of the rigid routine and ac-
countancy advocated by the schoolmasters; and the out-
come in nearly all cases where the control of both depart-
ments vests in one composite corporate body, as it usually
does, is the gradual insinuation of undergraduate methods
and standards in the graduate school ; until what is nom-
inally university work settles down, in effect, into nothing
more than an extension of the undergraduate curriculum.
This effect is had partly by reducing such of the graduate
courses as are found amenable to the formalities of the
undergraduate routine, and partly by dispensing with such
graduate work as will not lend itself, even ostensibly, to
the schoolmaster's methods.

What has been said of the college in this connection
holds true in the main also of the professional and techni-
cal schools. In their aims, methods and achievements
these schools are, in the nature of the case, foreign to the '
higher learning. This is, of course, not said in disparage-
ment of their work; rather the contrary. As is the case
with the college, so these schools also are often included
in the university corporation by ties of an external and
factitious kind, frequently by terms of the charter. But
this formal inclusion of them under the corporate charter
does not set aside the substantial discrepancy between

Introductory 27

their purpose, work and animus and those of the univer^
sity proper. It can only serve to trouble the singlemind-
edness of both. It leaves both the pursuit of learning and
the work of preparation for the professions somewhat at
loose ends, confused with the bootless illusion that they
are, in some recondite way, parallel variants of a single
line of work.

In aim and animus the technical and professional
schools are " practical," in the most thoroughgoing man-
ner; while the pursuit of knowledge that occupies the
scientists and scholars is not ^'practical" in the slight-
est degree. The divergent lines of interest to be taken
care of by the professional schools and the university,
respectively, are as widely out of touch as may well be
within the general field of human knowledge. The one
is animated wholly by considerations of material ex-
pediency, and the range of its interest and efforts is
strictly limited by consideration of the useful effect to
which the proficiency that it gives is to be turned; the
other knows nothing of expediency, and is influenced by
no consideration of utility or disutility, in its appreciation
of the knowledge to be sought. The animus of the one
is worldly wisdom ; of the other, idle curiosity. The two
are incommensurably at variance so far as regafds their
purpose, and in great measure also as regards their
methods of work, and necessarily so.

But with all this divergence of purpose and animus
there is after all a broad and very substantial bond
of -community between the technical schools, on the one
hand, and the proper work of the university, on the
other hand, in that the two are, in great measure, oc-
cupied with the same general range of materials and
employ somewhat the same logical methods in handling
these materials. But the relation that results from this

28 The Higher Learning

community of material is almost wholly external and
mechanical. Nor does it set up any presumption that
the two should expediently be included in the same cor-
porate establishment, or even that they need be near
neighbors or need maintain peculiarly close relations of
personnel. The technical schools, and in a less degree the
professional schools not properly classed as technical,
depend in large measure on results worked out by the
scientists, who properly belong in the universities. But
the material so made use of for technical ends are taken
over and turned to account without afterthought. The
technologist's work is related to that of the scientists
very much as the work of the designer is related to that
of the inventor. To a considerable extent the scientists
similarly depend on the work of the technical men for
information, and for correction and verification of their
own theoretical work. But there is, on this account,
nothing to gain by associating any given technical school
with any given university establishment; incorporation
in any given university does not in any degree facilitate
the utilization of the results of the sciences by the tech-
nical men ; nor is it found in practice to further the work
of the sciences. The schools in question do not in any
peculiar degree draw on the work of the scientists at-
tached to their particular university; nor do these scien-
tists, on the other hand, have any special use for the
work of their associated technical schools. In either case
the source drawn on is the general literature of the
subject, the body of materials available at large, not the
work of particular men attached to particular schools.
The generalizations of science are indispensable to the
technical men; but what they draw on is the body of
science at large, regardless of what any given university
establishment may have had to do with the work out of

Introductory 29

which the particular items of scientific information have
emerged. Nor is this scientific material useful to the
technologists for the further pursuit of science ; to them
the scientific results are data, raw material to be turned
to practical use, not means by which to carry scientific
inquiry out to further results.

Similarly, the professions and the technical schools
afiFord valuable data for the use of the professed scholars
and scientists, information that serves as material of in-
vestigation, or that will at least be useful as a means of
extending, correcting, verifying and correlating lines of
inquiry on which they are engaged. But the further
bearing of these facts upon the affairs of life, their ex-
pediency or futility, is of no interest or consequence.
The affairs of life, except the affairs of learning, do
not touch the interest of the university man as a scholar
or scientist. What is of importance to him in all these
matters with which the professions and technologists are
busy is their bearing on those matters of fact into which
his scientific interest leads him to inquire. The tests
and experiments carried out at these technical schools, as
well as the experience gathered by the members of their
staff, will occasionally afford him material for further
inquiry or means whereby to check results already ar-
rived at; but for such material he does not by prefer-
ence resort to any one of the technical schools as con-
trasted with any other, and it is quite an idle question
whether the source of any such serviceable information
is a school attached to his own university. The in-
vestigator finds his material where he can ; which comes
to saying that he draws on the general body of technical
knowledge, with no afterthought as to what particular
technical school may have stood in some relation or
other to the information which he finds useful.

30 The Higher Learning

Neither to the man engaged in university work nor
to the technical schools that may serve him as occasional
sources of material is there any advantage to be derived
from their inclusion in the university establishment. In-
deed, it is a detriment to both parties, as has already been
remarked, but more decidedly to the university men.
By including the technical and professional schools in
the university corporation the technologists and profes-
sional men attached to these schools are necessarily in-
cluded among the academic staff, and so they come to take
their part in the direction of academic affairs at large.
In what they so do toward shaping the academic policy
they will not only count for all they are worth, but they
are likely to count for something more than their due
share in this respect ; for they are to some extent trained
to the conduct of affairs, and so come in for something
of that deference that is currently paid to men of affairs,
at the same time that this practical training gives them an
advantage over their purely academic colleagues, in the
greater assurance and adroitness with which they are able
to present their contentions. By virtue of this same
training, as well as by force of current practical interest,
the technologist and the professional man are, like other
men of affairs, necessarily and habitually impatient of
any scientific or scholarly work that does not obviously
lend itself to some practical use. The technologist ap-
preciates what is mechanically serviceable; the profes-
sional man, as, for instance, the lawyer, appreciates what
promises pecuniary gain; and the two unite with the
business-man at large in repudiating whatever does not
look directly to such a utilitarian outcome. So that as
members of the academic staff these men are likely to
count at their full weight toward the diversion of the

Introductory 31

university's forces from disinterested science and scholar-
ship to such palpably utilitarian ends.

But the active measures so taken by the academic
authorities at the instance of the schoolmasters and
" practical " men are by no means the only line along
which their presence in the academic corporation affects
the case. Intimate association with these ** utilitarians '*
unavoidably has its corrupting effect on the scientists
and schdiars, and induces in them also something of the
same bias toward "practical'* results in their work;
so that they no longer pursue the higher learning with
undivided interest^ but with more or less of an eye to
the utilitarian main chance; whereby the advantages of
specialization, which are the reason for these schools, are
lost, and the pride of the modem community is wounded
in its most sensitive spot — the efficiency of its special-
ists.

So also, on the other hand, the formal incorporation of
these technological and professional men in the academic
body, with its professedly singleminded interest in learn-
ing, has its effect on their frame of mind. They are,
without intending it, placed in a false position, which un-
avoidably leads them to court a specious appearance of
scholarship, and so to invest their technological discipline
with a degree of pedantry and sophistication; whereby it
is hoped to give these schools and their work some
scientific and scholarly prestige, and so lift it to that
dignity that is presumed to attach to a non-utilitarian
pursuit of learning. Doubtless this pursuit of scholarly
prestige is commonly successful, to the extent that it
produces the desired conviction of awe in the vulgar,
who do not know the difference ; but all this make-believe

32 The Higher Learning

scholarship, however successfully staged, is not what
these schools are designed for ; or at least it is not what is
expected of them, nor is it what they can do best and
most efficiently.

To the substantial gain of both parties, though with
some lesion of the vanity of both, the separation between
the university and the professional and technical schools
should be carried through and made absolute. Only on
such conditions can either the one or the other do its
own work in a workmanlike manner. Within the uni-
versity precincts any aim or interest other than those
of irresponsible science and scholarship — pursuit of
matter-of-fact knowledge — are to be rated as inter-
lopers.

IV

To all this there is the ready objection of the school-
masters and utilitarians that such a project is fantastic
and unpractical, useless and undesirable; that such has
not been the mission of the university in the past, nor
its accepted place and use in the educational system
of today and yesterday ; that the universities of Christen-
dom have from their first foundation been occupied with
professional training and useful knowledge; that they
have been founded for utilitarian purposes and their
work has been guided mainly or altogether by utilitarian
considerations ; — all of which is conceded without argu-
ment. The historical argument amounts to saying that
the universities were founded before modern civiliza-
tion took on its modern character, before the disin-
terested pursuit of knowledge had come to take the
first place among the ideals of civilized mankind, and
that they were established to take care of those interests
which were then accounted of first importance, and that

Introductory 33

this inellectual enterprise in pursuit of disinterested
knowledge consequently was not at that time confided
to the care of any special establishment or freely avowed
as a legitimate interest in its own right.

It is true that, by historical accident, the university at
large has grown out of professional training-schools, —
primarily schools for training in theology, secondarily
in law and medicine. It is also true, in like wise and
in like degree, that modem science and scholarship have
grown out of the technology of handicraft and the
theological philosophy of the schoolmen.^ But just as
it would be a bootless enterprise to cut modem science
back into handicraft technology, so would it be a gratui-
tous imbecility to prune back the modern university to
that inchoate phase of its life-history and make it again
a corporation for the training of theologians, jurists and
doctors of medicine. The historical argument does not
enjoin a return to the beginning of things, but rather
an intelligent appreciation of what things are coming
to.

The genesis of the university at large, taken as an in-
stitution of civilized life, is an incident of the transition
from the barbarian culture of the middle ages to modem
times, and its later growth and acquirement of char-
acter is an incident of the further growth of modern
civilization; and the character of this later growth of
the university reflects the bent of modern civilization,
as contrasted with the barbarian spirit of things in the
mediaeval spiritual world.

In a general way, the place of the university in the
culture of Christendom is still substantially the same
as it has been from the beginning. Ideally, and in the
popular apprehension, it is, as it has always been, a

1 Cf . The Instinct of Workmanship, ch. vi, vii.

34 The Higher Learning

coiporation for tbe cultivatioa and care of the com-
mmiitT's highest a^irations and ideals. But these ideals
and aspirations have changed somewhat with the cfaai^-
iBg scheme of the Western civilization; and so the uni-
versity^ has also concomitantly so changed in character,
aims and ideals as to leave it still the corporate organ
of Ae co mm unity's dominant intellectual interest At
the same time, it is true, these changes in die purpose and
spirit of the univeisity have always been, and are al-
ways being, made only tardily, reluctantly, concessively,
against the protests of those who are zealous for the
commonplaces of the day before yesterday. Such is
the character of institutional growth and dumge; and m
its adaptation to the altered requirements of an altered
scheme of culture the university has in this matter been
subject to the conditions of institutional growth at large.
An institution is, after all, a prevalent habit of thought,
and as such it is subject to the conditions and limita-
tions that surround any change in the habitual frame of
mind prevalent in the community.

The university of mediaeval and early modem times,
that is to say the barbarian university, was necessarily
given over to the pragmatic, utilitarian disciplines, since
that is the nature of barbarism; and the barbarian uni*
versity is but another, somewhat sublimated, expression
of the same barbarian frame of mind. The barbarian
culture is pragmatic, utilitarian, worldly wise, and its
leamii^ partakes of the same complexion. The bar-
barian, late or early, is typically an unmitigated pragma-
tist ; that is the spiritual trait that most profoundly marks
him off from the savage on the one hand and from
the civilized man on the other hand. " He turns a keen,
untroubled face home to the instant need of things."

The hig^ era of barbarism in Europe, the Daric and

Introductory 35

Middle Ages^ is marked off from what went before and
from what has followed in the cultural sequence, by a
hard and fast utilitarian animus. The all^dominating
spiritual trait of those times is that men then made the
means of life its end. It is perhaps needless to call to
mind that much of this animus still survives in later
civilized life, especially in so far as the scheme of civilized
life is embodied in the competitive system. In that earlier
time, practical sagacity and the serviceability of any
knowledge acquired, its bearing on individual advantage,
spiritual or temporal, was the ruling consideration, as
never before or since. The best of men in that world
were not ashamed to avow that a boundless solicitude
for their own salvation was their worthiest motive of
conduct, and it is plain in all their speculations that they
were unable to accept any other motive or sanction as
final in any bearing. Saint and sinner alike knew no
higher rule than expediency, for this world and the next.
And, for that matter, so it still stands with the saint and
the sinner, — who make up much of the commonplace
human material in the modern community; although
both the saint and the sinner in the modem community
carry, largely by shamefaced subreption, an ever in-
creasing side-line of other and more genial interests
that have no merit in point of expediency whether for
this world or the next.

Under the rule of such a cultural ideal the corpora-
tion of learning could not well take any avowed stand
except as an establishment for utilitarian instruction,
the practical expediency of whose work was the sole
overt test of its competency. And such it still should
continue to be according to the avowed aspirations of
the staler commonplace elements in the community to*
day. By subreption, and by a sophisticated subsump-

36 The Higher Learning

tion under some ostensibly practical line of interest and
inquiry, it is true, the university men of the earlier time
spent much of their best endeavour on matters of dis-
interested scholarship that had no bearing on any human
want more to the point than an idle curiosity ; and by a
similar turn of subreption and sophistication the later
spokesmen of the barbarian ideal take much complacent
credit for the " triumphs of modern science " that have
nothing but an ostensible bearing on any matter of prac-
tical expediency, and they look to the universities to
continue this work of the idle curiosity under some
plausible pretext of practicality.

So the university of that era unavoidably came to be
organized as a more or less comprehensive federation
of professional schools or faculties devoted to such
branches of practical knowledge as the ruling utilitarian
interests of the time demanded. Under this overshadow-
ing barbarian tradition the universities of early modern
times started out as an avowed contrivance for indoctrina-
tion in the ways and means of salvation, spiritual and
temporal, individual and collective, — in some sort a
school of engineering, primarily in divinity, secondarily
in law and politics, and presently in medicine and also
in the other professions that serve a recognized utilitar-
ian interest. After that fashion of a university that
answered to this manner of ideals and aspirations had
once been installed and gained a secure footing, its pat-
tern acquired a degree of authenticity and prescription,
so that later seminaries of learning came unquestioningly
to be organized on the same lines ; and further changes of
academic policy and practice, such as are demanded by
the later growth of cultural interests and ideals, have been
made only reluctantly and with a suspicious reserve,
gradually and by a circuitous sophistication ; so that much

Introductory 37

of the non-utilitarian scientific and scholarly work in-
dispensable to the university's survival under modem
conditions is still scheduled under the faculties of law
or medicine, or even of divinity.

But the human propensity for inquiry into things, ir-
respective of use or expediency, insinuated itself among
the expositors of worldly wisdom from the outset; and
from the first this quest of idle learning has sought
shelter in the university as the only establishment in
which it could find a domicile, even on sufferance, and
so could achieve that footing of consecutive intellectual
Enterprise running through successive generations of
scholars which is above all else indispensable to the
advancement of knowledge. Under the regime of un-
mitigated pragmatic aims that ruled the earlier days of
the European universities, this pursuit of knowledge for
its own sake was carried on as a work of scholarly
supererogation by men whose ostensibly sole occupa-
tion was the promulgation of some accredited line of
salutary information. Frequently it had to be carried on
under some colourable masquerade of practicality. And
yet so persistent has the spirit of idle curiosity proved to
be, and so consonant with the long-term demands even
of the laity, that the dissimulation and smuggling-in of
disinterested learning has gone on ever more openly and
at an ever increasing rate of gain; until in the end,
the attention given to scholarship and the non-utilitarian
sciences in these establishments has come far to ex-
ceed that given to the practical disciplines for which
the several faculties were originally installed. As time
has passed and as successive cultural mutations have
passed over the community, shifting the centre of interest
and bringing new ideals of scholarship, and bringing the
whole cultural fabric nearer to its modern complexion.

38 The Higher Learning

those purposes of crass expediency that were of such
gi^at moment and were so much a matter of cottrse in
vearlier academic policy, have insensibly fallen to the
rank of incidentals. And what had once been incidental,
©r even an object of surreptitious tolerance in the uni-
versity, remains today as the only unequivocal duty of
the corporation of learning, and stands out as the one
characteristic trait without which no establishment can
claim rank as a university.

Philosophy — the avowed body of theoretical science
in the late mediaeval time — had grown out oithe school-
men's speculations in theology, being in point of deriva-
tion a body of refinements on the divine scheme of salva-
tion ; and with a view to quiet title, and to make mani-
fest their devotion to the greater good of esdiatological
expediency, those ingenious speculators were content to
proclaim that their philosophy is the handmaid of theology
— Philosophia theologuB ancillans. But their philosophy
has fallen into the alembic of the idle curiosity and has
given rise to a body of modern science, godless and im-
practical, that has no intended or even ostensible bear-
ing on the religious fortunes of mankind ; and their sanc-
timonious maxim would today be better accepted as the
subject of a limerick than of a homily. Except in de-
gree, the fortimes of the temporal pragmatic disciplines,
in Law and Medicine, have been much the same as that
of their elder sister, Theology. Professionalism and
practical serviceability have been gradually crowded into
the background of academic interests and overlaid with
quasi-utilitarian researcli — such as the history of juris-
prudence, comparative physiology, and the like. They
have in fact largely been eliminated.^

^With the current reactionary trend of things political and
civil toward mediaeval-barbarian policies and habits of thought

Introductory 39

And changes running to this eflFect have gone farthest
and have taken most consistent effect in those communi-
ties that are most fully imbued with the spirit of the
modem peaceable civilization. It is in the more back-
ward communities and schools that the barbarian animus
of utilitarianism still maintains itself most nearly in-
tact, whether it touches matters of temporal or of spiritual
interest. With the later advance of culture, as the in-
tellectual interest has gradually displaced the older ideals
in men's esteem, and barring a reactionary episode here
and there, the university has progressively come to take
its place as a seat of the higher learning, a corporation
for the pursuit of knowledge; and barring accidental
reversions, it has increasingly asserted itself as an im-
perative necessity, more and more consistently, that the
spirit of disinterested inquiry must have free play in
these seminaries of the higher learning, without after-
thought as to the practical or utilitarian consequences
which this free inquiry may conceivably have for the
professional training or for the social, civil or religious
temper of the students or the rest of the community.
Nothing is felt to be so irremediably vicious in academic
policy as a coercive bias, religious, political, conventional
or professional, in so far as it touches that quest of
knowledge that constitutes the main interest of the uni-
versity.

in the Fatherland, something of a correlative change has also
latterly come in evidence in the German universities; so that
what is substantially *' cameralistic science" — training and in-
formation for prospective civil servants and police magistrates —
is in some appreciable measure displacing disinterested inquiry
in the field of economics and political theory. This is peculiarly
true of those corporations of learning that come closely in touch
with the Cultus Ministerium,

4

J

40 The Higher Learning

Professional training and technological work at large
have of course not lost ground, either in the volume and
the rigour of their requirements or in the application be-
stowed in their pursuit; but as within the circle of
academic interests, these utilitarian disciplines have lost
their preferential place and have been pushed to one side ;
so that the professional and technical schools are now in
fact rated as adjuncts rather than as integral constituents
of the university corporation. Such is the unmistakable
sense of this matter among academic men. At the same
time these vocational schools have, one with another,
progressively taken on more of a distinctive, independ-
ent and close-knit structure; an individual corporate ex-
istence, autonomous and academically self-sufficient, even
in those cases where they most tenaciously hold to their
formal connection with the university corporation. They
have reached a mature phase of organization, developed
a tjrpe of personnel and control peculiar to themselves
and their special needs, and have in effect come out
from under the tutelage of the comprehensive academic
organization of which they once in their early days were
the substantial core. These schools have more in com-
mon among themselves as a class than their class have
with the academic aims and methods that characterize the
university proper. They are in fact ready and compe-
tent to go on their own recognizances, — indeed they com-
monly resent any effective interference or surveillance
from the side of the academic corporation of which they
nominally continue to be members, and insist on going
their own way and arranging their own affairs as they
know best. Their connection with the university is super-
ficial and formal at the best, so far as regards any sub-
stantial control of their affairs and policy by the uni-
versity authorities at large; it is only in their interfer-

Introductory 41

ence with academic policy, and in injecting their own
peculiar bias into university affairs, that they count sub-
stantially as corporate members of the academic body.
And in these respects, what is said of the professional
and technical schools holds true also of the undergraduate
departments.

It is quite feasible to have a university without pro-
fessional schools and without an undergraduate depart-
ment ; but it is not possible to have one without due pro-
vision for that non-utilitarian higher learning about which
as a nucleus these utilitarian disciplines cluster. And
this in spite of the solicitous endeavours of the profes-
sional schools to make good their footing as the substantial
core of the corporation.

As intimated above, there are two main reasons for
the continued and tenacious connection between these
schools and the universities: (a) ancient tradition, forti-
fied by the solicitous ambition of the university directorate
to make a brave show of magnitude, and (b) the anxiety
of these schools to secure some degree of scholarly authen-
tication through such a formal connection with a seat
of learning. These two motives have now and again
pushed matters fairly to an extreme in the reactionary
direction. So, for instance, the chances of intrigue and
extra-academic clamour have latterly thrown up certain
men of untempered "practicality" as directive heads of
certain universities, and some of these have gone so far
as to avow a reactionary intention to make the modern
university a cluster of professional schools or faculties,
after the ancient barbarian fashion.^ But such a policy

1 Cf. " Some Considerations on the Function of the State Uni-
versity." (Inaugural Address of Edmund Janes James, Ph.D.,
LL.D.), Science, November 17, 1905.

4^ The Higher Learning

of return to the lost crudities is unworkable in the long
run under modern conditions. It may serve excellently
as a transient expedient in a campaign of popularity, and
such appears to have been its chief purpose where a
move of this kind has been advocated, but it runs on
superficial grounds and can afford neither hope nor fear
of a permanent diversion in the direction so spoken
for.

In the modem community, under the strain of the price
system and the necessities of competitive earning and
spending, many men and women are driven by an habitual
bias in favour of a higher "practical" efficiency in all
matters of education; that is to say, a more single-
minded devotion to the needs of eamii^ and spending.
There is, indeed, much of this spirit abroad in the com-
munity, and any candidate for popular favour and pres-
tige may find his own advantage in conciliating popular
sentiment of this kind. But there is at the same time
equally prevalent through the community a long-term
bias of another kind, such as will not enduringly tolerate
the sordid eflfects of pursuing an educational policy that
looks mainly to the main chance, and unreservedly makes
the means of life its chief end. By virtue of this long-
term idealistic drift, any seminary of learning that plays
fast and loose in this way with the cultural interests en-
trusted to its keeping loses caste and falls out of the
running. The universities that are subjected in this
fashion to an experimental reversion to vocationalism,
it appears, will unavoidably return presently to something
of the non-professional type, on pain of falling into hope-
less discredit. There have been some striking instances,
but current notions of delicacy will scarcely admit a
citation of nam*s and dates. And while the long-term
drift of the modern idealistic bias may not permit the

i

f

IfUroductory 43

universities pennanently to be diverted to the service of
Mammon in this fashion, yet the unremitting endeavours
of " educators " seeking prestige for worldly wisdom re-
sults at the best in a fluctuating state of compromise, in
which the ill effects of such bids for popularity are con-
tinually being outworn by the drift of academic usage.
The point is illustrated by the American state universi-
ties as a class, although the illustration is by no means
uniformly convincing. The greater number of these
state schools are not, or are not yet, universities except
in name. These establishments have been founded, com-
monly, with a professed utilitarian purpose, and have
started out with professional training as their chief
avowed aim. The purpose made most of in their estab-
lishment has commonly been to train young men for
proficiency in some gainful occupation; along with this
have gone many half-articulate professions of solicitude
for cultural interests to be taken care of by the same
means. They have been installed by politicians looking
for popular acclaim, rather than by men of scholarly or
scientific insight, and their management has not infre-
quently been entrusted to political masters of intrigue,
with scant academic qualifications; their foundations has
been the work of practical politicians with a view to con-
ciliate the good will of a lay constituency clamouring for
things tangibly "useful" — that is to say, pecuniarily
gainful. So these experts in short-term political prestige
have made provision for schools of a " practical " char-
acter ; but they have named these establishments " uni-
versities" because the name carries an air of scholarly
repute, of a higher, more substantial kind than any naked
avowal of material practicality would give. Yet, in those
instances where the passage of time has allowed the
readjustment to take place, these quasi-" universities,"

44 The Higher Learning

installed by men of affairs, of a crass " practicality," and
in response to the utilitarian demands of an unlearned
political constituency, have in the long run taken on more
and more of an academic, non-utilitarian character, and
have been gradually falling into line as universities claim-
ing a place among the seminaries of the higher learning.
The long-term drift of modern cultural ideals leaves
these schools no final resting place short of the university
type, however far short of such a consummation the
greater ntunber of them may still be found.

What has just been said of the place which the uni-
versity occupies in modern civilization, and more par-
ticularly of the manner in which it is to fill its place, may
seem something of a fancy sketch. It is assuredly not a
faithful description of any concrete case, by all means
not of any given American university ; nor does it faith-
fully describe the line of policy currently pursued by the
directorate of any such establishment. Yet it is true
to the facts, taken in a generalized way, and it describes
the type to which the American schools unavoidably
gravitate by force of the community's long-term idealistic
impulsion, in so far as their drift is not continually cor-
rected and oflfset by vigilant authorities who, from mo-
tives of their own, seek to turn the universities to ac-
count in one way and another. It describes an institu-
tional ideal ; not necessarily an ideal nursed by any given
individual, but the ideal logically involved in the scheme
of modern civilization, and logically coming out of the
historical development of Western civilization hitherto,
and visible to any one who will dispassionately stand
aside and look to the drift of latterday events in so far
as they bear on this matter of the higher learning, its
advancement and conservation.

Introductory 45

Many if not most of those men who are occupied with
the guidance of university affairs would disown such a
projected ideal, as being too narrow and too unpractical
to fit into the modem scheme of things, which is above ail
else a culture of affairs ; that it does not set forth what
should be aimed at by any who have the good of mankind
at heart, or who in any sensible degree appreciate the
worth of real work as contrasted with the leisurely in-
tellectual finesse of the confirmed scientist and man of
letters. These and the like objections and strictures may
be well taken, perhaps. The question of what, in any
ulterior sense, ought to be sought after in the determina-
tion of academic policy and the conduct of academic af-
fairs will, however, not coincide with the other question,
as to what actually is being accomplished in these
premises, on the one hand, nor as to what the long-term
cultural aspirations of civilized men are setting toward,
on the other hand.

Now, it is not intended here to argue the merits of
the current cultural ideals as contrasted with what, in
some ulterior sense, ought to be aimed at if the drift of
current aspirations and impulse should conceivably per-
mit a different ideal to be put into effect. It is in-
tended only to set forth what place, in point of fact and
for better or worse, the higher learning and the university
hold in the current scheme of Western civilization, as
determined by that body of instinctive aspirations and
proclivities that holds this civilization to its course as
it runs today; and further to show how and how far
certain institutional factors comprised in this modern
scheme of life go to help or hinder the realization of this
ideal which men's aspirations and proclivities so make
worth while to them. The sketch here offered in char-
acterization of the university and its work, therefore, en-

46 The Higher Learning

deavours to take account of the community's consensus
of impulses and desires touching the animus and aims
that should move the seminaries of the higher learning,
at the same time that it excludes those subsidiary or
alien interests in whose favour no such consensus is
found to prevail.

There are many of these workday interests, extraneous
to the higher learning, each and several of which may
be abundantly good and urgent in its own right; but,
while they need not be at cross purposes with the higher
learning, they are extraneous to that disinterested pursuit
of knowledge in which the characteristic intellectual bent
of modem civilization culminates. These others are
patent, insistent and palpable, and there need be no ap-
prehension of their going by default. The intellectual
predilection — the idle curiosity — abides and asserts
itself when other pursuits of a more temporal but more
immediately urgent kind leave men free to take stock
of the ulterior ends and values of life; whereas the
transient interests, preoccupation with the ways and
means of life, are urgent and immediate, and employ
men's thought and energy through the greater share of
their life. The question of material ways and means,
and the detail requirements of the day's work, are for
ever at hand and for ever contest the claims of any
avowed ulterior end ; and by force of unremitting habitua-
tion the current competitive system of acquisition and
expenditure induces in all classes such a bias as leads
them to overrate ways and means as contrasted with the
ends which these ways and means are in some sense de-
signed to serve.

So, one class and another, biassed by the habitital pre-
occupation of the class, will aim to divert the academic
equipment to some particular use which habit has led them

Introductory 47

to rate high; or to include in the academic discipline
various lines of inquiry and training which are extrane*
ous to the higher learning but which the class in ques-
tion may specially have at heart ; but taking them one
with another, there is no general or abiding consensus
among the various classes of the community in favour
of diverting the academic establishment to any other
specific uses, or of including in the peculiar work of the
university an3rthing beyond the pursuit of knowledge for
its own sake.

Now, it may be remarked by the way, that civilized
mankind should have come so to set their heart on this
chase after a fugitive knowledge of inconsequential facts
may be little to the credit of the race or of that scheme of
culture that so centres about this cult of the idle curiosity.
And it is perhaps to their credit, as well as to the credit
of the community whose creatures they are, that the
ispdkesmen of some tangible ideal, some materially ex-
pedient aspiration, embodying more of worldly wisdom,
are for ever urging upon the institutions of the higher
learning one or another course of action of a more pal-
pably expedient kind. But, for better or worse, the
passage of time brings out the fact that these scdber and
sensible courses of policy so advocated are after all es-
sentially extraneous, if not alien, to those purposes for
which a university can be maintained, on the ground af-
forded by the habits of thought prevalent in the modem
civilized community.

One and another of these "practical" and expedient
interests have transiently come to the front in academic
policy, and have in their time given a particular bent
to the pursuit of knowledge that has occupied the uni-
versities. Of these extraneous interests the two most
notable have, as already indicated above, been the ec-

48 The Higher Learning

clesiastical and the political. But in the long run these
various interests and ideals of expediency have, all and
several, shown themselves to be only factional elements
in the scheme of culture, and have lost their preferential
voice in the shaping of academic life. The place in
men's esteem once filled by church and state is now held
by pecuniary traffic, business enterprise. So that the
graver issues of academic policy which now tax the
discretion of the directive powers, reduce themselves
in the main to a question between the claims of science
and scholarship on the one hand and those of business
principles and pecuniary gain on the other hand. In
one shape or another this problem of adjustment, recon-
ciliation or compromise between the needs of the higher
learning and the demands of business enterprise is for
ever present in the deliberations of the university di-
rectorate. This question gathers in its net all those per-
plexing details of expediency that now claim the atten-
tion of the ruling bodies.

VI

Since the paragraphs that make up the foregoing
chapter were written the American academic community
has been thrown into a new and peculiar position by the
fortunes of war. The progress and the further promise
of the war hold in prospect new and untried responsibili-
ties, as well as an unexampled opportunity. So that the
outlook now (June 191 8) would seem to be that the
Americans are to be brought into a central place in the
republic of learning; to take a position, not so much of
dominance as of trust and guardianship ; not so much by
virtue of their own superior merit as by force of the
insolvency of the European academic community.

Introductory 49

Again, it is not that the war is expected to leave the
lines of European scholars and scientists extinct; al-
though there is no denying the serious inroads made by
the war, both in the way of a high mortality among
European men of learning, and in the way of a decimation
of the new men on whom tlie hopes of the higher learn-
ing for the incoming generation should have rested.
There is also a serious diversion of the young forces from
learning to transiently urgent matters of a more material
and more ephemeral nature. But possibly more sinister
than all these losses that are in a way amenable to statis*
tical record and estimate, is the current an^ prospective
loss of morale..

Naturally, it would be difficult and hazardous to offer
an appraisal of this prospective loss of morale, with
which it is to be expected that the disintegrated European
community of learned men will come through the troubled
times. But that there is much to be looked for on this
score, that there is much to be written off in the way of
lowered aggregate efficiency and loss of the spirit of
team-work, — that much there is no denying, and it is
useless to blink the fact.

There has already a good deal of disillusionment taken
effect throughout the nations of Christendom in respect
of the temper and trustworthiness of German scholarship
these past three or four years, and it is fairly beyond
computation what further shift of sentiment in this
respect is to be looked for in the course of a further
possible period of years given over to the same line of
experience. Doubtless, the German scholars, and there-
fore the German seats of learning whose creatures and
whose custodians these German scholars are, have earned
much of the distrust and dispraise that is falling to
their share. There is no overlooking the fact that they

so The Higher Learning

have proved the frailty of their hold on those elementary
principles of sobriety and single mind that underlie all
sound work in the field of learning. To any one who
has the interest of the higher learning at heart, the
spectacle of maudlin chauvinism and inflated scurrility
unremittingly placed on view by the putative leaders of
German science and scholarship can not but be exceed-
ingly disheartening.

It may be argued, and it may be true, of course, that
much of this failure of intelligence and spiritual force
among Germany's men of learning is of the nature of a
transient eclipse of their powers; that with the return
of settled conditions there is due to come a return of
poise and insight. But when all due argument has been
heard, it remains true that the distrust set afoot in the
mind of their neighbours, by this highly remarkable
exhibition of their personal equation, will long inure to
the disability of Germany's men of learning as a force to
be counted on in that teamwork that is of the essence of
things for the advancement of learning. In eflfect, Ger-
many, and Germany's associates in this warlike enter-
prise, will presumably be found bankrupt in this respect
on the return of peace, even beyond the other nations.

These others have also not escaped the touch of the
angel of decay, but the visible corruption of spiritual
and intellectual values does not go the same length among
them. Nor have these others suffered so heavy a toll on
their prospective scholarly man power. It is all a mat-
ter of degree and of differential decline, coupled with a
failure of corporate organization and of the usages and
channels of communion and co-operation. Chauvinistic
self-sufficiency and disesteem of their neighbours have
apparently also not gone so deep and far among the

Introductory 51

other nations; although here again it is only a relative
d^ree of immunity that they enjoy.

And all this holds true of the Americans in much the
same way as of the rest; except that the Americans
have, at least hitherto, not been exposed to the blight
in anything like the same degree as any one of those
other peoples with whom they come in comparison here.
It is, of course, not easy to surmise what may yet over-
take them, and the others with them ; but judged on the
course of things hitherto, and on the apparent promise
of the calculable future, it is scarcely to be presumed
that the Americans are due to suffer so extreme a de-
gree of dilapidation as the European peoples, — even
apart from the accentuated evil case of the Germans.
The strain has hitherto been lighter here, and it promises
so to continue, whether the further duration of the war
shall turn out to be longer or shorter. The Americans
are, after all, somewhat sheltered from the impact; and
so soon as the hysterical anxiety induced by the shock
has had time to spend itself, it should reasonably be
expected that this people will be able soberly to take
stock of its assets and to find that its holdings in the
domain of science and scholarship are, in the main, still
intact.

Not that no loss has been incurred, nor that no mater-
ial degree of derangement is to be looked for, but in
comparison with what the experience of the war is bring-
ing to the Europeans, the case of the Americans should
still be the best there is to be looked for; and the best
is always good enough, perforce. So it becomes a ques-
tion, what the Americans will do with the best op-
portunity which the circumstances offer. And on their
conduct of their affairs in this bearing turns not only their

52 The Higher Learning

own fortune in respect of the interests of science and
scholarship, but in great measure the fortunes of their
overseas friends and copartners in the republic of learn-
ing as well.

The fortunes of war promise to leave the American
men of learning in a strategic position, in the position
of a strategic reserve, of a force to be held in readiness,
equipped and organized to meet the emergency that so
arises, and to retrieve so much as may be of those assets
of scholarly equipment and personnel that make the sub-
stantial code of Western civilization. And so it becomes
a question of what the Americans are minded to do
about it. It is their opportunity, and at the same time
it carries the gravest responsibility that has yet fallen
on the nation ; for the spiritual fortunes of Christendom
are bound up with the line of policy which this surviv-
ing contingent of American men of learning shall see
fit to pursue. They are not all that is to be left over
when the powers of decay shall begin to retire, nor are
they, perhaps, to be the best and most valuable contingent
among these prospective survivors; but they occupy a
strategic position, in that they are today justly to be
credited with disinterested motives, beyond the rest,
at the same time that they command those material re-
sources without which the quest of knowledge can
hope to achieve little along the modern lines of inquiry.
By force of circumstances they are thrown into the posi-
tion of keepers of the ways and means whereby the re-
public of learning is to retrieve its fortunes. By force
of circumstances they are in a position, if they so choose,
to shelter many of those masters of free inquiry whom the
one-eyed forces of reaction and partisanship oversea will
seek to suppress and undo ; and they are also in a position,
if they so choose, to install something in the way of an

Introductory 53

international clearing house and provisional headquarters
for the academic community throughout that range of
civilized peoples whose goodwill they now enjoy, — a
place of refuge and a place of meeting, confluence and
dissemination for those views and ideas that live and
move and have their being in the higher learning.

There is, therefore, a work of reconstruction to be taken
care of in the realm of learning, no less than in the
working scheme of economic and civil institutions. And
as in this other work of reconstruction, so here ; if it is to
be done without undue confusion and blundering it is
due to be set afoot before the final emergency is at hand.
But there is the difference that, whereas the framework
of civil institutions may still, with passable success, be
drawn on national lines and confined within the national
frontiers ; and while the economic organization can also,
without fatal loss, be confined in a similar fashion, in re-
sponse to short-sighted patriotic preconceptions; the in-
terests of science, and therefore of the academic com-
munity, do not run on national lines and can not similarly
be confined within geographical or political boundaries.
In the nature of the case these interests are of an in-
ternational character and can not be taken care of except
by unrestricted collusion and collaboration among the
learned men of all those peoples whom it may concern.
Yet there is no mistaking the fact that the spirit of
invidious patriotism has invaded these premises, too,
and promises to bungle the outcome; which makes the
needed work of reconstruction all the more difficult and
all the more imperative. Unhappily, the state of senti-
ment on both sides of the line of cleavage will presum-
ably not admit a cordial understanding and co-opera-
tion between the German contingent and the rest of the

54 The Higher Learning

civilized nations, for some time to come. But the others
are in a frame of mind that should lend itself generously
to a larger measure of co-operation in this respect now
than ever before.

So it may not seem out of place to offer a suggestion,
tentatively and under correction, looking to this end.
A beginning may well be made by a joint enterprise
among American scholars and universities for the instal-
lation of a freely endowed central establishment where
teachers and students of all nationalities, including
Americans with the rest, may pursue their chosen work
as guests of the American academic community at large,
or as guests of the American people in the character of
a democracy of culture. There should also be nothing to
hinder the installation of more than one of these academic
houses of refuge and entertainment; nor should there be
anything to hinder the enterprise being conducted on
such terms of amity, impartiality and community in-
terest as will make recourse to it an easy matter of course
for any scholars whom its opportunities may attract.
The same central would at the same time, and for the
time being, take care of those channels of communica-
tion throughout the academic world that have been falling
into enforced neglect under the strain of the war. So
also should provision be made, perhaps best under the
same auspices, for the (transient) taking-over of the
many essential lines of publicity and publication on which
the men engaged in scholarly and scientific inquiry have
learned to depend, and which have also been falling into
something of a decline during the war.

Measures looking to this end might well be made, at
the same time, to serve no less useful a purpose within the
American Academic community. As is well known, there
prevails today an extensive and wasteful competitive du-

Introductory 55

plication of plant, organization and personnel among the
American universities, as regards both publications and
courses of instruction. Particularly is this true in respect
of that advanced work of the universities that has to do
with the higher learning. At the same time, these uni-
versities are now pinched for funds, due to the current
inflation of prices. So that any proposal of this nature,
which might be taken advantage of as an occasion for
the pooling of common issues among the universities,
might hopefully be expected to be welcomed as a meas-
ure of present relief from some part of the pecuniary
strain under which they are now working.

But competition is well ingrained in the habitual out-
look of the American schools. To take the issue to
neutral ground, therefore, where this competitive animus
may hopefully be counted on to find some salutary abate-
ment, it may be suggested that a practicable nucleus for
this proposed joint enterprise can well be found in
one or another — perhaps in one and another — of those
extra-academic foundations for research of which there
already are several in existence, — as, e. g., the Carnegie
Institution. With somewhat enlarged powers, or per-
haps rather with some abatement of restrictions, and
with such additional funds as may be required, the neces-
sary work and organization should readily be taken care
of by such an institution. Further growth and ramifica-
tion would be left to future counsel and advisement.

The contemplated enterprise would necessarily require
a certain planning and organization of work and some-
thing in the way of an administrative and clerical staff, —
a setting up of something in the way of "organization
tables"; but there can be no question of offering de-
tailed proposals on that head here. Yet the caution may
well be entered here that few specifications are better

56 The Higher Learning

than many, in these premises, and that the larger the
latitude allowed from the outset, the fewer the seeds of
eventual defeat, — as is abundantly illustrated by con-
traries.

It is also evident that such an enterprise will involve
provision for some expenditure of funds; presumably a
somewhat generous expenditure ; which comes near imply-
ing that recourse should be had to the public revenues, or
to resources that may legitimately be taken over by the
public authorities from private hands where they now
serve no useful purpose. There are many items of ma-
terial resources in the country that come legitimately
under this head. At the same time it is well in this con-
nection to call to mind that there is no prospect of the
country's being in any degree impoverished in the course
of the war; so that there need be no apprehension of a
shortage of means for the carrying on of such an enter-
prise, if only the available sources are drawn on with-
out prejudice. In the mind of any disinterested student
of the American economic situation, there can be no
serious apprehension that the American people, collec-
tively, will be at all worse off in point of disposable means
at the close of the war than they were at its beginning ;
quite the contrary in fact. To any one who will look to
the facts it is evident that the experience of the war,
and the measures taken and to be taken, are leading to
a heightened industrial productiveness and a concomitant
elimination of waste. The resulting net gain in pro-
ductive efficiency has not gone at all far, and there need
be no apprehension of its going to great lengths; but,
for more or less, it is going so far as safely to promise
a larger net annual production of useful goods in the im-
mediate future than in the immediate past; and the dis-

Introductory 57

posable means of any people is always a matter of the
net annual production, and it need be a question of
nothing else. The manner in which this net product Is,
and is to be, shared among the classes and individuals of
the community is another question, which does not be-
long here.

A question of graver weight and of greater perplexity
touches the presumptive attitude of the several universi-
ties and their discretionary authorities in the face of any
proposed measure of this kind; where the scope of the
enterprise is so far beyond their habitual range of in-
terest. When one calls to mind the habitual parochialism
of the governing boards of these seminaries of the higher
learning, and the meticulous manoeuvres of their execu-
tives seeking each to enhance his own prestige and the
prestige of his own establishment, there is not much of
an evident outlook for large and generous measures look-
ing to the common good. And yet it is also to be called
to mind that these governing boards and executives are,
after all, drawn from the common stock of humanity,
picked men as they may be; and that they are subject,
after all, to somewhat the same impulses and infirmities
j as the common run, picked though they may be with a
* I view to parochialism and blameless futility. Now, what
is overtaking the temper of the common run under the
strain of the war situation should be instructive as to
what may be also looked for at the hands of these men
in whose discretion rest the fortunes of the American
universities. There should be at least a fighting chance
that, with something larger, manlier, more substantial,
to occupy their attention and to shape the day's work
for them, these seminaries of learning may, under in-
stant pressure, turn their best efforts to their ostensible

58 The Higher Learning

purpose, " the increase and diffusion of knowledge among
men," and to forego their habitual preoccupation with
petty intrigue and bombastic publicity, until the return
of idler days.

CHAPTER II

The Governing Boards

In the working theory of the modem civilized community,
— that is to say in the current common-sense apprehen-
sion of what is right and good, as it works out in the
long run, — the university is a corporation of learning,
disinterested and dispassionate. To its keeping is en-
trusted the community's joint interest in esoteric knowl-
edge. It is given over to the single-minded pursuit of
science and scholarship, without afterthought and without
a view to interests subsidiary or extraneous to the higher
learning. It is, indeed, the one great institution of
modem times that works to no ulterior end and is con-
trolled by no consideration of expediency beyond its own
work. Typically, normally, in point of popular theory,
the university is moved by no consideration other than
"the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men."
This is so because this profitless quest of knowledge has
come to be the highest and ulterior aim of modem cul-
ture.

Such has been the case, increasingly, for some genera-
tions past; but it is not until quite recently that such a
statement would hold true unequivocally and with an un-
qualified generality. That the case stands so today is
due to the failure of theoretical interests of a different
kind; directly and immediately it is due to the fact that
in the immediate present the cult of knowledge has, by
default, taken over that primacy among human interests

59

6o The Higher Learning

which an eschatologically thrifty religious sentiment once
held in the esteem of Christendom. So long as the fear
of God still continued to move the generality of civilized
men in sufiScient measure, their theoretical knowledge
was organized for "the glory of God and the good of
man," — the latter phrase being taken in the eschatological
sense ; and so long the resulting scheme of learning was
laid out and cultivated with an eye to the main chance
in a hereafter given over, in the main and for its major
effect, to pains and penalties. With the latterday dis-
sipation of this fear of God, the scheme of knowledge
handed down out of a devout past and further amplified
in the (theoretically) Godless present, has, by atrophy of
disuse, lost its ulterior view to such spiritual expediency,
and has come to stand over as an output of intellectual
enterprise working under the impulsion and guidance of
an idle curiosity simply. All this may not be much to the
credit of civilized mankind, but dispassionate reflection
will not leave the fact in doubt. And the outcome for
the university, considered as an institution of this mod-
ern culture, is such as this conjuncture of circumstances
will require.

But while such is the dispassionate working theory,
the long-term drift of modern common sense as touches
the work of the university, it is also a matter of course
that this ideally singleminded course of action has never
been realized in any concrete case. While it holds true,
by and large, that modem Christendom has outlived the
fear of God, — that is to say of " the Pope, the Turk, and
the Devil," — it does not therefore follow that men take
a less instant interest in the affairs of life, or carry on
the traffic of their lives with a less alert eye to the main
chance, than they once did under the habitual shadow of
that barbarian fear. The difference is, for the purpose in

The Governing Boards 6i

hand, that the same solicitous attention that once con-
verged on such an avoidance of ulterior consequences
now centres on questions of present ways and means.
Worldly wisdom has not fallen into decay or abeyance,
but it has become a wisdom of ways and means that lead
to nothing beyond further ways and means. Expediency
and practical considerations have come to mean considera-
tions of a pecuniary kind; good, on the whole, for
pecuniary purposes only; that is to say, gain and ex-
penditure for the sake of further gain and expenditure,
with nothing that will stand scrutiny as a final term to
this traffic in ways and means, — except only this cult of
the idle curiosity to which the seats of learning are,
in theory, dedicate. But unremitting habituation to the
competitive pursuit of ways and means has determined
that " practical " interests of this complexion rule work-
day life in the modern community throughout, and they
are therefore so intimately and ubiquitously bound up
with current habits of thought, and have so strong and
immediate a hold on current workday sentiment, that,
hitherto, in no case have the seats of learning been able
to pursue their quest of knowledge with anything like
that singlemindedness which academic men are moved
to profess in their moments of academic elation.

Some one vital interest of this practical sort, some
variant of the quest of gain, is always at hand and
strenuously eflFective in the community's life, and there-
fore dominates their everyday habits of thought for the
time being. This tone-giving dominance of such a work-
day interest may be transient or relatively enduring;
it may be more or less urgently important and conse-
quential under the circumstances in which the com-
munity is placed, or the clamour of its spokesmen and
beneficiaries may be mpr^ or les$ ubiquitous and pertina-

62 The Higher Learning

cious ; but in any case it will have its effect in the counsels
of the " Educators," and so it will infect the university
as well as the lower levels of the educational system. So
that, while the higher learning still remains as the en-
during purpose and substantial interest of the university
establishment, the dominant practical interests of the day
will, transiently but effectually, govern the detail lines of
academic policy, the range of instruction offered, and
the character of the personnel; and more particularly
and immediately will the character of the governing
boards and the academic administration so be deter-
mined by the current run of popular sentiment touching
the commimity's practical needs and aims; since these
ruling bodies stand, in one way or another, under the
critical surveillance of a lay constituency.

The older American universities have grown out of
underlying colleges, — undergraduate schools. Within
the memory of men still living it was a nearly unbroken
rule that the governing boards of these higher American
schools were drawn largely from the clergy and were
also guided mainly by ecclesiastical, or at least by devo-
tional, notions of what was right and needful in matters
of learning. This state of things reflected the ingrained
devoutness of that portion of the American community
to which the higher schools then were of much signifi-
cance. At the same time it reflected the historical fact
that the colleges of the early days had been established
primarily as training schools for ministers of the church.
In their later growth, in the recent past, while the chief
purpose of these seminaries has no longer been religious,
yet ecclesiastical prepossessions long continued to mark
the permissible limits of the learning which they culti-

The Governing Boards 63

vated, and continued also to guard the curriculum and
discipline of the schools.

That phase of academic policy is past. Due regard
at least is, of course, still had to the religious proprie-
ties — the American community, by and large, is still
the most devout of civilized countries — but such regard
on the part of the academic authorities now proceeds on
grounds of businesslike expediency rather than on reli-
gious conviction or on an ecclesiastical or priestly bias in
the ruling bo4ies. It is a concessive precaution on the
part of a worldly-wise directorate, in view of the devout
prejudices of those who know no better.

The rule of the clergy belongs virtually to the pre-
histoiy of the American universities. While that rule
held there were few if any schools that should properly
be rated as of university grade. Even now, it is true,
much of the secondary school system, including the
greater part, though a diminishing number, of the smaller
colleges, is under the tutelage of the clergy; and the
academic heads of these schools are almost universally
men of ecclesiastical standing and bias rather than of
scholarly attainments. But that fact does not call for
particular notice here, since these schools lie outside the
university field, and so outside the scope of this inquiry.

For a generation past, while the American universities
have been coming into line as seminaries of the higher
learning, there has gone on a wide-reaching substitution
of laymen in the place of clergymen on the governing
boards. This progressive secularization is sufficiently
notorious, even though there are some among the older
establishments the terms of whose charters require a large
proportion of clergymen on their boards. This secular-
ization is entirely consonant with the prevailing drift of

64 The Higher Learning

sentiment in the community at large, as is shown by the
uniform and uncritical approval with which it is re-
garded. The substitution is a substitution of business-
men and politicians; which amounts to saying that it is
a substitution of businessmen. So that the discretionary
control in matters of university policy now rests finally
in the hands of businessmen.

The reason which men prefer to allege for this state
of things is the sensible need of experienced men of af-
fairs to take care of the fiscal concerns of these university
corporations ; for the typical modern university is a cor-
poration possessed of large property and disposing of
large aggregate expenditures, so that it will necessarily
have many and often delicate pecuniary interests to be
looked after. It is at the same time held to be expedient
in case of emergency to have several wealthy men identi-
fied with the governing board, and such men of wealth
are also commonly businessmen. It is apparently be-
lieved, though on just what ground this sanguine belief
rests does not appear, that in case of emergency the
wealthy members of the boards may be counted on to
spend their substance in behalf of the university. In
point of fact, at any rate, poor men and men without
large experience in business affairs are felt to have no
place in these bodies. If by any chance such men,
without the due pecuniary qualifications, should come
to make up a majority, or even an appreciable minority
of such a governing board, the situation would be viewed
with some apprehension by all persons interested in the
case and cognizant of the facts. The only exception
might be cases where, by tradition, the board habitually
includes a considerable proportion of clergymen :

" Such great regard is always lent
By men to ancient precedent"

The Governing Boards. 65

The. reasons alleged are no doubt convincing to those
who are ready to be so convinced, but they are after all
more plausible at first sight than on reflection. In point
of fact these businesslike governing boards commonly
exercise little if any current surveillance of the cor-
porate affairs of the university, beyond a directive over-
sight of the distribution of expenditures among the
several academic purposes for which the corporate in-
come is to be used ; that is to say, they control the budget
of expenditures ; which comes to saying that they exercise
a pecuniary discretion in the case mainly in the way"
of deciding what the body of academic men that consti-
tutes the university may or may not do with the means in
hand; that is to say, their pecuniary surveillance comes
in the main to an interference with the academic work,
the merits of which these men of affairs on the governing
board are in no special degree qualified to judge. Be-
yond this, as touches the actual running administration of
the corporation's investments, income and expenditures,
— all that is taken care of by permanent officials who
have, as they necessarily must, sole and responsible charge
of those matters. Even the auditing of the corporation's
accounts is commonly vested in such officers of the cor-
poration, who have none but a formal, if any, direct con-
nection with the governing board. The governing board,
or more commonly a committee of the board, on the
other hand, will then formally review the balance sheets
and bundles of vouchers duly submitted by the corpora-
tion's fiscal officers and their clerical force, — with such
effect of complaisant oversight as will best be appreciated
by any person who has had the fortune to look into the
accounts of a large corporation.

So far as regards its pecuniary affairs and their due
administration, the t}rpical modem university is in a^

66 The Higher Learning

position^ without loss or detriment, to dispense with the
services of any board of trustees, regents, curators, or
what not. Except for the insuperable difficulty of getting
a hearing for such an extraordinary proposal, it should
be no difficult matter to show that these governing boards
of businessmen commonly are quite useless to the uni-
versity fo^ any businesslike purpose. Indeed, except for
a stubborn prejudice to the contrary, the fact should
readily be seen that the boards are of no material use in
any connection; their sole effectual function being to
interfere with the academic management in matters that
are not of the nature of business, and that lie outside their
competence and outside the range of their habitual in-
terest.

The governing boards — trustees, regents, curators, f el-

^lows, whatever their style and title — are an aimless sur-
vival from the days of clerical rule, when they were pre-
sumably of some effect in enforcing conformity to ortho-
dox opinions and observances, among the academic staff.
At that time, when means for maintenance of the de-
nominational colleges commonly had to be procured by
an appeal to impecunious congregations, it fell to these
bodies of churchmen to do service as sturdy beggars for
funds with which to meet current expenses. So that as
long as the boards were made up chiefly of clergymen
they served a pecuniary purpose; whereas, since their
complexion has been changed by the substitution of busi-
nessmen in the place of ecclesiastics, they have ceased
to exercise any function other than a bootless meddling
with academic matters which they do not understand.

w The sole ground of their retention appears to be an un-
reflecting deferential concession to the usages of cor-
porate organization and control, such as have been found
advantageous for the pursuit of private gain by business-

The Governing Boards 67

men banded together in the exploitation of joint-stock
companies with limited liability.^

The fact remains, the modern civilized community is
reluctant to trust its serious interests to others than men

^ An instance showing something of the measure and incidence
of fiscal service rendered by such a businesslike board may be
suggestive, even though it is scarcely to be taken as faithfully
illustrating current practice, in that the particular board in
question has exercised an uncommon measure of surveillance
over its university's pecuniary concerns.

A university corporation endowed with a large estate (ap-
praised at something over $30,000,000) has been governed by a
board of the usual form, with plenary discretion, established on
a basis of co-optatioa In point of practical effect, the board,
or rather that fraction of the board which takes an active interest
in the university's affairs, has been made up of a group of local
business men engaged in divers enterprises of the kind familiar
to men of relatively large means, with somewhat extensive
interests of the nature of banking and underwriting, where large
extensions of credit and the temporary use of large funds are
of substantial consequence. By terms of the corporate charter
the board was required to render to the governor of the state
a yearly report of all the pecuniary affairs of the university; but
no penalty was attached to their eventual failure to render such
report, though some legal remedy could doubtless have been had
on due application by the parties in interest, as e. g., by the
academic head of the university. No such report has been ren-
dered, however, and no steps appear to have been taken to pro-
cure such a report, or any equivalent accounting. But on per-
sistent urging from the side of his faculty, and after some cour-
teous delay, the academic head pushed an inquiry into the cor-
poration's finances so far as to bring out facts somewhat to the
following effect: —

The board, or the group of local business men who constituted
the habitual working majority of the board, appear to have kept
a fairly close and active oversight of the corporate funds en-
trusted to them, and to have seen to their investment and dis-
posal somewhat in detail — and, it has been suggested, somewhat
to their own pecuniary advantage. With the result that the
investments were found to yield a current income of some three
per cent, (rather under than over), — in a state where investment
on good security in the open market commonly yielded from six
per cent to eight per cent Of this income approximately one-

68 The Higher Learning

of pecuniary substance, who have proved their fitness for
the direction of academic affairs by acquiring, or by
otherwise being possessed of, considerable wealth.^ It
is not simply that experienced businessmen are, on ma-
ture reflection, judged to be the safest and most compe-
tent trustees of the university's fiscal interests. The
preference appears to be almost wholly impulsive, and
a matter of habitual bias. It is due for the greater part

half (apparently some forty-five per cent.) practically accrued
to the possible current use of the university establishment. Just
what disposal was made of the remainder is not altogether clear ;
though it is loosely presumed to have been kept in hand with
an eventual view to the erection and repair of buildings. Some-
thing like one-half of what so made up the currently disposable
income was further set aside in the character of a sinking fund,
to accumulate for future use and to meet contingencies; so that
what effectually accrued to the university establishment for cur-
rent use to meet necessary academic expenditures would amount
to something like one per cent, (or less) on the total investment.
But of this finally disposable fraction of the income, again, an
appreciable sum was set aside as a special sinking fund to ac-
cumulate for the eventual use of the university library, — which,
it may be remarked, was in the meantime seriously handicapped
for want of funds with which to provide for current needs. So
also the academic establishment at large was perforce managed
on a basis of penurious economy, to the present inefficiency and
the lasting damage of the university.

The figures and percentages given above are not claimed to be
exact; it is known that a more accurate specification of details
would result in a less favourable showing.

At the time when these matters were disclosed (to a small num-
ber of the uneasy persons interested) there was an ugly sugges-
tion afloat touching the pecuniary integrity of the board's man-
agement, but this is doubtless to be dismissed as being merely
a loose expression of ill-will ; and the like is also doubtless to be
said as regards the suggestion that there may have been an in-
terested collusion between the academic head and the active
members of the board. These were "all honourable men," of
great repute in the community and well known as sagacious and
successful men in their private business ventures.

1 Cf . The Instinct of Workmanship, ch. vii, pp. 343-352.

The Governing Boards 69

to the high esteem currently accorded to men of wealth
at large, and especially to wealthy men who have suc-
ceeded in business, quite apart from any special capacity
shown by such success for the guardianship of any in-
stitution of learning. Business success is by common con-
sent, and quite uncritically, taken to be conclusive evidence
of wisdom even in matters that have no relation to busi-
ness affairs. So that it stands as a matter of course that
businessmen must be preferred for the guardianship and
control of that intellectual enterprise for the pursuit of
which the university is established, as well as to take
care of the pecuniary welfare of the university corpora-
tion. And, full of the same naive faith that business
success "answereth all things," these businessmen into
whose hands this trust falls are content to accept the re-
sponsibility and confident to exercise full discretion in
these matters with which they have no special familiarity.
Such is the outcome, to the present date, of the recent
and current secularization of the governing boards. The
final discretion in the affairs of the seats of learning is
entrusted to men who have proved their capacity for
work that has nothing in common with the higher learn-
ing.^

As bearing on the case of the American universities,
it should be called to mind that the businessmen of this

^ A subsidiary reason of some weight should not be overlooked
in seeking the cause of this secularization of the boards, and
of the peculiar colour which the secularization has given them.
In any community where wealth and business enterprise are
held in such high esteem, men of wealth and of affairs are not
only deferred to, but their countenance is sought from one
motive and another. At the same time election to one of these
boards has come to have a high value as an honourable distinc-
tion. Such election or appointment therefore is often sought
from motives of vanity, and it is at the same time a convenient
means of conciliating the good will of the wealthy incumbent.,

70 The Higher Learning

country, as a class, are of a notably conservative habit
of mind. In a degree scarcely equalled in any community
that can lay claim to a modicum of intelligence and enter-
prise, the spirit of American business is a spirit of quiet-
ism, caution, compromise, collusion, and chicane. It is
not that the spirit of enterprise or of unrest is wanting in
this community, but only that, by selective effect of the
conditioning circumstances, persons affected with that
spirit are excluded from the management of business, and
so do not come into the class of successful businessmen
from which the governing boards are drawn. American
inventors are bold and resourceful, perhaps beyond the
common run of their class elsewhere, but it has become
a commonplace that American inventors habitually die
poor; and one does not find them represented on the
boards in question. American engineers and technolo-
gists are as good and efficient as their kind in other coun-
tries ; but they do not as a class accumulate wealth enough
to entitle them to sit on the directive board of any self-
respecting university, nor can they claim even a moderate
rank as "safe and sane" men of business. American
explorers, prospectors and pioneers can not be said to
fall short of the common measure in hardihood, insight,
temerity or tenacity; but wealth does not accumulate in
their hands; and it is a common saying, of them as of
the inventors, that they are not fit to conduct their own
(pecuniary) affairs ; and the reminder is scarcely needed
that neither they nor their qualities are drawn into the

It may be added that now and again the discretionary control
of large funds which so falls to the members of the board may
come to be pecuniarily profitable to them, so that the office may
come to be attractive as a business proposition as well as in
point of prestige. Instances of the kind are not wholly un-
known^ though presumably exceptional

The Governing Boards yx

counsels of these governing boards. The wealth and
the serviceable results that come of the endeavours of
these enterprising and temerarious Americans habitually
inure to the benefit of such of their compatriots as are
endowed with a " safe and sane " spirit of " watchful
waiting," — of caution, collusion and chicane. There is
a homely but well-accepted American colloquialism which
says that " The silent hog eats the swill."

As elsewhere, but in a higher degree and a more cogent
sense than elsewhere, success in business affairs, in such
measure as to command the requisite deference, comes
only by getting something for nothing. And, barring
accidents and within the law, it is only the waiting game
and the defensive tactics that will bring gains of that
kind, unless it be strategy of the nature of finesse and
chicane. Now it happens that American conditions dur-
ing the past one hundred years have been peculiarly
favourable to the patient and circumspect man who will
rather wait than work ; and it is also during these hun-
dred years that the current traditions and standards of
business conduct and of businesslike talent have taken
shape and been incorporated in the community's common
sense. America has been a land of free and abounding^
resources ; which is to say, when converted into terms of '
economic theory, that it is the land of the unearned in- {
crement. In all directions, wherever enterprise and in-
dustry have gone, the opportunity was wide and large
for such as had the patience or astuteness to place them-
selves in the way of this piultifarious flow of the un-
earned increment, and were endowed with the retentive
grasp. Putting aside the illusions of public spirit and
diligent serviceability, sedulously cultivated by the
apologists of business, it will readily be seen that the

72 The Higher Learning

great mass of reputably large fortunes in this country
are of such an origin; nor will it cost anything beyond a
similar lesion to the affections to confirm the view that
such is the origin and line of derivation of the American
propertied business community and its canons of right
and honest living.

It is a common saying that the modem taste has been
unduly commercialized by the unremitting attention neces-
sarily given to matters of price and of profit and loss in an
industrial community organized on business principles;
that pecuniary standards of excellence are habitually ac-
cepted and applied with undue freedom and finality. But
what is scarcely appreciated at its full value is the fact
that these pecuniary standards of merit and efficiency
are habitually applied to men as well as to things, and
with little less freedom and finality. The man who ap-
plies himself undeviatingly to pecuniary affairs with a
view to his own gain, and who is habitually and cautiously
alert to the main chance, is not only esteemed for and
in respect of his pecuniary success, but he is also habit-
ually rated high at large, as a particularly wise and sane
person. He is deferred to as being wise and sane not
only in pecuniary matters but also in any other matters
on which he may express an opinion.

A very few generations ago, before the present
pecuniary era of civilization had made such headway, and
before the common man in these civilized communities
had lost the fear of God, the like wide-sweeping and
obsequious veneration and deference was given to the
clergy and their opinions; for the churchmen were then,
in the popular apprehension, proficient in all those mat-
ters that were of most substantial interest to the common
man of that time. Indeed, the salvation of men's soula

The Coverning Boards 73

was then a matter of as grave and untiring solicitude as
their commercial solvency has now become. And the
trained efficiency of the successful clergyman of that
time for the conduct of spiritual and ecclesiastical af-
fairs lent him a prestige with his fellow men such as to
give his opinions, decisions and preconceptions great and
unquestioned weight in temporal matters as well; he was
tlien accepted as the type of wise, sane and benevolent
humanity, in his own esteem as well as in the esteem of
his fellows. In like manner also, in other times and
under other cultural conditions the fighting-man has held
the first place in men's esteem and has been deferred to in
matters that concerned his trade and in matters that did
not.

Now, in that hard and fast body of aphoristic wisdom
that commands the faith of the business community there
is comprised the conviction that learning is of no use
in business. This conviction is, further, backed up and
coloured with the tenet, held somewhat doubtfully, but
also, and therefore, somewhat doggedly, by the common
run of businessmen, that what is of no use in business is
not worth while. More than one of the greater business-
men have spoken, advisedly and with emphasis, to the
effect that the higher learning is rather a hindrance than
a help to any aspirant for business success ; ^ more par-
ticularly to any man whose lot is cast in the field of busi-
ness enterprise of a middling scale and commonplace cir-
cumstances. And notoriously, the like view of the mat-
ter prevails throughout the business community at large.
What these men are likely to have in mind in passing this
verdict, as shown by various expressions on this head,
is not so much the higher learning in the proper sense,

1 Cf., e. g., R. T. Crane. The Futility of All Kinds of Higher
Schooling, especially part I, ch. iv.

74 The Higher Learning

but rather that slight preliminary modicum that is to be
found embodied in the curriculum of the colleges, — for
the common run of businessmen are not sufficiently con-
versant with these matters to know the difference, or that
there is a difference, between the college and the uni-
versity. They are busy with other things.

It is true, men whose construction of the facts is
coloured by their wish to commend the schools to the
good will of the business community profess to find
ground for the belief that university training, or rather
the training of the undergraduate school, gives added
fitness for a business career, particularly for the larger
business enterprise. But they commonly speak apolo-
getically and offer extenuating considerations, such as vir-
tually to concede the case, at the same time that they
are very prone to evade the issue by dwelling on acces-
sory and subsidiary considerations that do not substan-
tially touch the question of trained capacity for the con-
duct of business affairs.^ The apologists commonly
shift from the undebatable ground of the higher learn-
ing as related to business success, to the more defensible
ground of the undergraduate curriculiun, considered as
introductory to those social amenities that devolve on the
successful man of business ; and in so far as they confine
themselves to the topic of education and business they
commonly spend their efforts in arguing for the business
utility of the training afforded by the professional and

* Cf . R. T. Crane, as above, especially part I, ch. ii, lii, and vi.
Cf . also H. P. Judson, The Higher Education as a Training fot
Btdsiness, where the case is argued in a typically commonplace
and matter-of-fact spirit, but where " The Higher Education " is
taken to mean the undergraduate curriculum simply; also "A
Symposium on the value of humanistic, particularly classical,
studies as a training for men of affairs," Proceedings of the
Qassical Conference at Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 3, 1909.

The Governing Boards 75

technical schools, included within the university cor-
poration or otherwise. There is ground for their con-
tention in so far as " university training " is (by subrep-
tion) taken to mean training in those "practical"
branches of knowledge (Law, Politics, Accountancy, etc.)
that have a place within the university precincts only by
force of a non-sequitur. And the spokesmen for these
views are commonly also, and significantly, eager to
make good their contention by advocating the introduction
of an increased proportion of these ** practical " subjects
into the schedule of instruction.

The facts are notorious and leave little room for cavil
on the merits of the case. Particularly is the award of
the facts unequivocal in America, — the native ground of
the self-made businessman, and at the same time the
most admirably thorough-paced business community ex-
tant. The American business community is well enough
as it is, without the higher learning, and it is fully sensible
that the higher learning is not a business proposition.

But a good rule works both ways. If scholarly and
scientific training, such as may without shame be in-
cluded under the caption of the higher learning, unfits men
for business efficiency, then the training that comes of
experience in business must also be held to unfit men for
scholarly and scientific pursuits, and even more pro-
nouncedly for the surveillance of such pursuits. The
circumstantial evidence for the latter proposition is
neither less abundant nor less unequivocal than for the
former. If the higher learning is incompatible with busi-
ness shrewdness, business enterprise is, by the same token,
incompatible with the spirit of the higher learning. In-
deed, within the ordinary range of lawful occupations
these two lines of endeavour, and the animus that be-
longs to each, are as widely out of touch as may be.

y6 The Higher Learning

They are the two extreme terms of the modern cultural
scheme; although at the same time each is intrinsic and
indispensable to the scheme of modern civilization as
it runs. With the excision or serious crippling of either,
Western Civilization would suffer a dislocation amounting
to a revolutionary change.

On the other hand, the higher learning and the spirit
of scientific inquiry have much in common with modern
industry and its technological discipline. More particu-
larly is there a close bond of sympathy and relationship
between the spirit of scientific inquiry and the habit of
mind enforced by the mechanical industries of the mod-
ern kind. In both of these lines of activity men are oc-
cupied with impersonal facts and deal with them in a
matter-of-fact way. In both, as far as may be, the per-
sonal equation is sought to be eliminated, discounted and
avoided, so as to leave no chance for discrepancies due to
personal infirmity or predilection. But it is only on its
mechanical side that the industrial organization so comes
in touch with modern science and the pursuit of matter-
of-fact knowledge ; and it is only in so far as their habits
of thought are shaped by the discipline of the mechanical
industries that there is induced in the industrial popula-
tion the same bent as goes to further or to appreciate the
work of modem science. But it would be quite nuga-
tory to suggest that the governing boards of the uni-
versities should be made up of, or should comprise,
impecunious technologists and engineers.

There is no similar bond of consanguinity between the
business occupations and the scientific spirit; except so
far as regards those clerical and subaltern employments
that lie wholly within the mechanical routine of business
traffic; and even as regards these employments and the
persons so occupied it is, at the most, doubtful whether

The Governing Boards 771

their training does not after all partake more of that
astute and invidious character of cunning that belongs to
the conduct of business affairs than of the dispassionate
animus of scientific inquiry.

These extenuating considerations do not touch the case
of that body of businessmen, in the proper sense of the
term, from which the membership of the governing boards
is drawn. The principles that rule business enterprise
of that larger and pecuniarily effectual sort are a matter
of usage, appraisement, contractual arrangement and
strategic manoeuvres. They are the principles of a game
of competitive guessing and pecuniary coercion, a game
carried on wholly within the limits of the personal equa-
tion, and depending for its movement and effect on per-
sonal discrepancies of judgment. Science has to do with
the opaquely veracious sequence of cause and effect, and
it deals with the facts of this sequence without mental
reservation or ulterior purposes of expediency. Business
enterprise proceeds on ulterior purposes and calculations
of expediency ; it depends on shrewd expedients and lives
on the margin of error, on the fluctuating margin of hu-
man miscalculation. The training given by these two
lines of endeavour — science and business — is wholly di-
vergent ; with the notorious result that for the purposes of
business enterprise the scientists are the most ignorant,
gullible and incompetent class in the community. They
are not only passively out of touch with the business
spirit, out of training by neglect, but they are also posi-
tively trained out of the habit of mind indispensable to
business enterprise. The converse is true of the men of
business affairs.*

Plato's classic scheme of folly, which would have the

1 Cf. Bacon, Esisays, " Of Cunning," and " Of Wisdom for a
Man's Self."

78 The Higher Learning

philosophers take over the management of affairs, has
been turned on its head; the men of affairs have taken
over the direction of the pursuit of knowledge. To any
one who will take a dispassionate look at this modern ar-
rangement it looks foolish, of course, — ingeniously fool-
ish; but, also, of course, there is no help for it and no
prospect of its abatement in the calculable future.

It is a fact of the current state of things, grounded in
the institutional fabric of Christendom; and it will avail
little to speculate on remedial corrections for this state
of academic affairs so long as the institutional ground of
this perversion remains intact. Its institutional ground
is the current system of private ownership. It claims the
attention of students as a feature of the latterday cultural
growth, as an outcome of the pecuniary organization of
modern society, and it is to be taken as a base-line in any
inquiry into the policy that controls modern academic
life and work — just as any inquiry into the circumstances
and establishments of learning in the days of scholas-
ticism must take account of the ecclesiastical rule of that
time as one of the main controlling facts in the case.
The fact is that businessmen hold the plenary discretion,
and that business principles guide them in their manage-
ment of the affairs of the higher learning; and such must
continue to be the case so long as the community's
workday material interests continue to be organized on a
basis of business enterprise. All this does not promise
well for the future of science and scholarship in the uni-
versities, but the current effects of this method of uni-
versity control are sufficiently patent to all academic men,
— and the whole situation should perhaps trouble the mind
of no one who will be at pains to free himself from the
(possibly transient) preconception that " the increase and
diffusion of knowledge among men " is, in the end, more

The Governing Boards 79

to be desired than the acquisition and expenditure of
riches by the astuter men in the community.

Many of those who fancy themselves conversant with
the circumstances of American academic Ufe would ques-
tion the view set forth above, and they would particularly
deny that business principles do or can pervade the cor-
porate management of the universities in anything like'
the degree here implied. They would contend that while
the boards of control are commonly gifted with all the
disabilities described — that much being not open to dis-
pute — yet these boards do not, on the whole, in practice,
extend the exercise of their plenary discretion to the di-
rective control of what are properly speaking academic
matters; that they habitually confine their work of di-
rectorship to the pecuniary aflFairs of the corporation;
and that in so far as they may at times interfere in the
university's scholarly and scientific work, they do so in
their capacity as men of culture, not as men of property
or of enterprise. This latter would also be the view to
which the men of property on the boards would them-
selves particularly incline. So it will be held by the
spokesmen of content that virtually full discretion in all
matters of academic policy is delegated to the academic
head of the university, fortified by the advice and consent
of the senior members of his faculty; so that the schol-
arly interests of the university are, by the free choice of
the governing boards, in practice drawn out from under
the control of these businessmen in question and placed
in the hands of the scholars. And such, commonly, is at
least ostensibly the case, in point of form; more par-
ticularly as regards those older establishments that are
burdened with academic traditions running back beyond
the date when their j^overning boards were taken over by

8o The Higher Learning

the businessmen, and more particularly in the recent past
than in the immediate present or for the establishments of
a more recent date.

This complaisant view overlooks the fact that much ef-
fective surveillance of the academic work is exercised
through the board's control of the budget. The academic
staff can do little else than what the specifications of the
budget provide for; without the means with which the
corporate income should supply them they are as helpless
as might be expected.

Imbued with an alert sense of those tangible pecuniary
values which they are by habit and temperament in a po-
sition to appreciate, a sagacious governing board may,
for instance, determine to expend the greater proportion
of the available income of the university in improving and
decorating its real estate, and they may with businesslike
thrift set aside an appreciable proportion of the remainder
for a sinking fund to meet vaguely unforeseen contingen-
cies, while the academic staff remains (notoriously) un-
derpaid and so scantily filled as seriously to curtail their
working capacity. Or the board may, again, as has also
happened, take a thrifty resolution to " concede " only a
fraction — say ten or fifteen per-cent — of the demands
of the staff for books and similar working materials for
current use ; while setting aside a good share of the funds
assigned for such use, to accumulate until at some future
date such materials may be purchased at more reasonable
prices than those now ruling. These illustrations are not
supplied by fancy. There is, indeed, a visible reluctance
on the part of these businesslike boards to expend the
corporation's income for those intangible, immaterial uses
for which the university is established. These uses leave
no physical, tangible residue, in the way of durable goods,
5uch as will justify the expenditure in terms of yendibl^

The Governing Boards 8i

property acquired; therefore they are prima facie imbe-
cile, and correspondingly distasteful, to men whose habit-
ual occupation is with the acquisition of property. By
force of the same businesslike bias the boards tmavoid-
ably incline to apportion the funds assigned for current
expenses in such a way as to favour those " practical " or
quasi-practical lines of instruction and academic propa-
ganda that are presumed to heighten the business acumen
of the students or to yield immediate retiu-ns in the way
of a creditable publicity.

As to the delegation of powers to the academic head.
There is always the reservation to be kept in mind, that
the academic head is limited in his discretion by the speci-
fications of the budget. The permissible deviations in that
respect are commonly neither wide nor of a substantial
character; though the instances of a university president
exercising large powers are also not extremely rare. But
in common practice, it is to be noted, the academic head
is vested with somewhat autocratic powers, within the
lines effectually laid down in the budget; he is in effect
responsible to the governing board alone, and his re-
sponsibility in that direction chiefly touches his observ-
ance of the pecuniary specifications of the budget.

But it is more to the point to note that the academic
head commonly holds office by choice of the governing
board. Where the power of appointment lies freely in
the discretion of such a board, the board will create an
academic head in its own image. In point of notorious
fact, the academic head of the university is selected chiefly
on grounds of his business qualifications, taking that ex-
pression in a somewhat special' sense. There is at pres-
ent an increasingly broad and strenuous insistence on such
qualifications in the men selected as heads of the univer-

82 The Higher Learning

sities ; and the common sense of the community at large
bears out the predilections of the businesslike board of
control in this respect. The new incumbents are selected
primarily with a view to give the direction of academic
policy and administration more of a businesslike character.
The choice may not always fall on a competent business
man, but that is not due to its inclining too far to the side
of scholarship. It is not an easy matter even for the most
astute body of businessmen to select a candidate who shall

. measure up to their standard of businesslike efficiency in a
field of activity that has substantially nothing in commoh
with that business traffic in which their preconceptions of
efficiency have been formed.

In many cases the alumni have much to say in the choice
of a new academic head, whether by courtesy or by ex-
press provision ; and the results under these circumstances
are not substantially different. It follows as an inevitable
consequence of the current state of popular sentiment that
the successful businessmen among the alumni will have
the deciding voice, in so far as the matter rests with the
alumni; for the successful men of affairs assert them-
selves with easy confidence, and they are looked up to, in
any community whose standards of esteem are business
standards, so that their word carries weight beyond that

"^ of any other class or order of men. The community at
large, or at least that portion of the community that
habitually makes itself heard, speaks to the same effect
and on the same ground, — viz., a sentimental conviction
that pecuniary success is the final test of manhood. Busi-
ness principles are the sacred articles of the secular creed,
and business methods make up the ritual of the secular
cult.
The one clear note of acclaim that goes up, from the

The Gofverning Boards 83

avowed adepts of culture and from those without the
pale, when a new head has, as recently been called to one
of the greater xmiversities, is in commendation of his busi-
ness capacity, " commercial sense," executive ability,
financiering tact ; and the effectual canvass of his qualifi-
cations does not commonly range much outside of these
prime requisites. The modicum of scholarship and schol-
arly ideals and insight concessively deemed indispensable
in such a case is somewhat of the nature of a perquisite,
and is easily found. It is not required that the incumbent
meet the prepossessions of the contingent of learned men
in the community in this respect ; the choice does not rest
with that element, nor does its ratification, but rather at
the other end of the scale, with that extreme wing of the
laity that is taken up with " practical," that is to say pe-
cuniary, affairs.

As to the requirements of scholarly or scientific com-
petency, a plausible speaker with a large gift of assur-
ance, a businesslike ".educator " or clergyman, some ur-
bane pillar of society, some astute veteran of the scientific
demi-monde, will meet all reasonable requirements. Schol-
arship is not barred, of course, though it is commonly
the quasi-scholarship of the popular raconteur that comes
in evidence in these premises ; and the fact that these in-
cumbents of executive ofiice show so much of scholarly
animus and attainments as they do is in great measure a
fortuitous circumstance. It is, indeed, a safe generaliza-
tion that in point of fact the average of university presi-
dents fall short of the average of their academic staff in
scholarly or scientific attainments, even when all persons
employed as instructors are counted as members of the
staff. It may also be remarked by the way that when, as
may happen, a scholar or scientist takes office as directive

84 The Higher Learning

head of a university, he is commonly lost to the republic
of learning; he has in effect passed from the ranks of
learning to those of business enterprise.

The upshot of it all should be that when and in so far
as a businesslike governing board delegates powers to the
university's academic head, it delegates these powers to
one of their own kind, who is somewhat peremptorily ex-
pected to live up to the aspirations that animate the board.
What such a man, so placed, will do with the powers and
opportunities that so devolve on him is a difficult question
that can be answered only in terms of the compulsion of
the circumstances in which he is placed and of the moral
wear and tear that comes of arbitrary powers exercised in
a tangle of ambiguities.^

1 Cf. ch. viii, especially pp. 24^269.

I

f

CHAPTER III

The Academic Administration and Policy

Men dilate on the high necessity of a businesslike organi-
zation and control of the university, its equipment, per-
sonnel and routine. What is had in mind in this insistence
on an efficient system is that these corporations of learn-
ing shall set their affairs in order after the pattern of a
well-conducted business concern. In this view the uni-
versity is conceived as a business house dealing in mer-
chantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand
of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the
means in hand to account in the largest feasible output.
It is a corporation with large funds, and for men biased
by their workday training in business affairs it comes as
a matter of course to rate the university in terms of in-
vestment and turnover. Hence the insistence on business
capacity in the executive heads of the universities, and
hence also the extensive range of businesslike duties and
powers that devolve on them.

Yet when all these sophistications of practical wisdom
are duly allowed for, the fact remains that the university
is, in usage, precedent, and commonsense preconception,
an establishment for the conservation and advancement
of the higher learning, devoted to a disinterested pursuit
of knowledge. As such, it consists of a body of scholars
and scientists, each and several of whom necessarily goes
to his work on his own initiative and pursues it in his own
way. This work necessarily follows an orderly sequence

85

86 The Higher Learning

and procedure, and so takes on a systematic form, of an
organic kind. But the system and order that so govern
the work, and that come into view in its procedure and
results, are the logical system and order of intellectual en-
terprise, not the mechanical or statistical systematization
that goes into effect in the management of an industrial
plant or the financiering of a business corporation.

Those items of human intelligence and initiative that go
to make up the pursuit of knowledge, and that are em-
bodied in systematic form in its conclusions, do not lend
themselves to quantitative statement, and can not be made
to appear on a balance-sheet Neither can that intel-
lectual initiative and proclivity that goes in as the indis-
pensable motive force in the pursuit of learning be re-
duced to any known terms of subordination, obedience, or
authoritative direction. No scholar or scientist can be-
come an employe in respect of his scholarly or scientific
work. Mechanical systematization and authoritative
control can in these premises not reach beyond the ma-
terial circumstances that condition the work in hand, nor
can it in these external matters with good effect go far-
ther than is necessary to supply the material ways and
means requisite to the work, and to adapt them to the
peculiar needs of any given line of inquiry or group of
scholars. In order to their best efficiency, and indeed in
the degree in which efficiency in this field of activity is to
be attained at all, the executive officers of the university
must stand in the relation of assistants serving the needs
and catering to the idiosyncrasies of the body of scholars
and scientists that make up the university ; ^ in the degree
in which the converse relation is allowed to take efi.*ict,

^Cf. George T. Ladd, "The Need of Administrative Changes
in the American University/' reprinted in University Control, by
J, McKeen Cattell ; especially pp. 352-353.

The Academic Administration 87

the unavoidable consequence is wasteful defeat. A free
hand is the first and abiding requisite of scholarly and
scientific work.

Now, in accepting office as executive head of a uni- 1
versity, the incumbent necessarily accepts all the condi- 1
tions that attach to the administration of his office,
whether by usage and commonsense expectation, by ex-
press arrangement, or by patent understanding with the
board to which he owes his elevation to this post of dig-
nity and command. By usage and precedent it is incum-
bent on him to govern the academic personnel and equip-
ment with an eye single to the pursuit of knowledge, and
so to conduct its affairs as will most effectually compass
that end. That is to say he must so administer his of-
fice as best to serve the scholarly needs of the academic
staff, due regard being scrupulously had to the idosyncra-
sies, and even to the vagaries, of the men whose work he
is called on to further. But by patent understanding, if
not by explicit stipulation, from the side of the govern-
ing board, fortified by the preconceptions of the laity at
large to the same effect, he is held to such a conspicuously
efficient employment of the means in hand as will gratify
those who look for a voluminous turnover. To this end
he must keep the academic administration and its activity
constantly in the public eye, with such "pomp and cir-
cumstance " of untiring urgency and expedition as will
carry the conviction abroad that the university under his
management is a highly successful going concern, and he
must be able to show by itemized accounts that the volume
of output is such as to warrant the investment. So the
equipment and personnel must be organized into a facile
and orderly working force, held under the directive con-
trol of the captain of erudition at every point, and so ar-
ticulated and standardized that its rate of speed and the

88 The Higher Learning

volume of its current output can be exhibited to full sta-
tistical effect as it runs.

The university is to make good both as a corporation of
learning and as a business concern dealing in standardized
erudition, and the executive head necessarily assumes the
responsibility of making it count wholly and unreservedly
in each of these divergent, if not incompatible lines.^ Hu-
manly speaking, it follows by necessary consequence that
he will first and always take care of those duties that are
most jealously insisted on by the powers to whom he is
accountable, and the due performance of which will at
the same time yield some sufficiently tangible evidence of
his efficiency. That other, more recondite side of the
university's work that has substantially to do with the
higher learning is not readily set out in the form of statis-
tical exhibits, at the best, and can ordinarily come to ap-
praisal and popular appreciation only in the long run.
The need of a businesslike showing is instant and impera-
tive, particularly in a business era of large turnover and
quick returns, and to meet this need the uneventful schol-
astic life that counts toward the higher learning in the long
run is of little use ; so it can wait, and it readily becomes
a habit with the busy executive to let it wait.

It should be kept in mind also that the incumbent of
executive office is presumably a man of businesslike quali-
fications, rather than of scholarly insight, — the method of
selecting the executive heads under the present regime
makes that nearly a matter of course. As such he will in
his own right more readily appreciate those results of his
own management that show up with something of the glare
of publicity, as contrasted with the slow-moving and often
obscure working of inquiry that lies (commonly) some-

^Cf. George T. Ladd, as above, pp. 35.1-352.

The Academic Administration 89

what beyond his intellectual horizon. So that with slight
misgivings, if any, he takes to the methods of organiza-
tion and control that have c6mmended themselves in that
current business enterprise to which it is his ambition to
assimilate the corporation of learning.

These precedents of business practice that are to afford
guidance to the captain of erudition are, of course, the
precedents of competitive business. It is one of the un-
written, and commonly unspoken, commonplaces lying at
the root of modern academic policy that the various uni-
versities are competitors for the traffic in merchantable
instruction, in much the same fashion as rival establish-
ments in the retail trade compete for custom. Indeed,
the modem department store offers a felicitous analogy,
that has already been found serviceable in illustration of
the American university's position in this respect, by
those who speak for the present regime as well as by its
critics. The fact that the universities are assumed to be
irreconcilable competitors, both in the popular apprehen-
sion and as evidenced by the manoeuvres of their several
directors, is too notorious to be denied by any but the
interested parties. Now and again it is formally denied
by one and another among the competing captains of eru-
dition, but the reason for such denial is the need of it.^

^ Apart from the executive's need of satisfying the prejudices
of the laity in this matter, there is no ground for this competition
between the universities, either in the pecuniary circumstances
of the several establishments or in the work they are to take
care of. So much is admitted on all hands. But the fact remains
that no other one motive has as much to do with shaping aca-
demic policy as this same competition for traffic. The cause of
it appears to be very little if anything else than that the habits
of thought induced by ex^rience in business are uncritically
carried over into academic affairs.

Critics of the present regime are inclined to admit that the
colleges of the land are in great part so placed as to be thrown
into competition by force of circumstances, both as to the acqui-

90 The Higher Learning

Now, the duties of the executive head of a competitive
business concern are of a strategic nature, the object of
his management being to get the better of rival concerns
and to engross the trade. To this end it is indispensable
that he should be a " strong man " and should have a free
hand, — though perhaps under the general and tolerant
surveillance of his board of directors. Any wise board
of directors, and in the degree in which they are endowed
with the requisite wisdom, will be careful to give their
general manager full discretion, and not to hamper him
with too close an accounting of the details of his adminis-
tration, so long as he shows gratifying results. He must
be a strong man ; that is to say, a capable man of affairs,
tenacious and resourceful in turning the means at hand
to account for this purpose, and easily content to let the
end justify the means. He must be a man of scrupulous
integrity, so far as may conduce to his success, but with
a shrewd eye to the limits within which honesty is the
best policy, for the purpose in hand. He must have full
command of the means entrusted to him and full control
of the force of employes and subordinates who are to work
under his direction, and he must be able to rely on the
instant and unwavering loyalty of )iis staff in any line of
policy on which he may decide to enter. He must there-
fore have free power to appoint and dismiss, and to
reward and punish, limited only by the formal ratification
of his decisions by the board of directors who will be
careful not to interfere or inquire unduly in these matters,
— so long as their strong man shows results.

sition of funds and as to the enrolment of students. The point
may be conceded, though with doubt and reservation, as applies
to the colleges ; for the universities there is no visible ground of
such rivalry, apart from unreflecting prejudice on the part of
the laity, and an ambition for popular acclaim on the part of the
university directorate.

The Academic Administration gi

The details and objective of his strategy need not be
known to the members of the staff; indeed, all that does
not concern them except in the most general way. They
are his creatures, and are responsible only to him and
only for the due performance of the tasks assigned them ;
and they need know only so much as will enable them to
give ready and intelligent support to the moves made by
their chief from day to day. The members of the staff
are his employes, and their first duty is a loyal obedience ;
and for the competitive good of the concern they must
utter no expression of criticism or unfavourable comment
on the policy, actions or personal characteristics of their
chief, so long as they are in his employ. They have
eaten his bread, and it is for them to do his bidding.

Such is the object-lesson afforded by business practice
as it bears on the duties incumbent on the academic head
and on the powers of office delegated to him. It is need-
less to remark on what is a fact of common notoriety, that
this rule drawn from the conduct of competitive business
is commonly applied without substantial abatement in the
conduct of academic affairs.^

^An incumbent of executive office, recently appointed, in one
of the greater universities was at pains a few years ago to
speak his mind on this head, to the effect that the members of
the academic staff are employes in the pay of the university and
under the orders of its president, and as such they are bound
to avoid all criticism of him and his administration so long as
they continue on the pay-roll; and that if any member of the
staflF has any fault to find with the conduct of affairs he must
first sever his connection with the university, before speaking his
mind. These expressions were occasioned by the underhand dis-
missal of a scholar of high standing and long service, who had
incurred the displeasure of the president then in charge, by
overt criticism of the administration. As to its general features
the case might well have been the one referred to by Professor
Ladd {University Control, as above, p. 359), though the circum-
stances of the dismissal offer several details of a more discredit-

92 The Higher Learning

Under this rule the academic staff becomes a body of
graded subalterns, who share the confidence of the chief
in varying degrees, but who have no decisive voice in the
policy or the conduct of affairs of the concern in whose
pay they are held. The faculty is conceived as a body of
employes, hired to render certain services and turn out
certain scheduled vendible results.

The chief may take advice; and, as is commonly the
practice in analogous circumstances in commercial busi-
ness, he will be likely to draw about him from among the
faculty a conveniently small number of advisers who are
in sympathy with his own ambitions, and who will in this
way form an unofficial council, or cabinet, or " junta," to
whom he can turn for informal, anonymous and irre-
sponsible, advice and moral support at any juncture. He
will also, in compliance with charter stipulations and par-
liamentary usage, have certain officially recognized advis-
ers, — the various deans, advisory committees. Academic
Council, University Senate, and the like, — with whom he
shares responsibility, particularly for measures of doubt-
ful popularity, and whose advice he formally takes coram
publico; but he can not well share discretion with these,
except on administrative matters of inconsequential de-
tail. For reasons of practical efficiency, discretion must
be undivided in any competitive enterprise. There is
much fine-spun strategy to be taken care of under cover
of night and cloud.

But the academic tradition, which still drags on the
hands of the captains of erudition, has not left the ground
prepared for such a clean-cut businesslike organization
and such a campaign of competitive strategy. By tradi-

able character than Professor Ladd appears to have been aware
of.

The Academic Administration 93

tion the faculty is the keeper of the academic interests of
the university and makes up a body of loosely-bound non-
competitive co-partners, with no view to strategic team-
play and no collective ulterior ambition, least of all with
a view to engrossing the trade. By tradition, and indeed
commonly by explicit proviso, the conduct of the univer-
sity's academic affairs vests formally in the president, with
the advice and consent of the faculty, or of the general
body of senior members of the faculty. In due observ-
ance of these traditions, and of the scholastic purposes
notoriously underlying all university life, certain forms
of disinterested zeal must be adhered to in all official
pronouncements of the executive, as well as certain punc-
tilios of conference and advisement between the directive
head and the academic staff.

All of which makes the work of the executive head less
easy and ingenuous than it might be. The substantial de-
mands of his position as chief of a competitive business
are somewhat widely out of touch with these forms of
divided responsibility that must (formally) be observed
in administering his duties, and equally out of touch with
the formal professions of disinterested zeal for the cause
of learning that he is by tradition required to make from
time to time. All that may reasonably be counted on
under these trying circumstances is that he should do the
best he can, — to save the formalities and secure the sub-
stance. To compass these difficult incongruities, he will,
as already remarked above, necessarily gather about him,
within the general body of the academic personnel, a corps
of trusted advisors and agents, whose qualifications for
their peculiar work is an intelligent sympathy with their
chief's ideals and methods and an unreserved subservience
to his aims, — unless it should come to pass, as may hap-
pen in case its members are men of force and ingenuity,

94 The Higher Learning

that this unofficial cabinet should take over the direction
of affairs and work out their own aims and purposes
under cover of the chief's ostensibly autocratic rule.

Among these aids and advisers will be found at least a
proportion of the higher administrative officials, and
among the number it is fairly indispensable to include
one or more adroit parliamentarians, competent to pro-
cure the necessary modicum of sanction for all arbitrary
acts of the executive, from a distrustful faculty convened
as a deliberative body. These men must be at least par-
tially in the confidence of the executive head. From the
circumstances of the case it also follows that they will
commonly occupy an advanced academic rank, and so will
take a high (putative) rank as scholars and scientists.
High academic rank comes of necessity to these men who
serve as coadjutors and vehicles of the executive policy,
as does also the relatively high pay that goes with high
rank; both are required as a reward of merit and an in-
citement to a zealous serviceability on the one hand, and
to keep the administration in countenance on the other
hand by giving the requisite dignity to its agents.
They will be selected on the same general grounds of fit-
ness as their chief, — administrative facility, plausiblity,
proficiency as public speakers and parliamentarians, ready
versatility of convictions, and a staunch loyalty to their
bread. Experience teaches that scholarly or scientific ca-
pacity does not enter in any appreciable measure among
the qualifications so required for responsible academic
office, beyond what may thriftily serve to mask the con-
ventional decencies of the case.

It is, further, of the essence of this scheme of academic
control that the captain of erudition should freely exercise
the power of academic life and death over the members
of his stafif, to reward the good and faithful servant and

The Academic Administration 95

to abase the recalcitrant. Otherwise discipline would be
a difficult matter, and the formally requisite " advice and
consent " could be procured only tardily and grudgingly.

Admitting such reservations and abatement as may be
due, it is to be said that the existing organization of
academic control under business principles falls more or
less nearly into the form outlined above. The perfected
type, as sketched in the last paragraphs, has doubtless not
been fully achieved in practice hitherto, unless it be in one
or another of the newer establishments with large ambi-
tions and endowment, and with few traditions to hamper
the working out of the system. The incursion of busi-
ness principles into the academic community is also of
relatively recent date, and should not yet have had time
to pervade the organization throughout and with full ef-
fect ; so that the regime of competitive strategy should as
yet be neither so far advanced nor so secure a matter of
course as may fairly be expected in the near future. Yet
the rate of advance along this line, and the measure of
present achievement, are more considerable than even a
very sanguine advocate of business principles could have
dared to look for a couple of decades ago.

In so far as these matters are still in process of gfrowth,
rather than at their full fruition, it follows that any
analysis of the effects of this regime must be in some
degree speculative, and must at times deal with the drift
of things as much as with accomplished fact. Yet such
an inquiry must approach its subject as an episode of
history, and must deal with the personal figures and the
incidents of this growth objectively, as phenomena thrown
up to view by the play of circumstances in the dispas-
sionate give and take of institutional change. Such an
impersonal attitude, it is perhaps needless to remark, is

96 The Higher Learning

not always easy to maintain in dealing with facts of so
personal, and often of so animated, a character. Particu-
larly will an observer who has seen these incidents from
the middle and in the making find it difficult uniformly to
preserve that aloof perspective that will serve the ends
of an historical appreciation. The difficulty is increased
and complicated by the necessity of employing terms, de-
scriptions and incidents that have been habitually em-
ployed in current controversy, often with a marked ani-
mus. Men have taken sides on these matters, and so are
engaged in controversy on the merits of the current regime
and on the question of possible relief and remedy for
what are considered to be its iniquities. Under the
shadow of this controversy, it is nearly unavoidable that
any expression or citation of fact that will bear a partisan
construction will habitually be so construed. The vehicle
necessarily employed must almost unavoidably infuse the
analysis with an unintended colour of bias, to one side or
the other of the presumed merits of the case. A degree
of patient attention is therefore due at points where the
facts cited, and the characterization of these facts and
their bearing, would seem, on a superficial view, to bear
construction as controversial matter.

In this episode of institutional growth, plainly, the ex-
ecutive head is the central figure. The light falls on him
rather than on the forces that move him, and it comes as
a matter of course to pass opinions on the resulting inci-
dents and consequences, as the outcome of his free initia-
tive rather than of the circumstances whose creature he is.
No doubt, his initiative, if any, is a powerful factor in
the case, but it is after all a factor of transmission and
commutation rather than of genesis and self-direction ; for
he is chosen for the style and measure of initiative with

The Academic Administration 97

which he is endowed, and unless he shall be found to meas-
ure up to expectations in kind and degree in this matter
he will go in the discard, and his personal ideals and ini-
tiative will count as little more than a transient obstruc-
tion. He will hold his place, and will count as a creative
force in his world, in much the same degree in which he
responds with ready flexibility to the impact^ of those
forces of popular sentiment and class conviction that have
called him to be their servant. Only so can he be a
" strong man " ; only in so far as, by fortunate bent or
by its absence, he is enabled to move resistlessly with the
parallelogram of forces.

The exigencies of a businesslike administration demand
that there be no division of powers between the academic
executive and the academic staff ; but the exigencies of the
higher learning require that the scholars and scientists
must be left quite free to follow their own bent in con-
ducting their own work. In the nature of things this
work cannot be carried on effectually under coercive rule.
Scientific inquiry can not be pursued under direction of a
layman in the person of a superior officer. Also, learning
is, in the nature of things, not a competitive business and
can make no use of finesse, diplomatic equivocation and
tactful regard for popular prejudices, such as are of the
essence of the case in competitive business. It is, also, of
no advantage to learning to engross the trade. Tradition
and present necessity alike demand that the body of schol-
ars and scientists who make up the university must be
vested with full powers of self-direction, without ulterior
consideration. A university can remain a corporation of
learning, de facto, on no other basis.

As has already been remarked, business methods of
course have their place in the corporation's fiscal affairs
and in the office-work incident to the care of its material

98 The Higher Learning

equipment. As regards these items the university is a
business concern, and no discussion of these topics would
be in place here. These things concern the university
only in its externals, and they do not properly fall within
the scope of academic policy or academic administration.
They come into consideration here only in so far as a
lively regard for them may, as it sometimes does, divert
the forces of the establishment from its ostensible pur-
pose.

Under the rule imposed by those businesslike precon-
ceptions that decide his selection for office, the first duty
of the executive head is to see to the organization of an
administrative machinery for the direction of the univer-
sity's internal affairs, and the establishment of a facile
and rigorous system of accountancy for the control and
exhibition of the academic work. In the same measure
in which such a system goes into effect the principles of
competitive business will permeate the administration in
all directions; in the personnel of the academic staff, in
the control and intercourse of teachers and students, in
the schedule of instruction, in the disposition of the ma-
terial equipment, in the public exhibits and ceremonial of
the university, as well as in its pecuniary concerns.

Within the range of academic interests proper, these
business principles primarily affect the personnel and the
routine of instruction. Here their application immedi-
ately results in an administrative system of bureaux or de-
partments, a hierarchical gradation of the members of the
staff, and a rigorous parcelment and standardization of
the instruction offered. Some such system is indispens-
able to any effective control of the work from above, such
as is aimed at in the appointment of a discretionary head
of the university, — particularly in a large school; and
the measure of control desired will decide the degree

The Academic Administration 99

of thoroughness with which this bureaucratic organization
is to be carried through. The need of a well-devised
bureaucratic system is greater the more centralized and
coercive the control to which the academic work is to be
subject; and the degree of control to be exercised will be
greater the more urgent the felt need of a strict and large
accountancy may be. All of which resolves itself into a
question as to the purposes sought by the installation of
such a system.

For the everyday work of the higher learning, as such,
little of a hierarchical gradation, and less of bureaucratic
subordination, is needful or serviceable ; and very little of
statistical uniformity, standard units of erudition, or de-
tail accountancy, is at all feasible. This work is not of
a mechanical character and does not lend itself, either in
its methods or its results, to any mechanically standardized
scheme of measurements or to a system of accounting
per cent, per time unit. This range of instruction con-
sists substantially in the facilitation of scholarly and scien-
tific habits of thought, and the imposition of any appreci-
able measure of such standardization and accounting must
unavoidably weaken and vitiate the work of instruction, in
just the degree in which the imposed system is effective.

It is not within the purpose of this inquiry to go into
the bearing of all this on the collegiate (undergraduate)
departments or on the professional and technical schools
associated with the university proper in American prac-
tice. But something of a detailed discussion of the sys-
tem and principles of control applied in these schools is
necessary because of its incidental bearing on graduate
work.

It is plain beyond need of specification that in the prac-
tical view of the public at large, and of the governing
boards, the university is primarily an undergraduate

loo The Higher Learning

school, with graduate and professional departments
added to it. And it is similarly plain that the captains of
erudition chosen as executive heads share the same pre-
conceptions, and go to their work with a view primarily
to the needs of their undergraduate departments. The
businesslike order and system introduced into the univer-
sities, therefore, are designed primarily to meet the needs
and exploit the possibilities of the undergraduate school ;
but, by force of habit, by a desire of uniformity, by a de-
sire to control and exhibit the personnel and their work,
by heedless imitation, or what not, it invariably happens
that the same scheme of order and system is extended to
cover the graduate work also.

While it is the work of science and scholarship,
roughly what is known in American usage as graduate
work, that gives the university its rank as a seat of learn-
ing and keeps it in countenance as such with laymen and
scholars, it is the undergraduate school, or college, that
still continues to be the larger fact, and that still engages
the greater and more immediate attention in university
management. This is due in part to received American
usage, in part to its more readily serving the ends of com-
petitive ambition ; and it is a fact in the current academic
situation which must be counted in as a chronic discrep-
ancy, not to be got clear of or to be appreciably mitigated
so long as business principles continue to rule.

What counts toward the advancement of learning and
the scholarly character of the university is the gfraduate
work, but what gives statistically formidable results in
the way of a numerous enrolment, many degrees con-
ferred, public exhibitions, courses of instruction — in
short what rolls up a large showing of turnover and out-
put — is the perfunctory work of the undergraduate de-

The Academic Administration loi

partment, as well as the array of vocational schools lat-
terly subjoined as auxiliaries to this end. Hence the
needs and possibilities of the undergraduate and voca-
tional schools are primarily, perhaps rather solely, had in
view in the bureaucratic organization of the courses of
instruction, in the selection of the personnel, in the di-
visions of the school year, as well as in the various ac-
cessory attractions offered, such as the athletic equip-
ment, facilities for fraternity and other club life, debates,
exhibitions and festivities, and the customary routine of
devotional amenities under official sanction.

The undergraduate or collegiate schools, that now bulk
so large in point of numbers as well as in the attention
devoted to their welfare in academic management, have
undergone certain notable changes in other respects than
size, since the period of that shifting from clerical control
to a business administration that marks the beginning of
the current regime. Concomitant with their growth in
numbers they have taken over an increasing volume of
other functions than such as bear directly on matters of
learning. At the same time the increase in numbers has
brought a change in the scholastic complexion of this en-
larged student body, of such a nature that a very appre-
ciable proportion of these students no longer seek resi-
dence at the universities with a view to the pursuit of
knowledge, even ostensibly. By force of conventional
propriety a " college course " — the due term of residence
at some reputable university, with the collegiate degree
certifying honourable discharge — has become a requisite
of gentility! So considerable is the resulting genteel con-
tingent among the students, and so desirable is their en-
rolment and the countenance of their presence, in the ap-

102 The Higher Learning

prehension of the university directorate, that the academic
organization is in great part, and of strategic necessity,
adapted primarily to their needs.

This contingent, and the general body of students in so
far as this contingent from the leisure class has leavened
the lump, are not so seriously interested in their studies
that they can in any degree be counted on to seek knowl-
edge on their own initiative. At the same time they have
other interests that must be taken care of by the school,
on pain of losing their custom and their good will, to the
detriment of the university's standing in genteel circles
and to the serious decline in enrolment which their with-
drawal would occasion. Hence college sports come in for
an ever increasing attention and take an increasingly
prominent and voluminous place in the university's life ;
as do also other politely blameless ways and means of
dissipation, such as fraternities, clubs, exhibitions, and the
extensive range of extra-scholastic traffic known as " stu-
dent activities."

At the sa.iie time the usual and average age of the
college students has been slowly falling farther back
into the period of adolescence; and the irregularities and
uncertain temper of that uneasy period consequently are
calling for more detailed surveillance and a more circum-
spect administration of college discipline. With a body
of students whose everyday interest, as may be said with-
out exaggeration, lies in the main elsewhere than in the
pursuit of knowledge, and with an imperative tradition
still standing over that requires the college to be (os-
tensibly at least) an establishment for the instruction of
the youth, it becomes necessary to organize this instruc-
tion on a coercive plan, and hence to itemize the scholas-
tic tasks of the inmates with great nicety of subdivision
and with a meticulous regard to an exact equivalence as

The Academic Administration 103

between the various courses and items of instruction to
which they are to be subjected. Likewise as regards the
limits of permissible irregularities of conduct and ex-
cursions into the field of sports and social amenities.

To meet the necessities of this difficult control, and to
meet them always without jeopardizing the interests of
the school as a competitive concern, a close-cut mechan-
ical standardization, uniformity, surveillance and ac-
countancy are indispensable. As regards the schedule of
instruction, bona fide students will require but little ex-
acting surveillance in their work, and little in the way of
an apparatus of control. But the collegiate school has to
deal with a large body of students, many of whom have
little abiding interest in their academic work, beyond the
academic credits necessary to be accumulated for hon-
ourable discharge, — indeed their scholastic interest may
fairly be said to centre in unearned credits.

For this reason, and also because of the difficulty of
controlling a large volume of perfunctory labour, such as
18 involved in undergraduate instruction, the instruction
offered must be reduced to standard units of time, grade
and volume. Each unit of work required, or rather of
credit allowed, in this mechanically drawn scheme of tasks
must be the equivalent of all the other units; otherwise
a comprehensive system of scholastic accountancy will not
be practicable, and injustice and irritation will result both
among the pupils and the schoolmasters. For the greater
facility and accuracy in conducting this scholastic ac-
countancy, as well as with a view to the greater im-
pressiveness of the published schedule of courses offered,
these mechanical units of academic bullion are increased
in number and decreased in weight and volume ; until the
parcelment and mechanical balance of units reaches a
point not easily credible to any outsider who might naively

104 The Higher Learning

consider the requirements of scholarship to be an impera-
tive factor in academic administration. There is a well-
considered preference for semi-annual or quarterly peri-
ods of instruction, with a corresponding time limit on
the courses offered; and the parcelment of credits is car-
ried somewhat beyond the point which this segmentation
of the school year would indicate. So also there prevails
a system of grading the credits allowed for the perform-
ance of these units of task-work, by percentages (often
carried out to decimals) or by some equivalent scheme of
notation ; and in the more solicitously perfected schemes of
control of this task- work, the percentages so turned in will
then be further digested and weighed by expert account-
ants, who revise and correct these returns by the help of
statistically ascertained index numbers that express the
mean average margin of error to be allowed for each in-
dividual student or instructor.

In point of formal protestation, the standards set up in
this scholastic accountancy are high and rigorous; in
application, the exactions of the credit system must not
be enforced in so inflexible a spirit as to estrange that
much-desired contingent of genteel students whose need
of an honourable discharge is greater than their love of
knowledge. Neither must its demands on the student's
time and energy be allowed seriously to interfere with
those sports and " student activities " that make up the
vChief attraction of college life for a large proportion of
the university's young men, and that are, in the appre-
hension of many, so essential a part in the training of the
modern gentleman.

Such a system of accountancy acts to break the con-
tinuity and consistency of the work of instruction and to
divert the interest of the students from the work in hand
to the making of a passable record in terms of the acade-

The Academic Administration 105

mic " miner's inch." Typically, this miner's inch is meas-
ured in terms of standard text per time unit, and the im-
mediate objective of teacher and student so becomes the
compassing of a given volume of prescribed text, in print
or lecture form, — leading up to the broad principle:
'" Nichts als was im Buche steht" Which puts a premium
on mediocrity and perfunctory work, and brings academic
life to revolve about the office of the Keeper of the Tape
and Sealing Wax. Evidently this organization of depart-
ments, schedules of instruction, and scheme of scholastic
accountancy, is a matter that calls for insight and sobriety
on the part of the executive ; and in point of fact there
is much deliberation and solicitude spent on this behalf.

The installation of a rounded system of scholastic ac-
countancy brings with it, if it does not presume, a
painstaking distribution of the personnel and the courses
of instruction into a series of bureaux or departments.
Such an organization of the forces of the establishment
facilitates the oversight and control of the work, at the
same time that it allows the array of scheduled means,
appliances and personnel at its disposal to be statistically
displayed to better effect. Under existing circumstances
of rivalry among these institutions of learning, there is
need of much shrewd management to make all the avail-
able forces of the establishment count toward the com-
petitive end; and in this composition it is the part of
worldly wisdom to see that appearances may often be of
graver consequence than achievement, — as is true in all
competitive business that addresses its appeal to a large
and scattered body of customers. The competition is for
custom, and for such prestige as may procure custom, and
these potential customers on whom it is desirable to pro-
duce an impression, especially as regards the undergradu-
ate school, are commonly laymen who are expected to go

io6 The Higher Learning

on current rumour and the outward appearance of things
academic.

The exigencies of competitive business, particularly of
such retail trade as seems chiefly to have contributed to
the principles of businesslike management in the compet-
ing schools, throw the stress on appearances. In such
business, the " good will " of the concern has come to be
(ordinarily) its most valued and most valuable asset.
The visible success of the concern, or rather the sentiments
of confidence and dependence inspired in potential cus-
tomers by this visible success, is capitalized as the chief
and most substantial element of the concern's intangible
assets. And the accumulation of such intangible assets,
to be gained by convincing appearances and well-devised
pronouncements, has become the chief object of persistent
endeavour on the part of sagacious business men engaged
in such lines of traffic. This, that the substance must not
be allowed to stand in the way of the shadow, is one of
the fundamental principles of management which the uni-
versities, under the guidance of business ideals, have taken
over from the wisdom of the business community.

Accepting the point of view of the captains of erudition,
and so looking on the universities as competitive business
concerns, and speaking in terms applicable to business con-
cerns generally, the assets of these seminaries of learning
are in an exceptional degree intangible assets. There is,
of course, the large item of the good-will or prestige of the
university as a whole, considered as a going concern. But
this collective body of " immaterial capital " that pertains
to the university at large is made up in great part of the
prestige of divers eminent persons included among its
personnel and incorporated in the fabric of its bureau-
cratic departments, and not least the prestige of its execu-
tive head; in very much the same way as the like will

The Academic Administration 107

hold true, e.g., for any company of public amusement,
itinerant or sedentary, such as a circus, a theatrical or
operatic enterprise, which all compete for the acclamation
and custom of those to whom these matters appeal.

For the purposes of such competition the eflFectual pres-
tige of the university as a whole, as well as the detail
prestige of its personnel, is largely the prestige which it
has with the laity rather than with the scholarly classes.
And it is safe to say that a somewhat more meretricious
showing of magnitude and erudition will pass scrutiny,
for the time being, with the laity than with the scholars.
Which suggests the expediency for the university, as a
going concern competing for the traffic, to take recourse
to a somewhat more tawdry exhibition of quasi-scholarly
feats, and a somewhat livelier parade of academic splen-
dour and magnitude, than might otherwise be to the taste
of such a body of scholars and scientists. As a business
proposition, the meretricious quality inherent in any given
line of publicity should not consign it to neglect, so long
as it is found effectual for the end in view.

Competitive business concerns that find it needful to
commend themselves to a large and credulous body of
customers, as, e. g., newspapers or department stores, also
find it expedient somewhat to overstate their facilities for
meeting all needs, as also to overstate the measure of
success which they actually enjoy. Indeed, much talent
and ingenuity is spent in that behalf, as well as a very
appreciable outlay of funds. So also as touches the case
of the competitive seminaries of learning. And even
apart from the exigencies of intercollegiate rivalry, taken
simply as a question of sentiment it is gratifying to any
university directorate to know and to make known that
the stock of merchantable knowledge on hand is abundant
and comprehensive, and that the registration and gradua-

io8 The Higher Learning

tion lists make a brave numerical showing, particularly in
case the directive head is duly imbued with a businesslike
penchant for tests of accountancy and large figures. It
follows directly that many and divers bureaux or depart-
ments are to be erected, which will then announce courses
of instruction covering all accessible ramifications of the
field of learning, including subjects which the corps of
instructors may not in any particular degree be fit to
undertake. A further and unavoidable consequence of
this policy, therefore, is perfunctory work.

For establishments that are substantially of secondary-
school character, including colleges and undergraduate de-
partments, such a result may not be of extremely serious
consequence; since much of the instruction in these
schools is of a perfunctory kind anyway. But since the
university and the college are, in point of formal status
and of administrative machinery, divisions of the same
establishment and subject to the same executive control;
and since, under competitive business principles, the col-
legiate division is held to be of greater importance, and
requires the greater share of attention; it comes about
that the college in great measure sets the pace for the
whole, and that the undergraduate scheme of credits, de-
tailed accountancy, and mechanical segmentation of the
work, is carried over into the university work proper.
Such a result follows more consistently and decisively, of
course, in those establishments where the line of demarka-
tion between undergraduate and graduate instruction is
advisedly blurred or disregarded. It is not altogether
unusual latterly, advisedly to efface the distinction be-
tween the undergraduate and the graduate division and
endeavour to make a gradual transition from the one
to the other.^ This is done in the less conspicuous fash-

^ The strategic reason for this is the desire to retain for gradu-

The Academic Administration 109

ion of scheduling certain courses as Graduate and Senior,
and allowing scholastic credits acquired in certain courses
of the upper-class undergraduate curriculum to count to-
ward the<:omplement of graduate credits required of can-
didates for advanced degrees. More conspicuously and
with fuller effect the same end is sought at other uni-
versities by classifying the two later years of the under-
graduate curriculum as " Senior College " ; with the
avowed intention that these two concluding years of the
usual four are scholastically to lie between the stricter
undergraduate domain, now reduced to the freshman and
sophomore years, on the one hand, and the graduate divi-
sion as such on the other hand. This " Senior College "
division so comes to be accounted in some sort a half-
way graduate school ; with the result that it is assimilated
to the graduate work in the fashion of its accountancy
and control ; or rather, the essentially undergraduate meth-
ods that still continue to rule unabated in the machinery
and management of this " senior college " are carried over
by easy sophistication of expediency into the graduate
work; which so takes on the usual, conventionally per-
functory, character that belongs by tradition and neces-
sity to the undergraduate division ; whereby in effect the
instruction scheduled as " graduate " is, in so far, talcen
out of the domain of the higher learning and thrown back
into the hands of the schoolmasters. The rest of the cur-
rent undergraduate standards and discipline tends strongly
to follow the lead so given and to work over by insensible
precession into the graduate school ; until in the consum-
mate end the free pursuit of learning should no longer find
a standing-place in the university except by subreption and

ate registration any student who might otherwise prefer to look
for graduate instruction elsewhere. The plan has not been
found to work well, and it is still on trial.

no The Higher Learning

dissimulation ; much after the fashion in which, in the days
of ecclesiastical control and scholastic lore, the pursuit of
disinterested knowledge was constrained to a shifty simu-
lation of interest in theological speculations and a disin-
genuous formal conformity to the standards and methods
that were approved for indoctrination in divinity.

Perfunctory work and mechanical accountancy may be
sufficiently detrimental in the undergraduate curriculum,
but it seems altogether and increasingly a matter of course
in that section; but it is in the graduate division that it
has its gravest consequences. Yet even in undergraduate
work it remains true, as it does in all education in a
degree, that the instruction can be carried on with best
eflfect only on the ground of an absorbing interest on the
part of the instructor; and he can do the work of a
teacher as it should, be done only so long as he continues
to take an investigator's interest in the subject in which
he is called on to teach. He must be actively engaged in
an endeavour to extend the bounds of knowledge at the
point where his work as teacher falls. He must be a
specialist offering instruction in the specialty with which
he is occupied; and the instruction offered can reach its
best efficiency only in so far as it is incidental to an ag-
gressive campaign of inquiry on the teacher's part.

But no one is a competent specialist in many lines ; nor
is any one competent to carry on an assorted parcel of
special inquiries, cut to a standard unit of time and vol-
ume. One line, somewhat narrowly bounded as a spe-
cialty, measures the capacity of the common run of tal-
ented scientists and scholars for first-class work, what-
ever side-lines of subsidiary interest they may have in
hand and may carry out with passably creditable results.
The alternative is schoolmaster's task-work; or if the
pretense of advanced learning must be kept up, the alter-

The Academic Administration iii

native which not unusually goes into eflfect is amateurish
pedantry, with the charlatan ever in the near background.
By and large, if the number of distinct lines of instruction
offered by a given departmental corps appreciably exceeds
the number of men on the staff, some of these lines or
courses will of necessity be carried in a perfunctory fash-
ion and can only give mediocre results, at the best. What
practically happens at the worst is better left imder the
cover of a decent reticence.

Even those preferred lines of instruction which in their
own fight engage the serious interest of the instructors
can get nothing better than superficial attention if the
time and energy of the instructors are dissipated over a
scattering variety of courses. Good work, that is to say
sufficiently good work to be worth while, requires a free
hand and a free margin of time and energy. If the num-
ber of distinct lines of instruction is relatively large, and
if, as happens, they are distributed scatteringly among the
members of the staff, with a relatively large assignment of
hours to each man, so as to admit no assured and per-
sistent concentration on any point, the run of instruction
oflfered will necessarily be of this perfunctory character,
and will therefore be of such amateurish and pedantic
quality. Such an outcome is by no means unusual where
regard is had primarily to covering a given inclusive
range of subjects, rather than to the special aptitudes of
the departmental corps ; as indeed commonly happens, and
as happens particularly where the school or the depart-
ment in question is sufficiently imbued with a businesslike
spirit of academic rivalry. It follows necessarily and in
due measure on the introduction of the principles, meth-
ods, and tests of competitive business into the work of
instruction.^

^ At least one si^ch businesslike chief of bure«iu has $eriQUsty

112 The Higher Learning

Under these principles of accountancy and hierarchical
control, each of the several bureaux of erudition — com-
monly called departments — is a competitor with all its
fellow bureaux in the (thrifty) apportionment of funds
and equipment, — for the businesslike university manage-
ment habitually harbours a larger number of departments
than its disposable means will adequately provide for.
So also each department competes with its fellow depart-
ments, as well as with similar departments in rival uni-
versities, for a clientele in the way of student registra-
tions. These two lines of competition are closely inter-
dependent. An adverse statistical showing in the number
of students, or in the range, variety and volume of courses
of instruction offered by any given department, is rated
by the businesslike general directorate as ^ shortcoming,
and it is therefore likely to bring a reduction of allow-
ances. At the same time, of course, such an adverse
showing reflects discredit on the chief of bureau, while it
also wounds his self-respect. The final test of compe-
tency in such a chief, under business principles, is the
statistical test; in part because numerical tests have a
seductive air of businesslike accountancy, and also be-
cause statistical exhibits have a ready use as advertising
material to be employed in appeals to the potential donors
and the unlearned patrons of the university, as well as to
the public at large.

endeavoured so to standardize and control the work of his staff
as to have all courses of lectures professed in the department
reduced to symmetrical and permanent shape under the form of
certified syllabi, which could then be taken over by any member
of the staff, at the discretion of the chief, and driven home in
the lecture room with the accredited pedagogical circumstance
and apparatus. The scheme has found its way into academic
anecdote, on the lighter side, as being a project to supply stand-
ard erudition in uniform packages, " guaranteed under the pure-
food law, fully sterilized, and sealed without solder or acids";
to which it is only necessary to " add hot air and serve."

The Academic Administration 113

So the chief of bureau, with the aid and concurrence
of his loyal staff, will aim to offer as extensive and varied
a range of instruction as the field assigned his depart-
ment will admit. Out of this competitive aggrandize-
ment of departments there may even arise a diplomatic
contention between heads of departments, as to the pre-
cise frontiers between their respective domains; each
being ambitious to magnify his office and acquire merit
by including much of the field and many of the students
under his own dominion.^ Such a conflict of jurisdiction
is particularly apt to arise in case, as may happen, the
number of scholastic departments exceeds the number of
patently distinguishable provinces of knowledge ; and com-
petitive business principles constantly afford provocation
to such a discrepancy, at the hands of an executive pushed
by the need of a show of magnitude and large traffic. It
follows, further, from these circumstances, that wherever
contiguous academic departments are occupied with such
closely related subject matter as would place them in a
position to supplement one another's work, the negotia-
tions involved in jealously guarding their respective fron-
tiers may even take on an acrimonious tone, and may in-
volve more or less of diplomatic mischief-making ; so that,
under this rule of competitive management, opportunities
for mutual comfort and aid will not infrequently become
occasion for mutual distrust and hindrance.

The broader the province and the more exuberant the

^ So, e. g., it is known to have, on occasion, became a difficult
question of inter-bureaucratic comify, whether commercial geog-
raphy belongs of right to the department of geology or to that
of economics; whether given courses in Hebrew are equitably
to be assigned to the department of Semitics or to that of Re-
ligions; whether Church History is in fairness to be classed
with profane History or with Divinity, etc., — questions which,
except in point of departmental rivalry, have none but a mere-
tricious significance.

114 The Higher Learning

range of instruction appropriated to a given department
and its corps of teachers, the more creditable will be the
statistical showing, and the more meagre and threadbare
are likely to be the scientific results. The corps of in-
structors will be the more consistently organized and con-
trolled with a view to their dispensing accumulated knowl-
edge, rather than to pursue further inquiry in the direction
of their scholarly inclination or capacity ; and frequently,
indeed, to dispense a larger volume and a wider range of
knowledge than they are in any intimate sense pos-
sessed of.

It is by no means that no regard is had to the special
tastes, aptitudes, and attainments of the members of the
staff, in so apportioning the work ; these things are, com-
monly, g^ven such consideration as the exigencies of aca-
demic competition will permit ; but these exigencies decide
that the criterion of special fitness becomes a secondary
consideration. Wherever the businesslike demands of a
rounded and extensive schedule of courses traverse the
lines of special aptitude and training, the requirements of
the schedule must rule the case; whereas, of course, the
interests of science and scholarship, and of the best effi-
ciency in the instruction given, would decide that no de-
mands of the schedule be allowed to interfere with each
man's doing the work which he can do best, and nothing
else.

A schedule of instruction drawn on such lines of effi-
ciency would avoid duplication of course, and would cur-
tail the number of courses offered by any given depart-
ment to such a modicum as the special fitness of the mem-
bers of the staff would allow them to carry to the best
effect. It would also proceed on the obvious assumption
that co-ordinate departments in the several universities
should supplement one another's work, — an assumption

The Academic Administration 115

obvious to the meanest academic common sense. But
amicable working arrangements of this kind between de-
partments of different universities, or between the sev-
eral universities as a whole, are of course virtually barred
out under the current policy of competitive duplication.
It is out of the question, in the same manner and degree
as the like co-operation between rival department stores
is out of the question. Yet so urgently right and good is
such a policy of mutual supplement and support, except
as a business proposition, that some exchange of academic
civilities paraded under its cloak is constantly offered to
view in the manoeuvres of the competing captains of
erudition. The well-published and nugatory^ periodic
conferences of presidents commonly have such an osten-
sible purpose.

Competitive enterprise, reinforced with a sentimental
penchant for large figures, demands a full schedule of in-
struction. But to carry such a schedule and do the work
well would require a larger staff of instructors in each
department, and a larger allowance of funds and equip-
ment, than business principles will countenance. There
is always a dearth of funds, and there is always urgent
use for more than can be had; for the enterprising di-
rectorate is always eager to expand and project the busi-
ness of the concern into new provinces of school work, —
secondary, primary, elementary, normal, professional,
technical, manual-training, art schools, schools of music,
elocution, book-keeping, housekeeping, and a further va-

* Nugatory, that is, for the ostensible purpose of reducing
inter-academic rivalry and duplication. However, there arc
other matters of joint interest to the gild of university execu-
tives, as, e. g., the inter-academic, or inter-executive, blacklist, and
similar recondite matters of presidential courtesy and prestige,
necessary to be attended to tiiough not necessary to be spread
abroad.

ft

H

I

»

ii6 The Higher Learning

riety that will more readily occur to those who have been
occupied with devising ways and means of extending the
competitive traffic of the university. Into these divers
and sundry channels of sand the pressure of competitive
expansion is continually pushing additional half-equipped,
under- fed and over- worked ramifications of the academic
body. And then, too, sane competitive business practice
insists on economy of cost as well as a large output of
goods. It is " bad business " to offer a better grade of
goods than the market demands, particularly to custom-
ers who do not know the difference, or to turn out goods
at a higher cost than other competing concerns. So busi-
ness exigencies, those exigencies of economy to which
the businesslike governing boards are very much alive,
preclude any department confining itself to the work which
it can do best, and at the same stroke they preclude the
authorities from dealing with any department according
to such a measure of liberality as would enable it to carry
on the required volume of work in a competent manner.

In the businesslike view of the captains of erudition,
taken from the standpoint of the counting-house, learn-
ing and university instruction are a species of skilled
labour, to be hired at competitive wages and to turn out
the largest merchantable output that can be obtained by
shrewd bargaining with their employes; whereas, of
course, in point of fact and of its place in the economic
system, the pursuit of learning is a species of leisure, and
the work of instruction is one of the modes of a life so
spent in " the increase and diffusion of knowledge among
men." It is to be classed as " leisure " only in such a
sense of that term as may apply to other forms of activity
that have no economic, and more particularly no pecuni-
ary, end or equivalence. It is by no means hereby in-
tended to imply that such pursuit of knowledge is an

The Academic Administration 117

aimless or indolent manner of life; nothing like dissipa-
tion has a legitimate place in it, nor is it " idle " in any
other sense than that it is extra-economic, not without
derogation to be classed as a gainful pursuit. Its aim is
not the increase or utilization of the material means of
life ; nor can its spirit and employment be bought with a
price. Any salary, perquisites, or similar emoluments as-
signed the scholars and scientists in the service of civili-
zation, within the university or without, are (should be)
in the nature of a stipend, designed to further the free
use of their talent in the prosecution of this work, the
value of which is not of a pecuniary kind. But under the
stress of businesslike management in the universities the
drift of things sets toward letting the work of science
and scholarship to the lowest bidder, on a roughly ap-
plicable piece-wage plan. The result is about such a
degree of inefficiency, waste and stultification as might
fairly be expected; whereof there are abundantly many
examples, that humble the pride of the scholars and re-
joice the heart of the captains of erudition.

The piece-wage plan never goes into effect in set form,
or has not hitherto done so, — although there are schools
of nominally university grade in which there is a recog-
nized and avowed endeavour so to apportion the weekly
hours of class-room exercises to the pay of the teachers
as to bring the pay per class-hour per semester to a pass-
ably uniform level for the general body of the staff.
That the piece-wage plan has so little avowed vogue in
the academic wage scheme may at first sight seem
strange; the body of academic employes are as defence-
less and unorganized as any class of the wage-earning
population, and it is among the unorganized and helpless
that the piece-wage plan is commonly applied with the
best effect; at the same time the system of scholastic

Ii8 The Higher Learning

accountancy, worked out for other purposes and already
applied both to instructors, to courses of instruction, and
to divisions of the school year, has already reduced all
the relevant items to such standard units and thorough
equivalence as should make a system of piece-wages al-
most a matter of course. That it has not formally been
put in practice appears to be due to tradition, and to
that long-term commonsense appreciation of the nature
of learning that will always balk at rating this work as a
frankly materialistic and pecuniary occupation. The
academic personnel, e. g., are unable to rid themselves
of a fastidious — perhaps squeamish — persuasion that
they are engaged in this work not wholly for pecuniary
returns; and the community at large are obscurely, but
irretrievably and irresponsibly, in the same suspicious
frame of mind on that head. The same unadvised and
unformulated persuasion that academic salaries are after
all not honestly to be rated as wages, is doubtless ac-
countable for certain other features of academic manage-
ment touching the pay-roll ; notably the failure of the em-
ployes to organize anything like a trades-union, or to fall
into line on any workable basis of solidarity on such an
issue as a wage-bargain, as also the equivocal footing on
which the matter of appointments and removals is still
allowed to stand; hence also the unsettled ethics of the
trade in this respect.

For divers reasons, but mainly reasons of competitive
statistics, which resolve themselves, again, in the main
into reasons of expedient publicity, it is desired that the
enrolment should be very large and should always and
unremittingly increase, — due regard being always had, of
course, to the eminent desirability of drawing into the en-
rolment many students from the higher levels of gen-

The Acadetnic Administration 119

tility and pecuniary merit. To this end it is well, as has
already been remarked above, to announce a very full
schedule of instruction and a free range of elective alter-
natives, and also to promote a complete and varied line
of scholastic accessories, in the way of athletics, clubs,
fraternities, " student activities," and similar devices of
politely blameless dissipation.

These accessories of college life have been strongly on
the increase since the business regime has come in. They
are held to be indispensable, or unavoidable ; not for schol-
arly work, of course, but chiefly to encourage the at-
tendance of that decorative contingent who take more
kindly to sports, invidious intrigue and social amenities
than to scholarly pursuits. Notoriously, this contingent
is, on the whole, a serious drawback to the cause of learn-
ing, but it adds appreciably, and adds a highly valued
contribution, to the number enrolled ; and it gives also a
certain, highly appreciated, loud tone ("college spirit")
to the student body; and so it is felt to benefit the cor-
poration of learning by drawing public attention. Cor-
porate means expended in provision for these academic
accessories — " side shows," as certain ill-disposed critics
have sometimes called them — are commonly felt to be
well spent. Persons who are not intimately familiar with
American college life have little appreciation of the grave
solicitude given to these matters.

During some considerable number of years past, while
the undergraduate enrolment at the universities has been
increasing rapidly, the attitude of the authorities has
progressively been undergoing a notable change touching
these matters of extra-scholastic amenity. It is in great
measure a continuation of changes that have visibly been
going forward in the older universities of the country for

I20 The Higher Learning

a longer period, and it is organically bound up with the
general shifting of ground that marks the incursion of
business principles.

While the authorities have turned their attention pri-
marily to the undergraduate division and its numerical
increase, they have at the same time, and largely with the
same end in view, endeavoured to give it more of the
character of a " gentleman's college " ; that is to say, an
establishment for the cultivation of the graces of gentility
and a suitable place of residence for young men of spend-
thrift habits. The improvement sought in these endeav-
ours is not so much the increase and acceleration of schol-
arly pursuits, as a furthering of " social " proficiency. A
" gentleman's college " is an establishment in which schol-
arship is advisedly made subordinate to genteel dissipa-
tion, to a grounding in those methods of conspicuous con-
sumption that should engage the thought and energies of
a well-to-do man of the world. Such an ideal, more or
less overtly, appears to be gaining ground among the
larger universities; and, needless to say, it is therefore
also gaining, by force of precedent and imitation, among
the younger schools engaged in more of a struggle to
achieve a secure footing of respectability.

Its bearing on the higher learning is, of course, suf-
ficiently plain ; and its intimate connection with business
principles at large should be equally plain. The scheme
of reputability in the pecuniary culture comprises not only
the imperative duty of acquiring something more than an
equitable share of the community's wealth, but also the
dutiful privilege of spending this acquired wealth, and the
leisure that goes with it, in a reputably conspicuous way,
according to the ritual of decorum in force for the time
being. So that proficiency in the decorously conspicuous
waste of time and means is no less essential in the end

The Academic Administration 121

than proficiency in the gainful conduct of business. The
ways and means of reputably consuming time and sub-
stance, therefore, is by prescriptive necessity to be in-'
eluded in the training offered at any well-appointed under- j
graduate establishment that aims in any comprehensive
sense to do its whole duty by the well-to-do young men
under its tutelage.^ It is, further and by compulsion of '
the same ideals, incumbent on such an establishment to
afford these young men a precinct dedicate to cultured
leisure, and conventionally sheltered from the importuni-
ties of the municipal police, where an adequate but
guarded indulgence may be had for those extravagances
of adolescence that count for so much in shaping the
canons of genteel intercourse.

There is, of course, no intention here to find fault with
this gentlemanly ideal of undergraduate indoctrination,
or with the solicitude shown in this behalf by the captains
of erudition, in endeavouring to afford time, place and
circumstance for its due inculcation among college men.
It is by no means here assumed that learning is substan-
tially more to be desired than proficiency in genteel dis-
sipation. It is only that the higher learning and the life
of fashion and affairs are two widely distinct and di-
vergent lines, both lying within the current scheme of
civilization ; and that it is the university's particular office
in this scheme to conserve and extend the domain of
knowledge. There need be no question that it is a
work of great social merit and consequence to train

^The Ejiglish pattern of boys* schools and gentlemanly uni-
versity residence has doubtless afforded notable guidance to the
"Educators" who have laboured for the greater gentility of
American college life; at the same time that the grave authen-
ticity of these English customs has at many a difficult passage
served opportunely to take the edge off the gentlemen-educators*
sense of shame.

122 The Higher Learning

adepts in the ritual of decorum, and it is doubtless a
creditable woric for any school adapted to that purpose to
equip men for a decorative place in polite society, and
imbue them with a discriminating taste in the reputable
waste of time and means. And all that may perhaps fall,
not only legitimately, but meritoriously, within the prov-
ince of the undergraduate school; at least it is not here
intended to argue the contrary. At the same time a se-
cure reputation for efficiency and adequate facilities along
this line of aspirations on the part of any such school
will serve a good business purpose in duly attracting stu-
dents — or residents — from the better classes of soci-
ety, and f roni those classes that aspire to be " better."

But this is essentially not university work. In the
nature of the case it devolves on the college, the under-
graduate school; and it can not be carried through
with due singleness of purpose in an establishment bound
by tradition to make much of that higher learning that
is substantially alien to the spirit of this thing. If, then,
as indications run, the large undergraduate schools are
in due course to develop somewhat unreservedly into
gentlemen's colleges, that is an additional reason why,
in the interest of both parties, the divorce of the univer-
sity from the collegiate division should be made absolute.
Neither does the worldly spirit that pervades the gentle-
men's college further the university's interest in scholar-
ship, nor do the university's scholarly interests further
the college work in gentility.

Well to the front among these undergraduate appurte-
nances of gentlemanship are the factional clubs known as
Greek-letter fraternities. These touch the province of
learning in the universities only incidentally and super-
ficially, as they do not in practice enter the graduate
division except by way of a thin aftermath of factional

The Academic Admi/tistraiion 123

animus, which may occasionally infect such of the staff as
are gifted with a particularly puerile temperament.
They are, in effect, competitive organizations for the
elaboration of the puerile irregularities of adolescence,
and as such they find little scope among the graduate
students or among the adult personnel at large. But as
part of the apparatus of the undergraduate division they
require a strict surveillance to keep them within the
(somewhat wide) limits of tolerance; and so their pres-
ence affects the necessary discipline of the school at large,
entailing a more elaborate and rigorous surveillance and
more meddling with personal habits than would other-
wise be required, and entailing also some slight corporate
expense.

Much the same is true for the other social clubs, not
of an advisedly factional character, that are latterly be-
ing installed by authority under university patronage and
guaranteed by the university funds; as, also, and in a
more pronounced degree, for college athletics, except
that the item of expense in connection with these things
is much more serious and the resulting diversion of
interest from all matters of learning is proportionally
greater. Among these means of dissipating energy and
attention, college athletics is perhaps still the most ef-
fective; and it is also the one most earnestly pushed by
the businesslike authorities, at the same time that it is
the most widely out of touch with all learning, whether
it be the pursuit of knowledge or the perfunctory task-
work of the collegiate division. So notorious, indeed, is
the discrepancy between college athletics and scholarly
work that few college authorities latterly venture to avow
as cordial a support of this training in sportsmanship as
they actually give. Yet so efficient a means of attracting
a certain class of young men is this academic enterprise

1^4 The Higher Learning

in sports that, in practical effect, few schools fail to give
it all the support that the limits of deconim will admit.
There is probably no point at which specious practices
and habitual prevarication are carried so far as here.
Little need be said of the threadbare subterfuges by
which (ostensibly surreptitious) pecuniary inducements
are extended to students and prospective students who
promise well as college athletes ; ^ or of the equally thread-
bare expedients by which these members of the gild of
sportsmen are enabled to meet the formal requirements
of scholarship imposed by shamefaced intercollegiate
bargaining.*

^ Illustrative instances liave little value as anecdotes and not
mu^h more as circumstantial evidence; their abundance and
outrance are such as to have depreciated their value in both
respects. Yet to any who may not know of this traffic by fami-
liar contact one or two commonplace instances may perhaps not
seem too much. So, a few years ago> in one of the greater of
the new universities, a valued member of one of the athletic
teams was retained at an allowance of $40 a month as book-
keeper to the janitor of one of the boys' dormitories on the
campus. At the same university and about the same time two
other athletes were carried on university pay as assistants to
the editor of the weekly bulletin announcing the programme of
academic events for the week; though in this case, to the relief
of the editor in question, only one of the two assistants re-
ported at his office, and that only once, during the year of their
incumbency. These, as already remarked, are commonplace oc-
currences. The more spectacular instances of shrewd manage-
ment in these premises can not well be dealt with otherwise than
by a canny silence ; that being also the course approved by cur-
rent practice.

2 A single instance may tolerantly be admitted here. Among
the formal requirements that would admit students to a free
pursuit of sportsmanship, at the same university as above men-
tioned, without imputation of professionalism, was specified the
ability to read at sight such a passage in a given foreign lan-
guage as would satisfy the instructor in charge that the candid-
date was competent in the language in question. The instructor

The Academic Administration 125

But apart from such petty expedients, however abun-
dant and commonplace, there is the more significant prac-
tice of retaining trainers and helpers at the university's
expense and with academic countenance. There is the
corps of workmen and assistants to take care of the
grounds, buildings and apparatus, and there is the corps
of trainers and coaches, masseurs and surgeons, masquer-
ading under the caption of "physical culture," whose
chief duty is to put the teams in form for the various con-
tests. One may find a football or baseball coach retained
officially as a member of the faculty and carried on the
academic pay-roll, in a university that practices a penuri-
ous economy in the equipment and current supply of mate-
rials and services necessary to the work of its scientific
laboratories, and whose library is in a shameful state of
neglect for want of adequate provision for current pur-
chases and attendance. The qualifications of such a
•• professor " are those of a coach, while in point of scho-
larly capacity and attainments it would be a stretch of
charity to say that he is of quite a neutral composition.
Still, under the pressure of intercollegiate competition
for the services of such expert lanistae, he may have to
be vested with the highest academic rank and conceded
the highest scholastic honours, with commensurate salary.
Expediency may so decide, partly to cloak the shameful-
ness of the transaction, partly to meet the exacting de-
mands of a coach whose professional services have a high

responsible in this case, a man of high academic rank and gifted
with a sympathetic good-will toward the "boys," submitted in
fulfilment of the test a copy of the Lord's Prayer in this for-
eign tongue, and passed the (several) candidates on finding them
able passably to repeat the same in English. It would scarcely
be fair to distinguish this episode by giving names and places,
since equally ingenious expedients have been in use elsewhere.

126 The Higher Learning

commercial rating in the sporting community, and who is
presumed to be indispensable to the university's due suc-
cess in intercollegiate athletics.

The manifest aim, and indeed the avowed purpose, of
these many expedients of management and concessions to
fashion and frailty is the continued numerical growth of
the undergraduate school, — the increase of the enrol-
ment and the obtaining of funds by use of which to
achieve a further increase. To bring this assiduous en-
deavour into its proper light, it is to be added that most
of these undergraduate departments are already too large
for the best work of their kind. Since these undergrad-
uate schools have grown large enough to afford a secure
contrast as against the smaller colleges that are engaged
in the same general field, it is coming to be plain to uni-
versity men who have to do with the advanced instruction
that, for the advanced work in science and scholarship,
the training given by a college of moderate size commonly
affords a better preparation than is had in the very large
undergraduate schools of the great universities. This
holds true, in a general way, in spite of the fact that the
smaller schools are handicapped by an inadequate equip-
ment, are working against the side-draft of a religious
bias, with a corps of under-paid and over-worked teach-
ers in great part selected on denominational grounds, and
are under-rated by all concerned. The proposition, how-
ever, taken in a general way and allowing for exceptions,
IS too manifestly true to admit of much question; par-
ticularly in respect of preparation for the sciences proper,
as contrasted with the professions.

The causes of this relative inefficiency that seems to
attach unavoidably to the excessively large undergradu-
ate establishments can not be gone into here ; in part they
are obvious, in part quite obscure. But in any case the

The Academic Administration 127

matter can not be gone into here, except so far as it has
an immediate bearing on the advanced work of the uni-
versity, through the inclusion of these collegiate schools
in the university corporation and under the same gov-
ernment. As has already been remarked, by. force of the
competitive need of a large statistical showing and a wide
sweep of popular prestige and notoriety, and by reason
of other incentives of a nature more intimate to the per-
son of the executive, it is in effect a matter of course that
the undergraduate school and its growth becomes the
chief object of solicitude and management with a busi-
nesslike executive ; and that so its shaping of the founda-
tions of the establishment as a whole acts irresistibly to
fashion the rest of the university administration and in-
struction in the image of the undergraduate policy. Un-
der the same compulsion it follows also that whatever
elements in the advanced work of the university will not
lend themselves to the scheme of accountancy, statistics^
standardization and coercive control enforced in and
through the undergraduate division, will tend to be lost
by disuse and neglect, as being selectively unfit to survive
under that system.

The advanced work falls under the same stress of com-
petition in magnitude and visible success; and the same
scheme of enforced statistical credits will gradually in-
sinuate itself into the work for the advanced degrees;
so that these as well as the lower degrees will come to
be conferred on the piece-work plan. Throughout the
American universities there is apparent such a movement
in the direction of a closer and more mechanical specifi-
cation of the terms on which the higher degrees are to
be conferred, — a specification in terms of stipulated
courses of class-room work and aggregate quantity of
standard credits and length of residence. So that his

128 The Higher Learning

need of conformity to the standard credit requirements
will therefore constrain the candidate for an advanced
degree to make the substantial pursuit of knowledge
subordinate to the present pursuit of credits, to be at-
tended to, if at all, in the scant interstitial intervals al-
lowed by a strictly drawn accountancy. The effect of it
all on their animus, and on the effective prosecution of
the higher learnings by the instructors, should be suffi-
ciently plain; but in case of doubt any curious person
may easily assure himself of it by looking over the cur-
rent state of things as they run in any one of the uni-
versities that grant degrees.

Nothing but continued workday familiarity with this
system of academic grading and credit, as it takes effect
in the conduct and control of instruction, and as its fur-
ther elaboration continues to employ the talents and de-
liberation of college men, can enable any observer to ap-
preciate the extraordinary lengths to which this matter is
carried in practice, and the pervasive way in which it
resistlessly bends more and more of current instruction to
its mechanical tests and progressively sterilizes all per-
sonal initiative and ambition that comes within its sweep.
And nothing but the same continued contact with the
relevant facts could persuade any outsider that all this
skilfully devised death of the spirit is brought about by
well-advised efforts of improvement on the part of men
who are intimately conversant with the facts, and who
are moved by a disinterested solicitude for the best aca-
demic good of the students under their charge. Yet
such, unmistakably, are the facts of the case.

While the initial move in this sterilization of the
academic intellect is necessarily taken by the statistically-
minded superior officers of the corporation of learning,
the detail of schedules and administrative routine in-

The Academic Administration 129

volved is largely left in the discretion of the faculty.
Indeed, it is work of this character that occupies nearly
the whole of the attention of the faculty as a deliberative
body, as well as of its many and various committees. In
these matters of administrative routine and punctilio the
faculty, collectively and severally, can exercise a degree
of initiative and discretion. And these duties are taken
as seriously as well may be, and the matters that so come
within the faculty's discretion are handled in the most
unambiguous spirit of responsible deliberation. Each
added move of elaboration is taken only after the de-
liberative body has assured itself that it embodies a
needed enhancement of the efficiency of the system of
control. But each improvement and amplification also
unavoidably brings the need of further specification and
apparatus, designed to take care of further refinements
of doubt and detail that arise out of the last previous ex-
tensions of the mechanism. The remedy sought in all
such conjunctures is to bring in further specifications and
definitions, with the effect of continually making two
specifications grow where one grew before, each of which
in its turn will necessarily have to be hedged about on
both sides by like specifications, with like effect ; ^ with
the consequence that the grading and credit system is
subject to a ceaseless proliferation of ever more meticu-
lous detail. The underlying difficulty appears to be not
that the collective wisdom of the faculty is bent on its
own stultification, as an unsympathetic outsider might
hastily conclude, but that there is in all the deliberations
of such a body a total disregard of common sense. It
is, presumably, not that the constituent members are quite
devoid of that quality, but rather that no point in their

^ " And then there came another locust and carried off another
grain of wheat, and then there came another locust," etc., etc.

130 The Higher Learning

elaboration of apparatus can feasibly be reached, beyond
which a working majority can be brought conscientiously
to agree that dependence may safely be placed on com-
mon sense rather than on further and more meticulous
and rigorous specification.

It is at this point that the American system of fellow-
ships falls into the scheme of university policy ; and here
again the effect of business principles and undergraduate
machinery is to be seen at work. At its inception the
purpose of these fellowships was to encourage the best
talent among the students to pursue disinterested ad-
vanced study farther and with greater singleness of pur-
pose and it is quite plain that at that stage of its growth
the system was conceived to have no bearing on inter-
collegiate competition or the statistics of registration.
This was something over thirty years ago. A fellowship
was an honourable distinction; at the same time it was
designed to afford such a stipend as would enable the
incumbent to devote his undivided energies to scholastic
work of a kind that would yield no pecuniary return.
Ostensibly, such is still the sole purpose of the fellow-
ships; the traditional decencies require (voluble and re-
iterated) professions to that effect. But in point of prac-
tical effect, and progressively, concomitant with the incur-
sion of business principles into university policy, the
exigencies of competitive academic enterprise have turned
the fellowships to account in their own employ. So that,
in effect, today the rival universities use the fellowships to
bid against one another for fellows to come into resi-
dence, to swell the statistics of graduate registration and
increase the number of candidates for advanced degrees.
And the eligible students have learned so to regard the

The Academic Administration 131

matter, and are quite callously exploiting the system in
that sense.

Not that the fellowships have altogether lost that char-
acter of a scholarly stipendiary with which they started
out; but they have, under businesslike management, ac-
quired a use not originally intended; and the new, com-
petitive use of them is unequivocally their main use to-
day. It would be hazardous to guess just how far the
directorates of the rival universities consciously turn the
fellowships to account in this enterprising way, or how
far, on the other hand, they are able to let self-deception
cover the policy of competitive bargaining in which they
are engaged; but it would be difficult to believe that their
right hand is altogether ignorant of what their left hand
is doing. It would doubtless also be found that both the
practice and the animus back of it differ appreciably from
one school to another. But there is no element of hazard
in the generalization that, by and large, such competitive
use of the fellowships is today their chief use; and that
such is the fact is quite openly avowed among the aca-
demic staff of some universities at least.

As a sequel and symptom of this use of the fellowship
stipends in bargaining for an enlarged enrolment of ad-
vanced students, it has become a moot question in aca-
demic policy whether a larger number of fellowships with
smaller stipends will give a more advantageous net sta-
tistical result than a smaller number of more adequate
stipends. An administration that looks chiefly to the
short-term returns — as is commonly the practice in lat-
terday business enterprise — will sensibly incline to make
the stipends small and numerous ; while the converse will
be true where regard is had primarily to the enrolment of
carefully selected men who may reflect credit on the in-

13^ The Higher LearninQ

stitution in the long run. Up-to-date business policy will
apparently commend the former rather than the latter
course; for business practice, in its later phases, is emi-
nently guided by consideration of short-term gains. It
is also true that the average stipend attached to the fel-
lowships offered today is very appreciably lower than
was the practice some two or three decades ago; at the
same time that the cost of living — which these stipends
were originally designed to cover — has increased by
something like one hundred per cent. As final evidence
of the decay of scholarly purpose in the matter of fellow-
ships, and as a climax of stultification, it is to be added
that stipends originally established as an encouragement
to disinterested scholarship are latterly being used to
induce enrolment in the professional schools attached to
the universities.^

One further point of contact and contamination is nec-
essary to be brought into this account of the undergradu-
ate administration and its bearing on advanced work.
The scholastic accessories spoken of above — clubs, fra-
ternities, devotional organizations, class organizations,
spectacles and social functions, athletics, and " student
activities " generally — do not in any appreciable degree
bear directly on the advanced work, in as much as they
find no ready lodgement among the university students

^ More than one instance might be cited where a student whose
privately avowed and known aim was the study and practice of
Law has deliberately been induced by the offer of a fellowship
stipend to register, for the time being, as an academic graduate
student and as candidate for the academic doctor's degree. In
the instances that come to mind the students in question have
since completed their law studies and entered practice, without
further troubling about the academic degree for which they once
were ostensible candidates.

The Academic Administration 133

proper. But they count, indirectly and effectually, to-
ward lowering the scholarly ideals and keeping down the
number of advanced students, chiefly by diverting the
interest and energies of the undergraduate men from
scholarly pursuits and throwing them into various lines
of business and sportsmanship.

The subsidized clubs work, in these premises, to much
the same effect as the fraternities; both are, in effect,
designed to cultivate expensive habits of life. The same
is true in a higher degree of athletic sports. The full
round of sportsmanlike events, as well as the round
schedule of social amenities for which the polite side of
undergraduate life (partly subsidized) is designed to give
a taste and training, are beyond the compass of men
devoted to scholarship. In effect these things come in as
alternatives to the pursuit of knowledge. These things
call for a large expenditure of time and means, neither
of which can be adequately met by the scientist or scholar.
So that men who have been trained to the round of things
that so go to make up the conventional scheme of under-
graduate interests can not well look to a career in the
higher learning as a possible outcome of their residence
in college. On the other hand, young men habitually, and
no doubt rightly, expect a business career to yield an in-
come somewhat above the average of incomes in the com-
munity, and more particularly in excess of the common-
place incomes of academic men ; such an income, indeed,
as may afford the means to cover the conventional routine
of such polite expenditures. So that, in the absence of
an independent income, some sort of a business career
that promises well in the pecuniary respect becomes the
necessary recourse of the men to whom these amenities
of expenditure have become habitual through their under-
graduate training. With like effect the mental discipline

134 The Higher Learning

exercised by these sports and polite events greatly fa-
vours the growth of tactful equivocation and a guarded
habit of mind, such as makes for worldly wisdom and suc-
cess in business, but which is worse than useless in the
scholar or scientist. And further and perhaps more de-
cisively, an undergraduate who does his whole duty in
the way of sports, fraternities, clubs, and reputable dis-
sipation at large, commonly comes through his under-
graduate course with a scanty and superficial preparation
for scholarly or scientific pursuits, if any. So that even
in case he should still chance to harbour a penchant for
the pursuit of learning he will be unfit by lack of training.

CHAPTER IV

Academic Prestige and the Material Equipment

In the course of the preceding chapter it has appeared
that the introduction of business principles into univer-
sity policy has had the immediate and ubiquitous effect of
greatly heightening the directorate's solicitude for a due
and, creditable publicity, a convincing visible success, a
tactful and effectual showing of efficiency reflected in an

■i uninterrupted growth in size and other tangible quanti-

tative features. This is good policy as seen from the
point of view of competitive business enterprise. In
competitive business it is of the gravest importance to
keep up the concern's prestige, or " good will." A busi-
ness concern so placed must be possessed of such prestige
as will draw and hold a profitable traffic; otherwise the
enterprise is in a precarious case. For the objective end
and aim of business enterprise is profitable sales, or the
equivalent of such sales if the concern is not occupied
with what would strictly be called sales. The end sought
is a net gain over costs; in effect, to buy cheap and
sell dear. The qualities that count as of prime conse-
quence in business enterprise, therefore, particularly in

I such business enterprise as has to do with many impres-

sionable customers, are the salesmanlike virtues of ef-
frontery and tact. These are high qualities in all busi-
ness, because their due exercise is believed to bring a net
return above the cost of the goods to the seller, and, in-
deed, above their value to the buyer. Unless the man in

135

136 The Higher Learning

competitive business is able, by force of these business-
like aptitudes, to get something more than he gives, it is
felt that he has fallen short of the highest efficiency. So
the efficient salesman, and similarly the efficiently man-
aged business concern, are enabled to add to their market-
able goods an immaterial increment of " prestige value,"
as some of the economists are calling it. A margin of
prepossessions or illusions as to their superior, but in-
tangible and inexpensive, utility attaches to a given line
of goods because of the advertiser's or salesman's work,
— work spent not so much on the goods as on the cus-
tomer's sensibilities.

In case these illusions of superior worth are of an
enduring character, they will add an increment of such
intangible utility also to goods or other marketable items
subsequently to be offered by the same concern ; and they
can be added up as a presumptive aggregate and cap-
italized as intangible assets of the business concern in
question. Such a body of accumulated and marketable
illusions constitute what is known as " good-will," in the
stricter sense of the term. The illusions in question need,
of course, not be delusions; they may be well or ill
founded ; for the purpose in hand that is an idle question.

The most familiar and convincing illustrations of such
good will are probably those afforded by the sales of
patent medicines, and similar proprietary articles of
household consumption; but intangible values of a simi-
lar nature are involved in nearly all competitive business.
They are the product of salesmanship, not of workman-
ship ; and they are useful to the seller, not to the buyer.
They are useful for purposes of competitive gain to the
businessman, not for serviceability to the community at
large, and their value to their possessor lies in the differ-
ential advantage which they give to one seller as against

The Material EquipnieHt I37

another. They have, on the whole, no aggregate value
or utility. From the point of view of the common good,
work and expenditure so incurred for these competitive
purposes are bootless waste.

Under compulsion of such precedents, drawn from the
conduct of competitive business, publicity and "good-
will " have come to take a foremost place in the solicitude
of the academic directorate. Not that this notoriety and
prestige, or the efforts that go to their cultivation, con-
duce in any appreciable degree to any ostensible purpose
avowed, or avowable, by any university. These things,
that is to say, rather hinder than help the cause of learn-
ing, in that they divert attention and effort from scholarly
workmanship to statistics and salesmanship. All that is
beyond cavil. The gain which so accrues to any univer-
sity from such an accession of popular illusions is a differ-
ential gain in competition with rival seats of learning, not
a gain to the republic of learning or to the academic com-
munity at large ; and it is a gain in marketable illusions,
not in serviceability for the ends of learning or for any
other avowed or avowable end sought by the universi-
ties. But as competitors for the good-will of the unlet-
tered patrons of learning the university directorates are
constrained to keep this need of a reputable notoriety
constantly in mind, however little it may all appeal to
their own scholarly tastes.

It is in very large part, if not chiefly, as touches the
acquirement of prestige, that the academic wt)rk and
equipment are amenable to business principles, — not
overlooking the pervasive system of standardization and
accountancy that affects both the work and the equipment,
and that serves other purposes as well as those of pub-
licity ; so that " business principles " in academic policy

138 The Higher Learning

conies to mean, chiefly, the principles of reputable pub-
licity. It means this more frequently and more con-
sistently than anything else, so far as regards the acade-
mic administration, as distinguished from the fiscal man-
agement of the corporation.

Of course, the standards, ideals, principles and pro-
cedure of business traffic enter into the scheme of uni-
versity policy in other relations also, as has already ap-
peared and as will be shown more at large presently ; but
after all due qualification is had, it remains true that this
business of publicity necessarily, or at least commonly,
accounts for a disproportionately large share of the busi-
ness to be taken care of in conducting a university, as
contrasted with such an enterprise, e. g., as a bank, a
steel works, or a railway company, on a capital of about
the same volume. This follows from the nature of the
case. The common run of business concerns are occu-
pied with industrial enterprise of some kind, and with
transactions in credit, — with a running sequence of bar-
gains from which the gains of the concern are to accrue,
— and it is upon these gains that attention and effort
centers, and to which the management of the concern
constantly looks. Such concerns have to meet their com-
petitors in buying, selling, and effecting contracts of all
kinds, from which their gains are to come. A university,
on the other hand, can look to no such gains in the work
which is its sole ostensible interest and occupation; and
the pecuniary transactions and arrangements which it
enters into on the basis of its accumulated prestige are a
relatively very trivial matter. There is, in short, no ap-
preciable pecuniary gain to be looked for from any traffic
resting on the acquired prestige, and therefore there is
no relation of equivalence or discrepancy between any
outlay incurred in this behalf and the volume of gainful

The Material Equipment 139

business to be transacted on the strength of it; with the
result that the academic directorate applies itself to this
pursuit without arriere pensee. So far as the acquired
prestige is designed to serve a pecuniary end it can only
be useful in the way of impressing potential donors, —
a highly speculative line of enterprise, offering a sugges-
tive parallel to the drawings of a lottery.

Outlay for the purpose of publicity is not confined to
the employment of field-agents and the circulation of
creditable gossip and reassuring printed matter. The
greater share of it comes in as incidental to the installa-
tion of plant and equipment and the routine of academic
life and ceremony. As regards the material equipment,
the demands of a creditable appearance are pervading and
rigorous ; and their consequences in the way of elaborate
and premeditated incidentals are, perhaps, here seen at
their best. To the laity a " university " has come to
mean, in the first place and indispensably, an aggregation
of buildings and other improved real-estate. This ma-
terial equipment strikes the lay attention directly and
convincingly ; while the pursuit of learning is a relatively
obscure matter, the motions of which can not well be
followed by the unlettered, even with the help of the
newspapers and the circular literature that issues from
the university's publicity bureau. The academic work is,
after all, unseen, and it stays in the background. Cur-
rent expenditure for the prosecution of this work, there-
fore, offers the enterprise in advertisement a less ad-
vantageous field for the convincing use of funds than the
material equipment, especially the larger items, — labora-
tory and library buildings, assembly halls, curious mu-
seum exhibits, grounds for athletic contests, and the like.
There is consequently a steady drift of provocation to-
wards expenditure on conspicuous extensions of the

140 The Higher Learning

"plant," and a corrdative constant temptation to par-
simony in the more obscure matter of necessary supplies
and service, and similar running-expenses without which
the plant can not effectually be turned to account for its
ostensible use ; with the result, not infrequently, that the
usefulness of an imposing plant is seriously impaired for
want of what may be called " working capital." ^

*A single illustrative instance may serve to show how the
land lies in this respect, even though it may seem to the uniniti-
ated to be an extreme if not an exaggerated case; while it may
perhaps strike those familiar with these matters as a tedious
commonplace. A few years ago, in one of the larger, younger
and more enterprising universities, a commodious laboratory,
well appointed and adequately decorated, was dedicated to one
of the branches of biological science. To meet the needs of
scientific work such a laboratory requires the services of a corps
of experienced and intelligent aseistants and caretakers, particu-
larly where the establishment is equipped with modern appliances
for heating, ventilation and the like, as was the case in this
instance. In this laboratory the necessary warmth was supplied
by what is sometimes called the method of indirect steam heat;
that is to say, the provision for heat and for ventilation were
combined in one set of appliances, by bringing the needed air
from the open through an outdoor "intake," passing it over
steam-heated coils (in the basement of the building), and so
distributing the air necessary for ventilation, at the proper tem-
perature, throughout the building by means of a suitable ar-
rangement of air-shafts. Such was the design. But intelligent
service comes high, and ignorant janitors are willing to under-
take what may be asked of them. And sufficient warmth can be
had in an inclement climate and through a long winter season
only at an appreciable expense. So, with a view to economy,
and without the knowledge of the scientific staff who made use
of the laboratory, the expedient was hit upon by the academic
executive, in consultation with a suitable janitor, that the out-
door intake be boarded up tightly, so that the air which passed
over the heating coils and through the air-shafts to the labora-
tory rooms was thenceforth drawn not from the extremely cold
atmosphere of outdoors but from the more temperate supply
that filled the basement and had already had the benefit of circu-
lating over the steam coils and through the ventilating shafts.
By this means an obvious saving in fuel would be effected, corre-

The Material Equipment 141

Indeed, instances might be cited where funds that were
much needed to help out in meeting running expenses
have been turned to use for conspicuous extensions of
the plant in the way of buildings, in excess not only of
what was needed for their alleged purpose but in excess
of what could conveniently be made use of. More par-
ticularly is there a marked proclivity to extend the plant
and the school organization into new fields of scholastic
enterprise, often irrelevant or quite foreign to the prov-
ince of the university as a seminary of learning; and to
push these alien ramifications, to the neglect of the urgent
needs of the academic work already in hand, in the way
of equipment, maintenance, supplies, service and instruc-
tion.

The running-expenses are always the most urgent items
of the budget, as seen from the standpoint of the acade-
mic work; and they are ordinarily the item that is most
parsimoniously provided for. A scanty provision at this
point unequivocally means a disproportionate curtailment
of the usefulness of the equipment as well as of the per-
sonnel, — as, e. g., the extremely common and extremely

spending to the heat differential between the outdoor air, at
some 0° to — 20**, and that already confined in the building, at
some 60**. How long this fuel-saving expedient was in force
can not well be ascertained, but it is known to have lasted at
least for more than one season.

The members of the scientific staff meantime mysteriously but
persistently fell sick after a few weeks of work in the laboratory,
recurrently after each return from enforced vacations. Until,
in the end, moved by persistent suspicions of sewer-gas — which,
by the way, had in the meantime cost some futile inconvenience
and expense occasioned by unnecessary overhauling of the
plumbing — one of the staff pried into the janitor's domain in
the basement; where he found near the chamber of the steam
coils a loosely closed man-hole leading into the sewers, from
which apparently such air was drawn as would necessarily go
to offset the current leakage from this dosed system of venti-
lation.

14^ The Higher Learning

unfortunate practice of keeping the allowance for main-
tenance and service in the university libraries so low as
seriously to impair their serviceability. But the exigen-
cies of prestige will easily make it seem more to the point,
in the eyes of a businesslike executive, to project a new
extension of the plant ; which will then be half-employed,
on a scanty allowance, in work which lies on the outer
fringe or beyond the university's legitimate province.^

In so discriminating against the working capacity of
the university, and in favour of its real-estate, this pur-
suit of reputable publicity further decides that the ex-
terior of the buildings and the grounds should have the
first and largest attention. It is true, the initial purpose
of this material equipment, it is ostensibly believed, is to
serve as housing and appliances for the work of inquiry
and instruction. Such, of course, continues to be avowed
its main purpose, in a perfunctorily ostensible way. This
means a provision of libraries, laboratories, and lecture
rooms. The last of these is the least exacting, and it is
the one most commonly well supplied. It is also, on the
whole, the more conspicuous in proportion to the outlay.

^This is a nearly universal infirmity of American university
policy, but it is doubtless not to be set down solely to the ac-
count of the penchant for a large publicity on the part of the
several academic executives. It is in all likelihood due as much
to the equally ubiquitous inability of the governing boards to
appreciate or to perceive what the current needs of the academic
work are, or even what they are like. Men trained in the con-
duct of business enterprise, as the governing boards are, will
have great difficulty in persuading themselves that expenditures
which yield neither increased dividends nor such a durable physi-
cal product as can be invoiced and added to the capitalization,
can be other than a frivolous waste of good money; so that what
is withheld from current academic expenditure is felt to be
saved, while that expenditure which leaves a tangible residue of
(perhaps useless) real estate is, by force of ingrained habit,
rated as new investment.

The Material Equipment 143

But all these are matters chiefly of interior arrangement,
appliances and materials, and they are all of a relatively
inconspicuous character. Except as detailed in printed
statistics they do not ordinarily lend themselves with ap-
preciable effect to the art of advertising. In meeting all
these material requirements of the work in hand a very
large expenditure of funds might advantageously be made
— advantageously to the academic use which they are to
serve — without much visible effect as seen in perspective
from the outside. And so far as bears on this academic
use, the exterior of the buildings is a matter of altogether
minor consequence, as are also the decorative appoint-
ments of the interior.

In practice, under compulsion of the business principles
of publicity, it will be found, however, that the exterior
and the decorative appointments are the chief object of
the designer's attention; the interior arrangement and
working appointments will not infrequently become a
matter of rude approximation to the requirements of the
work, care being first taken that these arrangements shall
not interfere with the decorative or spectacular intent of
the outside. But even with the best-advised management
of its publicity value, it is always appreciably more diffi-
cult to secure appropriations for the material equipment
of a laboratory or library than for the shell of the edifice,
and still more so for the maintenance of an adequate
corps of caretakers and attendants.

As will be found true of other lines of this university
enterprise in publicity, so also as to this presentation of a
reputable exterior; it is designed to impress not the
academic personnel, or the scholarly element at large, but
the laity. The academic folk and scholars are commonly
less susceptible to the appeal of curious fagades and per-
plexing feats of architecture; and then, such an appeal

144 The Higher Learning

would have no particular motive in their case ; it is not
necessary to impress them. It is in the eyes of the unlet-
tered, particularly the business community, that it is de-
sirable for the university to present an imposing front;
that being the feature of academic installation which they
will readily appreciate. To carry instant conviction of a
high academic worth to this large element of the popu-
lace, the university buildings should bulk large in the
landscape, should be wastefuUy expensive, and should
conform to the architectural mannerisms in present vogue.
In a few years the style of architectural affectations will
change, of course, as fashions necessarily change in any
community whose tastes are governed by pecuniary
standards; and any particular architectural contrivance
will therefore presently lose much of its prestige value;
but by the time it so is overtaken by obsolescence, the
structures which embody the particular affectation in
question will have made the appeal for which they were
designed, and so will have served their purpose of pub-
licity. And then, too, edifices created with a thrifty view
to a large spectacular effect at a low cost are also liable
to so rapid a physical decay as to be ready for removal
and replacement before they have greatly outlived their
usefulness in this respect.

In recent scholastic edifices one is not surprised to find
lecture rooms acoustically ill designed, and with an an-
noying distribution of light, due to the requirements of
exterior symmetry and the decorative distribution of win-
dows; and the like holds true even in a higher degree
for libraries and laboratories, since for these uses the
demands in these respects are even more exacting. Nor
is it unusual to find waste of space and weakness of
structure, due, e. g., to a fictitious winding stair, thrown
into the design to permit such 2^ f a9ade as will simulate

The Material Equipment 145

the defensive details of a mediaeval keep, to be sur-
mounted with embrasured battlements and a (make-be-
lieve) loopholed turret. So, again, space will, on the
same ground, be wasted in heavy-ceiled, ill-lighted lob-
bies ; which might once have served as a mustering place
for a body of unruly men-at-arms, but which mean noth-
ing more to the point today, and in these premises, than
so many inconvenient flagstones to be crossed in com-
ing and going.

These principles of spectacular publicity demand a nice
adjustment of the conspicuous features of the plant to
the current vagaries in decorative art and magnificence, —
that is to say, conformity to the sophistications current
on that level of ctflture on which these unlettered men of
substance live and move and have their being. As
touches the case of the seats of learning, these current
lay sophistications draw on several more or less diverse,
and not altogether congruous, lines of conventionally ap-
proved manifestation of the ability to pay. Out of the
past comes the conventional preconception that these
scholastic edifices should show something of the revered
traits of ecclesiastical and monastic real-estate ; while out
of the present comes an ingrained predilection for the
more sprightly and exuberant effects of decoration and
magnificence to which the modern concert-hall, the more
expensive cafes and clubrooms, and the Pullman coaches
have given a degree of authentication. Any one given
to curious inquiry might find congenial employment in
tracing out the manner and proportion in which these,
and the like, strains of aesthetic indoctrination are
blended in the edifices and grounds of a well-advised
modern university.

It is not necessary here to offer many speculations on
the enduring artistic merit of these costly stage proper-

146 The Higher Learning

ties of the seats of learning, since their permanent value
in that respect is scarcely to be rated as a substantial
motive in their construction. But there is, e. g., no ob-
vious reason why, with the next change in the tide of
mannerism, the disjointed grotesqueries of an eclectic
and modified Gothic should not presently pass into the
same category of apologetic neglect, with the architectural
evils wrought by the mid- Victorian generation. But
there is another side to this architecture of notoriety, that
merits some slight further remark. It is consistently and
unavoidably meretricious. Just at present the enjoined
vogue is some form of bastard antique. The archaic
forms which it ostensibly preserves are structurally out
of date, ill adapted to the modern materials and the mod-
em builder's use of materials. Modern building, on a
large scale and designed for durable results, is frame-
work building. The modern requirements of light, heat-
ing, ventilation and access require it to be such; and the
materials used lend themselves to that manner of con-
struction. The strains involved in modern structures are
frame-work strains ; whereas the forms which these edi-
fices are required to simulate are masonry forms. The
outward conformation and ostensible structure of the
buildings, therefore, are commonly meaningless, except
as an architectural prevarication. They have to be
adapted, simulated, deranged, because in modern use they
are impracticable in the shape, proportion and combina-
tion that of right belonged to them under the circum-
stances of materials and uses tmder which they were once
worked out. So there results a meaningless juxtaposi-
tion of details, that prove nothing in detail and contradict
one another in assemblage. All of which may suggest
reflections on the fitness of housing the quest of truth in
an edifice of false pretences.

The Material Equi^eni 147

These arcfaitectiiral vagaries serve no useful end in
academic life. As an object lesson they conduce^ in their
measure, to inculcate in the students a ^irit of disin-
genuousness. But they spread abroad the prestige of
the university as an ornate and spendthrift establishment ;
which is believed to bring increased enrolment of stu-
dents and, what is even more to the point, to conciliate
the good-will of the opulent patrons of kaming* That
these edifices are good for this purpose, and that this
policy of architectural mise en schne is wise, appears from
the greater readiness with which funds are procured for
such ornate constructions than for any other academic
use. It appears that the successful men of affairs to
whom the appeal for funds is directed, find these waste-
ful, ornate and meretricious edifices a competent expres-
sion of their cultural hopes and ambitions*

CHAPTER V

The Academic Personnel

As regards the personnel of the academic staff the con-
trol enforced by the principles of competitive business is
more subtle, complex and far-reaching, and should merit
more particular attention. The staff is the university, —
or it should so be if the university is to deserve the place
assigned it in the scheme of civilization. Therefore the
central and gravest question touching current academic
policy is the question of its bearing on the personnel and
the work which there is for them to do. In the appre-
hension of many critics the whole question of university
control is comprised in the dealings of the executive with
the staff.

Whether the power of appointment vests formally in
one man or in a board, in American practice it commonly
vests, in effect, in the academic executive. In practice,
the power of removal, as well as that of advancement,
rests in the same hands. The businesslike requirements
of the case bring it to this outcome de facto, whatever
formalities of procedure may intervene de jure.

It lies in the nature of the case that this appointing
power will tend to create a faculty after its own kind.
It will be quick to recognize efficiency within the lines
of its own interests, and slower to see fitness in those
lines that lie outside of its horizon, where it must neces-
sarily act on outside solicitation and hearsay evidence.

The selective effect of such a bias, guided as one might

148

The Academic Personnel 149

say, by a " consciousness of kind," may be seen in those
establishments that have remained under clerical tutelage ;
where, notoriously, the first qualification looked to in an
applicant for work as a teacher is his religious bias.
But the bias of these governing boards and executives
that are under clerical control has after all been able to
effect only a partial, though far-reaching, conformity to
clerical ideals of fitness in the faculties so selected ; more
especially in the larger and modernized schools of this
class. In practice it is found necessary somewhat to
wink at devotional shortcomings among their teachers;
clerical, or pronouncedly devout, scientists that are pass-
ably competent in their science, are of very rare occur-
rence ; and yet something presentable in the way of mod-
ern science is conventionally required by these schools,
in order to live, and so to effect any part of their pur-
pose. Half a loaf is better than no bread. None but
the precarious class of schools made up of the lower-
grade and smaller of these colleges, such as are content
to save their souls alive without exerting any effect on
the current of civilization, are able to get along with
faculties made up exclusively of God-fearing men.

Something of the same kind, and in somewhat the same
degree, is true for the schools under the tutelage of busi-
nessmen. While the businesslike ideal may be a faculty
wholly made up of men highly gifted with business sense,
it is not practicable to assemble such a faculty which shall
at the same time be plausibly competent in science and
scholarship. Scientists and scholars given over to the
pursuit of knowledge are conventionally indispensable to
a university, and such are commonly not largely gifted
with business sense, either by habit or by native gift.
The two lines of interest — business and science — do not
pull together; a competent scientist or scholar well en-

150 The Higher Learning

dowed with business sense is as rare as a devout scien-
tist — almost as rare as a white blackbird. Yet the in-
clusion of men of scientific gifts and attainments among
its faculty is indispensable to the university, if it is to
avoid instant and palpable stultification.

So that the most that can practically be accomplished by
a businesslike selection and surveillance of the academic
personnel will be a compromse; whereby a goodly num-
ber of the faculty will be selected on grounds of business-
like fitness, more or less pronounced, while a working
minority must continue to be made up of men without
much business proficiency and without pronounced loy-
alty to commercial princples.

This fluctuating margin of limitation has apparently
not yet been reached, perhaps not even in the most en-
terprising of our universities. Such should be the mean-
ing of the fact that a continued commercialization of the
academic staff appears still to be in progress, in the sense
that businesslike fitness counts progressively for more in
appointments and promotions. These businesslike quali-
fications do not comprise merely facility in the conduct
of pecuniary affairs, even if such facility be conceived to
include the special aptitudes and proficiency that go to
the making of a successful advertiser. In academic cir-
cles as elsewhere businesslike fitness includes solvency
as well as commercial genius. Both of these qualifica-
tions are useful in the competitive manoeuvres in which
the academic body is engaged. But while the two are
apparently given increasing weight in the selection and
grading of the academic personnel, the precedents and
specifications for a standard rating of merit in this bear-
ing have hitherto not been worked out to such a nicety as
to allow much more than a more or less close approach to
a consistent application of the principle in the average

The Academic Personnel 151

case. And there lies always the infirmity in the back-
ground of the system that if the staff were selected con-
sistently with an eye single to business capacity and
business animus the university would presently be functa
officio, and the captain of erudition would find his occupa-
tion gone.

A university is an endowed institution of culture,
whether the endowment take the form of assigned income,
as in the state establishments, or of funded wealth, as'
with most other universities. Such fraction of th^ in-
come as is assigned to the salary roll, and which there-
fore comes in question here, is apportioned among the
staff for work which has no determinate market value.
It is not a matter of quid pro quo; since one member of
the exchange, the stipend or salary, is measurable in
pecuniary terms and the other is not. This work has
no business value, in so far as it is work properly in-
cluded among the duties of the academic men. Indeed,
It is a fairly safe test ; work that has a commercial value
does not belong in the university. Such services of the
academic staff as have a business value are those por-
tions of their work that serve other ends than the higher
learning; as, e. g., the prestige and pecuniary gain of the
institution at large, the pecuniary advantage of a given
clique or faction within the university, or the profit and
renown of the directive head. Gains that accrue for
services of this general character are not, properly speak-
ing, salary or stipend payable toward " the increase and
diffusion of knowledge among men," even if they are
currently so designated, in the absence of suitable dis-
tinctions. Instances of such a diversion of corporate
funds to private ends have in the past occurred in certain
monastic and priestly orders, as well as in some modern
political organizations. Organized malversation of this

15^ The Higher Learning

character has latterly been called "graft." The long-
term common sense of the community would presently
disavow any corporation of learning overtly pursuing
such a course, as being faithless to its trust, and the con-
servation of learning would so pass into other hands.
Indeed, there are facts current which broadly suggest that
the keeping of the higher learning is beginning to pass
into other, and presumptively more distinterested, hands.

The permeation of academic policy by business prin-
ciples is a matter of more or less, not of absolute, dom-
inance. It appears to be a question of how wide a devia-
tion from scholarly singleness of purpose the long-term
common sense of the community will tolerate. The cult
of the idle curiosity sticks too deep in the instinctive en-
dowment of the race, and it has in modem civilization
been too thoroughly ground into the shape of a quest of
m&tter-of-fact knowledge, to allow this pursuit to be
definitively set aside or to fall into abeyance. It is by too
much an integral constituent of the habits of thought in-
duced by the discipline of workday life. The faith in
and aspiration after matter-of-fact knowledge is too pro-
foundly ingrained in the modern community, and too
consonant with its workday habit of mind, to admit of
its supersession by any objective end alien to it, — at least
for the present and until some stronger force than the
technological discipline of modern life shall take over the
primacy among the factors of civilization, and so give
us a culture of a different character from that which has
brought on this modem science and placed it at the
centre of things human.

The popular approval of business principles and busi-
nesslike thrift is profound, disinterested, alert and in-
sistent; but it does not, at least not yet, go the length of
unreservedly placing a businesslike exploitation of office

The Academic Personnel 153

above a faithful discharge of trust. The current popu-
lar animus may not, in this matter, approach that which
animates the business community, specifically so-called,
but it is sufficiently "practical" to approve practical
sagacity and gainful traffic wherever it is found ; yet the
furtherance of knowledge is after all an ideal which en-
gages the modern community's affections in a still more
profound way, and, in the long run, with a still more un-
qualified insistence. For good or ill, in the apprehension
of the civilized peoples, matter-of-fact knowledge is an
end to be sought ; while gainful enterprise is, after all, a
means to an end. There is, therefore, always this mas-
sive hedge of slow but indefeasible popular sentiment
that stands in the way of making the seats of learning
over into something definitively foreign to the purpose
which they are popularly believed to serve.^

Perhaps the most naive way in which a predilection
for men of substantial business value expresses itself in
university policy is the unobtrusive, and in part unformu-
lated, preference shown for teachers with sound pecu-
niary connections, whether by inheritance or by marriage.
With no such uniformity as to give evidence of an ad-
vised rule of precedence or a standarized schedule of
correlation, but with sufficient consistency to merit, and
indeed to claim, the thoughtful attention of the members
of the craft, a scholar who is in a position to plead per-
sonal wealth or a wealthy connection has a perceptibly
better chance of appointment on the academic staff, and
on a more advantageous scale of remuneration, than men
without pecuniary antecedents. Due preferment also ap-
pears to follow more as a matter of course where the

1 It was a very wise and adroit politician who found out that
"You can not fool all the people all the time."

154 The Higher Learning

candidate has or acquires a tangible standing of this
nature.

This preference for well-to-do scholars need by no
means be an altogether blind or impulsive predilection for
commercial solvency on the part of the appointing power ;
though such a predilection is no doubt ordinarily present
and operative in a degree. But there is substantial
ground for a wise discrimination in this respect. As a
measure of expediency, particularly the expediency of
publicity, it is desirable that the incumbents of the higher
stations on the staff should be able to live on such a scale
of conspicuous expensiveness as to make a favourable
impression on those men of pecuniary refinement and
expensive tastes with whom they are designed to come in
contact. The university should be worthily represented
in its personnel, particularly in such of its personnel as
occupy a conspicuous place in the academic hierarchy;
that is to say, it should be represented with becoming ex-
pensiveness in all its social contact with those classes
from whose munificence large donations may flow into the
corporate funds. Large gifts of this kind are creditable
both to him that gives and him that takes, and it is the
part of wise foresight so to arrange that those to whom
it falls to represent the university, as potential bene-
ficiary, at this juncture should do so with propitiously
creditable circumstance. To meet and convince the opu-
lent patrons of learning, as well as the parents and guar- r
dians of possible opulent students, it is, by and large,
necessary to meet them on their own ground, and to bring
into view such evidence of culture and intelligence as
will readily be appreciated by them. To this end a large
and well appointed domestic establishment is more fortu-
nate than a smaller one ; abundant, well-chosen and well-
served viands, beverages and narcotics will also felicit-

The Academic Personnel 155

ously touch the sensibilities of these men who are fortu-
nate enough to have learned their virtue; the better,
that is to say, on the whole, the more costly, achieve-
ments in dress and equipage will " carry farther " in these
premises than a penurious economy. In short, it is well
that those who may be called to stand spokesmen for the
seat of learning in its contact with men and women of
substantial means, should be accustomed to, and should
be pecuniarily competent for, a scale of living somewhat
above that which the ordinary remuneration for academic
work will support. An independent income, therefore, is
a meritorious quality in an official scholar.

The introduction of these delegates from the well-
to-do among the academic personnel has a further, sec-
ondary effect that is worth noting. Their ability freely
to meet any required pecuniary strain, coupled with that
degree of social ambition that commonly comes with the
ability to pay, will have a salutary effect in raising the
standard of living among the rest of the staff, — salutary
as seen from the point of view of the bureau of publicity.
In the absence of outside resources, the livelihood of
academic men is somewhat scant and precarious. This
places them under an insidious temptation to a more par-
simonious manner of life than the best (prestige) inter-
ests of the seat of learning would dictate. By undue
saving out of their current wages they may easily give the
academic establishment an untoward air of indigence,
such as would be likely to depreciate its prestige in those
well-to-do circles where such prestige might come to have
a commercial value, in the way of donations, and it might
at the same time deter possible customers of the same de-
sirable class from sending their young men to the uni-
versity as students.

The American university is not an eleemosynary insti-

1S6 The Higher Learning

tution; it does not plead indigence, except in that Pick-
wickian sense in which indigence may without shame be
avowed in polite circles ; nor does it put its trust in dona-
tions of that sparseness and modesty which the gifts of
charity commonly have. Its recourse necessarily is that
substantial and dignified class of gifts that are not given
thriftily on compunction of charity, but out of the fulness
of the purse. These dignified gifts commonly aim to pro-
mote the most reputable interests of humanity, rather
than the sordid needs of creature comfort, at the same
time that they serve to fortify the donor's good name
in good company. Donations to university funds have
something of the character of an investment in good
fame ; they are made by gentlemen and gentlewomen, to
gentlemen, and the transactions begin and end within the
circle of pecuniary respectability. An impeccable respect-
ability, authentic in the pecuniary respect, therefore, af-
fords the only ground on which such a seminary of
learning can reasonably claim the sympathetic attention
of the only class whose attentions are seriously worth
engaging in these premises; and respectability is insep-
arable from an expensive scale of living, in any commu-
nity whose scheme of life is conventionally regulated by
pecuniary standards.

It is accordingly expedient, for its collective good re-
pute, that the members of the academic staff should con-
spicuously consume all their current income in current
expenses of living. Hence also the moral obligation in-
cumbent on all members of the staff — and their house-
holds — to take hands and help in an endless chain of
conspicuously expensive social amenities, where their
social proficiency and their ostensible ability to pay may
effectually be placed on view. An effectual furtherance
to this desirable end is the active presence among the

The Academic Personnel 157

staff of an appreciable number who are ready to take the
lead at a pace slightly above the competency of the com-
mon run of university men. Their presence insures that
the general body will live up to their limit ; for in this, as
in other games of emulation, the pace-maker is invalu-
able.

Besides the incentive so given to polite expenditure by
the presence of a highly solvent minority among the
academic personnel, it has also been found expedient
that the directorate take thought and institute something
in the way of an authentic curriculum of academic fes-
tivities and exhibitions of social proficiency. A degree of
expensive gentility is in this way propagated by authority,
to be paid for in part out of the salaries of the faculty.

Something in this way of ceremonial functions and
public pageants has long been included in the ordinary
routine of the academic year among the higher American
schools. It dates back to the time when they were boys'
schools under the tutelage of the clergy, and it appears to
have had a ritualistic origin, such as would comport with
what IS found expedient in the service of the church.
By remoter derivation it should probably be found to rest
on a very ancient and archaic faith in the sacramental or
magical efficacy of ceremonial observances. But the
present state of the case can by no means be set down
to the account of aimless survival alone. Instead of be-
ing allowed in any degree to fall into abeyance by neglect,
the range and magnitude of such observances have pro-
gressively grown appreciably greater since the principles
of competitive business have come to rule the counsels of
the universities. The growth, in the number of such ob-
servances, in their pecuniary magnitude, in their ritual-
istic circumstance, and in the importance attached to
them, is greater in the immediate present than at any

158 The Higher Learning

period in the past ; and it is, significantly, greater in those
larger new establishments that have started out with few
restraints of tradition. But the move so made by these
younger, freer, more enterprising seats of learning falls
closely in with that spirit of competitive enterprise that
animates all alike though unequally.^

That it does so, that this efflorescence of ritual and
pageantry intimately belongs in the current trend of
things academic, is shown by the visible proclivity of the
older institutions to follow the lead given in this matter
by the younger ones, so far as the younger ones have
taken the lead. In the mere number of authorized events,
as contrasted with the average of some twenty-five or
thirty years back, the present average appears, on a some-
what deliberate review of the available data, to compare
as three or four to one. For certain of the younger and
more exuberant seats of learning today, as compared with
what may be most nearly comparable in the academic
situation of the eighties, the proportion is perhaps twice
as large as the larger figure named above. Broadly
speaking, no requirement of the academic routine should
be allowed to stand in the way of an available occasion
for a scholastic pageant.

These genteel solemnities, of course, have a cultural
significance, probably of a high order, both as occasions
of rehearsal in all matters of polite conformity and as a
stimulus to greater refinement and proficiency in expendi-
ture on seemly dress and equipage. They may also be
believed to have some remote, but presumably salutary,
bearing on the higher learning. This latter is an obscure
point, on which it would be impossible at present to offer

^ La gloria di cc'ui che tutto muove.

Per Tuniverso penetra e risplende

In una parte piu e meno altr'ove.

The Academic Personnel 159

anything better than abstruse speculative considerations;
since the relation of these genteel exhibitions to scientific
inquiry or instruction is of a peculiarly intangible nature.
But it is none of these cultural bearings of any such round
of polite solemnities and stately pageants that comes in
question here. It is their expediency in point of busi-
nesslike enterprise, or perhaps rather their businesslike
motive, on the one hand, and their effect upon the animus
and efficiency of the academic personnel, on the other
hand.

In so far as their motive should not (by unseemly im-
putation) be set down to mere boyish exuberance of
make-believe, it must be sought among considerations
germane to that business enterprise that rules academic
policy. However attractive such a derivation might
seem, this whole traffic in pageantry and ceremonial
amenities can not be traced back to ecclesiastical ground,
except in point of remote pedigree ; it has grown greater
since the businessmen took over academic policy out of
the hands of the clergy. Nor can it be placed to the ac-
count of courtly, diplomatic, or military antecedents or
guidance; these fields of activity, while they are good
breeding ground for pomp and circumstance, do not over-
lap, or even seriously touch, the frontiers of the republic
of learning. On the other hand, in seeking grounds or
motives for it all, it is also not easy to find any close
analogy in the field of business enterprise of the larger
sort, that has to do with the conduct of industry. There
IS little of this manner of expensive public ceremonial
and solemn festivities to be seen, e.g., among business
concerns occupied with railroading or banking, in cotton-
spinning, or sugar-refining, or in farming, shipping, coal,
steel, or oil. In this field phenomena of this general class
are of rare occurrence, sporadic at the best; and when

ISO The Higher Learning

dowed with business sense is as rare as a devout scien-
tist — almost as rare as a white blackbird. Yet the in-
clusion of men of scientific gifts and attainments among
its faculty is indispensable to the university, if it is to
avoid instant and palpable stultification.

So that the most that can practically be accomplished by
a businesslike selection and surveillance of the academic
personnel will be a compromse ; whereby a goodly num-
ber of the faculty will be selected on grounds of business-
like fitness, more or less pronounced, while a working
minority must continue to be made up of men without
much business proficiency and without pronounced loy-
alty to commercial princples.

This fluctuating margin of limitation has apparently
not yet been reached, perhaps not even in the most en-
terprising of our universities. Such should be the mean-
ing of the fact that a continued commercialization of the
academic staff appears still to be in progress, in the sense
that businesslike fitness counts progressively for more in
appointments and promotions. These businesslike quali-
fications do not comprise merely facility in the conduct
of pecuniary affairs, even if such facility be conceived to
include the special aptitudes and proficiency that go to
the making of a successful advertiser. In academic cir-
cles as elsewhere businesslike fitness includes solvency
as well as commercial genius. Both of these qualifica-
tions are useful in the competitive manoeuvres in which
the academic body is engaged. But while the two are
apparently given increasing weight in the selection and
grading of the academic personnel, the precedents and
specifications for a standard rating of merit in this bear-
ing have hitherto not been worked out to such a nicety as
to allow much more than a more or less close approach to
a consistent application of the principle in the average

The Academic Personnel 151

case. And there lies always the infirmity in the back-
ground of the system that if the staff were selected con-
sistently with an eye single to business capacity and
business animus the university would presently be functa
officio, and the captain of erudition would find his occupa-
tion gone.

A university is an endowed institution of culture,
whether the endowment take the form of assigned income,
as in the state establishments, or of funded wealth, as'
with most other universities. Such fraction of th^ in-
come as is assigned to the salary roll, and which there-
fore comes in question here, is apportioned among the
staff for work which has no determinate market value.
It is not a matter of quid pro quo; since one member of
the exchange, the stipend or salary, is measurable in
pecuniary terms and the other is not. This work has
no business value, in so far as it is work properly in-
cluded among the duties of the academic men. Indeed,
it is a fairly safe test ; work that has a commercial value
does not belong in the university. Such services of the
academic staff as have a business value are those por-
tions of their work that serve other ends than the higher
learning; as, e. g., the prestige and pecuniary gain of the
institution at large, the pecuniary advantage of a given
clique or faction within the university, or the profit and
renown of the directive head. Gains that accrue for
services of this general character are not, properly speak-
ing, salary or stipend payable toward " the increase and
diffusion of knowledge among men," even if they are
currently so designated, in the absence of suitable dis-
tinctions. Instances of such a diversion of corporate
funds to private ends have in the past occurred in certain
monastic and priestly orders, as well as in some modern
political organizations. Organized malversation of this

1 62 The Higher Learning

With men circumstanced as the common run of uni*
versity men are, the temptation to parsimony is ever pres-
ent, while on the other hand, as has already been noted,
the prestige of the university — and of the academic head
— demands of all its members a conspicuously expensive
manner of living. Both of these needs may, of course,
be met in some poor measure by saving in the obscurer
items of domestic expense, such as food, clothing, heating,
lighting, floor-space, books, and the like ; and making all
available funds count toward the collective end of repu-
table publicity, by throwing the stress on such expendi-
tures as come under the public eye, as dress and equipage,
bric-a-brac, amusements, public entertainments, etc. It
may seem that it should also be possible to cut down the

actually paid come to fall short of the "normal" perhaps as
frequently as they conform to it.

There is no trades-union among university teachers, and no
collective bargaining. There appears to be a feeling prevalent
among them that their salaries are not of the nature of wages,
and that there would be a species of moral obliquity implied in
overtly so dealing with the matter. And in the individual bar-
gaining by which the rate of pay is determined the directorate
may easily be tempted to seek an economical way out, by offering
a low rate of pay coupled with a higher academic rank. The
plea is always ready to hand that the university is in want of the
necessary funds and is constrained to economize where it can.
So an advance in nominal rank is made to serve in place of an
advance in salary, the former being the less costly commodity
for the time being. Indeed, so frequent are such departures
from the normal scale as to have given rise to the (no doubt ill-
advised) suggestion that this may be one of the chief uses of the
adopted schedule of normal salaries. So an employe of the uni-
versity may not infrequently find himself constrained to accept,
as part payment, an expensive increment of dignity attaching to
a higher rank than his salary account would indicate. Such an
outcome of individual bargaining is all the more likely in the
academic community, since there is no settled code of profes-
sional ethics governing the conduct of business enterprise in aca-
demic management, as contrasted with the traffic of ordinary
competitive business.

The Academic Personnel 163

proportion of obscure expenditures for creature comforts
by limiting the number of births in the family, or by
foregoing marriage. But, by and large, there is reason
to believe that this expedient has been exhausted. As
men have latterly been at pains to show, the current
average of children in academic households is not high;
whereas the percentage of celibates is. There appears,
indeed, to be little room for additional economy on this
head, or in the matter of household thrift, beyond what is
embodied in the family budgets already in force in aca-
demic circles.

So also, the tenure of office is somewhat precarious;
more so than the documents would seem to indicate.
This applies with greater force to the lower grades than
to the higher. Latterly, under the rule of business prin-
ciples, since the prestige value of a conspicuous consump-
tion has come to a greater currency in academic policy, a
member of the staff may render his tenure more secure,
and may perhaps assure his due preferment, by a sedulous
attention to the academic social amenities, and to the more
conspicuous items of his expense account; and he will
then do well in the same connection also to turn his best
attention in the day's work to administrative duties and
schoolmasterly discipline, rather than to the increase of
knowledge. Whereas he may make his chance of prefer-
ment less assured, and may even jeopardize his tenure,
by a conspicuously parsimonious manner of life, or by
too pronounced an addiction to scientific or scholarly pur-
suits, to the neglect of those polite exhibitions of decorum
that conduce to the maintenance of the university's
prestige in the eyes of the (pecuniarily) cultured laity.

A variety of other untoward circumstances, of a simi-
larly extra-scholastic bearing, may affect the fortunes of
academic men to a like effect; as, e.g., unearned news-

164 The Higher Learning

paper notoriety that may be turned to account in ridicule ;
unconventional religious, or irreligious convictions — so
far as they become known ; an undesirable political affilia-
tion ; an impecunious marriage, or such domestic infelici-
ties as might become subject of remark. None of these
untoward circumstances need touch the serviceability of
the incumbent for any of the avowed, or avowable, pur-
poses of the seminary of learning; and where action has
to be taken by the directorate on provocation of such cir-
cumstances it is commonly done with the (unofficial) ad-
mission that such action is taken not on the substantial
merits of the case but on compulsion of appearances and
the exigencies of advertising. That some such effect
should be had follows from the nature of things, so far
as business principles rule.

In the degree, then, in which these and the like motives
of expediency are decisive, there results a husbanding of
time, energy and means in the less conspicuous expendi-
tures and duties, in order to a freer application to more
conspicuous uses, and a meticulous cultivation of the
bourgeois virtues. The workday duties of instruction,
and more particularly of inquiry, are, in the nature of the
case, less conspicuously in evidence than the duties of the
drawing-room, the ceremonial procession, the formal din-
ner, or the grandstand on some red-letter day of intercol-
legiate athletics.^ For the purposes of a reputable noto-

1 So, e.g., the well-known president of a well and favourably
known university was at pains a few years ago to distinguish
one of his faculty as being his " ideal of a university man " ; the
grounds of this invidious distinction being a lifelike imitation
of a country gentleman and a fair degree of attention to com-
mittee work in connection with the academic administration; the
incumbent had no distinguishing marks either as a teacher or as
a scholar, and neither science nor letters will be found in his
debt. It is perhaps needless to add that for reasons of invidi-
ous distinction, no names can be mentioned in this connection.

The Academic Personnel 165

riety the everyday work of the classroom and laboratory
IS also not so effective as lectures to popular audiences
outside; especially, perhaps, addresses before an audience
of devout and well-to-do women. Indeed, all this is well
approved by experience. In many and devious ways,
therefore, a university man may be able to serve the col-
lective enterprise of his university to better effect than
by an exclusive attention to the scholastic work on which
alone he is ostensibly engaged.

Among the consequences that follow is a constant
temptation for the members of the staff to take on work
outside of that for which the salary is nominally paid.
Such work takes the public eye; but a further incentive
to go into this outside and non-academic work, as well as
to take on supernumerary work within the academic
schedule, lies in the fact that such outside or super-
numerary work is specially paid, and so may help to eke
out a sensibly scant livelihood. So far as touches the
more scantily paid grades of university men, and so far
as no alien considerations come in to trouble the work-
ing-out of business principles, the outcome may be
schematized somewhat as follows. These men have, at
the outset, gone into the university presumably from an
inclination to scholarly or scientific pursuits; it is not
probable that they have been led into this calling by the
pecuniary inducements, which are slight as compared
with the ruling rates of pay in the open market for other
work that demands an equally arduous preparation and.
an equally close application. They have then been ap-

It should be added in illumination of the instance cited, that in
the same university, by consistent selection and discipline of the
personnel, it had come about that, in the apprehension of the
staff as well as of the executive, the accepted test of efficiency
was the work done on the administrative committees rather than
that of the class rooms or laboratories.

1 66 The Higher Learning

portioned rather more work as instructors than they can
take care of in the most efficient manner, at a rate of pay
which is sensibly scant for the standard of (conspicuous)
living conventionally imposed on them. They are, by au-
thority, expected to expend time and means in such polite
observances, spectacles and quasi-learned exhibitions as
are presumed to enhance the prestige of the university.
They are so induced to divert their time and energy to
spreading abroad the university's good repute by credi-
table exhibitions of a quasi-scholarly character, which
have no substantial bearing on a university man's legiti-
mate interests ; as well as in seeking supplementary work
outside of their mandatory schedule, from which to derive
an adequate livelihood and to fill up the complement of
politely wasteful expenditures expected of them. The
academic instruction necessarily suffers by this diversion
of forces to extra-scholastic objects; and the work of
inquiry, which may have primarily engaged their interest
and which is indispensable to their continued efficiency as
teachers, is, in the common run of cases, crowded to one
side and presently drops out of mind. Like other work-
men, under pressure of competition the members of the
academic staff will endeavour to keep up their necessary
income by cheapening their product and increasing their
marketable output. And by consequence of this pressure
of bread-winning and genteel expenditure, these univer-
sity men are so barred out from the serious pursuit of
those scientific and scholarly inquiries which alone can,
academically speaking, justify their retention on the uni-
versity faculty, and for the sake of which, in great part
at least, they have chosen this vocation. No infirmity
more commonly besets university men than this going to
seed in routine work and extra-scholastic duties. They
have entered on the academic career to find time, place,

The Academic Personnel 167

facilities and congenial environment for the pursuit of
knowledge, and under pressure they presently settle down
to a round of perfunctory labour by means of which to
simulate the life of gentlemen.^

Before leaving the topic it should further be remarked
that the dissipation incident to these polite amenities, that
so are incumbent on the academic personnel, apparently
also has something of a deteriorative effect on their work-
ing capacity, whether for scholarly or for worldly uses.
Prima facie evidence to this effect might be adduced, but
It is not easy to say how far the evidence would bear
closer scrutiny. There is an appreciable amount of dis-
sipation, in its several sorts, carried forward in university
circles in an inconspicuous manner, and not designed for
publicity. How far this is induced by a loss of interest
in scholarly work, due to the habitual diversion of the
scholars' energies to other and more exacting duties,
would be hard to say ; as also how far it may be due to
the lead given by men-of-the-world retained on the facul-

^ Within the past few years an academic executive of great
note has been heard repeatedly to express himself in facetious
doubt of this penchant for scholarly inquiry on the part of uni-
versity men, whether as " research '* or as " research " ; and there
is doubtless ground for scepticism as to its permeating the aca-
demic body with that sting of ubiquity that is implied in many
expressions on this head. And it should also be said, perhaps
in extenuation of the expression cited above, that the president
was addressing delegations of his own faculty, and presumably
directing his remarks to their special benefit; and that while he
professed (no doubt ingenuously) a profound zeal for the cause
of science at large, it had come about, selectively, through a long
course of sedulous attention on his own part to all other quali-
fications than the main fact, that his faculty at the time of speak-
ing was in the main an aggregation of slack-twisted schoolmas-
ters and men about town. Such a characterization, however,
does not carry any gravely invidious discrimination, nor will it
presumably serve in any degree to identify the seat of learning
to which it refers.

1 68 The Higher Learning

ties for other than scholarly reasons. At the same time
there is the difficulty that many of those men who bear a
large part in the ceremonial dissipation incident to the
enterprise in publicity are retained, apparently, for their
proficiency in this line as much as for their scholarly at-
tainments, or at least so one might infer ; and these men
must be accepted with the defects of their qualities.

As bearing on this whole matter of pomp and circum-
stance, social amenities and ritual dissipation, quasi-
learned demonstrations and meretricious publicity, in aca-
demic life, it is difficult beyond hope of a final answer to
determine how much of it is due directly to the masterful
initiative of the strong man who directs the enterprise,
and how much is to be set down to an innate proclivity
for all that sort of thing on the part of the academic per-
sonnel. A near view of these phenomena leaves the im-
pression that there is, on the whole, less objection felt
than expressed among the academic men with regard to
this routine of demonstration; that the reluctance with
which they pass under the ceremonial yoke is not alto-
gether ingenuous ; all of which would perhaps hold true
even more decidedly as applied to the faculty households.*
But for all that, it also remains true that without the
initiative and countenance of the executive head these

1 The share and value of the " faculty wives " in all this rou-
tine of resolute conviviality is a large topic, an intelligent and
veracious account of which could only be a work of naive bru-
tality.

** But the grim, grim Ladies, Oh, my brothers I
They are ladling bitterly.
They are ladling in the work-time of the others.
In the country of the free."
(Mrs. Elizabret Harte Browning, in The Cry of the Heathen
Chinee,)

The Academic Personnel 169

boyish movements of sentimental spectacularity on the
part of the personnel would come to little, by comparison
with what actually takes place. It is after all a matter
for executive discretion, and, from whatever motives,
this diversion of effort to extra-scholastic ends has the
executive sanction;^ with the result that an intimate
familiarity with current academic life is calculated to
raise the question whether make-believe does not, after
all, occupy a larger and more urgent place in the life of
these thoughtful adult male citizens than in the life of
their children.

^What takes place without executive sanction need trouble
no one.

CHAPTER VI

The Portion of the Scientist

The principles of business enterprise touch the life and
work of the academic staff at divers points and with
various effect. Under their rule, and in so far as they
rule, the remuneration 'shifts from the basis of a stipend
designed to further the pursuit of knowledge, to that of a
wage bargain, partaking of the nature of a piece-work
scheme, designed to procure class-room instruction at the
lowest practicable cost. A businesslike system of ac-
countancy standardizes and measures this instruction by
mechanically gauged units of duration and number,
amplitude and frequency, and so discountenances work
that rises above a staple grade of mediocrity. Usage and
the urgent need of a reputable notoriety impose on uni-
versity men an extraneous and excessively high standard
of living expenses, which constrains them to take on su-
pernumerary work in excess of what they can carry in an
efficient manner. The need of university prestige en-
forces this high scale of expenses, and also pushes the
members of the staff into a routine of polite dissipation,
ceremonial display, exhibitions of quasi-scholarly pro-
ficiency and propagandist intrigue.

If these business principles were quite free to work out
their logical consequences, untroubled by any disturbing
factors of an unbusinesslike nature, the outcome should
be to put the pursuit of knowledge definitively in abey-
ance within the university, and to substitute for that

170

The Portion of the Scientist 171

objective something for which the language hitherto lacks
a designation.

For divers reasons of an unbusinesslike kind, such a
consummate (" sweat-shop ") scheme has never fully
been achieved, particularly not in establishments that are,
properly speaking, of anything like university grade.
This perfect scheme of low-cost perfunctory instruction,
high-cost stage properties and press-agents, public song
and dance, expensive banquets, speech-making and pro-
cessions, is never fully rounded out. This amounts to
admitting a partial defeat for the gild of businesslike
"educators." While, as a matter of speculative predi-
lection, they may not aim to leave the higher learning
out of the university, the rule of competitive business
principles consistently pushes their administration toward
that end; which they are continually prevented from at-
taining, by the necessary conditions under which their
competitive enterprise is carried on.

For better or worse, there are always and necessarily
present among the academic corps a certain number of
men whose sense of the genteel properties is too vague and
meagre, whose grasp of the principles of official prefer-
ment is too weak and inconsequential, whose addiction to
the pursuit of knowledge is too ingrained, to permit their
conforming wholly to the competitive exigencies of the
case. By force of the exigencies of competitive prestige
there is, of course, a limit of tolerance that sets decent
bounds both to the number of such supererogatory schol-
ars harboured by the university, and the latitude allowed
them in their intemperate pursuit of knowledge ; but their
presence in the academic body is, after all, neither an
irrelevant accident nor a transient embarrassment. It is,
in one sense of the expression, for the use of such men,
and for the use which such men find for it, that the imi-

172 The Higher Lfearning

versity exists at all ; in some such sense, indeed, as a gov-
ernment, a political machine, a railway corporation or a
toll-road, may be said to exist for the use of the commu-
nity from which they get their living. It is true in the
sense that this ostensible use can not be left out of ac-
count in the long run. But even from day to day this
scholarly purpose is never quite lost sight of. The habit
of counting it in, as a matter of course, affects all con-
cerned, in some degree; and complacent professions of
faith to that effect cross one another from all quarters.
It may frequently happen that the enterprising men in
whom academic discretion centres will have no clear con-
ception of what is implied in this scholarly purpose to
which they give a perfunctory matter-of-course endorse-
ment, and much of their professions on that head may be
ad captandum; but that it need be a matter of course
argues that it must be counted with.

Still, in the degree in which business principles rule
the case the outcome will be of much the same complex-
ion as it might be in the absence of any such preposses-
sion, intelligent or otherwise, in favour of the higher
learning on the part of the directorate; for competition
has the same effect here as elsewhere, in that it permits
none of the competitors to forego any expedient that has
been found advantageous by any one of them. So that,
whatever course might be dictated by the sentiments of
the directorate, the course enjoined by the principles of
competitive business sets toward the suppression or
elimination of all such scholarly or scientific work from
the university as does not contribute immediately to its
prestige, — except so far as the conditions alluded to
make such a course impracticable.

It is not an easy or a graceful matter for a businesslike
executive to get rid of any undecorative or indecorous

The Portion of the Scientist 173

scientist, whose only fault is an unduly pertinacious pur-
suit of the work for which alone the university claims to
exist, whose failure consists in living up to the profes-
sions of the executive instead of professing to live up to
them. Academic tradition gives a broad, though per-
haps uncertain, sanction to the scientific spirit that moves
this obscure element in the academic body. And then,
their more happily gifted, more worldly-wise colleagues
have also a degree of respect for such a single-minded
pursuit of knowledge, even while they may view these
naive children of impulse with something of an amused
compassion; for the general body of the academic staff
is still made up largely of men who have started out with
scholarly ideals, even though these ideals may have some-
what fallen away from them under the rub of expediency.
At least in a genial, speculative sense of the phrase,
scholarship still outranks official preferment in the esteem
of the generality of academic men, particularly so long as
the question does not become personal and touch their
own preferment. In great part the academic corps still
understands and appreciates the scholarly animus, and
looks, on the whole, kindly and sympathetically — indeed,
with a touch of envy — on those among them who are so
driven to follow their own scientific bent, to the neglect
of expedient gentility and publicity.

The like can, of course, not be so freely said of that
body of businessmen in whom is vested the final control ;
yet this sentiment of genial approval that pervades the
academic body finds some vague response even among
these; and in any event it is always to be reckoned with
and is not to be outraged, unless for a good and valuable
consideration. It can not altogether be set aside, al-
though, it is true, the conduct of certain executive heads,
grown old in autocratic rule and self-complacency, may

174 The Higher Learning

at times appear to argue the contrary. So that, by and
large, there results an unstable compromise between the
requirements of scholarly fitness and those of competitive
enterprise, with a doubtful and shifting issue. Just at
present, under the firm hand of an enterprising and auto-
cratic executive, the principles of competitive business
are apparently gaining ground in the greater universities,
where the volume of traffic helps to cloud the details of
suppression, and the cult of learning is gradually falling
into a more precarious position.

In a curious way, too, the full swing of business prin-
ciples in academic life is hindered by the necessary ways
and means through which these principles are worked
out; so much so, indeed, as to throw a serious doubt on
their ultimately achieving an undivided dominion. Taken
as a business concern, the university is in a very singular
position. The reason for its being, at all, is the educa-
tional aspiration that besets modern mankind. Its only
ostensible reason for being, and so for its being governed
and managed, competitively or otherwise, is the advance-
ment of learning. And this advancement of learning is in
no degree a business proposition ; and yet it must, for the
present at least, remain the sole ostensible purpose of
the businesslike university. In the main, therefore, all
the competitive endeavours and manoeuvres of the cap-
tains of erudition in charge must be made under cover of
an ostensible endeavour to further this non-competitive
advancement of learning, at all costs. Since learning is
not a competitive matter; since, indeed, competition in
any guise or bearing in this field is detrimental to learn-
ing; the competitive manoeuvres of the academic execu-
tive must be carried on surreptitiously, in a sense, cloaked

The Portion of the Scientist 175

as a non-competitive campaign for the increase of knowl-
edge without fear or favour.

All this places the executive in a very delicate position.
On the one hand the principles of competitive business,
embodied in a plenary board of control and in a critical
scrutiny from the side of the business community at large,
demand that all appointments, promotions, dismissals,
ceremonials, pronouncements and expenditures, must be
made with a constant view to their highest advertising
effect; whereas the notions current as to what is fitting
in a seminary of the higher learning, on the other hand,
somewhat incongruously demand that all these deeds of
commission and omission be done with an eye single to
the increase of knowledge, regardless of appearances.
And this double responsibility falls, of necessity, on the
executive head of the university, under the present regime
of centralized autocratic rule. Any ethical code that shall
permit the executive head to accomplish what is expected
of him in the way of a competitive enterprise under these
circumstances, will necessarily be vague and shifty, not to
say tenuous and shadowy ; and men who have tried to do
their whole duty in these premises are ready to admit
that they have been called on to face many distasteful
situations, where honesty would not approve itself as the
best policy.^

Whatever expedients of decorative real-estate, spec-
tacular pageantry, bureaucratic magpificence, elusive sta-
tistics, vocational training, genteel solemnities and sweat-

*^Cf. also J. J. Qiapman, paper on "Professional Ethics," in
University Control, as above, for an estimate of the inefficiency
of academic opinion as a corrective of the executive power on
his head.

176 The Higher Learning

shop instruction, may be imposed by the exigencies of a
competitive business policy, the university is after all a
seat of learning, devoted to the cult of the idle curiosity,
— otherwise called the scientific spirit. And stultifica-
tion, broad and final, waits on any university directorate
that shall dare to avow any other end as its objective.
So the appearance of an unwavering devotion to the
pursuit of knowledge must be kept up. Hence the pres-
ence of scholars and scientists of accepted standing is
indispensable to the university, as a means of keeping up
its prestige. The need of them may be a need of their
countenance rather than of their work, but they are in-
dispensable, and they bring with them the defects of their
qualities. When a man achieves such notoriety for sci-
entific attainments as to give him a high value as an article
of parade, the chances are that he is endowed with some
share of the scientific animus, and he is likely to have
fallen into the habit of rating the triumphs of science
above those of the market place. Such a person will
almost unavoidably affect the spirit of any academic
corps into which he is intruded. He will also, in a meas-
ure, bend the forces of the establishment to a long-term
efficiency in the pursuit of knowledge, rather than to the
pursuit of a reputable notoriety from day to day. To
the enterprising captain of erudition he is likely to prove
costly and inconvenient, but he is unavoidable.

This will hold true in a general way, and with due ex-
ceptions, for men prominent in those material sciences
that have to do with data of such a tangible character,
and give their results in such terms of mechanical fact, as
to permit a passably close appreciation of their worth by
the laity. It applies only more loosely, with larger ex-
ceptions and a wider margin of error, in the humanities
and the so-called moral and social sciences. In this latter

The Portion of the Scientist 177

field a clamorous conformity to current prepossessions,
particularly the conventional prepossessions of respecta-
bility, or an edifying and incisive rehearsal of common-
places, will commonly pass in popular esteem for schol-
arly and scientific merit. A truculent quietism is often
accepted as a mark of scientific maturity. The reason foi
this will appear presently. But so far as popular esteem
is a truthful index of scientific achievement, the proposi-
tion holds, that scientists who have done great things
have a business value to the captain of erudition as a
means of advancing the university's prestige ; and so far
the indicated consequences follow. In some measure the
scientific men so intruded into the academic body are in
a position to give a direction to aflFairs within their field
and within the framework of the general policy. They
are able to claim rank and discretion, and their choice,
or at least their assent, must be consulted in the selection
of their subalterns, and in a degree 'also in the organiza-
tion of the department's work. It is true, men whose
talent, interest and experience run chiefly within the
lines of scientific inquiry, are commonly neither skilled
nor shrewd managers in that give and take of subtleties
and ambiguities by which the internal machinery of the
university is kept in line and running under a businesslike
administration ; but even so, their aims and prepossessions
will in a measure affect the animus and shape the work of
the academic body. All this applies particularly on the
higher levels of research, as contrasted with the common-
place (undergraduate) work of instruction. But at this
point, therefore, the principles of competitive publicity
carry with them a partial neutralization of their Own
tendency.

This necessity of employing scientists of a commanding
force and rank raises a point of some delicacy in the ad-

17^ The Higher Learning

ministration of the competitive university. It is neces-
sary to assign these men a relatively high rank in the
academic hierarchy; both because they will accept no
subordinate place and because the advertising value of
their prestige will be curtailed by reducing them to an
inconspicuous position. And with high rank is neces-
sarily associated a relatively large discretion and a wide
influence in academic affairs, at least on the face of
things. Such men, so placed, are apt to be exacting in
matters which they conceive to bear on the work in their
own sciences, and their exactions may not be guided
chiefly by the conspicuousness of the equipment which
they require or of the results at which they aim. They
are also not commonly adroit men of affairs, in the busi-
ness sense of the term; not given to conciliatory com-
promises and an exhibition of complaisant statistics.
The framing of shrewd lines of competitive strategy, and
the bureaucratic punctilios of university administration,
do not commonly engage their best interest, even if it does
not stir them to an indecorous impatience.^

Should such a man become unduly insistent in his ad-
vocacy of scholarship, so as seriously to traverse the sta-
tistical aspirations of the executive, or in any way to
endanger the immediate popular prestige of the univer-
sity, then it may become an open question whether his
personal prestige has not been bought at too high a cost.
As a business proposition, it may even become expedient
to retire him. But his retirement may not be an easy
matter to arrange. The businesslike grounds of it can
not well be avowed, since it is involved in the scheme of
academic decorum, as well as in the scheme of publicity,
that motives of notoriety must not be avowed. Colour-

1 " The lambs play always, they know no better.
They arc only one times one."

The Portion of the Scientist 179

able grounds of another kind must be found, such as will
divert the popular imagination from the point at issue.
By a judicious course of vexation and equivocations, an
obnoxious scientist may be manoeuvred into such a posi-
tion that his pride will force a " voluntary " resignation.
Failing this, it may become necessary, however distaste-
ful, delicately to defame his domestic life, or his racial,
religious or political status. In America such an appeal
to the baser sentiments will commonly cloud the issue
sufficiently for the purpose in hand, even though it all has
nothing to do with the man's fitness for university work.
Such a step, however, is not to be taken unless the case
is urgent; if there is danger of estranging the affections
of potential donors, or if it involves anything like overt
disloyalty to the executive head.

This is one of the points at which it is necessary to re-
call the fact that no settled code of business ethics has
yet been worked out for the guidance of competitive uni-
versity management ; nor is it easy to see how such a code
can be worked out, so long as the university remains
ostensibly a seat of learning, unable to avow any other
ground of action than a singleminded pursuit of knowl-
edge. It has been alleged — indeed it is fast becoming
a tradition — that the executives of the great competitive
universities habitually allow some peculiar latitude as
touches the canons of truth and fair dealing. If this de-
scribes the facts, it should not be counted against these
discreet men who so have to tax their ingenuity, but
against the situation in which they are placed, which
makes it impracticable to observe a nice discrimination in
matters of veracity. Statements of fact, under such con-
ditions, will in great part be controlled by the end to be
accomplished, rather than by antecedent circumstances;
such statements are necessarily of a tcleological order.

i8o The Higher Learning

As in other competitiYe busmess, facts faave in tins con-
nection only a strat^c value; but the exigencies of
strsLtegy here are peculiarly exacting, and often rigorous.

Academic tradition and current comnionsense unite in
imposing on the universities the employment of promi-
nent scholars and scientists, in that men of note in this
class have a high prestige value for purposes of publicity ;
and it was suggested above that a reservation of some
breadth must be made on this head. Qnnmon notoriety
is the due test of eminence which the conq>etitive univer-
sity must apply in the selection of its notables. But in
the sciences that deal with the less tangible and measure-
able data, the so-called moral or social sciences, common
notoriety is not even an approximately accurate index of
scientific capacity or attainments; and still it is, of course,
the standing of the incumbents in point of common noto-
riety that must chiefly be had in view in any strict valua-
tion of them for purposes of academic prestige. They
are needed for the advertising value which they bring,
and for this purpose they are valuable somewhat in pro-
portion to the rank awarded them by common report
among that unlearned element, whose good opinion the
competitive university must conciliate. But in the nature
of the case, within the range of sciences named, the esti-
mate of the unlearned is necessarily in the wrong.

With the exception of archaeological inquiries and the
study of law, as commonly pursued, these moral or social
sciences are occupied with inquiry into the nature of the
conventions under which men live, the institutions of soci-
ety, — customs, usages, traditions, conventions, canons of
conduct, standards of life, of taste, of morality and reli-
gion, law and order. No faithful inquiry into these mat-
ters can avoid an air of scepticism as to the stability or

The Portion of the Scientist i8i

finality of some one or other among the received articles
of institutional furniture. An inquiry into the nature
and causes, the working and the outcome, of this institu-
tional apparatus, will disturb the habitual convictions
and preconceptions on which they rest, even if the out-
come of the inquiry should bear no colour of iconoclasm ;
unless, indeed, the inquirer were so fortunate as to start
with an inalienable presumption that the received convic-
tions on these matters need no inquiry and are eternally
right and good ; in which case he does best to rest content
at his point of departure. Scepticism is the beginning of
science. Herein lies the difference between homiletical
exposition and scientific inquiry.

Now, on these matters of habit and convention, moral-
ity and religion, law and order — matters which intimately
touch the community's accepted scheme of life — all men
have convictions; sentimental convictions to which they
adhere with an instinctive tenacity, and any disturbance
of which they resent as a violation of fundamental truth.
These institutions of society are made up of the habits of
thought of the people who live under them. The consen-
sus of the unlearned, or unscientific, as regards the scien-
tific validity of inquiries which touch these matters means
little else than the collective expressions of a jealous
orthodoxy with respect to the articles of the current
social creed. One who purports to be a scientist in this
field can gain popular approval of his scientific capacity,
particularly the businessmen's approval, only by accept-
ing and confirming current convictions regarding those
elements of the accepted scheme of life with which his
science is occupied. Any inquiry which does not lead to
corroboration of the opinions in vogue among the un-
learned is condemned as being spurious and dangerously
wrong-headed; whereas an unbiassed inquiry into these

1 82 The Higher Learning

things, of course, neither confirms nor disputes the scheme
of things into which it inquires. And so, at the best, it
falls into the same class with the fabled Alexandrine
books that either agreed with the Koran or disagreed
with it, and were therefore either idle or sacrilegious.

Within this field, vulgar sentiment will tolerate a scep-
tical or non-committal attitude toward vulgar convic-
tions only as regards the decorative furnishings, not as
regards the substance of the views arrived at. Some
slight play of hazardous phrases about the fringe of the
institutional fabric may be tolerated by the popular taste,
as an element of spice, and as indicating a generous and
unbiassed mind; but in such cases the conclusive test of
scientific competency and leadership, in the popular ap-
prehension, is a serene and magniloquent return to the
orthodox commonplaces, after all such playful excursions.
In fact, substantially nothing but homiletics and wool-
gathering will pass popular muster as science in this con-
nection.

So it comes about that the men who are by common no-
toriety held to be the leaders in this field of learning, and
who therefore are likely to be thrown up by official
preferment, are such as enlarge on the commonplace and
aphoristic wisdom of the laity. Not that the official sanc-
tion falls unfailingly on the paragons of mediocrity ; there
are many and illustrious exceptions, a fair proportion of
whom would be illustrious even without the official sanc-
tion; and in this connection it is in place to recall that
business principles have not hitherto held undivided and
sovereign dominion in this province, and that there is even
reason to believe that they are not yet coming fully into
their own.

These putative leaders of science referred to are, in the
common rim of cases, not men with whom the science will

The Portion of the Scientist 183

have to count ; but by virtue of their eligiblity as academic
spokesmen of the science, they are men with whom their
contemporaries in the science will have to count. As is
shown by the experience of the past, they are likely to be
well forgotten by the generation that follows them, but
they are, perforce, equally well remembered by their con-
temporaries. It is not the long-term serviceability of
these official scientists that counts toward their availability
for academic leadership, but their popular prestige. They
may not be such leaders as the science needs, but they are
such exponents of opinion as are believed to commend
themselves to the tastes of the well-to-do laity. A cita-
tion of instances would seem invidious, nor, presumably,
is it called for. The anecdotal history of contemporary
events is particularly full at this juncture; while to out-
siders who are not in a position to appreciate either the
urgency or the subtlety of the motives of academic ex-
pediency in this bearing, a recital of illustrative instances
might seem either libellous or farcical. The exigencies of
competitive academic enterprise, especially in its relation
to the maintenance and increase of endowment, place the
executive in a very delicate position in this matter and
leave little room for squeamish deliberation.

At the risk of tedium, it is necessary to push the analy-
sis of businesslike motives and their bearing a step farther
at this point. It is not simply the vulgar, commonplace
convictions of the populace that must receive considera-
tion in this field of the moral and social sciences, — in-
cluding such matters as religion, sociology, economics, and
political science, so-called. What is especially to be con-
ciliated by the official scientists is the current range of
convictions on all these heads among those well-to-do
classes from whom the institution hopes to draw contri-

184 The Higher Learning

butions to its endowment, on the one hand, and the more
reputable part of its undergraduate clientele, on the other
hand. Which comes, broadly, to saying that a jealous
eye must be had to the views and prepossessions preva-
lent among the respectable, conservative middle class;
with a particular regard to that more select body of sub-
stantial citizens who have the disposal of accumulated
wealth. This select and substantial element are on the
whole more conservative, more old-fashioned in their
views of what is right, good and true, and hold their views
on more archaic grounds of conviction, than the general-
ity of the vulgar. And within this conservative body,
again, it is the elderly representatives of the old order that
are chiefly to be considered, — since it is the honourable
custom among men of large means not to give largely to
institutions of learning until late in life.

It is to be accounted one of the meritorious customs
of the greater businessmen that, one with another, they
eventually convert a share of their takings to the installa-
tion of schools and similar establishments designed to
serve and to conserve the amenities of civilized life.
Usually it is in later life, or as an act of leave-taking, that
this munificence is exercised. Usually, too, the great men
who put forth this large munificence do not hamper their
bounty with many restrictions on the character of the en-
lightenment which it is to serve. Indeed, there is in this
respect a certain large modesty and continence custom-
arily associated with the large donations. But like other
men of force and thoughtfulness, the large and elderly
businessmen have well-assured convictions and prefer-
ences; and as is the case with other men of the passing
generation, so with the superannuated businessmen, their
convictions and preferences fall out on the side of the
old order rather than contrariwise. A wise academic

The Portion of the Scientist 185

policy, conducted by an executive looking to the fiscal
interests of the university, will aim not to alienate the
affections of the large businessmen of a ripe age, by har-
bouring specialists whose inquires are likely to traverse
these old-settled convictions in the social, economic, po-
litical, or religious domain. It is bad business policy to
create unnecessary annoyance. So it comes about that
the habitual munificence of the captains of industry who
have reached their term will have grave consequences for
that range of academic science that is occupied with mat-
ters on which they hold convictions.*

There results a genial endeavour to keep step with the
moribund captains of industry and the relicts of the
wealthy dead. Remotely by force of a worldly-wise ap-
pointing power, proximately by force of the good taste
and sober sense of well-chosen incumbents, something of
filial piety comes to pervade the academic handling of
those institutional phenomena that touch the sentiments of
the passing generation. Hence it comes that current
academic work in the province of the social, political, and
economic sciences, as well as in the sciences that touch
the religious interest, has a larger reputation for assur-
ance and dignity than for an incisive canvassing of the
available material.

Critics of the latterday university policies have from
time to time called attention to an apparent reluctance on
the part of these academic scientists to encounter present-
day facts hand-to-hand, or to trace out the causes to which

i**He was a trusted and efficient employe of an institution
made possible and maintained by men of great wealth, men who
not only live on the interest of their money, but who expend
millions in the endowment of colleges and universities in which
enthusiastic young educators . . . find lucrative and honourable
employment." — Editorial on the dismissal of Dr. Nearing, in
the Minneapolis Journal, August 11, 1915.

1 86 The Higher Learning ^

current conditions are due. Distempered critics have
even alleged that the academic leaders in the social sci-
ences are held under some constraint, as being, in some
sort, in the pay of the well-to-do conservative element;
that they are thereby incapacitated from following up any
inquiry to its logical conclusion, in case the conclusion
might appear to traverse the interest or the opinions of
those on whom these leaders are in this way pecuniarily
dependent.

Now, it may be conceded without violence to notorious
facts, that these official leaders of science do commonly
reach conclusions innocuous to the existing law and order,
particularly with respect to religion, ownership, and the
distribution of wealth. But this need imply no constraint,
nor even any peculiar degree of tact, much less a moral
obliquity. It may confidently be asserted, without fear
of contradiction from their side, that the official leaders
in this province of academic research and indoctrination
are, commonly, in no way hindered from pushing their re-
searches with full freedom and to the limit of their ca-
pacity ; and that they are likewise free to give the fullest
expression to any conclusions or convictions to which
their inquiries may carry them. That they are able to do
so is a fortunate circimistance, due to the fact that their
intellectual horizon is bounded by the same limits of com-
monplace insight and preconceptions as are the prevail-
ing opinions of the conservative middle class. That is to
say, a large and aggressive mediocrity is the prime quali-
fication for a leader of science in these lines, if his leader-
ship is to gain academic authentication.

All this may seem too much like loose generality.
With a view to such precision as the case admits, it may
be remarked that this province of academic science as
habitually pursued, is commonly occupied with questions

The Portion of the Scientist 187

of what ought to be done, rather than with theories of the
genesis and causation of the present-day state of things,
or with questions as to what the present-day drift of
things may be, as determined by the causes at work. As
it does in popular speculation, so also in this academic
quasi-science, the interest centres on what ought to be
done to improve conditions and to conserve those usages
and conventions that have by habit been imbedded in the
received scheme of use and wont, and so have come to be
found good and right. It is of the essence of popular
speculations on this range of topics that they are f ocussed
on questions of use; that they are of a teleological order;
that they look to the expediency of the observed facts and
to their exploitation, rather than to a scientific explana-
tion of them. This attitude, of course, is the attitude of
expediency and homiletics, not of scientific inquiry.

A single illustrative instance of the prevalence of this
animus in the academic social sciences may be in place.
It is usual among economists, e. g., to make much of the
proposition that economics is an " art " — the art of ex-
pedient management of the material means of life ; and
further that the justification of economic theory lies in
its serviceability in this respect. Such a quasi-science
necessarily takes the current situation for granted as a
permanent state of things; to be corrected and brought
back into its normal routine in case of aberration, and to
be safeguarded with apologetic defence at points where
it is not working to the satisfaction of all parties. It is
a " science " of complaisant interpretations, apologies, and
projected remedies.

The academic leaders in such a quasi-science should be
gifted with the aspirations and limitations that so show up
in its pursuit. Their fitness in respect of this conformity
to the known middle-class animus and apprehension of

l88 The Higher Learning

truth may, as it expediently should, be considered when
their selection for academic office and rank is under ad-
visement; but, provided the choice be a wise one, there
need be no shadow of constraint during their incumbency.
The incumbent should be endowed with a large capacity
for work, particularly for " administrative " work, with
a lively and enduring interest in the " practical " questions
that fall within his academic jurisdiction, and with a
shrewd sense of the fundamental rightness of the existing
order of things, social, economic, political, and religious.
So, by and large, it will be found that these accredited
leaders of scientific inquiry are fortunate enough not nar-
rowly to scrutinize, or to seek particular explanation of,
those institutional facts which the conservative common
sense of the elderly businessman accepts as good and
final; and since their field of inquiry is precisely this range
of institutional facts, the consequence is that their leader-
ship in the science conduces more to the stability of opin-
ions than to the advancement of knowledge.

The result is by no means that nothing is accomplished
in this field of science under this leadership of forceful
mediocrity, but only that, in so far as this leadership de-
cides, the work done lies on this level of mediocrity. In-
deed, the volume of work done is large and of substantial
value, but it runs chiefly on compilation of details and on
the scrutiny and interpretation of these details with a
view to their conformity with the approved generaliza-
tions of the day before yesterday, — generalizations that
had time to grow into aphoristic commonplaces at a date
before the passing generation of businessmen attained
their majority.

What has just been said of this academic leadership in
the social sciences, of course, applies only with due qualifi-
cation. It applies only in so far as the principles of com-

The Portion of the Scientist 189

petitive enterprise control the selection of the personnel,
and even then only with exceptions. There is no inten-
tion to depreciate the work of those many eminent schol-
ars, of scientific animus and intellectual grasp, whose en-
deavours are given to this range of inquiry. Its applica-
tion, indeed, is intended to reach no farther than may
serve to cover the somewhat tactful and quietistic attitude
of the moral sciences in the universities. As they are
cultivated in the great seminaries of learning, these sci-
ences are commonly of a somewhat more archaic com-
plexion than the contemporary material sciences; they
are less iconoclastic, have a greater regard for prescriptive
authority and authenticity, are more given to rest their
inquiry on grounds of expediency, as contrasted with
grounds of cause and effect. They are content to con-
clude that such and such events are expedient or inexpedi-
ent, quite as often and as easily as that such are the causes
or the genetic sequence of the phenomena under discus-
sion. In short, under this official leadership these sciences
will have an attitude toward their subject of inquiry re-
sembling that taken by the material sciences something
like a century ago.

To the credit of this academic leadership in the social
sciences, then, it should be said that both the leaders and
their disciples apply themselves with admirable spirit to
these inquiries into the proper, expedient, and normal
course of events ; and that the conclusions arrived at also
shed much salutary light on what is proper, expedient,
and normal in these premises. Inquiries carried on in this
spirit in the field of human institutions belong, of course,
in the category of worldly wisdom rather than of science.
" Practical " questions occupy these scientists in great
part, and practical, or utilitarian, considerations guide the
course of the inquiry and shape the system of generaliza-

IQO The Higher Learning

tions in these sciences, to a much greater extent than in
the material sciences with which they are here contrasted.
An alert sense of the practical value of their inquiries and
their teaching is one of the chief requisites for official
recognition in the scientists who occupy themselves with
these matters, and it is one of the chief characteristics of
their work. So that, in so far as it all conforms to the
principles of competitive business, the line of demarca-
tion between worldly wisdom and theoretical validity be-
comes peculiarly indistinct in this province of science.
And, it may be remarked by the way, the influence of this
academic science, both in its discipline and in its tenets,
appears to be wholly salutary ; it conduces, on the whole,
to a safe and sane, if not an enthusiastic, acceptance of
things as they are, without undue curiosity as to why they
are such.

What has here been said of the place and use of the
scientist under the current regime of competitive enter-
prise describes what should follow from the unrestrained
dominion of business principles in academic policy, rather
than what has actually been accomplished in any concrete
case ; it presents an ideal situation rather than a relation
of events, though without losing touch with current facts
at any point. The run of the facts is, in effect, a com-
promise between the scholar's ideals and those of busi-
ness, in such a way that the ideals of scholarship are
yielding ground, in an uncertain and var)ring degree, be-
fore the pressure of businesslike exigencies.

CHAPTER VII

Vocational Training

In this latterday academic enterprise, that looks so
shrewdly to practical expediency, '* vocational training "
has, quite as a matter of course, become a conspicuous
feature. The adjective is a new one, installed expressly
to designate this line of endeavour, in the jargon of the
educators ; and it carries a note of euphemism. " Voca-
tional training " is training for proficiency in some gainful
occupation, and it has no connection with the higher learn-
ing, beyond that juxtaposition given it by the inclusion
of vocational schools in the same corporation with the
university ; and its spokesmen in the university establish-
ments accordingly take an apologetically aggressive at-
titude in advocating its claims. Educational enterprise of
this kind has, somewhat incontinently, extended the scope
of the corporation of learning by creating, " annexing," or
" affiliating " many establishments that properly lie out-
side the academic field and deal with matters foreign to
the academic interest, — fitting schools, high-schools, tech-
nological, manual and other training schools for mechan-
ical, engineering and other industrial pursuits, profes-
sional schools of divers kinds, music schools, art schools,
summer schools, schools of " domestic science," " domestic
economy," "home economics" (in short, housekeeping),
schools for the special training of secondary-school teach-
ers, and even schools that are avowedly of primary grade ;
while a variety of " university extension " bureaux have

191

192 The Higher Learning

also been installed, to comfort and edify the unlearned
with lycenm lectures, to dispense erudition by mail-order,
and to maintain some putative contact with amateur
scholars and dilettanti beyond the pale.

On its face, this enterprise in assorted education simu-
lates the precedents given by the larger modem business
coalitions, which frequently bring under one general busi-
ness management a considerable number and variety of
industrial plants. Doubtless a boyish imitation of such
business enterprise has had its share in the propagation of
these educational excursions. It all has an histrionic
air, such as would suggest that its use, at least in good
part, might be to serve as an outlet for the ambition and
energies of an executive gifted with a penchant for large
and difficult undertakings, and with scant insight into the
needs and opportunities of a corporation of the higher
learning, and who might therefore be carried off his scho-
lastic footing by the glamour of the exploits of the trust-
makers. No doubt, the histrionic proclivities of the ex-
ecutive, backed by a similar sensibility to dramatic effect
on the part of their staff and of the governing boards,
must be held accountable for much of this headlong pro-
pensity to do many other things half-way rather than do
the work well that is already in hand. But this visible
histrionic sensibility, and the glamour of great deeds, will
by no means wholly account for current university enter-
prise along this line; not even when there is added the
urgent competitive need of a show of magnitude, such as
besets all the universities; nor do these several lines of
motivation account for the particular direction so taken
by these excursions in partes infidelium. At the same
time, reasons of scholarship or science plainly have no
part in the movement.

Apart from such executive weakness for spectacular

Vocational Training 193

magnitude, and the competitive need of formidable statis-
tics, the prime mover in the case is presumably the cur-
rent unreflecting propensity to make much of all things
that bear the signature of the " practical." These various
projections of university enterprise uniformly make some
plausible claim of that nature. Any extension of the cor-
poration's activity can be more readily effected, is ac-
cepted more as an expedient matter of course, if it prom-
ises to have such a " practical " value. " Practical " in
this connection means useful for private gain; it need
imply nothing in the way of serviceability to the common
good.

The same spirit shows itself also in a ceaseless revision
of the schedule of instruction offered by the collegiate or
undergraduate division as such, where it leads to a mul-
tiplication of courses designed to give or to lead up to
vocational training. So that practical instruction, in the
sense indicated, is continually thrown more into the fore-
ground in the courses offered, as well as in the solicitude
of the various administrative boards, bureaux and com-
mittees that have to do with the organization and man-
agement of the academic machinery.

As has already been remarked, these directive boards,
committees, and chiefs of bureau are chosen, in great part,
for their businesslike efficiency, because they are good
office-men, with " executive ability " ; and the animus of
these academic businessmen, by so much, becomes the
guiding spirit of the corporation of learning, and through
their control it acts intimately and pervasively to order
the scope and method of academic instruction. This
permeation of the university's everyday activity by the
principles of competitive business is less visible to out-
siders than the various lines of extraneous enterprise al-
ready spoken of, but it touches the work within the uni-

194 The Higher Learning

versity proper even more radically and insistently; al-
though, it is true, it affects the collegiate (undergraduate)
instruction more immediately than what is fairly to be
classed as university work. The consequences are plain.
Business proficiency is put in the place of learning. It is
said by advocates of this move that learning is hereby
given a more practical bent ; which is substantially a con-
tradiction in terms. It is a case not of assimilation, but
of displacement and substitution, garnished with circum-
locution of a more or less ingenuous kind.

Historically, in point of derivation and early growth,
this movement for vocational training is closely related to
the American system of "electives" in college instruc-
tion, if it may not rather be said to be a direct outgrowth
of that pedagogical expedient.^ It dates back approxi-
mately to the same period for its beginnings, and much

^"Our professors in the Harvard of the '50s were a set of
rather eminent scholars and highly respectable men. They at-
tended to their studies with commendable assiduity and drudged
along in a dreary, humdrum sort of way in a stereotyped method
of classroom instruction. . . .

" And that was the Harvard system. It remains in essence the
system still — the old, outgrown, pedagogic relation of the large
class-recitation room. The only variation has been through
Eliot's effort to replace it by the yet more pernicious system of
premature specialization. This is a confusion of the college and
university functions and constitutes a distinct menace to all true
higher education. The function of the college is an all-around
development, as a basis for university specializations. Eliot
never grasped that fundamental fact, and so he undertook to
turn Harvard college into a German university — specializing the
student at 18. He instituted a system of one-sided contact in
place of a system based on no contact at all. It is devoutly to
be hoped that, some day, a glimmer of true light will effect an
entrance into the professional educator's head. It certainly
hadn't done so up to 1906."— Charles Francis Adams, An Auto-
biography.

Vocational Training 195

of the arguments adduced in its favour are substantially
the same as have been found convincing for the system
of electives. Under the elective system a considerable
and increasing freedom has been allowed the student in
the choice of what he will include in his curriculum; so
that the colleges have in this way come to refer the choice
of topics in good part to the guidance of the student's
own interest. To meet the resulting range and diversity
of demands, an increasing variety of courses has been
offered, at the same time that a narrower specialization
has also taken effect in much of the instruction offered.
Among the other leadings of interest among students, and
affecting their choice of electives, has also been the laud-
able practical interest that these young men take in their
own prospective material success.^ So that this-;— aca-
demically speaking, extraneous — interest has come to
mingle and take rank with the scholarly interests proper
in shaping the schedule of instruction. A decisive voice
in the ordering of the affairs of the higher learning has
so been given to the novices, or rather to the untutored
probationers of the undergraduate schools, whose en-
trance on a career of scholarship is yet a matter of specu-
lative probability at the best.

Those who have spoken for an extensive range of
electives have in a very appreciable measure made use of
that expedient as a means of displacing what they have
regarded as obsolete or dispensable items in the tradi-
tional college curriculum. In so advocating a wider range
and freedom of choice, they have spoken for the new
courses of instruction as being equally competent with the
old in point of discipline and cultural value; and they
have commonly not omitted to claim — somewhat in the

^ The college student's interest in his studies has shifted from
the footing of an avocation to that of a vocation.

tg6 The Higher Learning

way of an obiter dictum, perhaps — that these newer and
more vital topics, whose claims they advocate, have also
the peculiar merit of conducing in a special degree to good
citizenship and the material welfare of the community.
Such a line of argument has found immediate response
among those pragmatic spirits within whose horizon
" value " is synonymous with " pecuniary value," and to
whom good citizenship means proficiency in competitive
business. So it has come about that, while the initial
purpose of the elective system appears to have been the
sharpening of the students' scholarly interests and the
cultivation of a more liberal scholarship, it has by force
of circumstances served to propagate a movement at cross
purposes with all scholarly aspiration.

All this advocacy of the practical in education has
fallen in with the aspirations of such young men as are
eager to find gratuitous help toward a gainful career,
as well as with the desires of parents who are anxious
to see their sons equipped for material success; and not
least has it appealed to the sensibilities of those substan-
tial citizens who are already established in business and
feel the need of a free supply of trained subordinates at
reasonable wages. The last mentioned is the more sub-
stantial of these incentives to gratuitous vocational train-
ing, coming in, as it does, with the endorsement of the
community's most respected and most influential men.
Whether it is training in any of the various lines of en-
gineering, in commerce, in journalism, or in the mechanic
and manual trades, the output of trained men from these
vocational schools goes, in the main, to supply trained
employes for concerns already profitably established in
such lines of business as find use for this class of men;
and through the gratuitous, or half gratuitous, oppor-
tunities offered by these schools, this needed supply of

Vocational Training 197

trained employes comes to the business concerns in ques-
tion at a rate of wages lower than what they would have
to pay in the absence of such gratuitous instruction.

Not that these substantial citizens, whose word counts
for so much in commendation of practical education, need
be greatly moved by selfish consideration of this increased
ease in procuring skilled labour for use in their own pur-
suit of gain ; but the increased and cheaper supply of such
skilled workmen is " good for business," and, in the com-
monsense estimation of these conservative businessmen,
what is good for business is good, without reservation.
What is good for business is felt to be serviceable for
the common good; and no closer scrutiny is commonly
given to that matter. While any closer scrutiny would
doubtless throw serious doubt on this general proposition,
such scrutiny can not but be distasteful to the successful
businessmen; since it would unavoidably also throw a
shadow of doubt on the meritoriousness of that business
traffic in which they have achieved their success and to
which they owe their preferential standing in the com-
munity.

In this high rating of things practical the captains of
industry are also substantially at one with the current
common-sense aw^rd of the vulgar, so that their advocacy
of practical education carries the weight of a self-evident
principle. It is true, in the long run and on sober re-
flection the award of civilized common sense runs to the
effect that knowledge is more to be desired than things
of price ; but at the same time the superficial and transient
workday sense of daily needs — the " snap judgment " of
the vulgar — driven by the hard usage of competitive
bread-winning, says that a gainful occupation is the first
requisite of human life; and accepting it without much
question as the first requisite, the vulgar allow it un-

198 The Higher Learning

critically to stand as the chief or sole and that is worth
an effort. And in so doing they are not so far out of
their bearings ; for to the common man, under the com-
petitive system, there is but a scant margin of energy or
interest left over and disposable for other ends after the
instant needs of bread-winning have been met.

Proficiency and singlemindedness in the pursuit of pri-
vate gain is something that can readily be appreciated by
all men who have had the usual training given by the
modern system of competitive gain and competitive spend-
ing. Nothing is so instantly recognized as being of great
urgency, always and everywhere, under this modern, pe-
cuniary scheme of things. So that, without reflection and
as a matter of course, the first and gravest question of any
general bearing in any connection has come to be that
classic of worldly wisdom: What profiteth it a man?
and the answer is, just as uncritically, sought in terms of
pecuniary gain. And the men to whom has been en-
trusted the custody of that cultural heritage of mankind
that can not be bought with a price, make haste to play
up to this snap judgment of the vulgar, and so keep them
from calling to mind, on second thought, what it is that
they, after all, value more highly than the means of com-
petitive spending.

Concomitant with this growing insistence on vocational
training in the schools, and with this restless endeavour
of the academic authorities to gratify the demand, there
has also come an increasing habitual inclination of the
same uncritical character among academic men to value
all academic work in terms of livelihood or of earning
capacity.^ The question has been asked, more and more

1 So, e.g., in the later eighties, at the time when the confusion
of sentiments in this matter of electives and practical academic
instruction was reaching its height, one of the most largel)r en-

Vocational Training 199

urgently and openly, What is the use of all this knowl-
edge?^

Pushed by this popular prejudice, and themselves also
drifting under compulsion of the same prevalent bias,
even the seasoned scholars and scientists — Matthew Ar-
nold's "Remnant" — have taken to heart this question
of the use of the higher learning in the pursuit of gain.
Of course it has no such use, and the many shrewdly
devised solutions of the conundrum have necessarily run
out in a string of sophistical dialectics. The place of
disinterested knowledge in modern civilization is neither
that of a means to private gain, nor that of an inter-
mediate step in " the roundabout process of the produc-
tion of goods."

As a motto for the scholars' craft, Scientia pecuniae
ancillans is nowise more seemly than the Schoolmen's
Philosophia theologiae ancillans.^ Yet such inroads have
pecuniary habits of valuation made even within the pre-
cincts of the corporation of learning, that university men,

dowed of the late-founded universities set out avowedly to bend
its forces singly to such instruction as would make for the mate-
rial success of its students; and, moreover, to accomplish this
end by an untrammelled system of electives, limited only by the
general qualification that all instruction offered was to be of
this pragmatic character. The establishment in question, it may
be added, has in the course of years run a somewhat inglorious
career, regard being had to its unexampled opportunities, and
has in the event come to much the same footing of compromise
between learning and vocational training, routine and electives,
as its contemporaries that have approached their present am-
biguous position from the contrary direction; except that, pos-
sibly, scholarship as such is still held in slightly lower esteem
among the men of this faculty — selected on grounds of their
practical bias — than among the generality of academic men.
^ " And why the sea is boiling hot,
And whether pigs have wings."
3 Cf . Adam Smith on the *' idle curiosity.** Moral Sentiments,
1st cd., p. 351 — , csp. 355.

200 The Higher Learning

— and even the scholarly ones among them, — are no more
than half ashamed of such a parcel of fatuity. And rela-
tively few among university executives have not, within
the past few years, taken occasion to plead the merits of
academic training as a business proposition. The man
of the world — that is to say, of the business world —
puts the question. What is the use of this learning? and
the men who speak for learning, and even the scholars
occupied with the " humanities," are at pains to find some
colourable answer that shall satisfy the worldly-wise that
this learning for which they speak is in some way useful
for pecuniary gain.^

If he were not himself infected with the pragmatism of
the market-place, the scholar's answer would have to be •
Get thee behind me !

Benjamin Franklin — high-bred pragmatist that he was

— once put away such a question with the rejoinder:
What is the use of a baby? To civilized men — with the
equivocal exception of the warlike politicians — this latter
question seems foolish, criminally foolish. But there
once was a time, in the high days of barbarism, when
thoughtful men were ready to canvass that question with
as naive a gravity as this other question, of the use of
learning, is canvassed by the substantial citizens of the
present day. At the period covered by that chapter in an-
cient history, a child was, in a way, an article of equip-
ment for the up-keep of the family and its prestige, and

^ So, a man eminent as a scholar and in the social sciences
has said, not so long ago: "The first question I would ask is,
has not this learning a large part to play in supplementing those
practical powers, instincts and sympathies which can be developed
only in action, only through experience ? . . . That broader train-
ing is just what is needed by the higher and more responsible
ranks of business, both private and public. . . . Success in large
trading has always needed breadth of view."

Vocational Training ^Oi

more remotely for the support of the sovereign and his
prestige. So that a male child would be rated as indubi-
tably worth while if he gave promise of growing into a
robust and contentious man. If the infant were a girl, or
if he gave no promise of becoming an effective disturber
of the peace, the use or expediency of rearing the child
would become a matter for deliberation ; and not infre-
quently the finding of those old-time utilitarians was ad-
verse, and the investment was cancelled. The habit of so
deliberating on the pragmatic advisability of child-life has
been lost, latterly; or at any rate such of the latterday
utilitarians as may still entertain a question of this kind in
any concrete case are ashamed to have it spoken of
nakedly. Witness the lame but irrepressible sentimental
protest against the Malthusian doctrine of population.

It is true, in out-of-the-way corners and on the lower
levels — and on the higher levels of imperial politics —
where men have not learned to shrink from shameful
devices, the question of children and of the birth-rate is
still sometimes debated as a question of the presumptive
use of offspring for some ulterior end. And there may
still be found those who are touched by the reflection that
a child born may become a valuable asset as a support
for the parents' old age. Such a pecuniary rating of the
parental relation, which values children as a speculative
means of gain, may still be met with. But wherever
modern civilization has made its way at all effectually,
such a provident rating of offspring is not met with in
good company. Latterday common sense does not coun-
tenance it.

Not that a question of expediency is no longer enter-
tained, touching this matter of children, but it is no longer
the patriarchal-barbarian question as to eventual gains
that may be expected to accrue to the parent or the

202 The Higher Learning

family. Except in the view of those statesmen of the
barbarian line who see the matter of birth-rate from the
higher ground of dynastic politics, a child born is not
rated as a means, but as an end. At least conventionally,
it is no longer a question of pecuniary gain for the parent
but of expediency for the child. No mother asks her-
self if her child will pay.

Civilized men shrink from anything like rating children
as a contrivance for use in the " round-about process of
the production of goods." And in much the same spirit,
and in the last analysis on much the same grounds, al-
though in a less secure and more loosely speculative fash-
ion, men also look to the higher learning as the ripe fulfil-
ment of material competency, rather than as a means to
material success. In their thoughtful intervals, the most
businesslike pragmatists will avow such an ideal. But in
workday detail, when the question turns concretely on the
advisability of the higher education, the workday habit
of pecuniary traffic asserts itself, and the matter is then
likely to be argued in pecuniary terms. The barbarian
animus, habitual to the quest of gain, reverts, and the de-
liberation turns on the gainfulness of this education,
which has in all sobriety been acknowledged the due end
of culture and endeavour. So that, in working out the
details, this end of living is made a means, and the means
is made an end.

No doubt, what chiefly urges men to the pursuit of
knowledge is their native bent of curiosity, — an impulsive
proclivity to master the logic of facts; just as the chief
incentive to the achievement of children has, no doubt,
always been the parental bent. But very much as the
boorish element in the present and recent generations will
let the pecuniary use of children come in as a large sub-
sidiary ground of decision, and as they have even avowed

Vocational Training 203

this to be their chief concern in the matter ; so, in a like
spirit, men trained to the business system of competitive
gain and competitive spending will not be content to find
that they can afford the quest of that knowledge which
their human propensity incites them to cultivate, but they
must back this propensity with a shamefaced apology for
education on the plea of its gainfulness.

What is here said of the businesslike spirit of the latter-
day "educators" is not to be taken as reflecting dis-
paragingly on them or their endeavours. They respond
to the call of the times as best they can. That they do so,
and that fhe call of the times is of this character, is a
fact of the current drift of things; which one may com-
mend or deprecate according as one has the fortune to
fall in with one or the other side of the case ; that is to say
according to one's habitual bent ; but in any event it is to
be taken as a fact of the latterday situation, and a factor
of some force and permanence in the drift of things
academic, for the present and the calculable future. It
means a more or less effectual further diversion of inter-
est and support from science and scholarship to the com-
petitive acquisition of wealth, and therefore also to it3
competitive consumption. Through such a diversion of
energy and attention in the schools, the pecuniary animus
at large, and pecuniary standards of worth and value,
stand to gain, more or less, at the cost of those other vir-
tues that are, by the accepted tradition of modem Chris-
tendom, held to be of graver and more enduring import.
It means an endeavour to substitute the pursuit of gain
and expenditure in place of the pursuit of knowledge, as
the focus of interest and the objective end in the modern
intellectual life.

This incursion of pecuniary ideals in academic policy

204 The Higher Learning

is seen at its broadest and baldest in the Schools of Com-
merce, — " Commerce and Politics," " Business Training,"
" Commerce and Administration," " Commerce and
Finance," or whatever may be the phrase selected to desig-
nate the supersession of learning by worldly wisdom.
Facility in competitive business is to take the place of
scholarship, as the goal of university training, because, it
is alleged, the former is the more useful. The ruling in-
terest of Christendom, in this view, is pecuniary gain.
And training for commercial management stands to this
ruling interest of the modern community in a relation
analogous to that in which theology and homiletics stood
to the ruling interest in those earlier times when the sal-
vation of men's souls was the prime object of solicitude.
Such a seminary of business has something of a sacer-
dotal dignity. It is the appointed keeper of the higher
business animus.^

Such a school, with its corps of instructors and its
equipment, stands in the university on a tenure similar
to that of the divinity school. Both schools are equally
extraneous to that " intellectual enterprise " in behalf of
which, ostensibly, the university is maintained. But while
the divinity school belongs to the old order and is losing

1 Of., e. g., Report of a Conference on Commercial Education
and Business Progress: In connection with the dedication of
the Commerce Building, at the University of Illinois, 191 3. The
somewhat raucous note of self-complacency that pervades this
characteristic document should not be allowed to lessen its value
as evidence of the spirit for which it speaks. Indeed, whatever
it may show, of effrontery and disingenuousness, is rather to be
taken as .of the essence of the case. It might prove difficult to
find an equally unabashed pronouncement of the like volume and
consistency put forth under the like academic auspices; but it
does by no means stand alone, and' its perfections should not be
counted against it.

Vocational Training 205

its preferential hold on the corporation of learning, the
school of commerce belongs to the new order and is gain-
ing ground. The primacy among pragmatic interests has
passed from religion to business, and the school of com-
merce is the exponent and expositor of this primacy.
It is the perfect flower of the secularization of the uni-
versities. And as has already been remarked above, there
is also a wide-sweeping movement afoot to bend the or-
dinary curriculum of the higher schools to the service of
this cult of business principles, and so to make the or-
dinary instruction converge to the advancement of busi-
ness enterprise, very much as it was once dutifully ar-
ranged that the higher instruction should be subservient
to religious teaching and consonant with the demands of
devout observances and creeds.

It is not that the College of Commerce stands alone as
the exponent of worldly wisdom in the modern univer-
sities; nor is its position in this respect singular, except
in the degree of its remoteness from all properly academic
interests. Other training schools, as in engineering and
in the other professions, belong under the same general
category of practical aims, as contrasted with the aims of
the higher learning. But the College of Commerce stands
out pre-eminent among these various training schools in
two respects : (a) While the great proportion of train-
ing for the other professions draws largely on the results
of modern science for ways and means, and therefore in-
cludes or presumes a degree of familiarity with the work,
aims and methods of the sciences, so that these schools
have so much of a bond of community with the higher
learning, the school of commerce on the other hand need
scarcely take cognizance of the achievements of science,
nor need it presume any degree of acquaintance on the

2o6 The Higher Learning

part of its students or adepts with the matter or logic of
the sciences;^ (b) in varying degrees, the proficiency
given by training in the other professional schools, and
required for the efficient pursuit of the other professions,
may be serviceable to the community at large; whereas
the business proficiency inculcated by the schools of com-
merce has no such serviceability, being directed singly to
a facile command of the ways and means of private gain.^

^ This characterization applies without abatement to the schools
of commerce as commonly designed at their foundation and set
forth in their public announcements, and to their work in so far
as they live up to their professions. At the same time it is to
be noted that few of these schools successfully keep their work
clear of all entanglement with theoretical discussions that have
only a scientific bearing. And it is also quite feasible to organize
a "school of commerce" on lines of scientific inquiry, with the
avowed purpose of dealing with business enterprise in its various
ramifications as subject matter of theoretical investigation; but
such is not the avowed aim of the established schools of this
class, and such is not the actual character of the work carried on
in these schools, except by inadvertence.

2 It is doubtless within the mark to say that the training given
by the American schools of commerce is detrimental to the com-
munity's material interests. In America, even in a more pro-
nounced degree than elsewhere, business management centres on
financiering and salesmanship ; and American commercial schools,
even in a more pronounced degree than those of other countries,
centre their attention on proficiency in these matters, because
these are the matters which the common sense of the American
business community knows how to value, and on which it insists
as indispensable qualifications in its young men. The besetting
infirmity of the American business community, as witness the
many and circumstantial disclosures of the " efficiency engineers,"
and of others who have had occasion to speak of the matter, is
a notable indifference to the economical and mechanically efficient
use, exploitation and conservation of equipment and resources,
coupled with an equally notable want of insight into the tech-
nological needs and possibilities of the industries which they con-
trol. The typical American businessman watches the industrial
process from ambush, with a view to the seizure of any item
of value that may be left at loose ends. .Business strategy is a

Vocational Training 207

The training that leads up to the several other profes-
sions, of course, varies greatly in respect of its draught on
scientific information, as well as in the degree of its serv-
iceability to the community ; some of the professions, as,
e. g.. Law, approach very cloce to the character of busi-
ness training, both in the unscientific and unscholarly
nature of the required training and in their uselessness
to the community; while others, as, e.g., Medicine and
the various lines of engineering, differ widely from com-
mercial training in both of these respects. With the main
exception of Law (and, some would add, of Divinity?)
the professional schools train men for work that is of

strategy of "watchful waiting," at the centre of a web; very
alert and adroit, but remarkably incompetent in the way of any-
thing that can properly be called " industrial enterprise."

The concatenation of circumstances that has brought American
business enterprise to this inglorious posture, and has virtually
engrossed the direction of business affairs in the hands of men
endowed with the spiritual and intellectual traits suitable to such
prehensile enterprise, can not be gone into here. The fact,
however, is patent. It should suffice to call to mind the large
fact, as notorious as it is discreditable, that the American busi-
ness community has, with unexampled freedom, had at its dis-
posal the largest and best body of resources that has yet become
available to modern industry, in men, materials and geographical
situation, and that with these. means they have achieved some-
thing doubtfully second-rate, as compared with the industrial
achievements of other countries less fortunately placed in all
material respects.

What the schools of commerce now offer is further specializa-
tion along the same line of proficiency, to give increased facility
in financiering and salesmanship. This specialization on com-
merce is like other specialization in that it draws off attention
and interest from other lines than those in which the specializa-
tion falls; thereby widening the candidate's field of ignorance
while it intensifies his effectiveness within his specialty. The
effect, as touches the community's interest in the matter, should
be an enhancement of the candidate's proficiency in all the futile
ways and means of salesmanship and " conspiracy in restraint of
trade," together with a heightened incapacity and ignorance
bearing on such work as is of material use.

2o8 The Higher Learning

some substantial use to the community at large. This is
particularly true of the technological schools. But while
the technological schools may be occupied with work that
is of substantial use, and while they may draw more or
less extensively on the sciences for their materials and
even for their methods, they can not, for all that, claim
standing in the university on the ground of that disin-
terested intellectual enterprise which is the university's
peculiar domain.

The professional knowledge and skill of physicians,
surgeons, dentists, pharmacists, agriculturists, engineers
of all kinds, perhaps even of journalists, is of some use
to the community at large, at the same time that it may be
profitable to the bearers of it. The community has a sub-
stantial interest in the adequate training of these men,
although it is not that intellectual interest that attaches
to science and scholarship. But such is not the case with
the training designed to give proficiency in business. No
gain comes to the community at large from increasing the
business proficiency of any number of its young men.
There are already much too many of these businessmen,
much too astute and proficient in their calling, for the
common good. A higher average business efficiency sim-
ply raises activity and avidity in business to a higher
average pitch of skill and fervour, with very little other
material result than a redistribution of ownership; since
business is occupied with the competitive acquisition of
wealth, not with its production. It is only by a euphemis-
tic metaphor that we are accustomed to speak of the busi-
nessmen as producers of goods. Gains due to such effi-
ciency are differential gains only. They are a differential
as against other businessmen on the one hand, and as
against the rest of the community on the other hand.
The work of the College of Commerce, accordingly, is a

Vocational Training 209

peculiarly futile line of endeavour for any public institu-
tion, in that it serves neither the intellectual advancement
nor the material welfare of the community.

The greater the number and the higher the proficiency
of the community's businessmen, other things equal, the
worse must the rest of the community come off in that
game of skilled bargaining and shrewd management by
which the businessmen get their gains. Gratuitous or
partly gratuitous training for business will presumably
increase the number of highly proficient businessmen.
As the old-fashioned economists would express it, it will
increase the number of " middlemen," of men who " live
by their wits." At the same time it should presumably
increase the average efficiency of this increased number.
The outcome should be that the resulting body of busi-
nessmen will be able, between them, to secure a larger
proportion of the aggregate wealth of the community;
leaving the rest of the community poorer by that much, —
except for that (extremely doubtful) amount by which
shrewd business management is likely to increase the ma-
terial wealth-producing capacity of the community. Any
such presumed increase, of wealth-producing capacity is
an incidental concomitant of business traffic, and in the
nature of the case it can not equal the aggregate increased
gain that goes to the businessmen. At the best the ques-
tion, as to the effect which such an aggregate increased
business efficiency will have on the community's material
welfare is a question of how large the net loss will be;
that it will entail a net loss on the community at large is
in fact not an open question.

A college of commerce is designed to serve an emu-
lative purpose only — individual gain regardless of, or at
the cost of, the community at large — and it is, therefore,
peculiarly incompatible with the collective cultural pur-

2IO The Higher Learning

pose of the university. It belongs in the corporation of
learning no more than a department of athletics.^ Botli
alike give training that is of no use to the community, —
except, perhaps, as a sentimental excitement Neither
business proficiency nor proficiency in athletic contests
need be decried, of course. They have their value, to the
businessmen and to the athletes, respectively, chiefly as a
means of livelihood at the cost of the rest of the com-
munity, and it is to be presumed that they are worth while
to those who go in for that sort of thing. Both alike are
related to the legitimate ends of the university as a drain
on its resources and an impairment of its scholarly ani-
mus. As related to the ostensible purposes of a uni-
versity, therefore, the support and conduct of such schools
at the expense of the tmiversities is to be construed as a
breach of trust.

What has just been said of the schools of commerce is,
of course, true also of the other training schools, com-

^ Latterly, it appears, the training given by the athletic estab-
lishments attached to the universities is also coming to have a
value as vocational training; in that the men so trained and
vouched for by these establishments are finding lucrative em-
plo3rment as instructors, coaches, masseurs, etc., engaged in simi-
lar athletic traffic in various schools, public or private. So also,
and for the same reason, they are found eligible as '^ muscular
Christian" secretaries in charge of chapters of the Y. M. C. A.
and the like quasi-devout clubs and gilds. Indeed in all but the
name, the athletic establishments are taking on the character of
" schools " or " divisions " included under the collective aca-
demic administration, very much after tfie fashion of a " School
of Education" or a "School of Journalism"; and they are in
effect "graduating" students in Athletics, with due, though
hitherto unofficial, certification of proficiency. So also, latterly,
one meets with proposals, made in good faith, among official
academic men to allow due "academic credit" for training in
athletics and let it count toward graduation. By indirection
and subreption, of course, much of the training given in athletics
already does so count.

Vocational Training '211

prised in this latterday university policy, in the degree in
which these others aim at the like emulative and unschol-
arly results. It holds true of the law schools, e. g., typi-
cally and more largely than^ of the generality of profes-
sional and technical schools. Both in point of the purely
competitive value of their training and of the unscientific
character of their work, the law schools are in very much
the same case as the schools of commerce ; and, no doubt,
the accepted inclusion of law schools in the university
corporation has made the intrusion of the schools of com-
merce much easier than it otherwise would have been.
The law school's inclusion in the university corporation
has the countenance of ancient tradition, it comes down
as an authentic usage from the mediaeval era of European
education, and from the pre-history of the American uni-
versities. But in point of substantial merit the law school
belongs in the modern university no more than a school
of fencing or dancing. This is particularly true of the
American law schools, in which the Austinian conception
of law is followed, and it is more particularly true the
more consistently the "case method" is adhered to.
These schools devote themselves with great singleness to
the training of practitioners, as distinct from jurists ; and
their teachers stand in a relation to their students analo-
gous to that in which the " coaches " stand to the athletes.
What is had in view is the exigencies, expedients and
strategy of successful practice ; and not so much a grasp
of even those quasi-scientific articles of metaphysics that
lie at the root of the legal system. What is required and
inculcated in the way of a knowledge of these elements of
law is a familiarity with their strategic use.

The profession of the Law is, of course, an honourable
profession, and it is doubtless believed by its apologists to
be a useful profession, on the whole; but a body of law-

212 The Higher Learning

yers somewhat less numerous, and with a lower average
proficiency in legal subtleties and expedients, would un-
questionably be quite as serviceable to the community at
large as a larger number of such men with a higher effi-
ciency ; at the same time they would be less costly, both as
to initial cost and as to the expenses of maintenance that
come of that excessive volume and retardation of litiga-
tion due to an extreme facility in legal technique on the
part of the members of the bar.

It will also be found true that both the schools of law
and those of commerce, and in a less degree the other
vocational schools, serve the advantage of one class as
against another. In the measure in which these schools
accomplish what they aim at, they increase the advantage
of such men as already have some advantage over the
common run. The instruction is half-way gratuitous;
that is the purpose of placing these schools on a founda-
tion or maintaining them at the public expense. It is
presumed to be worth more than its cost to the students.
The fees and other incidental expenses do not nearly
cover the cost of the schools ; otherwise no foundation or
support from the public funds would be required, and the
universities would have no colourable excuse for going
into this field. But even if the instruction and facilities
offered by these schools are virtually gratuitous, yet the
fees and incidental expenses, together with the expendi-
ture of time and the cost of living required for a residence
at the schools, make up so considerable an item of ex-
pense as effectually to exclude the majority of those
young men who might otherwise be inclined to avail
themselves of these advantages. In effect, none can af-
ford the time and expense of this business training,
whether in Commerce, Law, or the other professions, ex-
cept those who are already possessed of something more

\l

Vocational Training 213

than the average wealth or average income; and none,
presumably, take kindly to this training, in commerce or
law, e. g., except those who already have something more
than the average taste and aptitude for business traffic,
or who have a promising " opening " of this character in
sight. So that this training that is designed to serve the
private advantage of commercial students is, for the
greater part, extended to a select body of young men ; only
such applicants being eligible, in effect, as do not 6n any
showing need this gratuity.

In proportion to the work which it undertakes, the Col-
lege of Commerce is — or it would be if it lived up to its
professions — the most expensive branch of the univer-
sity corporation. In this connection the case of the law
school offers a significant object-lesson of what to expect
in the further growth of the schools of commerce. The
law school is of older standing and maturer growth, at
the same time that its aims and circumstances are of
much the same general character as those that condition
the schools of commerce; and it is therefore to be taken
as indicating something of what must be looked for in
the college of commerce if it is to do the work for which
it is established. The indications, then, are (a) that the
instruction in the field of commercial training may be ex-
pected gradually to fall into a more rigidly drawn curri-
culum, which will discard all irrelevant theoretical ex-
cursions and will diverge more and more widely from the
ways of scientific inquiry, in proportion as experience
and tactful organization bring the school to a maturer in-
sight into its purposes and a more consistent adherence
to its chief purpose of training expert men for the higher
business practice; and (b) that the personnel of its staff
must increasingly be drawn from among the successful
businessmen, rather than from men of academic training.

■e

214 The Higher Learning

Among the immediate consequences of this latter fea-
ture, as shown in the example of the law schools, is a
relatively high cost The schedule of salaries in the law
schools attached to the universities, e. g., runs appreciably
higher than in the university proper; the reason being, of
course, that men suitable efficiently to serve as instructors
and directive officials in a school of law are almost neces-
sarily men whose services in the practice of the law would
command a high rate of pay. What is needed in the law
school (as in the school of commerce) is men who are
practically conversant with the ways and means of earning
large fees, — that being the point of it all. Indeed, the
scale of pay which their services will command in the open
market is the chief and ordinary test of their fitness for
the work of instruction. The salaries paid these men of
affairs, who have so been diverted to the service of the
schools, is commonly some multiple of the salary assigned
to men of a comparable ability and attainments in the
academic work proper. The academic rank assigned
them is also necessarily, and for the like reason, com-
mensurate with their higher scale of pay; all of which
throws an undue preponderance of discretion and author-
ity into the hands of these men of affairs, and so intro-
duces a disproportionate bias in favour of unscientific
and unscholarly aims and ideals in the university at large.

Judged by the example of the law schools, then, the
college of commerce, if it is to live and thrive, may be
counted on to divert a much larger body of funds from
legitimate university uses, and to create more of a bias
hostile to scholarly and scientific work in the academic
body, than the mere numerical showing of its staff would
suggest. It is fairly to be expected that capable men of
affairs, drawn from the traffic of successful business for
this service, will require even a higher rate of pay, at

Vocational Training 215

the same time that they will be even more cordially out
of sympathy with the ideals of scholarship, than the per-
sonnel of the law schools. Such will necessarily be the
outcome, if these schools are at all effectually to serve the
purpose for which they are created.

But for the present, as matters stand now, near the in-
ception of this enterprise in training masters of gain,
such an outcome has not been reached. Neither have
the schools of commerce yet been placed on such a foot-
ing of expensiveness and authoritative discretion as the
high sanction of the quest of gain would seem properly
to assign them ; nor are they, as at present organized and
equipped, at all eminently fit to carry out the work en-
trusted to their care. Commonly, it is to be admitted, the
men selected for the staff are men of some academic
training, rather than men of affairs who have shown
evidence of fitness to give counsel and instruction, by emi-
nently gainful success in business. They are, indeed,
commonly men of moderate rating in the academic com-
munity, and are vested with a moderate rank and author-
ity ; and the emoluments of these offices are also such as
attach to positions of a middling g^ade in academic work,
instead of being comparable with the gains that come to
capable men engaged in the large business outside. Yet
it is from among these higher grades of expert business-
men outside that the schools of commerce must draw
their staff of instructors and their administrative officers
if they are to accomplish the task proposed to them.
A movement in this direction is already visibly setting
in.

It is reasonably to be expected that one or the other
result should follow : either the college of commerce must
remain, somewhat as in practice it now is, something in
the way of an academic division, with an academic

2i6 The Higher Learning

routine and standards, and with an unfulfilled ambition to
serve the higher needs of business training ; with a poorly
paid staff of nondescript academic men, not peculiarly
fitted to lead their students into the straight and narrow
way of business success, nor yet eminently equipped for
a theoretical inquiry into the phenomena of business traf-
fic and their underlying causes so that the school will con-
tinue to stand, in effect, as a more or less pedantic and
equivocal adjunct of a department of economics; or the
schools must be endowed and organized with a larger and
stricter regard to the needs of the higher business traffic ;
with a personnel composed of men of the highest business
talent and attainments, tempted from such successful busi-
ness traffic by the offer of salaries comparable with those
paid the responsible officials of large corporations engaged
in banking, railroading, and industrial enterprises, — and
they must also be fitted out with an equipment of a cor-
responding magnitude and liberality.

Apart from a large and costly material equipment, such
a college would also, under current conditions, have to be
provided with a virtually unlimited fund for travelling
expenses, to carry its staff and its students to the several
typical seats and centres of business traffic and maintain
them there for that requisite personal contact with affairs
that alone can contribute to a practical comprehension of
business strategy. In short, the schools would have to
meet those requirements of training and information
which men who today aim to prepare themselves for the
larger business will commonly spend expensive years of
apprenticeship to acquire. It is eminently true in business
training, very much as it is in military strategy, that noth-
ing will take the place of first-hand observation and per-
sonal contact with the processes and procedure involved ;
and such first-hand contact is to be had only at the cost

\

Vocational Training 217

of a more or less protracted stay where the various lines
of business are carried on.

The creation and maintenance of such a College of
Commerce, on such a scale as will make it anything more
than a dubious make-believe, would manifestly appear to
be beyond the powers of any existing university. So that
the best that can be compassed in this way, or that has
been achieved, by the means at the disposal of any uni-
versity hitherto, is a cross between a secondary school
for bank-clerks and traveUing salesmen and a subsidiary
department of economics.

All this applies with gradually lessened force to the
other vocational schools, occupied with training for occu-
pations that are of more substantial use to the community
and less widely out of touch with the higher learning.
In the light of their professions on the one side and the
degree of their fulfilment on the other, it would be
hazardous to guess how far the university directorate in
any given case is animated with a spontaneous zeal for the
furtherance of these " practical " aims which the universi-
ties so pursue, and how far on the other hand it may be
a matter of politic management, to bring content to those
commercially-minded laymen whose good-will is rated as
a valuable asset. These men of substance have a high
appreciation of business efficiency — a species of self-
respect, and therefore held as a point of honour — and
are consequently inclined to rate all education in terms of
eaming-capacity. Failure to meet the presumed wishes
of the businessmen in this matter, it is apprehended,
would mean a loss of support in endowment and enrol-
ment. And since endowment and enrolment, being the
chief elements of visible success, are the two main ends
of current academic policy, it is incumbent on the director-
ate to shape their policy accordingly.

2i8 The Higher Learning

So the academic authorities face the choice between
scholarly efficiency and vocational training, and hitherto
the result has been equivocal. The directorate should pre-
sumably be in a position to appreciate the drift of their
own action, in so diverting the university's work to ends
at variance with its legitimate purpose ; and the effect of
such a policy should presumably be repugnant to their
scholarly tastes, as well as to their sense of right and
honest living. But the circumstances of their office and
tenure leave them somewhat helpless, for all their pre-
sumed insight and their aversion to this malpractice ; and
these conditions of office require them, as it is commonly
apprehended, to take active measures for the defeat of
learning, — hitherto with an equivocal outcome. The
schools of commerce, even more than the other vocational
schools, have been managed somewhat parsimoniously,
and the effectual results have habitually fallen far short
of the clever promises held out in the prospectus. The
professed purpose of these schools is the training of
young men to a high proficiency in the larger and more
responsible affairs of business, but for the present this
purpose must apparently remain a speculative, and very
temperately ingenuous, aspiration, rather than a prac-
ticable working programme.

CHAPTER VIII

Summary and Trial Balance

As in earlier passages, so here in speaking of profit and
loss, the point of view taken is neither that of material
advantage, whether of the individuals concerned or of
the community at large, nor that of expediency for the
common good in respect of prosperity or of morals ; nor
is the appraisal here ventured upon to be taken as an
expression of praise or dispraise at large, touching this
incursion of business principles into the affairs of learn-
ing.

By and large, the intrusion of businesslike ideals, aims
and methods into this field, with all the consequences that
follow, may be commendable or the reverse. All that is
matter for attention and advisement at the hands of such
as aim to alter, improve, amend or conserve the run of
institutional phenomena that goes to make up the current
situation. The present inquiry bears on the higher learn-
ing as it comes into this current situation, and on the ef-
fect of this recourse to business principles upon the pur-
suit of learning.

Not that this learning is therefore to be taken as neces-
sarily of higher and more substantial value than that
traffic in competitive gain and competitive spending upon
which business principles converge, and in which they
find their consummate expression, — even though it is
broadly to be recognized and taken account of that such
is the deliberate appraisal awarded by the common sense

219

220 The Higher Learning

of civilized mankind. The profit and loss here spoken
for is not profit and loss, to mankind or to any given com-
munity, in respect of that inclusive complex of interests
that makes up the balanced total of good and ill; it is
profit and loss for the cause of learning, simply ; and there
is here no aspiration to pass on ulterior questions. As
required by the exigencies of such an argument, it is
therefore assumed, pro forma, that profit and loss for the
pursuit of learning is profit and loss without reservation ;
very much as a corporation accountant will audit income
and outlay within the affairs of the corporation, whereas,
qua accountant, he will perforce have nothing to say as
to the ulterior expediency of the corporation and its af-
fairs in any other bearing.

Business principles take effect in academic affairs most
simply, obviously and avowably in the way of a business-
like administration of the scholastic routine; where they
lead immediately to a bureaucratic organization and a sys-
tem of scholastic accountancy. In one form or another,
some such administrative machinery is a necessity in any
large school that is to be managed on a centralized plan ;
as the American schools commonly are, and as, more
particularly, they aim to be. This necessity is all the
more urgent in a school that takes over the discipline of
a large body of pupils that have not reached years of dis-
cretion, as is also commonly the case with those American
schools that claim rank as universities ; and the necessity
is all the more evident to men whose ideal of efficiency
is the centralized control exercised through a system of
accountancy in the modern large business concerns. The
larger American schools are primarily undergraduate es-

Summary and Trial Balance 221

tablishments, — with negligible exceptions ; and under
these current American conditions, of excessive numbers,
such a centralized and bureaucratic administration appears
to be indispensable for the adequate control of immature
and reluctant students ; at the same time, such an organi-
zation conduces to an excessive size. The immediate and
visible effect of such a large and centralized administra-
tive machinery is, on the whole, detrimental to scholar-
ship, even in the undergraduate work; though it need
not be so in all respects and unequivocally, so far as re-
gards that routine training that is embodied in the under-
graduate curriculum. But it is at least a necessary evil
in any school that is of so considerable a size as to pre-
clude substantially all close or cordial personal relations
between the teachers and each of these immature pupils
under their charge, as, again, is commonly the case with
these American undergraduate establishments. Such a
system of authoritative control, standardization, grada-
tion, accountancy, classification, credits and penalties, will
necessarily be drawn on stricter lines the more the school
takes on the character of a house of correction or a penal
settlement; in which the irresponsible inmates are to be
held to a round of distasteful tasks and restrained from
(conventionally) excessive irregularities of conduct. At
the same time this recourse to such coercive control and
standardization of tasks has unavoidably given the schools
something of the character of a penal settlement.

As intimated above, the ideal of efficiency by force of
which a large-scale centralized organization commends it-
self in these premises is that pattern of shrewd manage-
ment whereby a large business concern makes money.
The underlying business-like presumption accordingly ap-
pears to be that learning is a merchantable commodity, to
be produced on a piece-rate plan, rated, bought and sold

222 The Higher Learning

by standard units, measured, counted and reduced to staple
equivalence by impersonal, mechanical tests. In all its
bearings the work is hereby reduced to a mechanistic,
statistical consistency, with numerical standards and
units ; which conduces to perfunctory and mediocre work
throughout, and acts to deter both students and teachers
from a free pursuit of knowledge, as contrasted with the
pursuit of academic credits. So far as this mechanistic
system goes freely into effect it leads to a substitution of
salesmanlike proficiency — a balancing of bargains in
staple credits — in the place of scientific capacity and ad-
diction to study.

The salesmanlike abilities and the men of aflfairs that
so are drawn into the academic personnel are, presumably,
somewhat under grade in their kind ; since the pecuniary
inducement offered by the schools is rather low as com-
pared with the remuneration for office work of a similar
character in the common run of business occupations, and
since businesslike employes of this kind may fairly be
presumed to go unreservedly to the highest bidder. Yet
these more unscholarly members of the staff will neces-
sarily be assigned the more responsible and discretionary
positions in the academic organization; since under such
a scheme of standardization, accountancy and control, the
school becomes primarily a bureaucratic organization, and
the first and unremitting duties of the staff are those
of official management and accountancy. The further
qualifications requisite in the members of the academic
staff will be such as make for vendibility, — volubility,
tactful effrontery, conspicuous conformity to the popular
taste in all matters of opinion, usage and conventions.

The need of such a businesslike organization asserts
itself in somewhat the same degree in which the academic
policy is guided by considerations of magnitude and sta-

Summary and Trial Balance 22^

tistical renown ; and this in turn is somewhat closely cor-
related with the extent of discretionary power exercised
by the captain of erudition placed in control. At the
same time, by provocation of the facilities which it offers
for making an impressive demonstration, such bureaucra-
tic organization will lead the university management to
bend its energies with somewhat more singleness to the
parade of magnitude and statistical gains. It also, and
in the same connection, provokes to a persistent and de-
tailed surveillance and direction of the work and manner
of life of the academic staff, and so it acts to shut off ini-
tiative of any kind in the work done.^
Intimately bound up with this bureaucratic officialism

^''He has stifled all manly independence and individuality
wherever it has exhibited itself at college. All noble idealism,
and all the graces of poetry and art have been shrivelled by his
brutal and triumphant power. He has made mechanical efficiency
and administrative routine the goal of the university's endeavour.
The nobler ends of academic life will never be served so long as
this spokesman of materialism remains in power."

History will relate that one of the eminent captains, through
an incumbency of more than a quarter of a century, in a uni-
versity of eminent wealth and volume, has followed a settled
policy of defeating any overt move looking to scientific or schol-
arly inquiry on the part of any member of his faculty. Should
a man of scholarly proclivities by any chance sift through the
censorship exercised in virtue of the executive's appointing
power, as might happen, since the captain was himself not quali-
fied to pass a grounded opinion on any man's qualifications in
that respect; and should he then give evidence of continuing to
spend time and thought on matters of that nature, his burden
of administrative and class-room tasks would presently be in-
creased sufficiently to subdue his wayward bent; or, in an in-
corrigible case, the offender against the rule of academic sterility
would eventually be retired by severance of his connection with
this seat of learning.

In some sinister sense the case reflects credit on the American
academic community at large, in that, by the close of this quar-
ter-century of preventive regimen, the resulting academic staff
had become a byword of nugatory intrigue and vacant pedantry.

224 The Higher Learning

and accountancy, and working consistently to a similar
outcome, is the predilection for " practical efficiency " —
that is to say, for pecuniary success — prevalent in the
American community.^ This predilection is a matter of
settled habit, due, no doubt, to the fact that preoccupation
with business interests characterizes this community in
an exceptional degree, and that pecuniary habits of
thought consequently rule popular thinking in a peculiarly
uncritical and prescriptive fashion. This pecuniary ani-
mus falls in with and reinforces the movement for aca-
demic accountancy, and combines with it to further a
so-called " practical " bias in all the work of the schools.

It appears, then, that the intrusion of business principles
in the universities goes to weaken and retard the pursuit
of learning, and therefore to defeat the ends for which a
university is maintained. This result follows, primarily,
from the substitution of impersonal, mechanical relations,
standards and tests, in the place of personal conference,
guidance and association between teachers and students;
as also from the imposition of a mechanically standardized
routine upon the members of the staff, whereby any dis-
interested preoccupation with scholarly or scientific in-
quiry is thrown into the background and falls into abey-

^ So far has this predilection made its way in the counsels of
the "educators" that much of the current discussion of desid-
eranda in academic policy reads like controversial argument on
"efficiency engineering," — an "efficiency engineer" is an ac-
countant competent to advise business concerns how best to in-
crease their saleable output per unit of cost. And there has,
indeed, been at least one tour of inspection of American uni-
versities by such an " efficiency engineer," undertaken in the serv-
ice of an establishment founded with a view to academic welfare
and governed by a board of university presidents. The report
submitted by the inquiry in question duly conforms to the cus-
tomary lines of " scientific management."

Summary and Trial Balance 225

ance. Few if any who are competent to speak in these
premises will question that such has been the outcome.
To offset against this work of mutilation and retardation
there are certain gains in expedition, and in the volume
of traffic that can be carried by any given equipment and
corps of employes. Particularly will there be a gain in
the statistical showing, both as regards the volume of
instruction offered, and probably also as regards the en-
rolment; since accountancy creates statistics and its ab-
sence does not.

Such increased enrolment as may be due to bustinesslike
management and methods is an increase of undergraduate
enrolment. The net effect as regards the graduate enrol-
ment — apart from any vocational instruction that may
euphemistically be scheduled as " graduate " — is in all
probability rather a decrease than an increase. Through
indoctrination with utilitarian (pecuniary) ideals of earn-
ing and spending, as well as by engendering spendthrift
and sportsmanlike habits, such a businesslike manage-
ment diverts the undergraduate students from going in
for the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, and so from
entering on what is properly university work; as witness
the relatively slight proportion of graduate students —
outside of the professional schools — who come up from
the excessively large undergraduate departments of the
more expansive universities, as contrasted with the num-
ber of those who come into university work from the
smaller and less businesslike colleges.

The ulterior consequences that follow from such busi-
nesslike standardization and bureaucratic efficiency are
evident in the current state of the public schools; espe-
cially as seen in the lai^ger towns, where the principles of
business management have had time and scope to work
out in a fair degree of consistency. The resulting

226 The Higher Learning

abomination of desolation is sufficiently notorious. And
there appears to be no reason why a similarly stale rou-
tine of futility should not overtake the universities, and
give similarly foolish results, as fast as the system of
standardization, accountancy and piece-work goes con-
sistently into effect, — except only for the continued en-
forced employment of a modicum of impracticable schol-
ars and scientists on the academic staff, whose unbusi-
nesslike scholarly proclivities and inability to keep the
miner's-inch of scholastic credit always in mind, must in
some measure always defeat the perfect working of
standardization and accountancy.

As might be expected, this regime of graduated steril-
ity has already made fair headway in the undergraduate
work, especially in the larger undergraduate schools;
and this in spite of any efforts on the part of the admin-
istration to hedge against such an outcome by recourse to
an intricate system of electives and a wide diversification
of the standard units of erudition so offered.

In the graduate work the like effect is only less visible,
because the measures leading to it have come into bear-
ing more recently, and hitherto less unreservedly. But
the like results should follow here also, just so fast and
so far as the same range of business principles come to
be worked into the texture of the university organization
in the same efficacious manner as they have already taken
effect in the public schools. And, pushed on as it is by
the progressive substitution of men imbued with the
tastes and habits of practical affairs, in the place of un-
practical scholarly ideals, the movement toward a per-
functory routine of mediocrity should logically be ex-
pected to go forward at a progressively accelerated rate.
The visible drift of things in this respect in the academic
pursuit of the social sciences, so-called, is an argument

Summary and Trial Balance 227

as to what may be hoped for in the domain of academic
science at large. It is only that the executive is actuated
by a sharper solicitude to keep the academic establish-
ment blameless of anything like innovation or iconoclasm
at this point ; which reinforces the drift toward a mecha-
nistic routine and a curtailment of inquiry in this field;
it is not that these sciences that deal with the phenomena
of human life lend themselves more readily to mechanical
description and enumeration than the material sciences
do, nor is their subject matter intrinsically more inert or
less provocative of questions.

II

Throughout the above summary review, as also through
the foregoing inquiry, the argument continually returns
to or turns about two main interests, — notoriety and the
academic executive. These two might be called the two
foci about which swings the orbit of the university world.
These conjugate foci lie on a reasonably short axis; in-
deed, they tend to coincide ; so that the orbit comes near
the perfection of a circle; having virtually but a single
centre, which may perhaps indifferently be spoken of as
the university's president or as its renown, according as
one may incline to conceive these matters in terms of
tangible fact or of intangible.

The system of standardization and accountancy has this
renown or prestige as its chief ulterior purpose, — the
prestige of the university or of its president, which largely
comes to the same net result. Particularly will this be
true in so far as this organization is designed to serve
competitive ends; which are, in academic affairs, chiefly
the ends of notoriety, prestige, advertising in all its
branches and bearings. It is through increased credi-

228 The Higher Learning

table notoriety that the universities seek their competi-
tive ends, and it is on such increase of notoriety, accord-
ingly, that the competitive endeavours of a businesslike
management are chiefly spent. It is in and through such
accession of renown, therefore, that the chief and most
tangible gains due to the injection of competitive business
principles in the academic policy should appear.

Of course, this renown, as such, has no substantial
value to the corporation of learning; nor, indeed, to any
one but the university executive by whose management it
is achieved. Taken simply in its first incidence, as
prestige or notoriety, it conduces in no degree to the pur-
suit of knowledge; but in its ulterior consequences, it
appears currently to be believed, at least ostensibly, that
such notoriety must greatly enhance the powers of the
corporation of learning. These ulterior consequences are
(believed to be), a growth in the material resources and
the volume of traffic.

Such good effects as may follow from a sedulous at-
tention to creditable publicity, therefore, are the chief
gains to be set off against the mischief incident to " sci-
entific management" in academic affairs. Hence any
line of inquiry into the business management of the uni-
versities continually leads back to the cares of publicity,
with what might to an outsider seem undue insistence.
The reason is that the businesslike management and ar-
rangements in question are habitually — and primarily —
required either to serve the ends of this competitive cam-
paign of publicity or to conform to its schedule of expe-
diency. The felt need of notoriety and prestige has a
main share in shaping the work and bearing of the uni-
versity at every point. Whatever will not serve this
end of prestige has no secure footing in current univer-
sity policy. The margin of tolerance on this head is

Summary and Trial Balance 229

quite narrow ; and it is apparently growing incontinently
narrower.

So far as any university administration can, with the
requisite dignity, permit itself to avow a pursuit of noto-
riety, the gain that is avowedly sought by its means is
an increase of funds, — more or less ingenuously spoken
of as an increase of equipment. An increased enrolment
of students will be no less eagerly sought after, but the
received canons of academic decency require this object
to be kept even more discreetly masked than the quest of
funds.

The duties of publicity are large and arduous, and the
expenditures incurred in this behalf are similarly con-
siderable. So that it is not unusual to find a Publicity
Bureau — often apologetically masquerading under a less
tell-tale name — incorporated in the university organiza-
tion to fiuther this enterprise in reputable notoriety.
Not only must a creditable publicity be provided for, as
one of the running cares of the administration, but every
feature of academic life, and of the life of all members of
the academic staff, must unremittingly (though of course
unavowedly) be held under surveillance at every turn,
with a view to furthering whatever may yield a repu-
table notoriety, and to correcting or eliminating whatever
may be conceived to have a doubtful or untoward bear-
ing in this respect.

This surveillance of appearances, and of the means of
propagating appearances, is perhaps the most exacting
detail of duty incumbent on an enterprising executive.
Without such a painstaking cultivation of a reputable
notoriety, it is believed, a due share of funds could not
be procured by any imiversity for the prosecution of its
work as a seminary of the higher learning. Its more
alert and unabashed rivals, it is prestuned, would in that

230 The Higher Learning

case be able to divert the flow of loose funds to their own
use, and would so outstrip their dilatory competitor in
the race for size and popular acclaim, and therefore, it
is sought to be believed, in scientific and scholarly appli-
cation.

In the absence of all reflection — not an uncommon
frame of mind in this connection — one might be tempted
to think that all this academic enterprise of notoriety and
conciliation should add something appreciable to the ag-
gregate of funds placed at the disposal of the universi-
ties ; and that each of these competitive advertising con-
cerns should so gain something appreciable, without
thereby cutting into the supply of funds available for the
rest. But such is probably not the outcome, t6 any ap-
preciable extent ; assuredly not apart from the case of the
state universities that are dependent on the favour of
local politicians, and perhaps apart from gifts for con-
spicuous buildings.

With whatever (slight) reservation may be due, public-
ity in university management is of substantially the same
nature and effect as advertising in other competitive busi-
ness; and with such reservation as may be called for in
the case of other advertising, it is an engine of competi-
tion, and has no aggregate effect. As is true of competi-
tive gains in business at large, so also these differential
gains of the several university corporations can not be
added together to make an aggregate. They are differen-
tial gains in the main, of the same nature as the gains
achieved in any other game of skill and effrontery. The
gross aggregate funds contributed to university uses
from all sources would in all probability be nearly as large
in the absence of such competitive notoriety and con-
formity. Indeed, it should seem likely that such donors
as are gifted with suflicient sense of the value of science

Summary and Trial Balance 231

and scholarship to find it worth while to sink any part
of their capital in that behalf would be somewhat de-
terred by the spectacle of competitive waste and futile
clamour presented by this academic enterprise; so that
the outcome might as well be a diminution of the gross
aggregate of donations and allowances. But such an
argument doubtless runs on very precarious grounds; it
is by no means evident that these munificent patrons of
learning habitually distinguish between scholarship and
publicity. But in any case it is quite safe to presume
that to the cause of learning at large, and therefore to
the community in respect of its interest in the advance-
ment of learning, no appreciable net gain accrues from
this competitive publicity of the seats of learning.

In some slight, or doubtful, degree this competitive
publicity, including academic pageants, genteel solemni-
ties, and the like, may conceivably augment the gross
aggregate means placed at the disposal of the universi-
ties, by persuasively keeping the well-meaning men of
wealth constantly in mind of the university's need of
additional funds, as well as of the fact that such gifts
will not be allowed to escape due public notice. But the
aggregate increase of funds due to these endeavours is
doubtless not large enough to offset the aggregate ex-
penditure on notoriety. Taken as a whole, and counting
in all the wide-ranging expenditure entailed by this enter-
prise in notoriety and the maintenance of academic pres-
tige, university publicity doubtless costs appreciably more
than it brings. So far as it succeeds in its purpose, its
chief effect is to divert the flow of funds from one to
another of the rival establishments. In the aggregate
this expedient for procuring means for the advancement
of learning doubtless results in an appreciable net loss.

The net loss, indeed, is always much more considerable

232 The Higher Learning

than would be indicated hy snj statistical showing; for
this academic enterprise involves an extensive and almost
wholly wasteful duplication of equipment, personnel and
output of instruction, as between the rival seats of learn-
ing, at the same time that it also involves an excessively
parsimonious provision for actual scholastic work, as
contrasted with publicity; so also it involves the over-
loading of each rival corps of instructors with a hetero-
geneous schedule of courses, beyond what would conduce
to their best e£Sciency as teachers. This competitive par-
celment, duplication and surreptitious thrift, due to a
businesslike rivalry between the several schools, is per-
haps the gravest drawback to the American university
situation.

It should be added that no aggregate gain for scholar-
ship comes of diverting any given student from one
school to another duplicate establishment by specious of-
fers of a differential advantage; particularly when, as
frequently happens, the differential inducement takes the
form of the extra-scholastic amenities spoken of in an
earlier chapter, or the greater alleged prestige of one
school as against another, or, as also happens, a surrep-
titiously greater facility for achieving a given academic
degree.

In all its multifarious ways and means, university ad-
vertising carried beyond the modicum that would serve
a due " publicity of accounts " as regards the work to be
done, accomplishes no useful aggregate result. And, as
is true of advertising in other competitive business, cur-
rent university publicity is not an effective means of
spreading reliable information ; nor is it designed for that
end. Here as elsewhere, to meet the requirements of
competitive enterprise, advertising must somewhat ex-
ceed the point of maximum veracity.

Summary and Trial Balance 233

In no field of human endeavour is competitive notoriety
and a painstaking conformity to extraneous standards of
living and of conduct so gratuitous a burden, since learn-
ing is in- no degree a competitive enterprise ; and all
mandatory observance of the conventions — pecuniary or
other — is necessarily a drag on the pursuit of knowl-
edge* In ordinary competitive business, as, e.g., mer-
chandising, advertisement is a means of competitive sell-
ing, and is justified by the increased profits that come to
the successful advertiser from the increased traffic;, and
on the like grounds a painstaking conformity to conven-
tional usage, in appearances and expenditure, is there
wisely cultivated with the same end in view. In the af-
fairs of science and scholarship, simply as such and apart
from the personal ambitions of the university's execu-
tive, there is nothing that corresponds to this increased
traffic or these competitive profits,^ — nor will the dis-
cretionary officials avow that such increased traffic is the
purpose of academic publicity. Indeed, an increased en-
rolment of students yields no increased net income, nor is
the corporation of learning engaged (avowedly, at least)
in an enterprise that looks to a net income. At the same
time, such increased enrolment as comes of this competi-
tive salesmanship among the universities is made up al-
most wholly of wasters, accessions from the genteel and
sporting classes, who seek the university as a means of

1 " Education is the one kind of human enterprise that can not
be brought under the action of the economic law of supply and
demand. It can not be conducted on 'business principles.'
There is no 'demand' for education in the economic sense. . . .
Society is the only interest that can be said to demand it, and
society must supply its own demand. Those who found educa-
tional institutions or promote educational enterprise put them-
selves in the place of society and assume to speak and act for
society, not for any economic interest." — Lester F. Ward, Pure
Sociology, p. 575.

234 The Higher Learning

respectability and dissipation, and who serve the advance-
ment of the higher learning only as fire, flood and pesti-
lence serve the needs of the husbandman.

Competitive publicity, therefore, and its maid-servant
conventional observance, would appear in all this order
of things to have no serious motive, or at least none that
can freely be avowed; as witness the unwillingness of
any university administration formally to avow that it
seeks publicity or expends the corporate funds in com-
petitive advertising. So that on its face this whole aca-
demic traffic in publicity and genteel conventionalities
appears to be little else than a boyish imitation of the
ways and means employed, with shrewd purpose, in busi-
ness enterprise that has no analogy with the pursuit of
knowledge. But the aggregate yearly expenditure of the
universities on this competitive academic publicity runs
well up into the millions, and it involves also an extensive
diversion of the energies of the general body of academic
men to these purposes of creditable notoriety; and such
an expenditure of means and activities is not lightly to
be dismissed as an unadvised play of businesslike fancy
on the part of the university authorities.

Unquestionably, an unreflecting imitation of methods
that have been found good in retail merchandising counts
for something in the case, perhaps for much ; for the aca-
demic executives under whose surveillance this singularly
futile traffic is carried on are commonly men of common-
place intelligence and aspiration, bound by the common-
place habits of workday intercourse in a business com-
munity. The histrionic afflatus is also by no means
wanting in current university management, and when
coupled with commonplace ideals in the dramatic art its
outcome will necessarily be a tawdry, spectacular pag-
eantry and a straining after showy magnitude. There is

Summary and Trial Balance 235

also the lower motive of unreflecting clannishness on the
part of the several university establishments. This
counts for something, perhaps for more than one could
gracefully admit. It stands out perhaps most baldly in
the sentimental rivalry — somewhat factitious, it is true
• — shown at intercollegiate games and similar occasions
of invidious comparison between the different schools.
It is, of course, gratifying to the clannish conceit of any
college man to be able to hold up convincing statistical
exhibits showing the greater glory of ** his own " univer-
sity, whether in athletics, enrolment, alumni, material
equipment, or schedules of instruction ; whether he be an
official, student, alumnus, or member of the academic
staff; and all this array and circimistance will appeal to
him the more unreservedly in proportion as he is gifted
with a more vulgar sportsmanlike bent and is unmoved
by any dispassionate interest in matters of science or
scholarship ; and in proportion, also, as his habitual out-
look is that of the commonplace man of affairs. In the
uncritical eyes of the commonplace men of affairs, whose
experience in business has trained them into a quasi-
tropismatic approval of notoriety as a means of advertis-
ing, these puerile demonstrations will, of course, have a
high value simply in their own right. Sentimental chau-
vinism of this kind is a good and efficient motive to emu-
lative enterprise, as far as it goes, but even when backed
with the directorate's proclivity to businesslike make-be-
lieve, it can, after all, scarcely be made to cover the whole
voluminous traffic that must on any consistent view go in
under the head of competitive publicity.

V.

236 The Higher Learning

III

The abiding incentives to this traffic in publicity and
genteel observance must be sought elsewhere than in the
boyish emotions of rivalry and clannish elation that ani-
mates the academic staff, or even in the histrionic interest
which the members of the staff or the directorate may
have in the prestige of their own establishment. The
staff, indeed, are not in any sensible degree accountable
for this pursuit of prestige, since they have but little
discretion in these matters ; in substance, the government
of a competitive university is necessarily of an autocratic
character, whatever plausible forms of collective action
and advisement* it may be found expedient to observe.
The seat of discretion is in the directorate ; though many
details of administration may be left to the deliberations
of the staff, so long as these details do not impinge on
the directorate's scheme of policy. The impulse and ini-
tiative to this enterprise in publicity, as well as the sur-
veillance and guidance in the matter, radiates from this
centre, and it is here, presumably, that the incentives to
such enterprise are immediately felt. The immediate
discretion in the conduct of these matters rests in the
hands of the directive academic head, with the aid and
advice of his circle of personal counsellors, and with the
backing of the governing board.

The incentives that decide the policy of publicity and
guide its execution must accordingly be such as will ap-
peal directly to the sensibilities of the academic head and
of the members of the governing board ; and this applies
not only as regards the traffic in publicity by print and
public spectacles, but also as regards the diversion of the
corporation of learning to utilitarian ends, and as regards
the traffic in conventional observances and conformity to

Summary and Trial Balance 2^7

popular opinion. What these incentives may be, that so
appeal to the authorities in discretion, and that move
them to divert the universities from the pursuit of knowl-
edge, is not altogether easy to say; more particularly it
is not easy to find an explanation that shall take account
of the facts and yet reflect no discredit on the intelligence
or the good faith of these discretionary authorities.

The motives that actuate the members of the governing
boards are perhaps less obscure than those which deter-
mine the conduct of the academic executive. The gov-
erning boards are, in effect, made up of businessmen,
who do not habitually look beyond the ** practical " inter-
est of commercial gain and the commonplaces of commer-
cial routine and political bravado. It is (should be)
otherwise with the academic management, who are, by
tradition, presumed to be animated with scholarly ideals,
and whose avowed ulterior motive is in all cases the
singleminded furtherance of the cause of learning.

On its face it should not seem probable that motives of
personal gain, in the form of pecuniary or other material
interest, would have a serious part in the matter. In all
probability there is in no case a sensible pecuniary gain
to the university as such from its expenditures on pub-
licity, and there is still less question of gain in any other
than the pecuniary respect. There is also commonly no
very substantial pecuniary gain to be derived from this
business either by the academic head or by the members
of the board, — an exceptional instance to the contrary
will not vitiate this general proposition. It all brings no
appreciable pecuniary return to them, particularly so far
as it is concerned with the pursuit of prestige ; and apart
from exceptional, and therefore negligible, cases it ad-
mits of no appreciable conversion of funds to private use.
At the same time it seems almost an affront to entertain

238 The Higher Learning

the notion that these impassively purposeful men of af-
fairs are greatly moved by personal motives of vanity, —
vaingloriously seeking renown for efficiently carrying on
a traffic in publicity that has no other end than renown
for efficiently carrying it on. And yet it will be found
extremely difficult to take account of the facts and at the
same time avoid such an odiously personal interpreta-
tion of them.

Such, indeed, would have to be the inference drawn by
any one who might ingenuously take the available facts
at their face value, — not counting as facts the dutiful
protestations of the authorities to the contrary. But it
should be kept in mind that a transparent ingenuousness
is not characteristic of business phenomena, within the
university or without. A degree of deviation, or " diplo-
macy," may be forced on the academic management by
the circumstances of their office, particularly by the one-
eyed business sense of their governing boards. Indeed,
admissions to such an effect are not altogether wanting. •

Rated as they are, in the popular apprehension, as
gentlemen and scholars, and themselves presumably ac-
cepting this rating as substantially correct, no feature of
the scheme of management imposed on the academic
executive by business principles should (presumably) be
so repugnant to their sensibilities and their scholarly
judgment as this covert but unremitting pursuit of an
innocuous notoriety, coupled as it necessarily is with a
systematic misdirection of the academic forces to un-
scholarly ends; but prudential reasons will decide that
this must be their chief endeavour if they are to hold
their own as a competitive university. Should the aca-
demic head allow his sense of scholarly fitness and ex-
pediency to hamper this business of reputable notoriety,
it is, perhaps with reason, feared that such remissness

Summary and Trial Balance 239

would presently lead to his retirement from office; at
least something of that kind seems a fair inference from
the run of the facts. His place would then be supplied
by an incumbent duly qualified on this score of one-eyed
business sagacity, and one who would know how to keep
his scholarly impulses in hand. It is at least conceivable
that the apprehension of some such contii^ency may
underlie current university management at some points,
and it may therefore in some instances have given the
administration of academic affairs an air of light-headed
futility, when it should rather be credited with a saga*
ciously disingenuous yielding to circumstance.

The run of the facts as outlined aibove, and the line of
inference just indicated as following from them, reflect
no great credit on the manly qualities of the incumbents
of executive office; but the alternative, as also noted
above, is scarcely preferable even in that respect, while
it would be even less flattering to their intellectual powers.
Yet there appears to be no avoiding the dilemma so pre-
sented. Of disinterested grounds for the common run
of academic policy there seem to be only these two lines
to choose between: — either a short-sighted and head-
long conformity to the vulgar prejudice that does not look
beyond " practical " training and competitive expansion,
coupled with a boyish craving for popular display; or a
strategic compromise with the elders of the Philistines, a
futile doing of evil in the hope that some good may come
of it.

This latter line of apology is admissible only in those
cases where the university corporation is in an exception-
ally precarious position in respect of its endowment,
where it is in great need and has much to hope for in the
way of pecuniary gain through stooping to conventional
prejudices, that are of no scholastic value, but that are

240 The Higher Learning

conceived to bind its potential benefactors in a web of
fatally fragile bigotry; or, again, where the executive is
in sensible danger of being superseded by an adminis-
tration imbued with (conceivably) yet lower and feebler
scholarly ideals.

Now, it happens that there are notable instances of
universities where such a policy of obsequiously repu-
table notoriety and aimless utilitarian management is
pursued under such circumstances of settled endowment
and secure tenure as to preclude all hazard of superses-
sion on the part of the executive and all chance of mate-
rial gain from any accession of popular renown or stag-
nant respectability. There is a small class of American
university corporations that are so placed, by the peculiar
circumstances of their endowment, as to be above the
apprehension of need, so long as they are content to live
anywhere nearly within the domain of learning; at the
same time that they have nothing to lose through alienat-
ing the affections of the vulgar, and nothing to gain by
deferring to the sentimental infirmities of elderly well-
to-do persons. This class is not a numerous one; not
large enough to set the pace for the rest; but evidently
also not numerous enough to go on their own recog-
nizances, and adopt a line of policy suited to their own
circumstances and not bound to the fashion set by the
rest. Some of the well known establishments of this class
have already been alluded to in another connection.

Statistical display, spectacular stage properties, vain-
glorious make-believe and obsequious concessions to
worldly wisdom, should seem to have no place in the
counsels of these schools; which should therefore hope-
fully be counted on to pursue the quest of knowledge
with that single mind which they profess. Yet such is
eminently, not to say pre-eminently, not the case. Their

*

Summary and Trial Balance 241

policy in these matters commonly differs in no sensible
degree from that pursued by the needier establishments
that are engaged in a desperate race of obsequiousness,
for funds to be procured by favour of well-to-do donors,
or through the support of worldly-wise clergymen and
politicians. Indeed, some of the most pathetic clamour
for popular renown, as well as instances of the most
profligate stooping to vulgar prejudice, are to be credited
to establishments of this, potentially independent, class.
The management, apparently, are too well imbued with
the commonplace preconceptions of worldly wisdom afloat
among the laity, to admit of their taking any action on
their own deliberate initiative or effectually taking
thought of that pursuit of learning that has been en-
trusted to their care. So, perhaps through some puzzle-
headed sense of decorum, they have come to engage in
this bootless conventional race for funds which they
have no slightest thought of obtaining, and for an in-
creased enrolment which they advisedly do not desire.

In the light of these instances, one is constrained to
believe that the academic executive who has so been
thrown up as putative director of the pursuit of learn-
ing must go in for this annexation of vocational schools,
for amateurish " summer sessions," for the appointment
of schoolmasters instead of scholars on the academic
staff, for the safe-keeping and propagation of genteel
conventionalities at the cost of scholarship, for devout
and polite ceremonial, — one is constrained to believe that
such a university executive goes in for this policy of
tawdry routine because he lacks ordinary intelligence or
because he lacks ordinary courage. His discretion is
overborne either by his own store of unreflecting preju-
dice, or by fear of losing personal prestige among the
ignorant, even though he has no substantial ground, per-

242 The Higher Learning

sonal or official, for so yielding to current prejudice.
Such appears to be the state of the case in these instances,
where the exigencies of university politics afford no
occasion for strategic compromise with the worldly-wise ;
which pointedly suggests that the like threadbare motives
of unreflecting imitation and boyish make-believe may
also have unduly much to do with academic policy, even
in that common run of cases that might otherwise have
best been explained as an effect of shrewd strategy, de-
signed to make terms with the mischievous stupidity of
an underbred laity.

But any discussion of motives necessarily has an in-
vidious air, and so can not but be distasteful. Yet, since
this executive policy can be explained or understood only
as the outcome of those motives that appeal decisively to
the discretionary officials, it is necessary to pursue the
inquiry a degree farther at this point, even at the cost of
such slight odium as may not be avoided, and at the risk
of a certain appearance of dispraise. It is perhaps need-
less to say that this question of motivation is not gone into
here except as it may serve to exhibit the run of the facts.
The run of the facts is not intelligible except in the light
of their meaning as possible motives to the pursuit of
that policy of which they are the outcome.

On the above considerations, it follows that the execu-
tive heads of these competitive universities are a picked
body of men, endowed with a particular bent, such as will
dispose them to be guided by the run of motives indi-
cated. This will imply that they are, either by training
or by native gift, men of a somewhat peculiar frame of
mind, — peculiarly open to the appeal of parade and
ephemeral celebrity, and peculiarly facile in the choice of
means by which to achieve these gaudy distinctions;

Summary and Tried Balance 243

peculiarly solicitous of appearances, and peculiarly heed-
less of the substance of their performance. It is not
that this characterization would imply exceptionally g^eat
gifts, or otherwise notable traits of character; they are
little else than an accentuation of the more commonplace
frailties of commonplace men. As a side light on this
spiritual complexion of the t)rpical academic executive, it
may be worth noting that much the same characteriza-
tion will apply without abatement to the class of profes-
sional politicians, particularly to that large and long-
lived class of minor politicians who make a living by
keeping well in the public eye and avoiding blame.^

There is, indeed more than a superficial or accidental
resemblance between the typical academic executive and

^ Indeed, the resemblance is visible. As among professional
politicians, so also as regards incumbents and aspirants for aca-
demic office, it is not at all unusual, nor does it cause surprise,
to find such persons visibly affected with those characteristic
pathological marks that come of what is conventionally called
"high living" — late hours, unseasonable vigils, surfeit of vic-
tuals and drink, the fatigue of sedentary ennui. A flabby habit
of body, hypertrophy of the abdomen, varicose veins, particularly
of the facial tissues, a blear eye and a colouration suggestive of
bile and apoplexy, — when this unwholesome bulk is duly wrapped
in a conventionally decorous costume it is accepted rather as a
mark of weight and responsibility, and so serves to distinguish
the pillars of urbane society. Nor should it be imagined that
these grave men of affairs and discretion are in any peculiar
degree prone to excesses of the table or to nerve-shattering
bouts of dissipation. The exigencies of publicity, however, are,
by current use and wont, such as to enjoin not indulgence in
such excursions of sensual perversity, so much as a gentlemanly
conformity to a large routine of conspicuous convivialities. " In-
dulgence " in ostensibly gluttonous bouts of this kind — banquets,
dinners, etc. — is not so much a matter of taste as of astute pub-
licity, designed to keep the celebrants in repute among a laity
whose simplest and most assured award of esteem proceeds on
evidence of wasteful ability to pay. But the pathological conse-
quences, physical and otherwise, are of much the same nature in
either case.

/

244 The Higher Learning

the professional politician of the familiar and more vacant
sort, both as regards the qualifications requisite for en-
tering on this career and as regards the conditions of
tenure. Among the genial make-believe that goes to
dignify the executive office is a dutiful protest, indeed,
a somewhat clamorous protest, of conspicuous self-efface-
ment on the part of the incumbent, to the effect that the
responsibilities of office have come upon him unsought,
if not unawares; which is related to the facts in much
the same manner and degree as the like holds true for the
manoeuvres of those wise politicians that " heed the call
of duty " and so find themselves " in the hands of their
friends." In point of fact, here as in political office-
seeking, the most active factor that goes to decide the
selection of the eventual incumbents of office is a tena-
cious and aggressive self-selection. With due, but by no
means large, allowance for exceptions, the inciunbents
are chosen from among a self-selected body of candi-
dates, each of whom has, in the common run of cases,
been resolutely in pursuit of such an office for some ap-
preciable time, and has spent much time and endeavour
on fitting himself for its duties. Commonly it is only
after the aspirant has achieved a settled reputation for
eligibility and a predilection for the office that he will
finally secure an appointment. The number of aspirants,
and of eligibles, considerably exceeds the number of
such executive offices, very much as is true for the paral-
lel case of aspirants for political office.

As to the qualifications, in point of character and at-
tainments, that so go to make eligibility for the executive
office, it is necessary to recall what has been said in an
earlier chapter,^ on the characteristics of those boards
of control with whom rests the choice in these matters

1 See pp. 68-73, 79-Bi, above.

Summary and Trial Balance 245

of appointment. These boards are made up of well-
to-do businessmen, with a penchant for popular notabil-
ity; and the qualifications necessary to be put in evi-
dence by aspirants for executive office are such as will
convince such a board of their serviceability. Among the
indispensable general qualifications, therefore, will be a
" businesslike " facility in the management of affairs, an
engaging address and fluent command of language before
a popular audience, and what is called " optimism," — a
serene and voluble loyalty to the current conventionali-
ties and a conspicuously profound conviction that all
things are working out for good, except for such un-
toward details as do not visibly conduce to the vested
advantage of the well-to-do businessmen under the estab-
lished law and order. To secure an appointment to ex-
ecutive office it is not only necessary to be possessed of
these qualifications, and contrive to put them in evidence ;
the aspirant must ordinarily also, to use a colloquialism,
be willing and able to ** work his passage " by adroit
negotiation and detail engagements on points of policy,
appointments and administration.

The greater proportion of such aspirants for executive
office work their apprenticeship and manage their cam-
paign of office-seeking while engaged in some university
employment. To this end the most likely line of univer-
sity employment is such as will comprise a large share of
administrative duties, as, e.g., the deanships that are lat-
terly receiving much attention in this behalf; while of
the work of instruction the preference should be given
to such undergraduate class-work as will bring the as-
pirant in wide contact with the less scholarly element of
the student body, and with those "student activities"
that come favourably under public observation ; and more
particularly should one go in for the quasi-scholarly pur-

' •

246 The Higher Learning

suits of "university extension"; which will bring the
candidate into favourable notice among the quasi-literate
leisure class ; at the same time this employment conduces
greatly to assurance and a flow of popular speech.

It is by no means here intended to convey the assump-
tion that appointments to executive office are currently
made exclusively from among aspiring candidates an-
swering the description outlined above, or that the admin-
istrative deanships that currently abound in the univer-
sities are uniformly looked on by their incumbents as in
some sort a hopeful novitiate to the presidential dignity.
The exceptions under both of these general propositions
would be too numerous to be set aside as negligible, al-
though scarcely numerous enough or consequential
enough entirely to vitiate these propositions as a com-
petent formulation of the tjrpical line of approach to the
coveted office. The larger and more substantial excep-
tion would, of course, be taken to the generalization as
touching the use of the deanships in preparation for the
presidency.

The course of training and publicity afforded by the
deanships and extension lectures appears to be the most
promising, although it is not the only line of approach.
So, e.g., as has been remarked in an earlier passage, the
exigencies of academic administration will ordinarily
lead to the formation of an unofficially organized corps
of counsellors and agents or lieutenants, who serve as
aids to the executive head. While these aids, factors,
and gentlemen-in-waiting are vested with no official
status proclaiming their relation to the executive office or
their share in its administration, it goes without saying
that their vicarious discretion and their special preroga-
tives of access and advisement with the executive head
do not commonly remain hidden from their colleagues on

tl

Summary and Trial Balance 247

the academic staff, or from interested persons outside the
university corporation; nor, indeed, does it appear that
they commonly desire to remain unknown.

In the same connection, as has also been remarked
above, and as is sufficiently notorious, among the large
and imperative duties of executive office is public dis-
course. This is required, both as a measure of publicity
at large and as a means of divulging the ostensible aims,
advantages and peculiar merits of the given university
and its chief. The volume of such public discourse, as
well as the incident attendance at many public and cere-
monial functions, is very considerable ; so much so that in
the case of any university of reasonable size and spirit
the traffic in these premises is likely to exceed the powers
of any one man, even where, as is not infrequently the
case, the " executive " head is presently led to make this
business of stately parade and promulgation his chief
employment. In effect, much of this traffic will neces-
sarily be delegated to such representatives of the chief as
may be trusted duly to observe its spirit and intention;
and the indicated bearers of these vicarious dignities and
responsibilities will necessarily be the personal aids and
counsellors of the chief ; which throws them, again, into
public notice in a most propitious fashion.

So also, by force of the same exigencies of parade and
discourse, the chief executive is frequently called away
from home on a more or less extended itinerary ; and the
burden of dignity attached to the chief office is such as to
require that its ostensible duties be delegated to some
competent lieutenant .during these extensive absences of
the chief ; and here, again, this temporary discretion and
dignity will most wisely and fittingly be delegated to some
member of the corps orf personal aids who stands in
peculiarly close relations of sympathy and usefulness to

24& The Higher LearninCf

the chief. It has happened more than once that such ^
habitual ^* acting head " has come in for the succession
to the executive office.

It comes, therefore, to something like a general rule,
that the discipline which makes the typical xaptain of
erudition, as he is seen in the administration of executive
office, ^ill have set in before his induction into office, not
infrequently at an appreciable interval before that event,
Bnd involviag a consequent, more or less protracted, term
of novitiate, probation and preliminary seasoning; and
the aspirants so subjected to this discipline of initiation
are at the same time ficked men, drawn into the running
chiefly by force of a facile conformity and a seM-select-
ive predisposition for this official digmty.

The resulting captain of erudition then falls under a
certain exacting discipline exercised by the situation in
which the exigencies of office place him. These exi-
gencies are of divers origin, and are systematically at
variance among themselves. So "diat the dominant note
of his official life necessarily becomes that of ambiguity.
By tradition, — indeed, hy that tradition to which the
presidential office owes its existence, and except l^ force
of which thefe would apparently be no call to imtitute
such an office at all, — by tradition the president of the
university is the senior member of the faculty, its confi-
dential spokesman in official and corporate concerns, and
the "moderator" of its townmeetinglike deliberative
assemblies. As chairman of its meetings he is, by tradi-
tion, presumed to exercise no peculiar control, beyond
such guidance as the superior experience of the senior
member may be presumed to afford his colleagues. As
spokesman for the faculty he is, by tradition, presumed
to be a scholar of such erudition, breadth and maturity
as may fairly command something of filial respect and

Summary and Trial Balance 249

afffeetion from his associatSes in the corporation of Icariih
ing; 2nd it is by virtue of these qualities of schoiarlj
wisdom, wfaifli gf?e ham his. place as senior member o£ a
corporation of scholars, that he is, bj tradition^ cocn-
pefisnt ta serve as their spokesman and to occupy tiie
chair in their deHberatLve assembly.

Such is the tradition of the American College Prest*
dent, — and, in 90 far, of the university president, — as it
comes down from that earlier phase of academic fabtory
from which l^e office derives its. ostensible character, and
to which it owes; its hold on Hfe under the circtantstaAces
of ite later growth of die schools. And it will be noted
that this oftce is distinctly American ; it has no coitnteir^
part elsewhere, and there appears to be no felt need of
such an office in other countries, where no similar tradl^
lion of a college president has created a presumptive need
of a similar c^ficiat is the universities, — the reason beitig
evidently that these uaitiversitie& in other lands have tu&t,
in the typical case, growa out of an underlying collie.

In the sentimental apprehension of the laity out of
do^s, and in a degree even in the tmrefiecting esteem of
men within the academic precimcts, the preaiidenttalt oSace
still carries something of this traditionally preconceived
scholarly diaracter; and it is this still surviving tradi^
tional preconception^, which confuses induction- into the
office with sc&olarly fitness for its dignities, that still
m^es the office oi the academic executive available for
those purposes of expansive publicity and businesslike
management that it has been made to serve. Except for
this uncritfcal esteem of the crffice and its incumbency, so
surviving out of an inglorious past, no great prestige could
attach to that traffic in spectacular solemnities, edifying
discourse and misdirected business control, that makes
np the substantial duties of the office as now conducted.

250 The Higher Learning

It is therefore of the utmost moment to keep up, or
rather to magnify, that appearance of scholarly compe-
tence and of intimate solidarity with the corporation of
learning that gives the presidential office this prestige
value. But since it is only for purposes external, not to
say extraneous, to the corporation of learning that this
prestige value is seriously worth while, it is also only
toward the outside that the make-believe of presidential
erudition and scholarly ideals need seriously be kept up.
For the common run of the incumbents today to pose be-
fore their faculties as in any eminent degree conversant
with the run of contemporary science or scholarship, or
as rising to the average even of their own faculties in this
respect, would be as bootless as it is uncalled for. But
the faculties, as is well enough understood, need of course
entertain no respect for their executive head as a citizen
of the republic of learning, so long as they at all ade-
quately appreciate his discretionary power of use and
abuse, as touches them and their fortunes and all the
ways, means and opportunities of academic work. By
tradition, and in the genial legendary lore that colours
the proceedings of the faculty-meeting, he is still the
senior member of an assemblage of scholarly gentlemen ;
but in point of executive fact he is their employer, who
does business with and by them on a commercial footing.
To the faculty, the presidential office is a business propo-
sition, and its incumbent is chiefly an object of circum-
spection, to whom they owe a " hired-man's loyalty."

It is toward the outside, in the face of the laity out of
doors, that the high fence — " the eight- fold fence *' — of
scholarly pretension is to be kept up. Hence the indi-
cated means of its up-keep are such as will presumably
hold the (transient) respect and affection of this laity, —
quasi-scholarly homiletical discourse, frequent, volumi-

Summary and Tried Balance 251

nous, edifying and optimistic; ritualistic solemnities, di-
verting and vacant; spectacular affectations of (counter-
feit) scholastic usage in the way of droll vestments,
bizarre and archaic; parade of (make-believe) gentility;
encouragement and (surreptitious) subvention of athletic
contests; promulgation of (presumably ingenuous) sta-
tistics touching the volume and character of the work
done.

It is only by keeping up these manifestations toward
the outside, and making them good in the esteem of the
unlearned, that the presidential office can be made to
serve the ends of the board of control and the ambitions
of the incumbent ; and this large apparatus and traffic of
make-believe, therefore, is the first and most unremitting
object of executive solicitude. It is the " place whereon
to stand" while moving the academic universe. The
uses to be made of the standing-place so achieved have
already been set out in some detail in earlier chapters.
They centre about three main considerations: Visible
magnitude, bureaucratic organization, and vocational
training.

As already noted in earlier passages, the boards of con-
trol are bodies of businessmen in whose apprehension the
methods successfully employed in competitive business
are suitable for all purposes of administration; from
which follows that the academic head who is to serve as
their general manager is vested, in effect, with such dis-
cretionary powers as currently devolve on the discretion-
ary officials of business corporations ; from which follows,
among other things, that the members of the faculty
come to take rank as employes of the concern, hired by
and responsible to the academic head.

The first executive duty of the iqcumbent of pffice,

n

252 The Higher Learning'

therefore, is to keep his faculty under control, so as tcr Be
able unhampered to carry out the policy of magnitude
and seculiirizatron with a view to which the governing
board has invested him with his powers. This work of
putting the faculty in its place has by this time been car-
ried out with sufficient effect, so that its " advice anrf
consent '" may in all cases be taken as a matter of course;
and should a remnant of initiative and scholarly aspira-
tion show itself in any given concrete case m such a way
as to traverse the lines of policy pursued by the execu"-
tive, he can readily correct the difficulty by exercise of a
virtually plenary power of appointment, preferment and
removal, backed as this power is by a nearly indefeasibite
black-list. So well is the academic black-list understood,
indeed, and so sensitive and trustworthy is the fearsome
loyalty of the common run among academic men, that
very few among them will venture openly to say a: good
word for any one of their colleagues who may have fallen
under the displeasure of some incumbent of executive
office. This work of intimidation and subornation may
fairly be said to have acquired the force of an institution-,
and to need no current surveillance or effort.^

The subservience of the faculty, or of a working ma-
jority, may safely be counted on. But the forms of ad-
visement and responsibility are still necessary to be ob*
served ; the president is still, by tradition, the senior mem-
ber of the faculty, and its confidential spokesman. From
which follows a certain, at least pro former, disingenuous*
ness in the executive's cbercive control of academic pol-
icy, whereby the ostensible discretion and responsibiffty

lAs bearing on this "hired-man's loyalty" of the academic

staff and the means of maintaining it, see, e.g., a paper by

George Cram Cook in the Forum for October, 191^, Ga "Th«
Third American Sex," especially pp. 4$o-/|9J.

Summary and Trial Balance 253

comes to rest on the faculty, while the control remains
with the executive. But, after all, this particular run of
ambiguity And evasions has reached such settled forms
and is so well understood that it no longer mxpUt^ aui
a^reciable -strain on jt^ executive's veracity or on liis
diplomatic skill. It belongs under the category of J^gai
fiction, rather than that oi effectual prevarication.

So also as regards the businesslike, or bureaucraltic,
organization .and control of liie administrative machinery,
and its utilization for vocational ends and statifittiod
showing. Ail that has been worked out in ks ^getneral
features, and calls, in any concrete case, for noUii^g
much beyond an adaptation of general practices to the
detail requiremenits of the special case. It devolves, prop-
erly, on the clerical force, and especially on those chiefs
of clerical bureau called ''deans," together with the
many committees-for-the-sifting-of-sawdust into which
the faculty of a well-administered university is organized.
These committees being, in effect if not in intention, de-
signed chiefly to keep the faculty talking while the bureau-
cratic machine goes on its way under the guidance of the
executive and his pergonal counsellors and lieutenants.
These matters, then, are also well understood, standard-
ized, and accepted, and no longer require a vigitaat per-
sonal surveillance from the side of the executive.

As is well and seemly for any head of a great concern,
these matters of routine and current circumlocoition are
presently delegated to the oversight of trusted subakerna,
in a manner analogous to the delegation of the somewhat
parallel duties of the caretakers of the material equip-
ment. Both oi these hierarchical corps of suborcfinates
are in a somewhat similar case, in that their duties are of
a mechanically standardized nature, and in that it is in-
cumbi^it oa both alike to deal in a dispassionate, not to

254 The Higher Learning

say impersonal, way each with the particular segment of
apparatus and process entrusted to his care; as is right
and good for any official entrusted with given details of
bureaucratic routine.

The exacting duties that remain personally incumbent
on the academic executive, and claiming his ordinary and
continued attention, therefore, are those of his own offi-
cial prestige on the one hand, and the selection, prefer-
ment, rejection and proscription of members of the aca-
demic staff. These two lines of executive duty are
closely correlated ; not only in that the staff is necessarily
to be selected with a view to their furthering the prestige
of their chief and his university, but also in that the
executive's experience in the course of this enterprise in
publicity goes far to shape his ideals of scholarly en-
deavour and to establish his standards of expediency and
efficiency in the affairs of learning.

By usage, guided, no doubt, by a shrewd sense of ex-
pediency in the choice of means, it has, in the typical
case, come to be the settled policy of these incumbents of
executive office to seek the competitively requisite meas-
ure of public prestige chiefly by way of public oratory.
Now and again his academic rank, backed by the slow-dy-
ing tradition that his office should be filled by a man of
scholarly capacity, will bring the incumbent before some
scientific body or other; where he commonly avoids of-
fence. But, as has been remarked above, it is the laity
that is to be impressed and kept propitiously in mind of
the executive and his establishment, and it is therefore
the laity that is to be conciliated with presidential ad-
dresses; it is also to the laity that the typical academic
executive is competent to speak without stultification.
Hence the many edifying addresses before popular audi-
ences, at commencements, inaugurations, dedications.

/

!

1

Summary and Trial Balance 255

club meetings, church festivals, and the like. So that an
executive who aspires to do his whole duty in these prem-
ises will become in some sort an itinerant dispensary
of salutary verbiage; and university presidents have so
come to be conventionally indispensable for the effusion
of graceful speech at all gatherings of the well-to-do for
convivial deliberation on the state of mankind at large.*

Throughout this elocutionary enterprise there runs the
rigorous prescription that the speaker must avoid of-
fence, that his utterances must be of a salutary order,
since the purpose of it all is such conciliation of good-
will as will procure at least the passive good offices of
those who are reached by the presidential run of language.
But, by and large, it is only platitudes and racy anecdotes
that may be counted on to estrange none of the audiences
before which it is worth while for the captains of erudi-
tion to make their plea for sanity and renown. Hence

1 Unfortunately, the language wants a competent designation
for public-minded personages of this class; which comprises
something appreciably more than the homiletical university execu-
tives alluded to above, and their understudies, while it is also not
strictly inclusive of all these executives. There is indeed a fairly
obvious contingent comes in from among those minor politicians
and clergymen who crave the benefit of an inoffensive notoriety,
and who are at the same time solicitous to keep their fellow-men
in mind of the unforgotten commonplaces. One will necessarily
have misgivings about putting forward a new technical term for
adoption into a vocabulary that is already top-heavy with tech-
nical innovations. ** Philandropist " has been suggested. It is
not a large innovation, and it has the merit of being obviously
self-explanatory. At tfie same time its phonetic resemblance to
an older term, already well accepted in the language, should rec-
"ommend it to the members of the craft whom it is designed to
, signalize, and with whom phonetic considerations are habitually
/ aJlowed weight. The purists will doubtless find " philandropist "
I a barbarism; but that is an infirmity that has attached to many
f technical designations at their inception, without permanently
/ hindering their acceptance and serviceability ; it is also not wholly
unfitting that the term chosen should be of such a character.

2^ The Higher Leawning^

the pecnUarly, not to saty exuberantly, kiane dmsactcr mi
this branch of oratory, co«pted with an indefatigable
optimism and* good-nature. This outeomc i9 due neither
to a hidk. of application nor of reflecticm on the part of
the speakers; it is, indeed, a finished product of tiie:
homiletical art and makes up' something oi a^ class: of its
own among the artistic achievements^ of the race. At
the same time it is a means to aw end.*

However, the clay stfcks to the sculjjtop's thumb, as tte
meal-dust powders the miHer's hair and the cobbler car-
ries sensible traces of the pitch that goes int© his. day^s
work, and as the able-bodied seaman ** walks with a nAU
ing gait." So also the university executive, who by
pressure of competitive enterprise comes to be all thin^
to all audiences, will come also to take on the c&loisr q£
his own philandropic pronouncements; to believe, mooe
or less> conveniently, in his own blameless utterances.
They necessarily commit him to a pro forma observance
of their tenor; they may, of course, be designed as pep-
functory conciliation, simply, but in carrying conviction

1 « Xhe time has come^ the walrus said,.
To talk of many things."
Within the last few years one of the more illustrious and fluent
of the captains of erudition hit upon the expedient of having
a trusted laeum tenens appointed to take over the functions of
the home office for a term o£ years, while the captain himself
**tak€i5. the road" — on an appreciably augmented salary — to '
speak his mind eloquently on many topics. The device can, how-
ever, scarcely yet be said to have passed the experimental phase.
This illustrious exponent of philandropism commands an extraor-
dinary ramge of homily and is a raconteur of quite exceptional
merit; and a device that commends itself in this special case,
therefore,, may or may not prove a feasible plan in general and
oixlinary usage. But in any case it indicates a felt need of some
measiH-e of relief, such as will enable the run of presidential
speecU ta g^in a little* something in amplitude and f requency*

Summary and Trial Balance ^57

to the audience the speaker's eloquence unavoidab^
ibends his own .convictions in some degree. And not only
does the temper of the audience sympathetically affect
that of the speaker, as does also his familiar .contact with
the same range of persons, such as goes with and takes
a chief plac^ in this itinerant edification; but there is
also the opportunity which all this wide-,ranging itineraxy
of public addressees affords for feeliqg out the ^tate oi
popular sentiment as to what ends the university is >ex-
pected to serve and how it is expected best to serve them.
Particularly <io the solemn amenities of social intercourse
associated with this promulgation of lay sermons lend
themselves felicitously to such a j^urpose; and this con-
tact with the public and its spokesmen doubtless exercises
a powerful control over the policies pursued by these ajca-
demic executives, in that it affords them the readiest, and
at the same time the most habitual, indication as to what
line of .policy and what details of conduct wiU meet witli
popular approval, and what will not

Since, then, it is necessarily the endeavour of the com-
petitive executives to meet the desires of their public as
best they can, consistently with tiie demands of magni-
tude and eclat imposed by their position as chiefs of these
competitive concerns, it becomes a question of some xoo-
ment what the character of this select public opinion
may be, to which their per^rinations expose them ; and
how far and with what limitations the public opinion that
so habitually impinges on their sensibilities and shi|f)es
their canons of procedure may be taken as reflecting the
sentiments of the public at large, or of any |;iven class oi
the population.

The public that so contributes to the habitual bent of
the academic executives is necessarily a select fraction
of the laity^ of course, — self -selected by virtue of mera-

!

2S8 The Higher Learning

bership in the various clubs, churches and other like or-
ganizations under whose auspices the edification and
amenities in question are commonly brought into bearing,
or by virtue of voluntary attendance at these occasions
of quasi-culture and gentility. It is somewhat exclu-
sive fragment of the public, pecuniarily of a middling
grade, as is indeed also its case in other than the pecu-
niary respect. Apart from the (very consequential)
convivial gatherings where businessmen will now and
again come together and lend a genial ear to these execu-
tive spokesmen of philandropism, it will be found that at
the audiences, and at their attendant sofemnities of hos-
pitality, the assembly is made up of very much the same
elements as make up the effective constituency of the
moderately well-to-do churches.^ Neither the small
minority of the wholly idle rich, nor the great majority
who work with their hands, are present in appreciable
force ; particularly not the latter, • who are busy else-
where; nor do the learned class come in evidence in this
connection, — except, of course, the " scholars by ap-
pointment," within whose official competency lie pre-
cisely such occasions of public evidence.

Doubtless, the largest, tone-giving and effective, con-
stituent in this self-selected public on whose temper the
university president typically leans, and from whose bent
his canons of circumspection are drawn, is the class of
moderately well-to-do and serious-minded women who
have outlived the distractions of maternity, and so have
come to turn their parental solicitude to the common
good, conceived as a sterilization of the proprieties. The
controlling ideals of efficiency and expediency in the af-

1 So, e.g., a certain notably self-possessed and energetic cap-
tain of erudition has been in the habit of repeating ("on the spur
of the moment'') a homily on one of the staple Christian virtues.

Summary and Trial Balance 259

fairs of the higher learning accordingly, in so far as they
are not a precipitate of competitive business principles
simply, will be chiefly of this derivation. Not that the
captains of erudition need intimately harbour precisely
those notions of scholarship which this constituency
would enjoin upon them, and for which they dutifully
speak in their conciliatory sermons before these audi-
ences; but just as happens in all competitve retail busi-
ness that has to deal with a large and critical constitu-
ency, so here, — the captains find themselves constrained
in their management of the affairs of learning to walk
blamelessly in the sight of this quasi-public spirited wing
of the laity that has by force of circumstances come to
constitute the public, as seen in the perspective of the
itinerant philandropist.

The executive and all his works and words must avoid
blame from any source from which criticism might con-
ceivably affect the traffic with which he is occupied, —
such is the first of those politic principles that govern the
conduct of competitive business. The university must
accordingly be managed with a first view to a creditable
rating in those extraneous respects, touching which that
select laity that make up the executive's effective public
are competent to hold convictions. The resulting canons
of management will be chiefly of the nature of tabus,
since blame is best avoided by a code of avoidance ; and
since the forum in which these tabus are audited is a
forum in which the matronly negations of piety, pro-
priety and genteel usage take precedence of work,
whether scholarly or otherwise, a misdirected cowardice
not infrequently comes to rule the counsels of the cap-
tains of erudition, — misdirected not only in the more
obvious sense that its guidance is disserviceable to the
higher learning, but also (what is more to the immediate

26o The Higher Learning

point) in the sense that it discredits the executive and his
tactics in the esteem of that workday ipiAlic that does not
habitually give toi^gue over the .cups at five-o'clock.*

It is perhaps unjaecessary, as it wowld assuredly be
ungraceful, to .pufsue this quasi-personal inquiry into the
durcumstances that so determine that habitual attitude of
the executive. The difficulties of such soj ambiguous
positnon should he sufficiently evident, .and the character
of the xiemaiads which this position imakes on the incum-
bent should be similarly evident, so far as regards con-
duciveness to clean and honest living within the premises
of this executive office. It may, however, not be out of
place to call to mind one or two significant, and perhaps
extenuating^ traits among those conventions that go to
make up the situation. Unlike what occurs in the con-
duct ,of ,ordinary business and in the professions, there
has hitherto been worked out no code <of professional
ethics for the guidance of men employ^ed in this voca-
tion, — with the sole exception of that mandatoiy inter-

^ These resulting canons -of Mameless anility wiH react ea «&e
character -of the academic personnel m a two- fold waor: fkega-
tively and by indirection they work out in an (uncertain but
effectual) selective elimination of such persons as are worth
wihile in point of scholarship and inildative ; while positively and
by dkect incitement it resuUs that the tribe M <Lo Basswpod has
been elected to fill the staff with vacancy.

At the same time the case is not unknown, nor is it altogether
a •chance occurrence, where euch an executive with plenary
powers, driven to uncommonly fatuous lengths 4»y this calculus
of expedient notoriety, and intent on putting a needed patch on
the seat of Ihis honour, has endeavoured to save some remnant
of gorod-will among his academic acquaintaooe by pc^otesting, in
strict and conEdential privacy, that his course of action taken ui
conformity with these canons was taken for the sake of popular
effect, and not because he did not know better ; apparently having
by familiar use come to the persuasion that a knaTe is more to
be esteemed than a fciol, and overlooking the great ease w^
which he has been able to combine the two characters.

Summary and Trial Balance 261

presidential courtesy that binds all members of the craft
to a strict enforcement of the academic black-list, — all
of which leaves an exceptionally broad field for casuistry.
So thai, unlike what happens in the business commu-
nity at large, no standardization has here determined
the limits of legitimate prevarication; nor can such a
standardization and limit be worked out so long as the
executive is required, in effect, to function as the dis-
cretionary employer of his academic staff and hold them
to account as agents for whom he is responsible, at the
same time that he must, in appearance, be their confiden-
tial spokesman and their colleague in the corporation of
learning. And it is impossible to forego either of these
requirements, since the discretionary power of use and
abuse is indispensable to the businesslike conduct of the
enterprise, while the appearance of scholarly co-partnery
with the staff is indispensable to thsrt prestige on which
rests the continued exercise of this power. And so also
it has similarly proved unavoidable (perhaps as an issue
of human infirmity) that the executive be guided in
effect by a meretricious subservience to extra-cholastic
conventions, all the while that he must profess an un-
biassed pursuit of " the increase and diffusion of knowl-
edge among men.'*

m

IV

With all due endeavour to avoio the appearance of a
study in total depravity, the foregoing analysis has come,
after all, to converge on the growth and derivation of
those peculiar ambiguities and obh*quities that give char-
acter to the typical academic executive. Not that all
academic executives, without exception, are (in the his-
toricat present)' to be found fully abreast of that mature

262 The Higher Learning

phase of the type that would so be reflected by the exi-
gencies of their office as outlined above. Nor need it be
believed or argued that no man may enter on these duties
of office but such as are specially fitted, by native gift and
previous training, for just such an enterprise in mere-
tricious notoriety as these official duties enjoin. The ex-
ceptions to such a rule are not altogether rare, and the
incumbent may well have entered on the duties of office
with preconceptions and aims somewhat at variance with
what its discipline inculcates. But, it should be called to
mind, the training that makes a typical executive comes
with the most felicitous and indefeasible effect not in the
predisposing discipline of candidature but in the work-
day conduct of office. And so consistent and unremit-
ting is this drift of the duties of office, overt and covert,
that, humanly speaking, any one who submits to its disci-
pline through an appreciable period of years must un-
avoidably come to conform to type. Men of unmanage-
ably refractory temperament, such as can not by habitua-
tion be indued with the requisite deviation and self-suf-
ficiency, will of necessity presently be thrown out, as
being incompetent for this vocation. Instances of such
rejection after trial will come to mind, but such instances
are, after all, not so frequent or so striking as to throw
doubt on the general rule. The discipline of executive
office will commonly shape the incumbent to its uses. It
should seem beyond reason to expect that a decade of
exposure to the exigencies of this high office will leave
the incumbent still amenable to the dictates of common-
place tolerance and common honesty.

As intimated above, men with ingrained scholarly
ideals and a consistent aim to serve the ends of learning
will still occasionally be drawn into the executive office by
force of circumstances — particularly by force of the

Summary and Trial Balance 263

slow-dying preconception that the preferences of the aca-
demic staff should count for something in the choice of
their senior member ; and this will happen in spite of the
ubiquitous candidature of aspirants who have prepared
themselves for this enterprise by sedulous training in all
the arts of popularity and by a well organized backing of
influential " friends." The like happened more fre-
quently a quarter of a century ago, at the time when the
current situation was taking shape under the incipient
incursion of business principles into university policy.
But it does not appear that those incumbents who so
enter on these duties, will fare notably otherwise in the
end than do the others whose previous training has al-
ready bent them to the typical policy of deviation, from
the outset.

An illustrative instance or two may well be to the point.
And the same illustrations will perhaps also serve to
enforce the view that anything like an effectual univer-
sity — a seminary of the higher learning, as distinct from
an assemblage of vocational schools — is not a prac-
ticable proposition in America under current conditions.
Such seems to be the conclusion vouched for by the two
most notable attempts of the kind during the past quar-
ter-century. The two instances in question should ap-
pear to afford clear experimental evidence to that effect,
though it is always possible to allege that personal or local
conditions may so far have affected these experimental
instances as still to leave the case in doubt.

In these two instances, in the Middle West and in the
Far West, the matter has been tried out under conditions
as favourable to the cause of learning as the American
community may hope to offer, barring only the possible
inhibition due to an untoward local colour of sentiment.
Each of these two great establishments has been favoured

2364 The Higher Learnings

vrkh a» emdowment of such magnitude as wontd be ade-
quate to the foundation of an effectual wmversity, suf-
ficient to* the single-minded pursuit of the higher fearn-
ing, withi all the " modcpn appliances " requisite to sci-
entific and= scholarly work, if only their resources had
been: husbanded wkh a single mind to that end ; and in
either case the terms of the endowment have been suf-
ficiently tolerant to a<lmit such pursuit of knowledge
without arrihre peme&. The directive hands, too» under
whose discretionary control ea<rb of these establishments
entererf on its adventures and attained its distinctive
character, were men whoj at one point or another hi their
adhiinistration of academic policy, entertained a sincerely
conceived scholarly ambition to create a substantial um-
versity, an institution of learning.^ And, in a general
way, the two attempts have equally failed of their avowed
initial purpose.

Pn the persons of their discretionary heads, the twa
enterprises were from the outset animated with widefy
divergent ideals and aspirations in matters of scholar-

^ In all fairness it should be noted, as a caution against hasty
conclusionSj that in both of these cases this initial scholarly in-
tentk>n has been questioned, — or denied — by men well informed
aa to the later state oi things ia either of the two universities
in question. And it may as well be admitted without much reser-
vation that the later state of things has carried no broad hint
of an initial phase in the life-history of these schools, in which
ideal& of scholarship were given first consideration. Yet it is
to be taken as unequivocal fact that such was the case, in both
instances ; this is known as an assured matter of memory by
men competent to speak from familiar acquaintance wi^ the
relevant facts at the time. In both cases, it is only in the out-
come, only after the pressure of circumstances has had time to
act, that a roimded meretricious policy has taken effect. Wha^
has misled hasty and late-come observers in this matter is the
relatively very brief — inconspicuously brief — time interval dur-
ing which it was found practicable to let the academic policy
bc-gtiided primarily by scholarly ideals.

Summary and Trial Balance *65

ship, and with singularly dissimilar and distiactb^e traots
oi character, resembling one another in litt3e else than a
sincere devotion to the cause oi scholarship and wi tm-
hampered discretion in their autocratic manag^ement iof
affairs ; hut it is an illumioatu^ coaunent tm the f oroe tof
circumstances governing the&e matliers, thait tibese >two
establishments have gone down .to substantially tbt isame
kind and decree of defeat, — a defeat not extreme bttt
typical, both in kind and ^degree, iln :the one case, itfae
more notorious, the initial aim ( wdl known to persons on-
timately ki touch with the relevant facts at the time) was
the pursuit of schc^Uirsh^ somewhat blatant .perhaps, hat
none the less sincere and thoughtful.; in tiie con^anioii-
piece it was in a like degree the pursuit of scientific kxioiwl-
adge and serviceability, tiaougfa, it is true, unschooled and
|Mizzle-headed to a dqgree. In both entet^ses aSffloe the
discretionary heads so placed ki control iuifd been selexztod
by individual businessmen of the untutored sort, :and
were vested w.itii -plenary powiers. Under pcressnre «<
circumstances, ia .i)otJi cases aUkq, the policy sd iarctbd
initiative and innovation, witii wfaich Jboth alike entenod
on the enterprise, presently yielded to the ubiquitous
craving for statistical magnitude and the consequent lett
need of conciliatory publicity ; until presently the ulterior
object of hoth was lost in the shadow of these immediate
and urgent manoeuvres of expedieiicy, and it became :tfae
rule of policy to stidc at nothing but appearances.

So that both establishments have come substantially to
surrender the university ideal, through loss t>f effectual
initiative and courage, and so have found themsdves
running substantially the same course of insictious com-
promise with " vocational " aims, undergraduate meth-
ods, and the counsels of the PhiKstines. The life-history
of each, While differing widely in detail of wa^ and

266 The Higher Learning

methods, is after all made up, for the greater part, of
futile extensions, expansions, annexations, ramifications,
affiliations and pronunciamentos, in matters that are no
more germane to the cause of learning than is the state
of the weather. In the one case, the chase after a suf-
ficient notoriety took the direction of a ravenous mega-
lomania, the busiest concern of which presently came to
be how most conspicuously to prolong a shout into poly-
syllables; and the further fact that this clamorous raid
on the sensibilities of the gallery was presently, on a
change of executive personnel, succeeded by a genial sur-
render to time and tide, an aimless gum-shod pusillanim-
ity, has apparently changed the drift of things in no very
appreciable degree.*

In the companion-piece, the enterprise has been
brought to the like manner and degree of stultification
under the simple guidance of an hysterically meticulous
deference to all else than the main facts. In both cases
alike the executive solicitude has come to converge on a
self-centred and irresponsible government of intoler-
ance, diflfering chiefly in the degree of its efficiency. Of

1 As a commentary on the force of circumstances and the aca-
demic value of the executive office, it is worth noting that, in
the case cited, an administration guided by a forceful, ingenious
and intrepid personality, initially imbued with scholarly ideals
of a sort, has run a course of scarcely interrupted academic
decay ; while the succeeding reign of astute vacuity and quietism
as touches all matters of scholarship and science has, on the
whole, and to date, left the university in an increasingly hopeful
posture as a seminary of the higher learning. All of which
would appear to suggest a parallel with the classic instance of
King Stork and King Log. Indeed, at the period of the suc-
cession alluded to, the case of these fabled majesties was spe-
cifically called to mind by one and another of the academic staff.
It would appear that the academic staff will take care of its
ostensible work with better effect the less effectually its members
are interfered with and suborned by an enterprising captain of
erudition.

Summary and Trial Balance 267

course, through all this drift of stultification there has
always remained — decus et solamen — something of an
amiably inefficient and optimistic solicitude for the ad-
vancement of learning at large, in some unspecified man-
ner and bearing, some time, but not to interfere with the
business in hand.

It is not that either of these two great schools is to
be rated as useless for whatever each is good for, but
only that that pursuit of learning on which both set out
in the beginning has fallen into abeyance, by force of
circumstances as they impinge on the sensibilities of a
discretionary executive. As vocational schools and as
establishments for the diffusion of salutary advice on the
state of mankind at large, both are doubtless all that
might be desired; particularly in respect of their statis-
tical showing. It is only that the affairs of the higher
learning have come definitively to take a subsidiary, or
putative, place in these establishments ; and to all appear-
ance irretrievably so, because both are now committed to
so large and exacting a volume of obligations and liabili-
ties, legal and customary, extraneous and alien to their
legitimate interest, that there is no longer a reasonable
chance of their coming to anything of serious import in
the way of the higher learning, even, conceivably, under
the most enlightened management in the calculable fu-
ture. In their bootless chase after a blameless publicity,
both have sunk their endowment in conspicuous real
estate, vocational, technical and accessory schools, and
the like academic side-issues, to such an extent as to
leave them without means to pursue their legitimate end
in any adequate manner, even if they should harbour
an effectual inclination to pursue it.^

* There is a word to add, as to the measure of success achieved
by these enterprises along their chosen lines of endeavour. Both

^68 The Higher Learning

These remarks on the typical traJts of the academic
executive have miavoidably taken the colour of person-
alkies. That soch is Ae case should by no means be
taken as intentionafly Teflecting anything like dispraise
-on 4^hose persons Who "have this (unavoidable) work of
stultification in hand. Rather, it is dispassionately to be
^diered from Ihe run of the facte as set out aibove that
4hose 'persons on whom these exigencies impinge wtH,
%y force «f habituati<», ■necessarily come to take the
bent which these current conditions enforce, and withotrt
•which this work could ^ot wdH be done ; all on the sup-
position — and it is by no means an extravagant assump-
tion — that these persons so exposed to these agencies
trf spiritual disintegration are by native gift endowed
wtfli the commonplace traits of human nature, no inore
and no less. It is <he duties of the office, not a run t)f
infircmf ies i)ecifliaT to Ae incumbents of office, that make

of rthe establishments spoken of ar£ schools of some value in
many directions, and both have also achieved a large reputation
among the laity. Indeed, ^the captains -under whose management
die two schools have pcrioroe carried on their work, are com-
monly held in considerable esteem as having achieved ^reat
things. There is no desire here to understate the case; but it
4hcnM he worth noting, as bearing on the use and academic
vdlue of 'the proaidenHBl office, that the disposal of veiy large
means — means of unexampled magnitude — has gone to this
achievement. A consideration of these results, whether in point
of ^dholariAip or of notoriety, as compared -with the means
fwlskh ithe captahu have ^posed of, wiQ leave one in doubt.
Jt should aeem doubtful if the results could have been less ex-
cellent or less striking, given the free disj)osal of an endow-
ment of 20 or 30 millions, and upward, even under the undis-
dinguished and uneventful management of commonplace honesty
And academic tradition, without the guidance of 4 '* fftrong lOian.^'
It is, indeed, not easy to believe that less could have been
achieved without the captain's help. There is also evidence to
Jiand that the loss of the " strong man " has entailed no sensible
loss either in the efficiency or in the good repute of the academic
establishment; rather the reverse.

Summary and Trrat Balance 26g'

the outcome. Very much like that of the medicine-man,
the office is one which will not abide a tolerant and in-
genuous incumbent.*

^ Within the precincts^ it is. not unusual, to meet, with a: harsher
and more personal note of appraisal of what are rated as the.
frailties of tlfcte crecntive. There are many expressions* to be
met with, touchn^ this natter^ oi a. colloquial turn. These wHI.
conunonly have something of an underbred air^. a» may happen
in unguarded colloquial speech ; but if it be kept in mind that
tfreir personal incidence is daly to be read out of tfiem-, tlttir
tsner ma^^ y^ be tetructiTC, ani their scant eJcgaace mair he
aver-h)oked far oncev in. view of that certain candouc that i&
scarcely ta be had without a colloquial tunu They should serve
Better than many^ elaborate phrases to throw- ihto reticf the kintf
anot lauEuure: of esteem, acvorded tiiese uialner iuQuiubcnte or
executive office by the. men wha assist behind the scenea So,»
in bold but intelligible metaphor, one hears, "He is a targe
person Ml' of snralT potatoes,"" ^Theonfjr white thntg about hinr
is his tiva," " Half-a-pcck of pasiUkRhnlgr;" *' Aa ioniyftoOmrJ!^
Somethingr after this^ kind is. this aphoristic wisdom current, in
the academic community, in. so far as it runs safefy above the
level of scurrility. In point of tjaste, it would Be out of the
Questios. l4i folk»w the- same 96wi ef. discoinrteQua cxpRssions
itxta tiiat larger volume o£ more out&poken appraisal that liea
below that level; and even what has so been sparingly cited in
ilhistration can, of course, not dainr a sympathetic kearin^r a»
fanng' in aisjT way* a* gtaDocfuli prcsmtmBnt of the scne intandeifl
to be conveyed in. these figures* of speech. Yet the apobsg}^ may
be accepted, that it conveys this sense intelligibly even if not
efcgantfy;

indeed, a penoai widdjr eavrcrsanit wcdr current opinion and
k& expression among, the gejrsomicl o£ the staff, as touches the
character and academic value of a. capable and businesslike execu-
tive, might unguardedly come to the persuasion that the typical
academic head, under these tatterdayr conditions; will be a feeble*
minded rogue. Such is,, doubtless, far from being- the actual
valuation underlying these many artless, expressions that one
meets with. And doubtless, the most that could be said would
be that, in point of orientation, the typical executive, qua execu-
tive, tends to fall in with the lines so indicated'; that the exigen-
cies of the executive office are of a kind that would converge
upon such an issue " in the long run ** and '^m the absence of
(Csturbing causes "'; not that the effectual, run of circumstanaa

270 The Higher Learning

In all the above argument and exposition, touching the
executive office and its administrative duties, the point
of the discussion is, of course, not the personal character-
istics of the typical executive, nor even the spiritual for-
tunes of the persons exposed to the wear and tear of
executive office; although these matters might well en-
gage the attention of any one given to moralizing. The
point is, of course, that precarious situation in which the
university, considered as a corporation of the higher
learning, is placed under these current conditions, and
the manner in which these current conditions give rise
to this situation. Seen from the point of view of the
higher learning, and disregarding considerations ex-
traneous to that interest, it is evident that this run of
events, and the conditions which determine them, are
wholly untoward, not to say disastrous.

Now, this inquiry is nowise concerned to reform, de-
flect or remedy this current drift of things academic
away '^W. the ancient holding ground of the higher
learning ; partly baSTuSIUQh an enterprise in reform and
rehabilitation lies beyond its^W^tence ; and partly,
again, because in all this current \X« ^^ displace the
higher learning there may conceivably P^her ends in-
volved, which may be worth while in soiP*^^ bearing
that is alien to the higher learning but oP^^^ ^^".^^"
quence for the fortunes of the race,— urge?^^^^ which
can only be served by so diverting effort ^ attention
from this pursuit. Yet, partly out of a reas^^'^ defer-

will at all commonly permit a consummation of ' ^^^^ *"^
degree.

" Indeed ... we may say . . . as Dr. Boteler Si^ k^I
berries, * Doubtless God could have made a bctt '^'
doubdess God never did.' "

Summary and Trial Balance 271

ence to the current prejudice that any mere negative
criticism and citation of grievances is nothing better
than an unworthy experiment in irritation; and more
particularly as a means to a more adequate appreciation
of the rigorous difficulties inherent in this current state
and drift of things ; it may not be out of place to offer
some consideration of remedial measures that have been
attempted or projected, or that may be conceived to
promise a way out.

As is well known, divers and various remedial meas-
ures have been advocated by critics of current univer-
sity affairs, from time to time ; and it is equally evident
on reflection that these proposed remedial measures are
with fair uniformity directed to the treatment of symp-
toms, — to relieve agitation and induce insensibility.
However, there is at least one line of aggressively re-
medial action that is being tried, though not avowedly
as a measure to bring the universities into line with their
legitimate duties, but rather with a view to relieving
them of this work which they are no longer fit to take
care of. It is a move designed to shift the seat of the
higher learning out of the precincts of the schools. And
the desperate case of the universities, considered as semi-
naries of science and scholarship, is perhaps more forci-
bly brought in evidence by what is in this way taking
place in the affairs of learning outside the schools than
by their visible failure to take care of their own work.
This evidence goes to say that the difficulties of the aca-
demic situation are insurmountable; any rehabilitation
of the universities is not contemplated in this lattcrday
movement. And it is so coming to be recognized, in
effect though tacitly, that for all their professions of a
singleminded addiction to the pursuit of learning, the
academic establishments, old and new, are no longer

^7^ 5^A^ Higher Learning

jcompetent to take the direction of affairs in this domain.

So it i$ that, with a sanguine hope born of academic
defeat, there have latterly been founded certain large
establishments^ of the nature of retreats or shelters for
the prosecution of scientific and scholarly inquiry in some
sort of academic quarantine, detached from all aca-
demic affiliation and renouncing all share in the work
of instruction. In point of form the movement is not
altogether new. Foundations of a similar aim have been
had before. But the ms^gnitude and comprehensive aims
of the new jestablishments are such ag to take them out
of the category of auxiliaries and throw them into the
lead. They are assuming to take over the advance in
science and scholarship, which has by tradition belonged
under the tutelage of the academic community. This
move looks like a desperate surrender of the university
ideal. The reason for it appears to be the proven inabil-
ity X)f the schools, under competitive management, to
take care of the pursuit of knowledge.

Seen from the point of view of the higher leaminj^
Ihis new departure, as well as the apparent need of it, is
ito be rated as untoward.; and it reflects gravely enough
on the untoward condition into which the rule of busi-
ness principles is leading the American schooU. Such
establishments of research are capable, in any competent
manner, of serving only one of the two joint purposes
necessary to be served by any effective seminary of the
higher learning ; nor can they at all adequately serve this
one purpose to the best advantage when so disjoined from
its indisipensable correlate. By and large, these new es-
tablishments are good for research only, not for instruc-
tion; or at the best they can serve this latter purpose
only as a more or less surreptitious or supererogatory
side interest. Should they, under pressure of instant

Summary and Trial Balance 273

need; tum< tiieir forces to ihstrtiction as well as to hh
quiry, tii«y would incontinently fiad themselves drifting
into the same- eqtri vocal position as the umversittes> and
the diy^rot^ of business principles and- competitive gen-
tility would presently consunie their tissues after the
same fashiom

In is, to aH appearance, impracticafcAs and inadvisable
t9 let these institutions of research take over any ap-
preciable share of that wovk of scienttfie and scholarly
faistnietion that is slipping out of tlie palsied hands of
Ae uniY«9sities, so as to inchide some consistent appli*
cation to teaching within the scope of their everyday
work. And* this cuts out ol their complement of ways
and means one of the chief aids to an effectual pursuit
of scientific inquiry. Only in the most exceptional, not
to safy erratic, cases will good, consistent, sane and alert
scientific wovk be carried- forward through a course of
years 1^ any scientist without students, without liDss or
bknyting of that intellectual initiative that makes the
creative scientist. The work that can be done* welt in
tfte absence of that stimtttus and safegoavding that comes
of the give and take between teacher and student is ecmi'-
monly such only as can without deterioration be reduced
to a mechanically systematized task-work, — that is to
say, such as can, without loss or gain, be carried on under
the auspices of a businesslike academic government

This, imperatively unavoidabte, absence of provision
for systematic instruction in these new-found estabtisb-
ments of research means also that they and the work
which they have in hand are not self-peqietuating,
whether individuaHy and in detail or taken in the large ;
since their work breeds no generation of successors to
the current body of sdentists on which they draw. As
the matter stands now, they depend for their personnel

274 The Higher Learning

on the past output of scholars and scientists from the
schools, and so they pick up and turn to account what
there is ready to hand in that way, — not infrequently
men for whom the universities find little use, as being
refractory material not altogether suitable for the aca-
demic purposes of notoriety. When this academic
source fails, as it presently must, with the increasingly
efficient application of business principles in the univer-
sities, there should seem to be small recourse for estab-
lishments of this class except to run into the sands of
intellectual quietism where the universities have gone
before.

In this connection it will be interesting to note, by way
of parenthesis, that even now a large proportion of the
names that appear among the staff of these institutions
of research are not American, and that even the Ameri-
can-bom among them are frequently not American-bred
in respect of their scientific training. For this work,
recourse is necessarily had to the output of men trained
elsewhere than in the vocational and athletic establish-
ments of the American universities, or to that tapering
file of academic men who are still imbued with traditions
so alien to the current scheme of conventions as to leave
them not amenable to the dictates of business principles.
Meantime, that which is eating the heart out of the
American seminaries of the higher learning should in due
course also work out the like sterilization in the univer-
sities of Europe, as fast and as far as these other coun-
tries also come fully into line with the same pecuniary
ideals that are making the outcome in America. And
evidence is not wholly wanting that the like proclivity
to pragmatic and popular traffic is already making the
way of the academic scientist or scholar difficult and dis-

Summary and Trial Balance 275

tasteful in the greater schools of the Old World. Amer-
ica is by no means in a unique position in this matter,
except only in respect of the eminent degree in which
this community is pervaded by business principles, and
its consequent faith in businesslike methods, and its in-
tolerance of any other than pecuniary standards of value.
It is only that this country is in the lead ; the other peo-
ples of Christendom are following the same lead as fast
as their incumbrance of archaic usages and traditions
will admit ; and the generality of their higher schools are
already beginning to show the effects of the same busi-
nesslike aspirations, decoratively coloured with feudal-
istic archaisms of patriotic buncombe.

As will be seen from the above explication of details
and circtunstances, such practicable measures as have
hitherto been offered as a corrective to this sterilization
of the universities by business principles, amount to a
surrender of these institutions to the enemies of learn-
ing, and a proposal to replace them with an imperfect
substitute. That it should so be necessary to relinquish
the universities, as a means to the pursuit of knowledge,
and to replace them with a second-best, is due, as has
also appeared from the above analysis, to the course of
policy (necessarily) pursued by the executive officers
placed in control of academic affairs; and the character
of the policy so pursued follows unavoidably from the
dependence of the executive on a businesslike governing
board, backed by a businesslike popular clamour, on the
one hand, and from his being (necessarily) vested, in
effect, with arbitrary power of use and abuse within the
academic community, on the other hand. It follows,
therefore, also that no remedy or corrective can be con-

3^6 The Higher Learning

trived that wSl- have anything more than a transient
indHotive effect^ so> long as tliese conditions thai ereate
Ibff difficulty are aUowed to remain in force.

All of which points tmambigutmsly to the only line
«f remedial measures that can be worth serious consi^
etation ; and at the same tone it carries the broad impli-
cation that in the present state erf poptilaf sentiment,
touching these matters of cfi^fttrol and adnnnistrajtion, any
effort that look^ to reinstate the uaivesskies as eiffeetual
seminaries of kaming will necessarily be nugatcnry ; van
asmud» aa tim; popular sentiment run» plaiflaly to the effect
that magnitude;^ airbitra/ry controt^ a»d businesslike ad-
ministration is the o«dy sane rule to be fc^wed in any
human enterprise. So that, while the measures called
for are simple^ elbvious, and effectual, they are also sure
to^ be impracticablie, and for none but extraneous reasons.

While it still remains true that the long-term^ common-
sense judgment oif civilized mankind places kaowle^S^
above business tvaffic, as aift end to be sought, y^t work-
day habituation under the stress of competitive business
has induced » frame of nund that will td:erate no other
fluetliod qC procedure, and no^ rule of life that does not
3|:if)f<(Kve itfeelf as a faithful travesty of competitive enter-
prise; And since the quest of learmng c;an not be car-
ried on by the methods or with the apparatus and inci-
dents of competitive business, it follows that the only
remedtai measures that hold asky promise of rehabilita-
^xm ior the higher learning ia> the universities can not
be attempted in the present state orf public sentiment

All that ia required i» the abolition of the academic
esiecutive and of the governing board. Anything shoirt
of iftis heroic remedy is bound to fail, because the evUs
aoQght to be remedied are inherent in these oi^HiSy smd
intrinsic to their functioning.

Summary and Trial B<danc^ i^f^

Even granting the possibility of making siurh a move,
in the face of popular prejudice, it will doubtless seem
suicidal, on first thought, to take so radical a departure ;
in that it would be lield to cripple the whole .academic
organization and subvert the scheme of things academic,
for good and all: — which, by the way, is precisely what
would have to be aimed at, since k is the present scheme
and organizatioa that unavoidably work tht mischief,
and since^ also (as touches the interest of ikhe higher
learning), they work nothing but mischief.

It should be plain^ on reflection, to any ooie fami&ar
with academic matters that neither of these official
bodies serves any useful purpose in the unii^eFsity, in so
far as bear« in any way on the pursuit of knowledge.
They may conceivaWy both be useful for some other
purpose, foreiga or alien to the quest of learning; but
within the lines of the university's Intimate interest
both are wholly detrimental, and vety wastefuUy so.
They are needless, except to take care of needs and
emergencies to which their own presence gratuitoasly
gives rise. In so far as these needs and difficulties that
require executive surveaUanoe are not simply and
flagrantly factitious, — as, e.g., the onerous duties of
publicity — they are alt<3gether such needs as arise out
of an excessive size and a gratuitously complex admin-
istrative organization ; both of which cfaaracterkstics of
the American university are treated by the governing
boards and their executive officers, for no better pur-
pose than a vainglorious self-complacency, and with no
better justification than an uncritical prepossession to
the effect that large size, complex organization, and au-
thoritative control necessarily make for efficiency;
whereas, in point of fact, in the affairs of learning these
thills unavoidably make for defeat.

278 The Higher Learning

Objection to any such measure of abolition is not to
be grounded in their impracticability or their inefficiency,
— supposing only that they could be carried out in the
face of the prejudices of the ignorant and of the selfishly
interested parties; the obstacles to any such move He
simply in the popular prejudice which puts implicit faith
-n large, complicated, and formidable organizations, and
in that appetite for popular prestige that animates the
class of persons from which the boards and executives
are drawn.

This unreasoning faith in large and difficult combina-
tions has been induced in the modern community by its
experience with the large-scale organization of the me-
chanical industries, and still more particularly by the
convincing pecuniary efficiency of large capital, authori-
tative control, and devious methods, in modern business
enterprise; and of this popular prejudice the boards of
control and their executive officers have at least their
full share, — indeed they owe their place and power in
great part to their being animated with something more
than an equitable share of this popular prepossession.

It is undeniable, indeed it is a matter of course, that
so long as the university continues to be made up, as is
now customary, of an aggregation of divers and sundry
schools, colleges, divisions, etc., each and several of
which are engaged in a more or less overt rivalry, due
to their being so aggregated into a meaningless coali-
tion, — so long will something formidable in the way of a
centralized and arbitrary government be indispensable to
the conduct of the university's affairs ; but it is likewise
patent that none of the several constituent schools, col-
leges, etc., are any the better off, in respect of their work,
for being so aggregated in such an arbitrary collective
organization. The duties of the executive — aside from

Summary and Trial Balance 279

the calls of publicity and self-aggrandizement — are in
the main administrative duties that have to do with the
interstitial adjustments of the composite establishment.
These resolve themselves into a co-ordinated standard-
ization of the several constituent schools and divisions,
on a mechanically specified routine and scale, which com-
monly does violence to the efficient working of all these
diverse and incommensurable elements; with no gain at
any point, excepting a gain in the facility of control —
control for control's sake, at the best. Much of the
official apparatus and routine office-work is taken up with
this futile control. Beyond this, and requisite to the
due working of this control and standardization, there is
the control of the personnel and the checking-up of their
task work ; together with the disciplining of such as do
not sufficiently conform to the resulting schedule of uni-
formity and mediocrity.

These duties are, all and several, created by the impo-
sition of a central control, and in the absence of such
control the need of them would not arise. They are es-
sentially extraneous to the work on which each and sev-
eral of the constituent schools are engaged, and their
only substantial effect on that work is to force it into
certain extraneous formalities of routine and account-
ancy, such as to divert and retard the work in hand. So
also the control exercised more at large by the governing
board ; except in so far as it is the mere mischief-making
interference of ignorant outsiders, it is likewise directed
to the keeping of a balance between units that need no
balancing as against one another; except for the need
which so is gratuitously induced by drawing these units
into an incongruous coalition under the control of such
a board ; whose duties of office in this way arise wholly
out of the creation of their office.

280 The Higher Learning

The great and conspicuous effect of abolishing the
academic executive and the governing board would be,
of course, that the university organization as now known
would incontinently fall to pieces. The several con-
stituent schools would fall apart, since nothing holds
them together except the strong hand of the present cen-
tral government. This would, of course, seem a mon-
strous and painful outrage to all those persons who are
infatuated with a veneration of big things; to whom a
" great " — that is to say voluminous — university is an
object of pride and loyal affection. This class of per-
sons is a very large one, and they are commonly not
given to reflection on the merits of their preconceived
ideals of "greatness." So that the dissolution of this
" trust "-like university coalition would bitterly hurt their
feelings. So intolerable would the shock to this popu-
lar sentiment presumably be, indeed, that no project of
the kind can have any reasonable chance of a hearing.

Apart from such loss of ** prestige value " in the eyes
of those whose pride centres on magnitude, the move in
question would involve no substantial loss. The chief
direct and tangible effect would be a considerable saving
in ** overhead charges," in that the greater part of the
present volume of administrative work would fall away.
The greater part — say, three- fourths — of the present
officers of administration, with their clerical staff, would
be lost ; under the present system these are chiefly occu-
pied with the correlation and control of matters that need
correlation and control only with a view to centralized
management.

The aggregate of forces engaged and the aggregate
volume of work done in the schools would suflFer no
sensible diminution. Indeed, the contemplated change
should bring a very appreciably heightened efficiency of

Summary and Trial Balance, 281

all the working units that are now tied up in the uni-
versity coalition. Each of these units would be free to
follow its own devices, within the lines imposed by the
work in hand, since none of them would then be required
to walk in lock-step with several others with which it had
no more vital articulation than the lock-step in question.

Articulation and co-ordination is good and requisite
where and so far as it is intrinsic to the work in hand ;
but it all comes to nothing better than systematized lag,
leak and friction, so soon as it is articulation and co-
ordination in other terms and for other ends than the
performance of the work in hand. It is also true, the
coalition of these several school units into a pseudo-ag-
gregate under a centralized control gives a deceptive ap-
pearance of a massive engine working to some common
end ; but, again, mass movement comes to nothing better
than inhibition and misdirection when it involves a coali-
tion of working units whose work is necessarily to be
done in severalty.

Left to themselves the several schools would have to
take care each of its own affairs and guide its endeavours
by the exigencies of its own powers and purposes, with
such regard to inter-collegiate comity and courtesy as
would be required by the substantial relations then sub-
sisting between them, by virtue of their common employ-
ment in academic work.

In what has just been said, it is not forgotten that the
burden of their own affairs would be thrown back on the
initiative and collective discretion of the several faculties,
so soon as the several schools had once escaped from
the trust-like coalition in which they are now held. As
has abundantly appeared in latterday practice, these fac-
ulties have in such matters proved themselves notable

282 The Higher Learning

chiefly for futile disputation ; which does not give much
promise of competent self-direction on their part, in case
they were given a free hand. It is to be recalled, how-
ever, that this latterday experience of confirmed incom-
petence has been gathered under the overshadowing pres-
ence of a surreptitiously and irresponsibly autocratic
executive, vested with power of use and abuse, and
served by a corps of adroit parliamentarians and lobby-
ists, ever at hand to divert the faculty's action from any
measure that might promise to have a substantial effect
By force of circumstances, chief of which is the executive
office, the faculties have become deliberative bodies
charged with power to talk. Their serious attention has
been taken up with schemes for weighing imponderables
and correlating incommensurables, with such a degree
of verisimilitude as would keep the statistics and account-
ancy of the collective administration in countenance, and
still leave some play in the joints of the system for the
personal relation of teacher and disciple. It is a nice
problem in self-deception, chiefly notable for an endless
proliferation.

At the same time it is well known — too well-known
to command particular attention — that in current prac-
tice, and of necessity, the actual eflFective organization
of each of these constituent school units devolves on the
working staflF, in so far as regards the eflfectual work to
be done; even to the selection of its working members r
and the apportionment of the work. It is all done ** by
authority," of course, and must all be arranged discreetly,
with an ulterior view to its sanction by the executive and
its due articulation with the scheme of publicity at large ;
but in all these matters the executive habitually comes
into bearing only as a (powerful) extraneous and alien
interference, — aJmost wholly inhibitory, in effect, even

Summary and Trial Balance 283

though with a show of initiative and creative guidance.
And this inhibitory surveillance is exercised chiefly on
grounds of conciliatory notoriety towards the outside,
rather than on grounds that touch the efficiency of the
staff for the work in hand. Such efficiency is commonly
not barred, it is believed, so long as it does not hinder
the executive's quest of the greater glory. There is, in
effect, an inhibitory veto power touching the work and
its ways and means.

But even when taken at its best, and when relieved of
the inhibition and deflection worked by the executive,
such an academic body can doubtless be counted on to
manage its collective affairs somewhat clumsily and in-
competently. There can be no hope of trenchant policy
and efficient control at their hands; and, it should be
added, there need be no great fear of such an outcome.
The result should, in so far, be nearly clear gain, as
against the current highly efficient management by an
executive. Relatively little administration or control
would be needed in the resulting small-scale units ; except
in so far as they might carry over into the new regime
an appreciable burden of extra-scholastic traffic in the
way of athletics, fraternities, student activities, and the
like; and except so far as regards those schools that
might still continue to be ** gentlemen's colleges," devoted
to the cultivation of the irregularities of adolescence and
to their transfusion with a conventional elegance; these
latter, being of the nature of penal settlements, would
necessarily require government by a firm hand. That
work of intimately personal contact and guidance, in a
community of intellectual enterprise, that makes up the
substance of efficient teaching, would, it might fairly be
hoped, not be seriously hindered by the ill-co-ordinated
efforts of such an academic assembly, even if its members

284 The Higher Learning

had carried over a good share of the mechanistic frame
of mind induced by their experience under the regime of
standardization and accountancy.

Indeed, there might even be ground to hope that, on
the dissolution of the trust, the underlying academic units
would return to that ancient footing of small-scale parcel-
ment and personal communion between teacher and stu-
dent that once made the American college, with all its
handicap of poverty, chauvinism and denominational bias,
one of the most effective agencies of scholarship in
Christendom.

The hope — or delusion — would be that the staff in
each of the resulting disconnected units might be left
to conduct its own affairs, and that they would prove
incapable of much concerted action or detailed control.
It should be plain that no other and extraneous power,
such as the executive or the governing boards, is as com-
petent — or, indeed, competent in any degree — to take
care of these matters, as are the staff who have the work
to do. All this is evident to any one who is at all con-
versant with the run of academic affairs as currently
conducted on the grand scale; inasmuch as it is alto-
gether a matter of course and of common notoriety
within the precincts, that this is precisely what these con-
stituent schools and units now have to do, each and sev-
eral; with the sole qualification that they now have to
take care of these matters under the inhibitory surveil-
lance of the executive and his extraneous interests, and
under the exactions of a super-imposed scheme of me-
chanical standardization and accountancy that accounts
for nothing but its superimposition. At the same time
the working force of the staff is hampered with a load of
dead timber imported into its body to administer a rou-

Summary and Trial Balance 285

tine of control and accountancy exacted by the executive's
need of a creditable publicity.^

This highly conjectural tracing of consequences to
follow from this hypothetical dissolution of the trust,
may as well be pursued into a point or two of detail, as
touches those units of the university coalition that have
an immediate interest in point of scholarship, — the Col-
legiate ("Arts") division and the Graduate School.
The former being left to its own devices and, it might
be hoped, being purified of executive megalomania, it
should seem probable that something of a reversion
would take effect, in the direction of that simpler scheme
of scholarship that prevailed in the days before the com-
ing of electives. It. was in the introduction of electives,
and presently of alternatives and highly flexible cur-
ricula, that the move first set in which carried the Ameri-
can college oflF its footing as a school of probation and
introduction to the scholarly life, and has left it a job-lot
of ostensibly conclusive short-cuts into the trades and

^ It will be objected, and with much reason, that these under-
lying " school units " tihat go to make up the composite American
university habitually see no great evil in so being absorbed into
the trust. They lend themselves readily, if not eagerly, to
schemes of coalition; they are in fact prone to draw in under
the aegis of the university corporation by " annexation," " affili-
ation/' ** absorption," etc. Any one who cares to take stock of
that matter and is in a position to know what is going on can
easily assure himself that the reasons which decide in such a
case are not advisedly accepted reasons intrinsic to the needs of
efficiency for the work in hand, but rather reasons of competitive
expediency, of competitive advantage and of prestige; except
in so far as it may all be — as perhaps it commonly is — mere
unreflecting conformity to the current fashion. In this connec-
tion it is to be remarked, however, that even if the current
usage has no intrinsic advantage, as against another way of
doing, failure to conform with the current way of doing will
always entail a disadvantage.