The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of
Universities By Business Men
by Thorstein Veblen
1918


PREFACE

    It is something more than a dozen years since the following
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 American universities. Lines of policy which
were once considered 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 become commonplace,
with some resulting economy of space and argument. But,
unhappily, revision and abridgment 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. Circumstances, 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 circumstances 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 president. As is
well known, the first president's share in the management of the
university was intimate, masterful and pervasive, in a very high
degree; so much so that no secure line of demarcation could be
drawn between the administration's policy and the president's
personal 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
academic policy could scarcely have been handled in a detached
way, as an impersonal phenomenon of the unfolding 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 nothing 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 -- that
anything in the way of a temperate survey should 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 personal 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 whatever value this account of events and their
causes may have.
    This allusion to incidents which have no material bearing 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 concern 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
forecast. 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 attention 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 fond
referred to by name in the pages which more particularly lean on
their support; and the like is true for various utterances by men
in authority that have been drawn on for illustrative
expressions. But a narrow scrutiny would doubtless make it appear
that the unacknowledged indebtedness greatly exceeds what so is
accredited and accounted for. That such is the case must not be
taken as showing intentional neglect of the due courtesies.
    March 1916.

    In the course of the past two years, while the manuscript has
been lying in wait for the printer, a new situation 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 appears to be no call for a change in
the general argument, and it has not been disturbed since the
earlier date, which is accordingly left as it stands.

    June 1918.


CHAPTER ONE

Introductory: The Place of the University in Modern Life

                                I

     In any known civilization there will be found something in
the way of esoteric knowledge. This body of knowledge will vary
characteristically from one culture to another, 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 civilizations, 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 mythology, theology, philosophy or science. But
whatever shape it falls into in the given case, it 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 civilization, 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 learning holds
in modern 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.(1*)
    To the adepts who are occupied with this esoteric knowledge,
the scientists and scholars on whom its keeping devolves, the
matter will of course not appear in just that light; more
particularly so far as regards that special segment of the field
of knowledge with the keeping 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
inquiry, 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 perspective, these adepts
are themselves to be taken as creatures 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 particular 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 situation; but in the second place, and scarcely
less exacting in detail, the received scheme of use and wont in
its 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 institutional changes may have upon the pursuit of the
higher learning will necessarily be taken up in a peculiar degree
with the consequences 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 aptitudes and capacities, meets the
same range of human wants, and grows out of the same impulsive
propensities 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 pursuit of knowledge. The stress falls in a
somewhat obviously different way among the canons of reality by
recourse to which men systematize and verify the knowledge
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.
    In point of its genesis and growth any system of knowledge
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.(2*)
    In this generic trait the modern learning does not depart
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 saying 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.(3*) 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 instinct 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 connected 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.
    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 enforced by
the current technological scheme that will have most (or most
immediately) to say in the current systematization 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 modern 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 conditions that impose themselves on the
processes of industry 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 workmanship.
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 those principles and scholarship. More particularly,
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 in the conduct of the
affairs of learning. While it remains true that the bias of
workmanship continues to guide the quest of knowledge, under the
conditions imposed by modern institutions it will not be the
naive conceptions of primitive workmanship that will shape the
framework of the modern 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 accountancy of modern
business management is also of an extremely dispassionate and
impartially exacting nature. It results that the modern 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
central and decisive factor in the systematization of knowledge,
it is equally fair to say that in later time no effort is spared
to eliminate all bias of personality from the technique 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 knowledge,
kept in a cool, dry place, commands the affection of modern
civilized mankind no less unconditionally, with no more
afterthought of an extraneous sanction, than once did the highly
personalized mythological and philosophical 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 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
enterprise is actuated by an idle curiosity, a disinterested
proclivity 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 modern 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. Concomitantly the
canons of reality have taken on a mechanistic 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 "verification" 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
serviceability for human use, but only of mechanistically
effectual matter-of-fact.

    So it has come about that modern civilization is in a 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 modern civilized mankind most
ingenuously plumes itself and confidently rests its hopes. The
more emotional 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 sentimental movements of the
human spirit belong in the past, -at least such is the
self-complacent avowal of the modern spokesmen of culture. The
modern 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 repair, and the sentimentally
reminiscent endeavors of certain 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
adulation 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 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 disinterested pursuit of unprofitable knowledge has, by
and large, not been freely avowed as a legitimate end of
endeavour; or such has at any rate been the state of the case
through that later segment of history which students commonly
take account of. A quest of knowledge has overtly been rated as
meritorious, or even blameless, only in 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 common sense judgment of enlightened public opinion. A
settled presumption to some such effect has found lodgment as a
commonplace conviction in the popular mind, in much the same
measure and in much the same period of time as the current 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 knowledge of things is the only end in life that
indubitably justifies itself. So that nothing more irretrievably
shameful could overtake modern civilization than the miscarriage
of this modern 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 reaction 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 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 concessions 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 Western
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 relegated 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
patriotism, 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 disinterested
intellectual achievement which they are endeavouring to suborn to
their several ends. That such pro forma declarations are found
necessary argues that the faith in a civilization of intelligence
is still so far intact as to require 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 student of modern times. Conceivably, there may
come an abrupt term to its paramount vogue, through some
precipitate sweep of circumstances; 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 unintended, 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
gone 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,
without much foreknowledge of any ulterior consequences to which
such a sequence of change might be said to tend. It is only after
the new growth of use and wont has taken effect in an altered
range of principles and standards, that its direction and
ulterior consequences can be appreciated with any degree of
confidence. But this development that has thrown up
matter-of-fact knowledge 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
personnel involved; and in a peculiar degree the drift and
bearing 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 occidental 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 accounted 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. Anything 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
modern phase is to be studied only in its own light; and since
the sequence of development has hitherto reached no secure
consummation 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 achievement, -- 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 civilization. It is similarly beyond dispute
that men look to the modern system of schools and related
establishments of learning for the furtherance and conservation
of this intellectual 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 unquestioned 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 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
instruction, 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, encouragement 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
inclinations 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.(4*)
    The conservation and advancement of the higher learning
involves two lines of work, distinct but closely bound together:
(a) scientific and scholarly inquiry, and (b) the instruction of
students.(5*) The former of these is primary and indispensable.
It is this work of intellectual enterprise that gives its
character to the university and marks it off from the lower
schools. The work of teaching 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 inquiry. The instruction
necessarily involved in university work, therefore, is only such
as can readily be combined 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 purposes 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 learning.
    University teaching, having a particular and special purpose
-- the pursuit of knowledge -- it has also a particular and
special character, such as to differentiate it from other
teaching and at the same time leave it relatively ineffective for
other purposes. Its aim is to equip the student for the work of
inquiry, not to give him facility 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 inquiry, 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 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 under 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, together with whatever advisory
surveillance and guidance he may consistently afford 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 seeking their own preferment.(6*)
    All this, of course, implies no undervaluing of the work of
those men who aim to prepare the youth for citizenship and a
practical career. It is only a question of distinguishing between
things that belong apart. The scientist and the scholar on the
one hand, and the schoolmaster 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
modern 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 presumption 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 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 of indoctrination. The student who
comes up to the university 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 difference; the dispute turns
not on the practicability of distinguishing between the two, but
on the desirability of letting such a distinction go into effect.
It is a controversy between 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 generation 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
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, pecuniary, 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 scheme of
civilized life require that the establishments the to which this
interest is committed should not be charged with extraneous
duties; particularly not with extraneous matters 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 they are fit for their own special
work, are not men of affairs or adepts in worldly wisdom.

                III

    In point of historical pedigree the American universities are
of another derivation than their European counterpart; 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 American universities are, historically, an
outgrowth of the American college; and the latter was installed,
in its beginnings, 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 College, was this
early vocational aim of the schools allowed to decide their
character in the long run, nor to circumscribe 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 establishments 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 considerations that
guided their directorates. It would particularly 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 reshaped the
academic situation in America.
    At this era, some half a century ago, the American college
was, or was at least pressed to be, given over to disinterested
instruction, not specialized with a vocational, 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 superior and definitive member in a school system
designed 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 disinterested,
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 subdivisions 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 educational 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 professional 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 no means together in
bonds of ostensible Solidarity is by university an advisedly
concerted adjustment to the needs of scholarship 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 connection so inherited has not usually been
severed; and by ill-advised, or perhaps unadvised, imitation the
younger universities have blundered into encumbering themselves
with an undergraduate department to simulate this presumptively
honourable pedigree, to the detriment both of the university and
of the college so bound up with it. By this arrangement the
college -- undergraduate department -- falls into the position of
an appendage, 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 department
in the newer universities appears commonly to have been a
headlong eagerness on the part of the corporate 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 concluding touches to the education of young
men who have no designs on learning, beyond the close of the
college curriculum. It aims to afford 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 purports to be university work; so
that it is by no means unusual to find university (graduate) work
scheduled in the form of a curriculum, with all that
boarding-school circumstance 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 coercion
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 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 learning, which distinctively 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
accountancy advocated by the schoolmasters; and the outcome in
nearly all cases where the control of both departments 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 nominally 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 technical 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 disparagement 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 their
purpose, work and animus and those of the university proper. It
can only serve to trouble the single-mindedness 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 thorough going manner; while the pursuit
of knowledge that occupies the scientists and scholars is not
"practical" in the slightest 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 expediency, 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 regards 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, occupied 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 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 corporate 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 technical 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 attached to their particular university,
nor do these scientists, 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 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 afford
valuable data for the use of the professed scholars and
scientists, information that serves as material of Investigation,
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 expediency 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 arrived at; but for such material he does not by
preference resort to any one of the technical schools as
contrasted 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 investigator 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.
    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. Indeed, 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 professional men attached to these schools are
necessarily included 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 appreciates what is mechanically
serviceable; the professional 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 university's forces from
disinterested science and scholarship 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 scholars, 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 modern
community is wounded in its most sensitive spot -- the efficiency
of its specialists.
    So also, on the other hand, the formal incorporation of these
technological and professional men in the academic body, with its
professedly single-minded interest in learning, has its effect on
their frame of mind. They are, without intending it, placed in a
false position, which unavoidably 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
pressed 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 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 university precincts any aim or interest other
than those of irresponsible science and scholarship -- pursuit of
matter-of-fact knowledge -- are to be rated as interlopers.

                                IV

    To all this there is the ready objection of the schoolmasters
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 Christendom 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 argument. The
historical argument amounts to saying that the universities were
founded before modern civilization took on its modern character,
before the disinterested 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 this intellectual
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
modern science and scholarship have grown out of the technology
of handicraft and the theological philosophy of the
schoolmen.(7*) But just as it would be a bootless enterprise to
cut modern science back into handicraft technology, so would it
be a gratuitous 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
institution of civilized life, is an incident of the transition
from the barbarian culture of the middle ages to modern times,
and its later growth and acquirement of character 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 corporation for the cultivation and
care of the community's highest aspirations and ideals. But these
ideals and aspirations have changed somewhat with the changing
scheme of the Western civilization; and so the university has
also concomitantly so changed in character, aims and ideals as to
leave it still the corporate organ of the community's dominant
intellectual interest. At the same time, it is true, these
changes in the purpose and spirit of the university have always
been, and are always 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 change; and in 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 limitations that surround any
change in the habitual frame of mind prevalent in the community.
    The university of medieval and early modern 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 university is but another, somewhat
sublimated, expression of the same barbarian frame of mind. The
barbarian culture is pragmatic, utilitarian, worldly wise, and
its learning partakes of the same complexion. The barbarian, late
or early, is typically an unmitigated pragmatist; 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 high era of barbarism in Europe, the Dark and 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 modern community
carry, largely by shamefaced subreption, an ever increasing
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 corporation 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 today. By subreption, and by a sophisticated
subsumption 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 disinterested
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
practical 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 overshadowing barbarian tradition the
universities of early modern times started out as an avowed
contrivance for indoctrination 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 utilitarian
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 pattern 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 of the
non-utilitarian scientific and scholarly work indispensable to
the university's survival under modern conditions is still
scheduled under the faculties of law or medicine, or even of
divinity.
    But the human propensity for inquiry into things,
irrespective 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 régime of unmitigated 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 occupation
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 exceed 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, those purposes of crass expediency that were
of such great moment and were so much a matter of course in
earlier academic policy, have insensibly fallen to the rank of
incidentals. And what had once been incidental, or even an object
of surreptitious tolerance in the university, 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 medieval time -- had grown out of the schoolmen's
speculations in theology, being in point of derivation a body of
refinements on the divine scheme of salvation; and with a view to
quiet title, and to make manifest their devotion to the greater
good of eschatological expediency, those ingenious speculators
were content to proclaim that their philosophy is the handmaid of
theology -- Philosophia theologiae 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
unpractical, that has no intended or even ostensible bearing on
the religious fortunes of mankind; and their sanctimonious maxim
would today be better accepted as the subject of a limerick than
of a homily. Except in degree, the fortunes 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 research -- such as the history of
jurisprudence, comparative physiology, and the like. They have in
fact largely been eliminated.(8*)
    And changes running to this effect have gone farthest and
have taken most consistent effect in those communities that are
most fully imbued with the spirit of the modern peaceable
civilization. It is in the more backward communities and schools
that the barbarian animus of utilitarianism still maintains
itself most nearly intact, whether it touches matters of temporal
or of spiritual interest. With the later advance of culture, as
the intellectual 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 imperative necessity, more and
more consistently, that the spirit of disinterested inquiry must
have free play in these seminaries of the higher learning,
without afterthought 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 university.
    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 bestowed 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, independent and
close-knit structure; an individual corporate existence,
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 type 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 common 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 competent to go on their own recognizances,
-- indeed they commonly 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 superficial and formal at the
best, so far as regards any substantial control of their affairs
and policy by the university authorities at large; it is only in
their interference with academic policy, and in injecting their
own peculiar bias into university affairs, that they count
substantially 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
professional schools and without an undergraduate department; but
it is not possible to have one without due provision 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 professional schools to make good
their footing as the substantial core of the corporation.

                             V

    As intimated above, there are two main reasons for the
continued and tenacious connection between these schools and the
universities: (a) ancient tradition, fortified 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 authentication 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.(9*) But such a policy 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 modern 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 earning and
spending. There is, indeed, much of this spirit abroad in the
community, and any candidate for popular favour and prestige 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 effects 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 entrusted
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 hopeless discredit. There have been
some striking instances, but current not ions of delicacy will
scarcely admit a citation of nam es and dates. And while the
long-term drift of the modern idealistic bias may not permit the
universities permanently to be diverted to the service of Mammon
in this fashion, yet the unremitting endeavours of "educators"
seeking prestige for worldly wisdom results at the best in a
fluctuating state of compromise, in which the ill effects of such
bids for popularity are continually being outworn by the drift of
academic usage.
    The point is illustrated by the American state universities
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, commonly, with a professed utilitarian
purpose, and have started out with professional training as their
chief avowed aim. The purpose made most of in their establishment
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
infrequently been entrusted to political masters of intrigue,
with scant academic qualifications; their foundations has been
the work of practical politicians with a view to conciliate 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" character; but they have named these
establishments "universities" 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," 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 claiming 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 number of them may still be found.

    What has just been said of the place which the university
occupies in modern civilization, and more particularly 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 faithfully 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 corrected and offset by
vigilant authorities who, from motives of their own, seek to turn
the universities to account in one way and another. It describes
an institutional 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.
    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
modern scheme of things, which is above all 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 intellectual 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 determination of academic policy
and the conduct of academic affairs 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 permit a different ideal to be put
into effect. It is intended 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 characterization of the university and
its work, therefore, endeavours 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 modern civilization culminates. These others
are patent, insistent and palpable, and there need be no
apprehension 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 habituation 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 designed to
serve.
    So, one class and another, biassed by the habitual
preoccupation of the class, will aim to divert the academic
equipment to some particular use which habit has led them to rate
high; or to include in the academic discipline various lines of
inquiry and training which are extraneous to the higher learning
but which the class in question 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 anything
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 spokesmen of some tangible ideal, some
materially expedient aspiration, embodying more of worldly
wisdom, are for ever urging upon the institutions of the higher
leaning one or another course of action of a more palpably
expedient kind. But, for better or worse, the passage of time
brings out the fact that these sober and sensible courses of
policy so advocated are after all essentially extraneous, if not
alien, to those purposes for which a university can be
maintained, on the ground afforded by the habits of thought
prevalent in the modern 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 universities. Of these extraneous interests
the two most notable have, as already indicated above, been the
ecclesiastical 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, reconciliation 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 directorate.
This question gathers in its net all those perplexing details of
expediency that now claim the attention 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 responsibilities, as well as an unexampled opportunity.
So that the outlook now (June 1918) 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.
    Again, it is not that the war is expected to leave the lines
of European scholars and scientists extinct; although 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 the hopes of the higher
learning 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 statistical record and estimate, is the
current and 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
therefore 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 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 exceedingly 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 effect, Germany, and Germany's
associates in this warlike enterprise, 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 matter 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 other
nations; although here again it is only a relative degree 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 overtake 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 degree 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 material
degree of derangement is to be looked for, but in comparison with
what the experience of the war is bringing 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 question, what the Americans will do with the best
opportunity which the circumstances offer. And on their conduct
of their affairs in this bearing turns not only their own fortune
in respect of the interests of science and scholarship, but in
great measure the fortunes of their overseas friends and
co-partners in the republic of learning 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 substantial 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 surviving 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 resources 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 position of keepers of the ways and means whereby the
republic 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 overseas 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 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
response to short-sighted patriotic preconceptions; the interests
of science, and therefore of the academic community, 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 international 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 sentiment on both sides of the line of cleavage will
presumably not admit a cordial understanding and co-operation
between the German contingent and the rest of the 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 installation 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 interest 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 communication 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 duplication 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 universities 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 measure of present relief from some
part of the pecuniary strain under which they are now working.
    But competition is well ingrained in the habitual outlook 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 abatement, 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 perhaps rather
with some abatement of restrictions, and with such additional
funds as may be required, the necessary work and organization
should readily be taken care of by such an institution. Further
growth and ramification would be left to future counsel and
advisement.
    The contemplated enterprise would necessarily require a
certain planning and organization of work and something 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 detailed proposals on that head here. Yet
the caution may well be entered here that few specifications are
better 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 contraries.
    It is also evident that such an enterprise will involve
provision for some expenditure of funds; presumably a somewhat
generous expenditure; which comes near implying 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 material resources in the country that come legitimately
under this head. At the same time it is well in this connection
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 enterprise, if only the available sources
are drawn on without prejudice. In the mind of any disinterested
student of the American economic situation, there can be no
serious apprehension that the American people, collectively, 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
productive 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 immediate future than in the
immediate past; and the disposable 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 belong here.
    A question of graver weight and of greater perplexity touches
the presumptive attitude of the several universities 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 interest. 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
executives 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 looking 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 as the common run, picked though they may be with a
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 bands 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 instant
pressure, turn their best efforts to their ostensible 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.

NOTES:

1. An inquiry of this kind has been attempted elsewhere: Cf. The
Instinct of Workmanship. chapter vii, pp. 321-340; "The Place of
Science in Modern Civilization", American Journal of Sociology.
Vol. XI (March, 1906), pp. 585-609; "The Evolution of the
Scientific Point of View," University of California Chronicle
(1908), Vol. X, No. 4, pp. 395-416.

2. Cf. The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the
Industrial Arts, ch.i and pp. 30-45, 52-62, 84-89.

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

4. 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
contacts, 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 Transition." p 288.

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

6. Cf., e.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 externals 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 same
topic; and, indeed, it would be difficult to find a deliberate
expression to the contrary among men entitled to speak in these
premises.
    It may be in place to add here that the volume referred to,
on University Control, has been had in mind throughout the
following analysis and has served as ground and material for much
of the argument.

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

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

9. Cf. "Some Considerations On the Function of the State
University." (Inaugural Address of Edmund Janes James, Ph.D.,
LL.D.), Science, November 17, 1905.


CHAPTER II

The Governing Boards

    In the working theory of the modern civilized community, --
that is to say in the current common-sense apprehension 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 entrusted the community's joint
interest in esoteric knowledge. 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 modern times that works to no ulterior end and is
controlled 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 modern culture.
    Such has been the case, increasingly, for some generations
past; but it is not until quite recently that such a statement
would hold true unequivocally and with an unqualified 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 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 sufficient 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 dissipation 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 modern 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
single-minded course of action has never been realized in any
concrete case. While it holds true, by and large, that modern
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 hand, that the same solicitous attention that once converged
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
considerations of a pecuniary kind; good, on the whole, for
pecuniary purposes only; that is to say, gain and expenditure 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 workday 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
single-mindedness 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 effective
in the community's life, and therefore dominates their everyday
habits of thought for the time being. This tone-giving dominance
of such a workday interest may be transient or relatively
enduring; it may be more or less urgently important and
consequential under the circumstances in which the community is
placed, or the clamour of its spokesmen and beneficiaries may be
more or less ubiquitous and pertinacious; 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 enduring 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 determined by the current run of popular
sentiment touching the community'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 devotional, 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 significance. 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
cultivated, 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 proprieties -- 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 religious conviction or on an
ecclesiastical or priestly bias in the ruling bodies. 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 prehistory 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 o£ 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
secularization is entirely consonant with the prevailing drift of
sentiment in the community at large, as is shown by the uniform
and uncritical approval with which it is regarded. The
substitution is a substitution of businessmen 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 affairs to take
care of the fiscal concerns of these university corporations; for
the typical modern university is a corporation 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
identified with the governing board, and such men of wealth are
also commonly businessmen. It is apparently believed, 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 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 corporate affairs of the university,
beyond a directive oversight of the distribution of expenditures
among the several academic purposes for which the corporate
income 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 constitutes 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.
Beyond 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 corporation, who have none but a
formal, if any, direct connection 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 corporation's fiscal
officers and their clerical force, -- with such effect of
complaisant oversight as will best be appreciated by any person
who has bad the fortune to look into the accounts of a large
corporation.

    So far as regards its pecuniary affairs and their due
administration, the typical modern university is in a 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 university for 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 interest.
    The governing boards -- trustees, regents, curators, fellows,
whatever their style and title -- are an aimless survival from
the days of clerical rule, when they were presumably of some
effect in enforcing conformity to orthodox opinions and
observances, among the academic staff. At that time, when means
for maintenance of the denominational 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 businessmen 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. The
sole ground of their retention appears to be an unreflecting
deferential concession to the usages of corporate organization
and control, such as have been found advantageous for the pursuit
of private gain by businessmen banded together in the
exploitation of joint-stock companies with limited liability.(1*)
    The fact remains, the modern civilized community is reluctant
to trust its serious interests to others than men of pecuniary
substance, who have proved their fitness for the direction of
academic affairs by acquiring, or by otherwise being possessed
of, considerable wealth.(2*) It is not simply that experienced
businessmen are, on mature reflection, judged to be the safest
and most competent 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 to the
high esteem currently accorded to men of wealth at large, and
especially to wealthy men who have succeeded in business, quite
apart from any special capacity shown by such success for the
guardianship of any institution of learning. Business success is
by common consent, and quite uncritically, taken to be conclusive
evidence of wisdom even in matters that have no relation to
business 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 corporation. 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 responsibility 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 learning.(3*)
    As bearing on the case of the American universities, it
should be called to mind that the businessmen of this 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 enterprise, the spirit of American
business is a spirit of quietism, 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
technologists are as good and efficient as their kind in other
countries. 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 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, baring -- 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 during 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 hundred 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
increment. In all directions, wherever enterprise and industry
have gone, the opportunity was wide and large for such as had the
patience or astuteness to place themselves in the way of this
multifarious flow of the unearned 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 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 modern taste has been unduly
commercialized by the unremitting attention necessarily 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 accepted 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
applies 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 habitually 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, be fore 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 matters that
were of most substantial interest to the common man of that time.
Indeed, the salvation of men's souls 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 affairs 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 then
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
businessmen 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;(4*) more particularly to
any man whose lot is cast in the field of business enterprise of
a middling scale and commonplace circumstances. And notoriously,
the like view of the matter 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, 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 conversant with these matters
to know the difference, or that there is a difference, between
the college and the university. 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
apologetically and offer extenuating considerations, such as
virtually to concede the case, at the same time that they are
very prone to evade the issue by dwelling on accessory and
subsidiary considerations that do not substantially touch the
question of trained capacity for the conduct of business
affairs.(5*) The apologists commonly shift from the undebatable
ground of the higher learning as related to business success, to
the more defensible ground of the undergraduate curriculum,
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 technical schools,
included within the university corporation or otherwise. There is
ground for their contention in so far as "university training" is
(by subreption) 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 extant. 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 included 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 pronouncedly 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 business shrewdness,
business enterprise is, by the same token, incompatible with the
spirit of the higher learning. Indeed, within the ordinary range
of lawful occupations these two lines of endeavour, and the
animus that belongs to each, are as widely out of touch as may
be. 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 particularly 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 modern kind. In both of these lines
of activity men are occupied with impersonal facts and deal with
them in a matter-of-fact way. In both, as far as may be, the
personal 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 population the same bent as
goes to further or to appreciate the work of modern science. But
it would be quite nugatory to suggest that the governing boards
of the universities 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 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 equation, and depending for its movement and effect on
personal 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 human miscalculation. The training given by
these two lines of endeavour -- science and business -- is wholly
divergent; 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 positively trained out of
the habit of mind indispensable to business enterprise. The
converse is true of the men of business affairs.(6*)
    Plato's classic scheme of folly, which would have the
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 arrangement it looks foolish,
of course, -- ingeniously foolish; 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
scholasticism 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 management 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
universities, but the current effects of this method of
university 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 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 life would question the view
set forth above, and they would particularly deny that business
principles do or can pervade the corporate 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
dispute -- yet these boards do not, on the whole, in practice,
extend the exercise of their plenary discretion to the directive
control of what are properly speaking academic matters; that they
habitually confine their work of directorship to the pecuniary
affairs 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 themselves
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; 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 particularly
as regards those older establishments that are burdened with
academic traditions running back beyond the date when their
governing boards were taken over by 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 effective
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 position 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 contingencies, while the academic staff
remains (notoriously) underpaid 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, such as will justify the expenditure in
terms of vendible property acquired; therefore they are prima
facie imbecile, and correspondingly distasteful, to men whose
habitual occupation is with the acquisition of property. By force
of the same businesslike bias the boards unavoidably 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 propaganda that are presumed to heighten
the business acumen of the students or to yield immediate returns
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 specifications 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 responsibility
in that direction chiefly touches his observance 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 expression in a somewhat special sense. There is at
present an increasingly broad and strenuous insistence on such
qualifications in the men selected as heads of the universities;
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 common 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 express 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
themselves 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.
Business 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 avowed
adepts of culture and from those without the pale, when a new
head has, as recently been called to one of the greater
universities, is in commendation of his business capacity,
"commercial sense," executive ability, financiering tact; and the
effectual canvass of his qualifications does not commonly range
much outside of these prime requisites. The modicum of
scholarship and scholarly 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 pecuniary, affairs.
    As to the requirements of scholarly or scientific competency,
a plausible speaker with a large gift of assurance, a
businesslike "educator" or clergyman, some urbane pillar of
society, some astute veteran of the scientific demi-monde, will
meet all reasonable requirements. Scholarship 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 incumbents of executive office show so much
of scholarly animus and attainments as they do is in great
measure a fortuitous circumstance. It is, indeed, a safe
generalization that in point of fact the average of university
presidents 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 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 expected 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.(7*)

NOTES:

1. 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
(appraised 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-optation. 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 rendered, however, and no steps appear to have been taken to
procure such a report, or any equivalent accounting. But on
persistent urging from the side of his faculty, and after some
courteous delay, the academic head pushed an inquiry into the
corporation'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
entrusted to them, and to have seen to their investment and
disposal 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-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. Something 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 current 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 accumulate 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
number of the uneasy persons interested) there was an ugly
suggestion afloat touching the pecuniary integrity of the board's
management, 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
interested 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.

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

3. 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 distinction. 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.
    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 unknown,
though presumably exceptional.

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

5. Cf. R.T. Crane, as above, especially part I, ch. ii. iii, and
vi. Cf. also H.P. Judson, The Higher Education as a Training for
Business, 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 Classical
Conference at Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 3, 1909.

6. Cf. Bacon, Essays -- "Of Cunning", and "Of Wisdom for a Man's
Self."

7. Cf. ch. viii, especially pp. 242-269.

CHAPTER III

The Academic Administration and Policy

    Men dilate on the high necessity of a businesslike
organization and control of the university, its equipment,
personnel and routine. What is had in mind in this insistence on
an efficient system is that these corporations of learning shall
set their affairs in order after the pattern of a well-conducted
business concern. In this view the university is conceived as a
business house dealing in merchantable 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 investment
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 common sense 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 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
enterprise, 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 embodied 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 intellectual initiative and
proclivity that goes in as the indispensable motive force in the
pursuit of learning be reduced to any known terms of
subordination, obedience, or authoritative direction. No scholar
or scientist can become an employee in respect of his scholarly
or scientific work. Mechanical systematization and authoritative
control can in these premises not reach beyond the material
circumstances that condition the work in hand, nor can it in
these external matters with good effect go farther 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;(1*) in the degree in which the converse relation is
allowed to take effect, 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 university,
the incumbent necessarily accepts all the conditions that attach
to the administration of his office, whether by usage and common
sense expectation, by express arrangement, or by patent
understanding with the board to which he owes his elevation to
this post of dignity and command. By usage and precedent it is
incumbent on him to govern the academic personnel and equipment
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 office as best to serve the
scholarly needs of the academic staff, due regard being
scrupulously had to the idiosyncrasies, 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 governing 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 circumstance" 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 control of the
captain of erudition at every point, and so articulated and
standardized that its rate of speed and the volume of its current
output can be exhibited to full statistical 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.(2*) Humanly
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 statistical exhibits, at the best, and can
ordinarily come to appraisal and popular appreciation only in the
long run. The need of a businesslike showing is instant and
imperative, particularly in a business era of large turnover and
quick returns, and to meet this need the uneventful scholastic
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
qualifications, rather than of scholarly insight, -- the method
of selecting the executive heads under the present régime 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) somewhat beyond his intellectual horizon. So that
with slight misgivings, if any, he takes to the methods of
organization and control that have commended 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 unwritten,
and commonly unspoken, commonplaces lying at the root of modern
academic policy that the various universities are competitors for
the traffic in merchantable instruction, in much the same fashion
as rival establishments in the retail trade compete for custom.
Indeed, the modern 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 régime as well as by its critics. The fact
that the universities are assumed to be irreconcilable
competitors, both in the popular apprehension 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 erudition, but the reason for such denial is the need of
it.(3*)
    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
administration, 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 employees and subordinates who are to
work under his direction, and he must be able to rely on the
instant and unwavering loyalty of his staff in any line of policy
on which he may decide to enter. He must therefore 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.
    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 employees, 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 needless 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.(4*)
    Under this rule the academic staff becomes a body of graded
subalterns, who share confidence of the chief in varying degrees,
but who 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 employees, 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 business, 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 irresponsible, advice and moral support at any
juncture. He will also, in compliance with charter stipulations
and parliamentary usage, have certain officially recognized
advisers, -- the various deans, advisory committees, Academic
Council, University Senate, and the like, -- with whom he shares
responsibility, particularly for measures of doubtful popularity,
and whose advice he formally takes coram publico; but he can not
well share discretion with these, except on administrative
matters of inconsequential detail. 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 tradition the faculty is the keeper of
the academic interests of the university and makes up a body of
loosely-bound noncompetitive 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 university'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 observance 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 punctilios 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 demands 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 substance. 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 happen in case its members are men of force and
ingenuity, 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 procure 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 partially 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 incitement 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
fitness as their chief, -- administrative facility, plausibility,
proficiency as public speakers and parliamentarians, ready
versatility of convictions, and a staunch loyalty to their bread.
Experience teaches that scholarly or scientific capacity does not
enter in any appreciable measure among the qualifications so
required for responsible academic office, beyond what may
thriftily serve to mask the conventional 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 staff,
to reward the good and faithful servant and 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 ambitions and endowment, and with few
traditions to hamper the working out of the system. The incursion
of business 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 effect; so that
the régime 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 growth,
rather than at their full fruition, it follows that any analysis
of the effects of this régime 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 dispassionate give
and take of institutional change. Such an impersonal attitude, it
is perhaps needless to remark, is not always easy to maintain in
dealing with facts of so personal, and often of so animated, a
character. Particularly 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, descriptions
and incidents that have been habitually employed in current
controversy, often with a marked animus. Men have taken sides on
these matters, and so are engaged in controversy on the merits of
the current régime 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
executive head is the central figure. The light fails on him
rather than on the forces that move him, and it comes as a matter
of course to pass opinions on the resulting incidents and
consequences, as the outcome of his free initiative 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 which he is endowed, and unless he
shall be found to measure up to expectations in kind and degree
in this matter he will go in the discard, and his personal ideals
and initiative will count as little more than a transient
obstruction. 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 conducting 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 scholars 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 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 purpose.
    Under the rule imposed by those businesslike preconceptions
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 university'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 material 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 immediately results in an
administrative system of bureaux or departments, a hierarchical
gradation of the members of the staff, and a rigorous parcelment
and standardization of the instruction offered. Some such system
is indispensable 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 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 detail
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 consists substantially in the facilitation of
scholarly and scientific habits of thought, and the imposition of
any appreciable 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 practice. But something of a
detailed discussion of the system 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
practical view of the public at large, and of the governing
boards, the university is primarily an undergraduate 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 preconceptions, and go to their
work with a view primarily to the needs of their undergraduate
departments. The businesslike order and system introduced into
the universities, 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 desire 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 learning 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 competitive ambition; and it is a fact in the current
academic situation which must be counted in as a chronic
discrepancy, 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 graduate work, but
what gives statistically formidable results in the way of a
numerous enrolment, many degrees conferred, public exhibitions,
courses of instruction -- in short what rolls up a large showing
of turnover and output -- is the perfunctory work of the
undergraduate department, as well as the array of vocational
schools latterly subjoined as auxiliaries to this end. Hence the
needs and possibilities of the undergraduate and vocational
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 divisions of the school year,
as well as in the various accessory attractions offered, such as
the athletic equipment, 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 régime. 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 enlarged student
body, of such a nature that a very appreciable proportion of
these students no longer seek residence 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 contingent
among the students, and so desirable is their enrolment and the
countenance of their presence, in the apprehension 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 knowledge 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 withdrawal 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 "student
activities."
    At the same 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 circumspect administration of college
discipline. With a body of students whose everyday interest, as
may be said without 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 (ostensibly
at least) an establishment for the instruction of the youth, it
becomes necessary to organize this instruction on a coercive
plan, and hence to itemize the scholastic tasks of the inmates
with great nicety of subdivision and with a meticulous regard to
an exact equivalence as 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
excursions 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 mechanical standardization,
uniformity, surveillance and accountancy are indispensable. As
regards the schedule of instruction, bona fide students will
require but little exacting 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 honourable
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 is
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
accountancy, as well as with a view to the greater impressiveness
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 consider the requirements of scholarship to be an
imperative factor in academic administration. There is a
well-considered preference for semi-annual or quarterly periods
of instruction, with a corresponding time limit on the courses
offered; and the parcelment of credits is carried 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 performance 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
accountants, 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 individual 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 chief
attraction of college life for a large proportion of the
university's young men, and that are, in the apprehension of
many, so essential a part in the training of the modern
gentleman.
    Such a system of accountancy acts to break the continuity 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 academic "miner's inch." Typically, this
miner's inch is measured in terms of standard text per time unit,
and the immediate 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 departments, 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
accountancy 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 available
forces of the establishment count toward the competitive 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
produce an impression, especially as regards the undergraduate
school, are commonly laymen who are expected to go 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 competing 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 customers 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 universities, 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 concerns 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 bureaucratic departments, and not least the prestige of its
executive head; in very much the same way as the like will 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 effectual prestige
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 splendour 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 graduation 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 departments 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 departments, 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 collegiate
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, detailed 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 demarkation between undergraduate and graduate instruction is
advisedly blurred or disregarded. It is not altogether unusual
latterly, advisedly to efface the distinction between the
undergraduate and the graduate division and endeavour to make a
gradual transition from the one to the other.(5*) This is done in
the less conspicuous fashion of scheduling certain courses as
Graduate and Senior, and allowing scholastic credits acquired in
certain courses of the upper-class undergraduate curriculum to
count toward the complement of graduate credits required of
candidates for advanced degrees. More conspicuously and with
fuller effect the same end is sought at other universities by
classifying the two later years of the undergraduate 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
division as such on the other hand. This "Senior College"
division so comes to be accounted in some sort a halfway 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 methods 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
perfunctory, character that belongs by tradition and necessity to
the undergraduate division; whereby in effect the instruction
scheduled as "graduate" is, in so far, taken out of the domain of
the higher learning and thrown back into the hands of the
schoolmasters. The rest of the current 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 consummate end the free pursuit of learning should
no longer find a standing-place in the university except by
subreption and 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
simulation of interest in theological speculations and a
disingenuous 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 effect 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 aggressive 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 volume. One line,
somewhat narrowly bounded as a specialty, measures the capacity
of the common run of talented scientists and scholars for
first-class work, whatever 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 alternative
which not unusually goes into effect 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 fashion and can only give mediocre
results, at the best. What practically happens at the worst is
better left under the cover of a decent reticence.
    Even those preferred lines of instruction which in their own
right 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 number 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 persistent concentration on any point, the run of instruction
offered 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 department 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,
methods, and tests of competitive business into the work of
instruction.(6*)
    Under these principles of accountancy and hierarchical
control, each of the several bureaux of erudition -- commonly
called departments -- is a competitor with all its fellow bureaux
in the (thrifty) apportionment of funds and equipment, -- for the
businesslike university management habitually harbours a larger
number of departments than its disposable means will adequately
provide for. So also each department competes with its fellow
departments, as well as with similar departments in rival
universities, for a clientele in the way of student
registrations. These two lines of competition are closely
interdependent. 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 a shortcoming, and it is
there fore likely to bring a reduction of allowances. 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 competency 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
because 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.
    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 department will admit. Out
of this competitive aggrandizement of departments there may even
arise a diplomatic contention between heads of departments, as to
the precise 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.(7*) 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 competitive 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 negotiations
involved in jealously guarding their respective frontiers may
even take on an acrimonious tone, and may involve 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 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 instructors will be the more
consistently organized and controlled with a view to their
dispensing accumulated knowledge, 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
possessed 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, commonly, given
such consideration as the exigencies of academic 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
efficiency in the instruction given, would decide that no demands
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 efficiency
would avoid duplication of course, and would curtail the number
of courses offered by any given department to such a modicum as
the special fitness of the members 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 obvious to the meanest academic common sense. But
amicable working arrangements of this kind between departments of
different universities, or between the several 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(8*) periodic conferences of
presidents commonly have such an ostensible purpose.
    Competitive enterprise, reinforced with a sentimental
penchant for large figures, demands a full schedule of
instruction. 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 equipment, 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 directorate is always eager to expand and project
the business 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 variety 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 customers who do not know the
difference, or to turn out goods at a higher cost than other
competing concerns. So business 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, learning 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 employees; 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 pecuniary, end or
equivalence. It is by no means hereby intended to imply that such
pursuit of knowledge is an aimless or indolent manner of life;
nothing like dissipation 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 assigned the scholars
and scientists in the service of civilization, 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 applicable 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 rejoice 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 recognized 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 passably 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 employees are as defenceless 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 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
almost a matter of course. That it has not formally been put in
practice appears to be due to tradition, and to that long-term
common sense 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 accountable for certain other features of
academic management touching the pay-roll; notably the failure of
the employees 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 enrolment many students
from the higher levels of gentility 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
alternatives, 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 régime has come in. They are held to
be indispensable, or unavoidable; not for scholarly work, of
course, but chiefly to encourage the attendance 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 learning, 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 corporation
of learning by drawing public attention. Corporate 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 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 primarily
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 spendthrift habits. The improvement sought in these
endeavours is not so much the increase and acceleration of
scholarly pursuits, as a furthering of "social" proficiency. A
"gentleman's college" is an establishment in which scholarship is
advisedly made subordinate to genteel dissipation, to a grounding
in those methods of conspicuous consumption 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,
sufficiently 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 than proficiency in the gainful conduct of
business. The ways and means of reputably consuming time and
substance, therefore, is by prescriptive necessity to be included
in the training offered at any well-appointed undergraduate
establishment that aims in any comprehensive sense to do its
whole duty by the well-to-do young men under its tutelage.(9*) 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 importunities 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 substantially more to be desired than
proficiency in genteel dissipation. It is only that the higher
learning and the life of fashion and affairs are two widely
distinct and divergent 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 adepts in the
ritual of decorum, and it is doubtless a creditable work 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 province of the undergraduate school; at least it is not here
intended to argue the contrary. At the same time a secure
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 students -- or residents --
from the better classes of society, and from 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 undergraduate 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 university from the
collegiate division should be made absolute. Neither does the
worldly spirit that pervades the gentlemen's college further the
university's interest in scholarship, nor do the university's
scholarly interests further the college work in gentility.
    Well to the front among these undergraduate appurtenances of
gentlemanship are the factional clubs known as Greek-letter
fraternities. These touch the province of learning in the
universities only incidentally and superficially, as they do not
in practice enter the graduate division except by way of a thin
aftermath of factional 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 presence affects the necessary discipline of the school
at large, entailing a more elaborate and rigorous surveillance
and more meddling with personal habits than would otherwise 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 being 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
effective; 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 taskwork 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 in sports that, in practical effect, few schools fail
to give it all the support that the limits of decorum 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;(10*)
or of the equally threadbare expedients by which these members of
the gild of sportsmen are enabled to meet the formal requirements
of scholarship imposed by shamefaced intercollegiate
bargaining.(11*)
    But apart from such petty expedients, however abundant and
commonplace, there is the more significant practice 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, masquerading under the caption of "physical culture,"
whose chief duty is to put the teams in form for the various
contests. 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 penurious economy in
the equipment and current supply of materials 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 purchases and attendance. The
qualifications of such a "professor" are those of a coach, while
in point of scholarly 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 shamefulness of the
transaction, partly to meet the exacting demands of a coach whose
professional services have a high commercial rating in the
sporting community, and who is presumed to be indispensable to
the university's due success 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 enrolment and the obtaining of
funds by use of which to achieve a further increase. To bring
this assiduous endeavour 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 undergraduate
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 university 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
equipment, are working against the side-draft of a religious
bias, with a corps of under-paid and over-worked teachers in
great part selected on denominational grounds, and are
under-rated by all concerned. The proposition, however, taken in
a general way and allowing for exceptions, is too manifestly true
to admit of much question; particularly 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 undergraduate establishments
can not be gone into here; in part they are obvious, in part
quite obscure. But in any case the matter can not be gone into
here, except so far as it has an immediate bearing on the
advanced work of the university, through the inclusion of these
collegiate schools in the university corporation and under the
same government. 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 person 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 businesslike executive; and that
so its shaping of the foundations of the establishment as a whole
acts irresistibly to fashion the rest of the university
administration and instruction in the image of the undergraduate
policy. Under 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 competition
in magnitude and visible success; and the same scheme of enforced
statistical credits will gradually insinuate 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
specification 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 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
attended to, if at all, in the scant interstitial intervals
allowed 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 sufficiently plain; but
in case of doubt any curious person may easily assure himself of
it by looking over the current state of things as they run in any
one of the universities 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 further elaboration
continues to employ the talents and deliberation of college men,
can enable any observer to appreciate 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 personal 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 academic 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 involved 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 deliberative 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, desired to take care of further
refinements of doubt and detail that arise out of the last
previous extensions 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;(12*) with the consequence
that the grading and credit system is subject to a ceaseless
proliferation of ever more meticulous 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
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 common sense rather than on
further and more meticulous and rigorous specification.

    It is at this point that the American system of fellowships
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 advanced study farther and with greater
singleness of purpose and it is quite plain that at that stage of
its growth the system was conceived to have no bearing on
intercollegiate 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 fellowships; the traditional decencies require (voluble
and reiterated) professions to that effect. But in point of
practical effect, and progressively, concomitant with the
incursion 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 residence, 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 matter, and are quite callously
exploiting the system in that sense.
    Not that the fellowships have altogether lost that character
of a scholarly stipendiary with which they started out; but they
have, under businesslike management, acquired a use not
originally intended; and the new, competitive use of them is
unequivocally their main use today. 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 academic 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 advanced
students, it has become a moot question in academic policy
whether a larger number of fellowships with smaller stipends will
give a more advantageous net statistical 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 latterday 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 institution 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 eminently guided by consideration of
short-term gains. It is also true that the average stipend
attached to the fellowships 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 fellowships, 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.(13*)

    One further point of contact and contamination is necessary
to be brought into this account of the undergraduate
administration and its bearing on advanced work. The scholastic
accessories spoken of above -- clubs, fraternities, 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 proper. But they count, indirectly and effectually,
toward 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 undergraduate 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 income
somewhat above the average of incomes in the community, and more
particularly in excess of the commonplace 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 undergraduate training. With like
effect the mental discipline exercised by these sports and polite
events greatly favours the growth of tactful equivocation and a
guarded habit of mind, such as makes for worldly wisdom and
success in business, but which is worse than useless in the
scholar or scientist. And further and perhaps more decisively, an
undergraduate who does his whole duty in the way of sports,
fraternities, clubs, and reputable dissipation at large, commonly
comes through his undergraduate 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.

NOTES:

1. 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.

2. Cf. George T. Ladd, as above, pp. 351-352.

3. 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 academic 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 experience in business are
uncritically carried over into academic affairs.
    Critics of the present régime 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
acquisition 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.

4. 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 employees 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 staff 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 dismissal 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 circumstances of the
dismissal offer several details of a more discreditable character
than Professor Ladd appears to have been aware of.

5. The strategic reason for this is the desire to retain for
graduate 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.

6. At least one such businesslike chief of bureau has seriously
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 standard
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."

7. So, e. g., it is known to have, on occasion, became a
difficult question of inter-bureaucratic comity, whether
commercial geography 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 Religions; 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
meretricious significance.

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

9. The English pattern of boys' schools and gentlemanly
university 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
authenticity of these English customs has at many a difficult
passage sewed opportunely to take the edge off the
gentlemen-educators' sense of shame.

10. Illustrative instances have little value as anecdotes and not
much 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 familiar
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 bookkeeper 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 reported at his office,
and that only once, during the year of their incumbency. These,
as already remarked, are commonplace occurrences. The more
spectacular instances of shrewd management in these premises can
not well be dealt with otherwise than by a canny silence; that
being also the course approved by current practice.

11. 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 mentioned,
without imputation of professionalism, was specified the ability
to read at sight such a passage in a given foreign language as
would satisfy the instructor in charge that the candidate was
competent in the language in question. The instructor 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 foreign 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.

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

13. 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.

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 university 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 uninterrupted growth in
size and other tangible quantitative 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
business 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 consequence in business enterprise, therefore,
particularly in such business enterprise as has to do with many
impressionable customers, are the salesmanlike virtues of
effrontery and tact. These are high qualities in all business,
because their due exercise is believed to bring a net return
above the cost of the goods to the seller, and, indeed, above
their value to the buyer. Unless the man in competitive business
is able, by force of these businesslike 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 managed business concern, are enabled
to add to their marketable 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
intangible 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 customer'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 capitalized 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 similar nature are
involved in nearly all competitive business. They are the product
of salesmanship, not of workmanship; 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 differential advantage which they give to one seller as
against 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 "goodwill" 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, conduce 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 learning, 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 university from
such an accession of popular illusions is a differential gain in
competition with rival seats of learning, not a gain to the
republic of learning or to the academic community 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 universities. But as competitors for the good-will
of the unlettered 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 work 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 publicity; so that "business principles" in academic
policy comes to mean, chiefly, the principles of reputable
publicity. It means this more frequently and more consistently
than anything else, so far as regards the academic
administration, as distinguished from the fiscal management of
the corporation.
    Of course, the standards, ideals, principles and procedure of
business traffic enter into the scheme of university policy in
other relations also, as has already appeared 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 business 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 occupied with industrial
enterprise of some kind, and with transactions in credit, -- with
a running sequence of bargains 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
competitors 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 appreciable 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 business to be transacted on the strength of it; with the
result that the academic directorate applies itself to this
pursuit without arrière pensée. 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 suggestive 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 installation 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 material 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. Current expenditure for
the prosecution of this work, therefore, offers the enterprise in
advertisement a less advantageous field for the convincing use of
funds than the material equipment, especially the larger items,
-- laboratory and library buildings, assembly halls, curious
museum exhibits, grounds for athletic contests, and the like.
There is consequently a steady drift of provocation towards
expenditure on conspicuous extensions of the "plant," and a
correlative constant temptation to parsimony 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."(1*)
    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 particularly 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
province 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 instruction.
    The running-expenses are always the most urgent items of the
budget, as seen from the standpoint of the academic 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 personnel, -- as, e.g., the extremely common
and extremely unfortunate practice of keeping the allowance for
maintenance and service in the university libraries so low as
seriously to impair their serviceability. But the exigencies 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.(2*)
    In so discriminating against the working capacity of the
university, and in favour of its real-estate, this pursuit of
reputable publicity further decides that the exterior 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. 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
appreciable 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 appointments 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
difficult 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 facades and perplexing feats of architecture;
and then, such an appeal would have no particular motive in their
case; it is not necessary to impress them. It is in the eyes of
the unlettered, particularly the business community, that it is
desirable 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 populace, the
university buildings should bulk large in the landscape, should
be wastefully 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 publicity. 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 annoying
distribution of light, due to the requirements of exterior
symmetry and the decorative distribution of windows; 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 a facade as will
simulate the defensive details of a mediaeval keep, to be
surmounted with embrasured battlements and a (make-believe)
loopholed turret. So, again, space will, on the same ground, be
wasted in heavy-ceiled, ill-lighted lobbies; which might once
have served as a mustering place for a body of unruly
men-at-arms, but which mean nothing more to the point today, and
in these premises, than so many inconvenient flagstones to be
crossed in coming 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
culture 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 approved 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 properties 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 obvious 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 modern builder's use of materials.
Modern building, on a large scale and designed for durable
results, is framework building. The modern requirements of light,
heating, ventilation and access require it to be such; and the
materials used lend themselves to that manner of construction.
The strains involved in modern structures are frame-work strains;
whereas the forms which these edifices 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 combination that of
right belonged to them under the circumstances of materials and
uses under which they were once worked out. So there results a
meaningless juxtaposition 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.
    These architectural vagaries serve no useful end in academic
life. As an object lesson they conduce, in their measure, to
inculcate in the students a spirit of disingenuousness. But they
spread abroad the prestige of the university as an ornate and
spendthrift establishment; which is believed to bring increased
enrolment of students and, what is even more to the point, to
conciliate the good-will of the opulent patrons of learning. That
these edifices are good for this purpose, and that this policy of
architectural mise en scene 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 wasteful, ornate and meretricious edifices a
competent expression of their cultural hopes and ambitions.

NOTES:

1. A single illustrative instance may serve to show how the land
lies in this respect, even though it may seem to the uninitiated
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 assistants and caretakers,
particularly 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
temperature, throughout the building by means of a suitable
arrangement of air-shafts. Such was the design. But intelligent
service comes high, and ignorant janitors are willing to
undertake 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 outdoor intake
be boarded up tightly. so that the air which passed over the
heating coils and through the air-shafts to the laboratory 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 circulating over the
steam coils and through the ventilating shafts. By this means an
obvious saving in fuel would be effected, corresponding 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 closed
system of ventilation.

2. This is a nearly universal infirmity of American university
policy, but it is doubtless not to be set down solely to the
account 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 conduct
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 physical
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.

CHAPTER V

The Academic Personnel


    As regards the personnel of the academic staff the control
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 apprehension 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 necessarily act on outside
solicitation and hearsay evidence.
    The selective effect of such a bias, guided as one might 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 passably competent in
their science, are of very rare occurrence; and yet something
presentable in the way of modern science is conventionally
required by these schools, in order to live, and so to effect any
part of their purpose. 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 businessmen. 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 endowed with
business sense is as rare as a devout scientist -- almost as rare
as a white blackbird. Yet the inclusion 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 compromise; whereby a goodly number of the faculty will
be selected on grounds of businesslike fitness, more or less
pronounced, while a working minority must continue to be made up
of men without much business proficiency and without pronounced
loyalty to commercial principles.
    This fluctuating margin of limitation has apparently not yet
been reached, perhaps not even in the most enterprising of our
universities. Such should be the meaning 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 qualifications 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 circles
as elsewhere businesslike fitness includes solvency as well as
commercial genius. Both of these qualifications 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 bearing
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 case. And there lies
always the infirmity in the background of the system that if the
staff were selected consistently 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
occupation 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 the income as is assigned to the
salary roll, and which therefore 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 included 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
portions 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 speaking, 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
distinctions. 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 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 conservation 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 disinterested, hands.
    The permeation of academic policy by business principles is a
matter of more or less, not of absolute, dominance. It appears to
be a question of how wide a deviation 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 endowment of the race, and it has in modern
civilization been too thoroughly ground into the shape of a quest
of matter-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 induced by
the discipline of workday life. The faith in and aspiration after
matter-of-fact knowledge is too profoundly 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 modern science and placed it at the centre of things human.
    The popular approval of business principles and businesslike
thrift is profound, disinterested, alert and insistent; but it
does not, at least not yet, go the length of unreservedly placing
a businesslike exploitation of office above a faithful discharge
of trust. The current popular 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 engages
the modern community's affections in a still more profound way,
and, in the long run, with a still more unqualified 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 massive 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.(1*)

    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 unformulated, preference shown
for teachers with sound pecuniary connections, whether by
inheritance or by marriage. With no such uniformity as to give
evidence of an advised 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
personal 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 appears to follow more as a
matter of course where the 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 expensiveness 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 beneficiary, at
this juncture should do so with propitiously creditable
circumstance. To meet and convince the opulent patrons of
learning, as well as the parents and guardians 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
fortunate than a smaller one; abundant, well-chosen and
well-served viands, beverages and narcotics will also
felicitously touch the sensibilities of these men who are
fortunate enough to have learned their virtue; the better, that
is to say, on the whole, the more costly, achievements 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, secondary 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 parsimonious manner of
life than the best (prestige) interests 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 desirable class
from sending their young men to the university as students.
    The American university is not an eleemosynary institution;
it does not plead indigence, except in that Pickwickian sense in
which indigence may without shame be avowed in polite circles;
nor does it put its trust in donations 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
promote 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
respectability, authentic in the pecuniary respect, therefore,
affords 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 inseparable from an expensive scale of
living, in any community whose scheme of life is conventionally
regulated by pecuniary standards.
    It is accordingly expedient, for its collective good repute,
that the members of the academic staff should conspicuously
consume all their current income in current expenses of living.
Hence also the moral obligation incumbent on all members of the
staff -- and their households -- 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 staff of an
appreciable number who are ready to take the lead at a pace
slightly above the competency of the common 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 invaluable.
    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 festivities 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 being allowed in any degree to fall
into abeyance by neglect, the range and magnitude of such
observances have progressively 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
observances, in their pecuniary magnitude, in their ritualistic
circumstance, and in the importance attached to them, is greater
in the immediate present than at any 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. 1
    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 somewhat 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 expenditure 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 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
businesslike 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 imputation)
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 account of courtly,
diplomatic, or military antecedents or guidance; these fields of
activity, while they are good breeding ground for pomp and
circumstance, do not overlap, 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 cottonspinning, 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 they occur they will
commonly come in connection with competitive sales of products,
services or securities, particularly the latter. Nearer business
analogues will be found in retail merchandising, and in
enterprises of popular amusement, such as concert halls, beer
gardens, or itinerant shows. The street parades of the latter,
e.g., show a seductive, though, it is believed, misleading
analogy to the ceremonial pageants that round off the academic
year.
    Phenomena that come into view in the later and maturer growth
of the retail trade, as seen, e. g., in the larger and more
reputable department stores, are perhaps nearer the point. There
are formal "openings" to inaugurate the special trade of each of
the four seasons, desired to put the patrons of the house on a
footing of good-humoured familiarity with the plant and its
resources, with the customs of the house, the personnel and the
stock of wares in hand, and before all to arrest the attention
and enlist the interest of those classes that may be induced to
buy. There are also occasional gatherings of a more ceremonial
character, by special invitation of select customers to a
promised exhibition of peculiarly rare and curious articles of
trade. This will then be illuminated with shrewdly conceived
harangues setting forth the alleged history, adventures and
merits, past and future, of the particular branch of the trade,
and of the particular house at whose expense the event is
achieved. In addition to these seasonal and occasional set pieces
of mercantile ceremony, there will also run along in the day' s
work an unremitting display of meritorious acts of commission and
omission. Like their analogues in academic life these ceremonials
of trade are expensive, edifying, enticing, and surrounded with a
solicitous regard for publicity; and it will be seen that they
are, all and several, expedients of advertising.

    To return to the academic personnel and their implication in
these recurrent spectacles and amenities of university life. As
was remarked above, apart from outside resources the livelihood
that comes to a university man is, commonly, somewhat meagre. The
tenure is uncertain and the salaries, at an average, are not
large. Indeed, they are notably low in comparison with the high
conventional standard of living which is by custom incumbent on
university men. University men are conventionally required to
live on a scale of expenditure comparable with that in vogue
among the well-to-do businessmen, while their university incomes
compare more nearly with the lower grades of clerks and salesmen.
The rate of pay varies quite materially, as is well known. For
the higher grades of the staff, whose scale of pay is likely to
be publicly divulged, it is, perhaps, adequate to the average
demands made on university incomes by polite usage; but the large
majority of university men belong on the lower levels of grade
and pay; and on these lower levels the pay is, perhaps, lower
than any outsider appreciates.(3*)
    With men circumstanced as the common run of university men
are, the temptation to parsimony is ever present, 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 reputable
publicity, by throwing the stress on such expenditures 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 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 academic 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 principles, since the prestige value
of a conspicuous consumption 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 preferment 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 pursuits, 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 similarly
extra-scholastic bearing, may affect the fortunes of academic men
to a like effect; as, e.g., unearned newspaper notoriety that may
be turned to account in ridicule; unconventional religious, or
irreligious convictions -- so far as they become known; an
undesirable political affiliation; an impecunious marriage, or
such domestic infelicities 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, purposes of the seminary of learning; and where action
has to be taken by the directorate on provocation of such
circumstances it is commonly done with the (unofficial) admission
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 expenditures 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
dinner, or the grandstand on some red-letter day of
intercollegiate athletics.(4*) For the purposes of a reputable
notoriety 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 collective 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 supernumerary 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 working-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 apportioned 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 authority, 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 creditable
exhibitions of a quasi-scholarly character, which have no
substantial bearing on a university man's legitimate 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 workmen, 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
university 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 university
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, 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.(5*)
    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 working 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 dissipation, 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 faculties 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 attainments, 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 circumstance,
social amenities and ritual dissipation, quasi-learned
demonstrations and meretricious publicity, in academic 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 personnel. A near view of these phenomena leaves the
impression 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 altogether ingenuous; all of which would
perhaps hold true even more decidedly as applied to the faculty
households.(6*) But for all that, it also remains true that
without the initiative and countenance of the executive head
these 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;(7*) 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.

NOTES:

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

2.  La gloria di colui che tutto muove,
    Per l'universo penétra e risplende
    In una parte più e meno altr'ove.

3. In a certain large and enterprising university, e.g., the pay
of the lowest, and numerous, rank regularly employed to do full
work as teachers, is proportioned to that of the highest -- much
less numerous -- rank about as one to twelve at the most, perhaps
even as low as one to twenty. And it may not be out of place to
enter the caution that the nominal rank of a given member of the
staff is no secure index of his income, even where the salary
"normally" attached to the given academic rank is known. Not
unusually a "normal" scale of salaries is formally adopted by the
governing board and spread upon their records, and such a scale
will then be surreptitiously made public. But departures from the
scale habitually occur, whereby the salaries 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
bargaining 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 employee of the university 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 professional ethics
governing the conduct of business enterprise in academic
management, as contrasted with the traffic of ordinary
competitive business.

4. 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
committee 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
invidious distinction, no names can be mentioned in this
connection. 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.

5. 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 university
men, whether as "reseárch" or as "résearch"; and there is
doubtless ground for scepticism as to its permeating the academic
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
qualifications than the main fact, that his faculty at the time
of speaking was in the main an aggregation of slack-twisted
schoolmasters 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.

6. The share and value of the "faculty wives" in all this routine
of resolute conviviality is a large topic, an intelligent and
veracious account of which could only be a work of naive
brutality:

    "But the grim, grim Ladies, Oh, my brothers!
        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.)

7. 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 accountancy 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 university men an extraneous and excessively
high standard of living expenses, which constrains them to take
on supernumerary work in excess of what they can carry in an
efficient manner. The need of university prestige enforces 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 proficiency 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 abeyance within the
university, and to substitute for that 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 processions, is never fully rounded out. This
amounts to admitting a partial defeat for the gild of
businesslike "educators." While, as a matter of speculative
predilection, 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 attaining, 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 preferment 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
scholars 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 university exists at all; in
some such sense, indeed, as a government, a political machine, a
railway corporation or a toll-road, may be said to exist for the
use of the community from which they get their living. It is true
in the sense that this ostensible use can not be left out of
account 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 concerned, 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 conception of what is implied in this scholarly purpose to
which they give a perfunctory matter-of-course endorsement, 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 complexion as it might
be in the absence of any such prepossession, 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 scientist,
whose only fault is an unduly pertinacious pursuit of the work
for which alone the university claims to exist, whose failure
consists in living up to the professions of the executive instead
of professing to live up to them. Academic tradition gives a
broad, though perhaps 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 somewhat 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, although, it is true, the conduct of certain executive
heads, grown old in autocratic rule and self-complacency, may 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 autocratic 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 principles
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 educational aspiration that besets modern
mankind. Its only ostensible reason for being, and so for its
being governed and managed, competitively or otherwise, is the
advancement 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 captains 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 learning; the competitive manoeuvres
of the academic executive must be carried on surreptitiously, in
a sense, cloaked as a non-competitive campaign for the increase
of knowledge 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 régime 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 and men who have tried to do say tenuous and
shadowy; 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.(1*)

    Whatever expedients of decorative real-estate, spectacular
pageantry, bureaucratic magnificence, elusive statistics,
vocational training, genteel solemnities and sweat-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 stultification, 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 presence
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 indispensable, and they bring with them
the defects of their qualities. When a man achieves such
notoriety for scientific 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 measure, 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
exceptions, 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 exceptions and a wider margin of error,
in the humanities and the so-called moral and social sciences. In
this latter field a clamorous conformity to current
prepossessions, particularly the conventional prepossessions of
respectability, or an edifying and incisive rehearsal of
commonplaces, will commonly pass in popular esteem for scholarly
and scientific merit. A truculent quietism is often accepted as a
mark of scientific maturity. The reason for this will appear
presently. But so far as popular esteem is a truthful index of
scientific achievement. the proposition 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 affairs 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 organization 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 commonplace (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 administration of
the competitive university. It is necessary 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 necessarily
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 business sense of
the term; not given to conciliatory compromises 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.(2*)
    Should such a man become unduly insistent in his advocacy of
scholarship, so as seriously to traverse the statistical
aspirations of the executive, or in any way to endanger the
immediate popular prestige of the university, 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. Colourable 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 position that his pride will force a "voluntary" resignation.
Failing this, it may become necessary, however distasteful,
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 recall
the fact that no settled code of business ethics has yet been
worked out for the guidance of competitive university 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 single-minded pursuit
of knowledge. 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 describes 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 conditions, will in great part be controlled by the end to
be accomplished, rather than by antecedent circumstances; such
statements are necessarily of a teleological order. As in other
competitive business, facts have in this connection only a
strategic value; but the exigencies of strategy here are
peculiarly exacting, and often rigorous.

    Academic tradition and current common sense unite in imposing
on the universities the employment of prominent 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. Common notoriety is the due test of eminence which the
competitive university must apply in the selection of its
notables. But in the sciences that deal with the less tangible
and measureable 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 notoriety that
must chiefly be had in view in any strict valuation 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 proportion 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 estimate 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 society -- customs, usages,
traditions, conventions, canons of conduct, standards of life, of
taste, of morality and religion, law and order. No faithful
inquiry into these matters can avoid an air of scepticism as to
the stability or 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 institutional
apparatus, will disturb the habitual convictions and
preconceptions on which they rest, even if the outcome 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 convictions 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, morality 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
consensus of the unlearned, or unscientific, as regards the
scientific 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 accepting 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
unlearned is condemned as being spurious and dangerously
wrong-headed; whereas an unbiassed inquiry into these 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 sceptical
or non-committal attitude toward vulgar convictions 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
apprehension, is a serene and magniloquent return to the orthodox
commonplaces, after all such playful excursions. In fact,
substantially nothing but homiletics and woolgathering will pass
popular muster as science in this connection.
    So it comes about that the men who are by common notoriety
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 sanction 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 sanction; 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 run of cases, not men with whom the science will have to
count; but by virtue of their eligibility 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 contemporaries. 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 citation 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 outsiders who are not in a
position to appreciate either the urgency or the subtlety of the
motives of academic expediency 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 analysis
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 consideration in this field of the
moral and social sciences, -- including such matters as religion,
sociology, economics, and political science, so-called. What is
especially to be conciliated 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
contributions to its endowment, on the one hand, and the more
reputable part of its undergraduate clientèle, on the other hand.
Which comes, broadly, to saying that a jealous eye must be had to
the views and prepossessions prevalent among the respectable,
conservative middle class; with a particular regard to that more
select body of substantial 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 generality 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 installation 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 enlightenment which it is to serve. Indeed,
there is in this respect a certain large modesty and continence
customarily associated with the large donations. But like other
men of force and thoughtfulness, the large and elderly
businessmen have well-assured convictions and preferences; 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 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 harbouring
specialists whose inquires are likely to traverse these
old-settled convictions in the social, economic, political, 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 matters on which they hold convictions.(3*)
    There results a genial endeavour to keep step with the
moribund captains of industry and the relics of the wealthy dead.
Remotely by force of a worldly-wise appointing 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 assurance 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 current
conditions are due. Distempered critics have even alleged that
the academic leaders in the social sciences 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 researches with full freedom and to the limit of their
capacity; 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 circumstance, due to the fact that their intellectual
horizon is bounded by the same limits of commonplace insight and
preconceptions as are the prevailing opinions of the conservative
middle class. That is to say, a large and aggressive mediocrity
is the prime qualification for a leader of science in these
lines, if his leadership 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 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 focussed 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 explanation 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 expedient 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 truth may, as it
expediently should, be considered when their selection for
academic office and rank is under advisement; 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 narrowly 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 leadership in the science conduces
more to the stability of opinions 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 decides,
the work done lies on this level of mediocrity. Indeed, 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 generalizations 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 qualification.
It applies only in so far as the principles of competitive
enterprise control the selection of the personnel, and even then
only with exceptions. There is no intention to depreciate the
work of those many eminent scholars, of scientific animus and
intellectual grasp, whose endeavours are given to this range of
inquiry. Its application, 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 sciences
are commonly of a somewhat more archaic complexion 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
conclude that such and such events are expedient or inexpedient,
quite as often and as easily as that such are the causes or the
genetic sequence of the phenomena under discussion. In short,
under this official leadership these sciences will have an
attitude toward their subject of inquiry resembling 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 generalizations 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 demarcation
between worldly wisdom and theoretical validity becomes
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 régime of competitive enterprise 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 compromise between the scholar's ideals and those of
business, in such a way that the ideals of scholarship are
yielding ground, in an uncertain and varying degree, before the
pressure of businesslike exigencies.

NOTES:

1. Cf. also J. J. Chapman, 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.

2. "The lambs play always, they know no better, They are only one
times one."

3. "He was a trusted and efficient employee 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 II, 1915.

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. "Vocational training" is training for proficiency
in some gainful occupation, and it has no connection with the
higher learning, beyond that juxtaposition given it by the
inclusion of vocational schools in the same corporation with the
university; and its spokesmen in the university establishments
accordingly take an apologetically aggressive attitude 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 outside the academic field and
deal with matters foreign to the academic interest, -- fitting
schools, high-schools, technological, manual and other training
schools for mechanical, engineering and other industrial
pursuits, professional 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 teachers,
and even schools that are avowedly of primary grade; while a
variety of "university extension" bureaux have also been
installed, to comfort and edify the unlearned with lyceum
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 simulates
the precedents given by the larger modern business coalitions,
which frequently bring under one general business 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 scholastic footing by the
glamour of the exploits of the trustmakers. No doubt, the
histrionic proclivities of the executive, 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 propensity 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 enterprise 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 magnitude,
and the competitive need of formidable statistics, the prime
mover in the case is presumably the current 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 corporation's activity can be more readily
effected, is accepted more as an expedient matter of course, if
it promises 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
multiplication of courses desired to give or to lead up to
vocational training. So that practical instruction, in the sense
indicated, is continually thrown more into the foreground in the
courses offered, as well as in the solicitude of the various
administrative boards, bureaux and committees that have to do
with the organization and management 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 outsiders than the various lines of extraneous
enterprise already spoken of, but it touches the work within the
university proper even more radically and insistently; although,
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 contradiction in terms. It is a case not of
assimilation, but of displacement and substitution, garnished
with circumlocution 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 instruction, if it may
not rather be said to be a direct outgrowth of that pedagogical
expedient.(1*) It dates back approximately to the same period for
its beginnings, and much 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 laudable practical
interest that these young men take in their own prospective
material success.(2*) So that this -- academically 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
entrance on a career of scholarship is yet a matter of
speculative 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 traditional 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 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 substantial 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 substantial of these incentives to gratuitous vocational
training, 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 engineering, 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 employees 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, opportunities offered by these schools, this needed
supply of trained employees comes to the business concerns in
question 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 pursuit of gain;
but the increased and cheaper supply of such skilled workmen is
"good for business," and, in the common sense 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 community.
    In this high rating of things practical the captains of
industry are also substantially at one with the current
common-sense award 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 reflection
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
uncritically 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 competitive 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 single-mindedness in the pursuit of private
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 spending. Nothing is so
instantly recognized as being of great urgency, always and
everywhere, under this modern, pecuniary 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 entrusted 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 competitive 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.(3*) The question has been
asked, more and more urgently and openly, What is the use of all
this knowledge?(4*) Pushed by this popular prejudice, and
themselves also drifting under compulsion of the same prevalent
bias, even the seasoned scholars and scientists -- Matthew
Arnold'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 intermediate step in "the roundabout process of the
production of goods."
    As a motto for the scholars' craft, Scientia pecuniae
ancillans is nowise more seemly than the Schoolmen's Philosophia
theologiae ancillans.(5*) Yet such inroads have pecuniary habits
of valuation made even within the precincts of the corporation of
learning, that university men, -- and even the scholarly ones
among them, -- are no more than half ashamed of such a parcel of
fatuity. And relatively 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.(6*)
    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 ancient
history, a child was, in a way, an article of equipment for the
up-keep of the family and its prestige, and more remotely for the
support of the sovereign and his prestige. So that a male child
would be rated as indubitably 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 infrequently the
finding of those old-time utilitarians was adverse, 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 countenance it.
    Not that a question of expediency is no longer entertained,
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 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
herself 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, although in a less secure and more
loosely speculative fashion, men also look to the higher learning
as the ripe fulfilment 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 deliberation 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 subsidiary ground of decision, and as they have even
avowed 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 latterday
"educators" is not to be taken as reflecting disparagingly on
them or their endeavours. They respond to the call of the times
as best they can. That they do so, and that the call of the times
is of this character, is a fact of the current drift of things;
which one may commend 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 interest and support from science
and scholarship to the competitive acquisition of wealth, and
therefore also to its 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 virtues
that are, by the accepted tradition of modern Christendom, 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 is seen
at its broadest and baldest in the Schools of Commerce, --
"Commerce and Politics," "Business Training," "Commerce and
Administration," "Commerce and Finance," or whatever may be the
phrase selected to designate 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
interest 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 salvation of men's souls was the prime
object of solicitude. Such a seminary of business has something
of a sacerdotal dignity. It is the appointed keeper of the higher
business animus.(7*)
    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 its preferential hold on
the corporation of learning, the school of commerce belongs to
the new order and is gaining ground. The primacy among pragmatic
interests has passed from religion to business, and the school of
commerce is the exponent and expositor of this primacy. It is the
perfect flower of the secularization of the universities. And as
has already been remarked above, there is also a wide-sweeping
movement afoot to bend the ordinary curriculum of the higher
schools to the service of this cult of business principles, and
so to make the ordinary instruction converge to the advancement
of business enterprise, very much as it was once dutifully
arranged 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 universities; 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 training for the
other professions draws largely on the results of modern science
for ways and means, and therefore includes 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 part of its
students or adepts with the matter or logic of the sciences;(8*)
(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 commerce has no such serviceability, being
directed singly to a facile command of the ways and means of
private gain.(9*) The training that leads up to the several other
professions, of course, varies greatly in respect of its draught
on scientific information, as well as in the degree of its
serviceability to the community; some of the professions, as, e.
g., Law, approach very close to the character of business
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 commercial 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 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 disinterested 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 substantial 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 simply 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
wealth, not with its production. It is only by a euphemistic
metaphor that we are accustomed to speak of the businessmen as
producers of goods. Gains due to such efficiency 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 peculiarly futile line of endeavour for any public institution,
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 businessmen 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 material
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 question 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 emulative
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 purpose of the
university. It belongs in the corporation of learning no more
than a department of athletics.(10*) Both 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 community, 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 animus. As
related to the ostensible purposes of a university, therefore,
the support and conduct of such schools at the expense of the
universities 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 comprised in this
latterday university policy, in the degree in which these others
aim at the like emulative and unscholarly results. It holds true
of the law schools, e. g., typically and more largely than of the
generality of professional 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 commerce 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 universities. 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
analogous 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 lawyers somewhat
less numerous, and with a lower average proficiency in legal
subtleties and expedients, would unquestionably be quite as
serviceable to the community at large as a larger number of such
men with a higher efficiency; 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
litigation 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
foundation 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 expenditure
of time and the cost of living required for a residence at the
schools, make up so considerable an item of expense 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 afford the time and expense of this business
training, whether in Commerce, Law, or the other professions,
except those who are already possessed of something more 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 desired
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 on any showing
need this gratuity.
    In proportion to the work which it undertakes, the College of
Commerce is -- or it would be if it lived up to its professions
-- the most expensive branch of the university 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 expected gradually to fall into a more
rigidly drawn curriculum, which will discard all irrelevant
theoretical excursions 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 insight 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.
    Among the immediate consequences of this latter feature, 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 necessarily 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,
commensurate with their higher scale of pay; all of which throws
an undue preponderance of discretion and authority into the hands
of these men of affairs, and so introduces 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 the same time that they will be even more cordially out
of sympathy with the ideals of scholarship, than the personnel 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 inception
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 footing 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
entrusted 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 eminently gainful success in
business. They are, indeed, commonly men of moderate rating in
the academic community, and are vested with a moderate rank and
authority; and the emoluments of these offices are also such as
attach to positions of a middling grade 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 businessmen 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 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 traffic and their underlying causes so that the
school will continue 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 business 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 corresponding 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 nothing
will take the place of first-hand observation and personal
contact with the processes and procedure involved; and such
first-hand contact is to be had only at the cost 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 university hitherto, is a cross between a
secondary school for bank-clerks and travelling salesmen and a
subsidiary department of economics.
    All this applies with gradually lessened force to the other
vocational schools, occupied with training for occupations 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
universities 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 earning-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
enrolment. 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 directorate to shape
their policy accordingly.
    So the academic authorities face the choice between scholarly
efficiency and vocational training, and hitherto the result has
been equivocal. The directorate should presumably 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 presumed 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 practicable
working programme.

NOTES:

1. "Our professors in the Harvard of the '50s were a set of
rather eminent scholars and highly respectable men. They attended
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 Autobiography.

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

3. 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
largely endowed of the late-founded universities set out avowedly
to bend its forces singly to such instruction as would make for
the material 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 ambiguous position from the contrary direction; except
that, possibly, 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.

4. "And why the sea is boiling hot, And whether pigs have wings."

5. Cf. Adam Smith on the "idle curiosity." Moral Sentiments, 1st
ed., p. 351 -- , esp. 355.

6. 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 training
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."

7. Cf., 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, 1913. 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.

8. 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.

9. It is doubtless within the mark to say that the training given
by the American schools of commerce is detrimental to the
community's material interests. In America, even in a more
pronounced 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
technological needs and possibilities of the industries which
they control. 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 strategy of "watchful waiting," at the centre of a web; very
alert and adroit, but remarkably incompetent in the way of
anything 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
business community has, with unexampled freedom, had at its
disposal 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 something 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
specialization along the same line of proficiency, to give
increased facility in financiering and salesmanship. This
specialization on commerce is like other specialization in that
it draws off attention and interest from other lines than those
in which the specialization 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.

10. Latterly, it appears, the training given by the athletic
establishments 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
employment as instructors, coaches, masseurs, etc., engaged in
similar 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 academic administration, very much after the 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.


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 learning.
    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 learning as it comes into this current
situation, and on the effect of this recourse to business
principles upon the pursuit of learning.
    Not that this learning is therefore to be taken as
necessarily 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 of civilized mankind. The
profit and loss here spoken for is not profit and loss, to
mankind or to any given community, 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 affairs in any other bearing.

                                I

    Business principles take effect in academic affairs most
simply, obviously and avowably in the way of a businesslike
administration of the scholastic routine; where they lead
immediately to a bureaucratic organization and a system 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 discretion, 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 establishments, -- 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 organization conduces to an excessive size. The immediate
and visible effect of such a large and centralized administrative
machinery is, on the whole, detrimental to scholarship, even in
the undergraduate work; though it need not be so in all respects
and unequivocally, so far as regards that routine training that
is embodied in the undergraduate curriculum. But it is at least a
necessary evil in any school that is of so considerable a size as
to preclude 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, gradation, 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 itself in these
premises is that pattern of shrewd management whereby a large
business concern makes money. The underlying business-like
presumption accordingly appears to be that learning is a
merchantable commodity, to be Produced on a piece-rate plan,
rated, bought and sold 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 addiction to study.
    The salesmanlike abilities and the men of affairs 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 compared with the remuneration for
office work of a similar character in the common run of business
occupations, and since businesslike employees of this kind may
fairly be presumed to go unreservedly to the highest bidder. Yet
these more unscholarly members of the staff will necessarily 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 statistical renown; and
this in turn is somewhat closely correlated 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
bureaucratic 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 detailed surveillance
and direction of the work and manner of life of the academic
staff, and so it acts to shut off initiative of any kind in the
work done.(1*)
    Intimately bound up with this bureaucratic officialism 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.(2*)
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
animus falls in with and reinforces the movement for academic
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 disinterested preoccupation
with scholarly or scientific inquiry is thrown into the
background and falls into abeyance. 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 employees. Particularly will there be a gain in the
statistical showing, both as regards the volume of instruction
offered, and probably also as regards the enrolment; since
accountancy creates statistics and its absence does not.
    Such increased enrolment as may be due to businesslike
management and methods is an increase of undergraduate enrolment.
The net effect as regards the graduate enrolment -- 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 earning and spending, as well as by engendering
spendthrift and sportsmanlike habits, such a businesslike
management 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 number of those who come into university work
from the smaller and less businesslike colleges.
    The ulterior consequences that follow from such businesslike
standardization and bureaucratic efficiency are evident in the
current state of the public schools; especially as seen in the
larger towns, where the principles of business management have
had time and scope to work out in a fair degree of consistency.
The resulting abomination of desolation is sufficiently
notorious. And there appears to be no reason why a similarly
stale routine of futility should not overtake the universities,
and give similarly foolish results, as fast as the system of
standardization, accountancy and piece-work goes consistently
into effect, -- except only for the continued enforced employment
of a modicum of impracticable scholars and scientists on the
academic staff, whose unbusinesslike 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 régime of graduated sterility 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 administration 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 bearing 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
unpractical scholarly ideals, the movement toward a perfunctory
routine of mediocrity should logically be expected 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 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 establishment blameless of anything like innovation or
iconoclasm at this point; which reinforces the drift toward a
mechanistic 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; indeed, 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 creditable notoriety that the universities seek their
competitive ends, and it is on such increase of notoriety,
accordingly, 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 pursuit 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 attention to
creditable publicity, therefore, are the chief gains to be set
off against the mischief incident to "scientific management" in
academic affairs. Hence any line of inquiry into the business
management of the universities 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
arrangements in question are habitually -- and primarily required
either to serve the ends of this competitive campaign of
publicity or to conform to its schedule of expediency. The felt
need of notoriety and prestige has a main share in shaping the
work and bearing of the university at every point. Whatever will
not serve this end of prestige has no secure footing in current
university policy. The margin of tolerance on this head is 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 notoriety,
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 considerable.
So that it is not unusual to find a Publicity Bureau -- often
apologetically masquerading under a less tell-tale name --
incorporated in the university organization to further 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 reputable
notoriety, and to correcting or eliminating whatever may be
conceived to have a doubtful or untoward bearing 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 university for
the prosecution of its work as a seminary of the higher learning.
Its more alert and unabashed rivals, it is presumed, would in
that 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 application.
    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 aggregate of funds placed at the
disposal of the universities; and that each of these competitive
advertising concerns should so gain something appreciable,
without thereby cutting into the supply of funds available for
the rest. But such is probably not the outcome, to any
appreciable 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 conspicuous
buildings.
    With whatever (slight) reservation may be due, publicity in
university management is of substantially the same nature and
effect as advertising in other competitive business; and with
such reservation as may be called for in the case of other
advertising, it is an engine of competition, and has no aggregate
effect. As is true of competitive 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 differential 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 conformity. Indeed, it
should seem likely that such donors as are gifted with sufficient
sense of the value of science and scholarship to find it worth
while to sink any part of their capital in that behalf would be
somewhat deterred 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 advancement 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 solemnities, and
the like, may conceivably augment the gross aggregate means
placed at the disposal of the universities, 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 expenditure on
notoriety. Taken as a whole, and counting in all the wide-ranging
expenditure entailed by this enterprise in notoriety and the
maintenance of academic prestige, 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 than
would be indicated by any 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 learning, 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 overloading of each rival corps of instructors with
a heterogeneous schedule of courses, beyond what would conduce to
their best efficiency as teachers. This competitive parcelment,
duplication and surreptitious thrift, due to a businesslike
rivalry between the several schools, is perhaps the gravest
drawback to the American university situation.
    It should be added that no aggregate gain for scholarship
comes of diverting any given student from one school to another
duplicate establishment by specious offers 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
surreptitiously greater facility for achieving a given academic
degree.
    In all its multifarious ways and means, university
advertising 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, current 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 exceed the point of maximum veracity.
    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 learning 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 knowledge. In ordinary competitive business, as, e.g.,
merchandising, advertisement is a means of competitive selling,
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 conventional usage, in
appearances and expenditure, is there wisely cultivated with the
same end in view. In the affairs of science and scholarship,
simply as such and apart from the personal ambitions of the
university's executive, there is nothing that corresponds to this
increased traffic or these competitive profits,(3*) -- nor will
the discretionary officials avow that such increased traffic is
the purpose of academic publicity. Indeed, an increased enrolment
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 competitive salesmanship
among the universities is made up almost wholly of wasters,
accessions from the genteel and sporting classes, who seek the
university as a means of respectability and dissipation, and who
serve the advancement of the higher learning only as fire, flood
and pestilence 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 competitive advertising. So that
on its face this whole academic 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
business enterprise that has no analog 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 academic executives under
whose surveillance this singularly futile traffic is carried on
are commonly men of commonplace intelligence and aspiration,
bound by the commonplace habits of workday intercourse in a
business community. 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 pageantry and a straining
after showy magnitude. There is 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" university, 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 circumstance 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 outlook 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
advertising, these puerile demonstrations will, of course, have a
high value simply in their own right. Sentimental chauvinism of
this kind is a good and efficient motive to emulative enterprise,
as far as it goes, but even when backed with the directorate's
proclivity to businesslike make-believe, 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.


                            III

    The abiding incentives to this traffic in publicity and
genteel observance must be sought elsewhere than in the boyish
emotions of rivalry and clanish elation that animates 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 initiative to this enterprise in
publicity, as well as the surveillance 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 appeal 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 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 knowledge, 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 determine the conduct
of the academic executive. The governing boards are, in effect,
made up of businessmen, who do not habitually look beyond the
"practical" interest of commercial gain and the commonplaces of
commercial 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 single-minded 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 publicity, 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 admits of no
appreciable conversion of funds to private use. At the same time
it seems almost an affront to entertain the notion that these
impassively purposeful men of affairs 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 interpretation 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 "diplomacy," 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 accepting 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 unscholarly
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 academic head allow his sense of scholarly
fitness and expediency to hamper this business of reputable
notoriety, it is, perhaps with reason, feared that such
remissness 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
contingency may underlie current university management at some
points, and it may there fore in some instances have given the
administration of academic affairs an air of light-headed
futility, when it should rather be credited with a sagaciously
disingenuous yielding to circumstance.
    The run of the facts as outlined above, 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 presented. 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
headlong 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 exceptionally
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 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
administration 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 reputable
notoriety and aimless utilitarian management is pursued under
such circumstances of settled endowment and secure tenure as to
preclude all hazard of supersession on the part of the executive
and all chance of material gain from any accession of popular
renown or stagnant 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 alienating 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
recognizances, 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,
vainglorious make-believe and obsequious concessions to worldly
wisdom, should seem to have no place in the counsels of these
schools; which should therefore hopefully 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 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 entrusted to their care. So,
perhaps through some puzzleheaded 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 increased
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 learning 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 prejudice,
or by fear of losing. personal prestige among the ignorant, even
though he has no substantial ground, personal 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, designed to make terms with the
mischievous stupidity of an underbred laity.

    But any discussion of motives necessarily has an invidious
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 needless 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 executive
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 indicated. 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;
peculiarly solicitous of appearances, and peculiarly heedless of
the substance of their performance. It is not that this
characterization would imply exceptionally great 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 typical
academic executive, it may be worth noting that much the same
characterization will apply without abatement to the class of
professional 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.(4*)
    There is, indeed more than a superficial or accidental
resemblance between the typical academic executive and the
professional politician of the familiar and more vacant sort,
both as regards the qualifications requisite for entering 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-effacement 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 tenacious and aggressive
self-selection. With due, but by no means large, allowance for
exceptions, the incumbents are chosen from among a self-selected
body of candidates, each of whom has, in the common run of cases,
been resolutely in pursuit of such an office for some appreciable
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
parallel case of aspirants for political office.
    As to the qualifications, in point of character and
attainments, that so go to make eligibility for the executive
office, it is necessary to recall what has been said in an
earlier chapter(5*) on the characteristics of those boards of
control with whom rests the choice in these matters of
appointment. These boards are made up of well-to-do businessmen,
with a penchant for popular notability. and the qualifications
necessary to be put in evidence 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 conventionalities and a conspicuously
profound conviction that all things are working out for good,
except for such untoward details as do not visibly conduce to the
vested advantage of the well-to-do businessmen under the
established law and order. To secure an appointment to executive
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 campaign of
office-seeking while engaged in some university employment. To
this end the most likely line of university employment is such as
will comprise a large share of administrative duties, as, e.g.,
the deanships that are latterly 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 aspirant
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 pursuits 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 assumption that
appointments to executive office are currently made exclusively
from among aspiring candidates answering the description outlined
above, or that the administrative deanships that currently abound
in the universities 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, although scarcely
numerous enough or consequential enough entirely to vitiate these
propositions as a competent formulation of the typical line of
approach to the coveted office. The larger and more substantial
exception 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
prerogatives of access and advisement with the executive head do
not commonly remain hidden from their colleagues on 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 discourse. 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
ceremonial 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 necessarily 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 thief 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 of personal
aids who stands in peculiarly close relations of sympathy and
usefulness to the chief. It has happened more than once that such
an 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 captain of erudition, as
he is seen in the administration of executive office, will have
set in before his induction into office, not infrequently at an
appreciable interval before that event, and involving 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 picked men, drawn
into the running chiefly by force of a facile conformity and a
self-selective predisposition for this official dignity.
    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 exigencies are of divers
origin, and are systematically at variance among themselves. So
that the dominant note of his official life necessarily becomes
that of ambiguity. By tradition, -- indeed, by that tradition to
which the presidential office owes its existence, and except by
force of which there would apparently be no call to institute
SuCh an office at all, -- by tradition the president of the
university is the senior member of the faculty, its confidential
spokesman in official and corporate concerns, and the "moderator"
of its town meeting like deliberative assemblies. As chairman of
its meetings he is, by tradition, 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 affection from his
associates in the corporation of learning; and it is by virtue of
these qualities of scholarly wisdom, which give him his place as
senior member of a corporation of scholars, that he is, by
tradition, competent to serve as their spokesman and to occupy
the chair in their deliberative assembly.
    Such is the tradition of the American College President, --
and, in so far, of the university president, -- as it comes down
from that earlier phase of academic history from which the office
derives its ostensible character, and to which it owes its hold
on life under the circumstances of the later growth of the
schools. And it will be noted that this office is distinctly
American; it has no counterpart elsewhere, and there appears to
be no felt need of such an office in other countries, where no
similar tradition of a college president has created a
presumptive need of a similar official in the universities, --
the reason being evidently that these universities in other lands
have not, in the typical case, grown out of an underlying
college.
    In the sentimental apprehension of the laity out of doors,
and in a degree even in the unreflecting esteem of men within the
academic precincts, the presidential office still carries
something of this traditionally preconceived scholarly character;
and it is this still surviving traditional preconception, which
confuses induction into the office with scholarly fitness for its
dignities, that still makes the office of the academic executive
available for those purposes of expansive publicity and
businesslike management that it has been made to serve. Except
for this uncritical esteem of the office 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 up the
substantial duties of the office as now conducted. It is
therefore of the utmost moment to keep up, or rather to magnify,
that appearance of scholarly competence 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
before 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 adequately 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 proposition, and its incumbent is chiefly an object of
circumspection, 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 indicated means
of its up-keep are such as will presumably hold the (transient)
respect and affection of this laity,quasi-scholarly homiletical
discourse, frequent, voluminous, edifying and optimistic;
ritualistic solemnities, diverting and vacant; spectacular
affectations of (counterfeit) 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)
statistics 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 control
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 discretionary powers as currently devolve on
the discretionary officials of business corporations; from which
follows, among other things, that the members of the faculty come
to take rank as employees of the concern, hired by and
responsible to the academic head.
    The first executive duty of the incumbent of office,
therefore, is to keep his faculty under control, so as to be able
unhampered to carry out the policy of magnitude and
secularization 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 carried out with sufficient
effect, so that its "advice and consent" may in all cases be
taken as a matter of course; and should a remnant of initiative
and scholarly aspiration show itself in any given concrete case
in such a way as to traverse the lines of policy pursued by the
executive, 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 indefeasible 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.(6*)
    The subservience of the faculty, or of a working majority,
may safely be counted on. But the forms of advisement and
responsibility are still necessary to be observed; the president
is still, by tradition, the senior member of the faculty, and its
confidential spokesman. From which follows a certain, at least
pro forma, disingenuousness in the executive's coercive control
of academic policy, whereby the ostensible discretion and
responsibility 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 implies an appreciable
strain on the executive's veracity or on his diplomatic skill. It
belongs under the category of legal fiction, rather than that of
effectual prevarication.
    So also as regards the businesslike, or bureaucratic,
organization and control of the administrative machinery, and its
utilization for vocational ends and statistical showing. All that
has been worked out in its general features, and calls, in any
concrete case, for nothing much beyond an adaptation of general
practices to the detail requirements of the special case. It
devolves, properly, 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, designed chiefly to keep
the faculty talking while the bureaucratic machine goes on its
way under the guidance of the executive and his personal
counsellors and lieutenants. These matters, then, are also well
understood, standardized, and accepted, and no longer require a
vigilant personal 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 circumlocution are presently
delegated to the oversight of trusted subalterns, in a manner
analogous to the delegation of the somewhat parallel duties of
the caretakers of the material equipment. Both of these
hierarchical corps of subordinates are in a somewhat similar
case, in that their duties are of a mechanically standardized
nature, and in that it is incumbent on both alike to deal in a
dispassionate, not to 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 official prestige on
the one hand, and the selection, preferment, rejection and
proscription of members of the academic 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 endeavour and
to establish his standards of expediency and efficiency in the
affairs of learning.
    By usage, guided, no doubt, by a shrewd sense of expediency
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 measure of public prestige
chiefly by way of public oratory. Now and again his academic
rank, backed by the slow-dying 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 offence. 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 addresses; it is also
to the laity that the typical academic executive is competent to
speak without stultification. Hence the many edifying addresses
before popular audiences, at commencements, inaugurations,
dedications, club meetings, church festivals, and the like. So
that an executive who aspires to do his whole duty in these
premises 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.(7*)
   Throughout this elocutionary enterprise there runs the
rigorous prescription that the speaker must avoid offence, that
his utterances must be of a salutary order, since the purpose of
it all is such conciliation of goodwill 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 erudition to make their plea for sanity and renown.
Hence the peculiarly, not to say exuberantly, inane character of
this branch of oratory, coupled with an indefatigable optimism
and good-nature. This outcome is due neither to a lack of
application nor of reflection on the part of the speakers; it is,
indeed, a finished product of the homiletical art and makes up
something of a class of its own among the artistic achievements
of the race. At the same time it is a means to an end.(8*)

    However, the clay sticks to the sculptor's thumb, as the
meal-dust powders the miller's hair and the cobbler carries
sensible traces of the pitch that goes into his day's work, and
as the able-bodied seaman "walks with a rolling gait." So also
the university executive, who by pressure of competitive
enterprise comes to be all things to all audiences, will come
also to take on the colour of his own philandropic
pronouncements; to believe, more 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 desired as
perfunctory conciliation, simply, but in carrying conviction to
the audience the speaker's eloquence unavoidably bends 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 place in this itinerant edification; but
there is also the opportunity which all this wide-ranging
itinerary of public addresses affords for feeling out the state
of popular sentiment, as to what ends the university is expected
to serve and how it is expected best to serve them. Particularly
do the solemn amenities of social intercourse associated with
this promulgation of lay sermons lend themselves felicitously to
such a purpose; and this contact with the public and its
spokesmen doubtless exercises a powerful control over the
policies pursued by these academic 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
will meet with popular approval, and what will not.
    Since, then, it is necessarily the endeavour of the
competitive executives to meet the desires of their public as
best they can, consistently with the demands of magnitude and
éclat imposed by their position as chiefs of these competitive
concerns, it becomes a question of some moment what the character
of this select public opinion may be, to which their
peregrinations expose them; and how far and with what limitations
the public opinion that so habitually impinges on their
sensibilities and shapes their canons of procedure may be taken
as reflecting the sentiments of the public at large, or of any
given class of 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 membership in the
various clubs, churches and other like organizations 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
exclusive fragment of the public, pecuniarily of a middling
grade, as is indeed also its case in other than the pecuniary
respect. Apart from the (very consequential) convivial gatherings
where businessmen will now and again come together and lend a
genial ear to these executive spokesmen of philandropism, it will
be found that at the audiences, and at their attendant
solemnities of hospitality, the assembly is made up of very much
the same elements as make up the effective constituency of the
moderately well-to-do churches.(9*) 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 elsewhere; nor do the learned class come in
evidence in this connection, -- except, of course, the "scholars
by appointment," within whose official competency lie precisely
such occasions of public evidence.
    Doubtless, the largest, tone-giving and effective,
constituent 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 affairs 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 audiences; but
just as happens in all competitive retail business that has to
deal with a large and critical constituency, 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 conceivably 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, propriety and genteel usage take
precedence of work, whether scholarly or otherwise, a misdirected
cowardice not infrequently comes to rule the counsels of the
captains 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 point) in the
sense that it discredits the executive and his tactics in the
esteem of that workday public that does not habitually give
tongue over the cups at five-o'clock.(10*)
    It is perhaps unnecessary, as it would assuredly be
ungraceful, to pursue this quasi-personal inquiry into the
circumstances that so determine that habitual attitude of the
executive. The difficulties of such an ambiguous position should
be sufficiently evident, and the character of the demands which
this position makes on the incumbent should be similarly evident,
so far as regards conduciveness 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 conduct of ordinary
business and in the professions, there has hitherto been worked
out no code of professional ethics for the guidance of men
employed in this vocation, -- with the sole exception of that
mandatory inter-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 that, unlike what happens in the business community 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 discretionary 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 confidential 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 that
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-scholastic conventions, all
the while that he must profess an unbiassed pursuit of "the
increase and diffusion of knowledge among men."

                                IV

    With all due endeavour to avoid 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 obliquities that give character to the typical
academic executive. Not that all academic executives, without
exception, are (in the historical present) to be found fully
abreast of that mature phase of the type that would so be
reflected by the exigencies 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
meretricious notoriety as these official duties enjoin. The
exceptions 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 workday conduct of office.
And so consistent and unremitting is this drift of the duties of
office, overt and covert, that, humanly speaking, any one who
submits to its discipline through an appreciable period of years
must unavoidably come to conform to type. Men of unmanageably
refractory temperament, such as can not by habituation be indued
with the requisite deviation and self-sufficiency, 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 commonplace 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 slow-dying
preconception that the preferences of the academic 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 frequently 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 already 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 university -- a seminary of
the higher learning, as distinct from an assemblage of vocational
schools -- is not a practicable 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
quarter-century. The two instances in question should appear 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 with an endowment of such
magnitude as would be adequate to the foundation of an effectual
university, sufficient to the single-minded pursuit of the higher
learning, with all the "modern appliances" requisite to
scientific and scholarly work, if only their resources had been
husbanded with a single mind to that end; and in either case the
terms of the endowment have been sufficiently tolerant to admit
such pursuit of knowledge without arrière pensée. The directive
hands, too, under whose discretionary control each of these
establishments entered on its adventures and attained its
distinctive character, were men who, at one point or another in
their administration of academic policy, entertained a sincerely
conceived scholarly ambition to create a substantial university,
an institution of learning.(11*) And, in a general way, the two
attempts have equally failed of their avowed initial purpose.
    In the persons of their discretionary heads, the two
enterprises were from the outset animated with widely divergent
ideals and aspirations in matters of scholarship, and with
singularly dissimilar and distinctive traits of character,
resembling one another in little else than a sincere devotion to
the cause of scholarship and an unhampered discretion in their
autocratic management of affairs; but it is an illuminating
comment on the force of circumstances governing these matters,
that these two establishments have gone down to substantially the
same kind and degree of defeat, -- a defeat not extreme but
typical, both in kind and degree. In the one case, the more
notorious, the initial aim (well known to persons intimately in
touch with the relevant facts at the time) was the pursuit of
scholarship, somewhat blatant perhaps, but none the less sincere
and thoughtful; in the companion-piece it was in a like degree
the pursuit of scientific knowledge and serviceability, though,
it is true, unschooled and puzzle-headed to a degree. In both
enterprises alike the discretionary heads so placed in control
had been selected by individual businessmen of the untutored
sort, and were vested with plenary powers. Under pressure of
circumstances, in both cases alike, the policy of forceful
initiative and innovation, with which both alike entered on the
enterprise, presently yielded to the ubiquitous craving for
statistical magnitude and the consequent felt need of
conciliatory publicity; until presently the ulterior object of
both was lost in the shadow of these immediate and urgent
manoeuvres of expediency, and it became the rule of policy to
stick at nothing but appearances.
    So that both establishments have come substantially to
surrender the university ideal, through loss of effectual
initiative and courage, and so have found themselves running
substantially the same course of insidious compromise with
"vocational" aims, undergraduate methods, and the counsels of the
Philistines. The life-history of each, while differing widely in
detail of ways and methods, is after all macle 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 sufficient
notoriety took the direction of a ravenous megalomania, the
busiest concern of which presently came to be how most
conspicuously to prolong a shout into polysyllables; 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 surrender to time and tide, an aimless
gum-shod pusillanimity, has apparently changed the drift of
things in no very appreciable degree.(12*)
    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 intolerance, differing chiefly in the degree of its
efficiency. Of course, through all this drift of stultification
there has always remained -- decus et solamen -- something of an
amiably inefficient and optimistic solicitude for the advancement
of learning at large, in some unspecified manner 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 statistical 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 appearance
irretrievably so, because both are now committed to so large and
exacting a volume of obligations and liabilities, 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 future. 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.(13*)
    These remarks on the typical traits of the academic executive
have unavoidably taken the colour of personalities. That such is
the case should by no means be taken as intentionally reflecting
anything like dispraise on those persons who have this
(unavoidable) work of stultification in hand. Rather, it is
dispassionately to be gathered from the run of the facts as set
out above that those persons on whom these exigencies impinge
will, by force of habituation, necessarily come to take the bent
which these current conditions enforce, and without which this
work could not well be done; all on the supposition -- and it is
by no means an extravagant assumption -- that these persons so
exposed to these agencies of spiritual disintegration are by
native gift endowed with the commonplace traits of human nature,
no more and no less. It is the duties of the office, not a run of
infirmities peculiar to the incumbents of office, that make the
outcome. Very much like that of the medicine-man, the office is
one which will not abide a tolerant and ingenuous incumbent.(14*)

                                    V

    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 characteristics of the
typical executive, nor even the spiritual fortunes of the persons
exposed to the wear and tear of executive office; although these
matters might well engage 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 extraneous 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, deflect or
remedy this current drift of things academic away from the
ancient holding ground of the higher learning; partly because
such an enterprise in reform and rehabilitation lies beyond its
competence; and partly, again, because in all this current move
to displace the higher learning there may conceivably be other
ends involved, which may be worth while in some other bearing
that is alien to the higher learning but of graver consequence
for the fortunes of the race, -- urgent needs which can only be
served by so diverting effort and attention from this pursuit.
Yet, partly out of a reasonable deference 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 measures have
been advocated by critics of current university 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 symptoms, -- to relieve agitation and induce
insensibility. However, there is at least one line of
aggressively remedial 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 seminaries of science and
scholarship, is perhaps more forcibly 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
academic situation are insurmountable; any rehabilitation of the
universities is not contemplated in this latterday movement. And
it is so coming to be recognized, in effect though tacitly, that
for all their professions of a single-minded addiction to the
pursuit of learning, the academic establishments, old and new,
are no longer competent to take the direction of affairs in this
domain.
    So it is 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 academic 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 magnitude and comprehensive aims of the
new establishments are such as 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 inability of
the schools, under competitive management, to take care of the
pursuit of knowledge.
    Seen from the point of view of the higher learning, this new
departure, as well as the apparent need of it, is to be rated as
untoward; and it reflects gravely enough on the untoward
condition into which the rule of business principles is leading
the American schools. 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
indispensable correlate. By and large, these new establishments
are good for research only, not for instruction; 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 need, turn their forces to instruction as
well as to inquiry, they would incontinently find themselves
drifting into the same equivocal position as the universities,
and the dry-rot of business principles and competitive gentility
would presently consume their tissues after the same fashion.
    It is, to all appearance, impracticable and inadvisable to
let these institutions of research take over any appreciable
share of that work of scientific and scholarly instruction that
is slipping out of the palsied hands of the universities, so as
to include some consistent application to teaching within the
scope of their everyday work. And this cuts out of 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 say erratic, cases will good, consistent,
sane and alert scientific work be carried forward through a
course of years by any scientist without students, without loss
or blunting of that intellectual initiative that makes the
creative scientist. The work that can be done well in the absence
of that stimulus and safe-guarding that comes of the give and
take between teacher and student is commonly 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 unavoidable, absence of provision for
systematic instruction in these new-found establishments of
research means also that they and the work which they have in
hand are not self-perpetuating, whether individually and in
detail or taken in the large; since their work breeds no
generation of successors to the current body of scientists on
which they draw. As the matter stands now, they depend for their
personnel 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 academic purposes of notoriety. When
this academic source fails, as it presently must, with the
increasingly efficient application of business principles in the
universities, there should seem to be small recourse for
establishments 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 American-born 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 establishments 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 universities of Europe, as fast
and as far as these other countries 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
distasteful in the greater schools of the Old World. America 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 intolerance of any other than pecuniary
standards of value. It is only that this country is in the lead;
the other peoples 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 businesslike
aspirations, decoratively coloured with feudalistic archaisms of
patriotic buncombe.

    As will be seen from the above explication of details and
circumstances, 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 learning, 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
contrived that will have anything more than a transient
palliative effect, so long as these conditions that create the
difficulty are allowed to remain in force.
    All of which points unambiguously to the only line of
remedial measures that can be worth serious consideration; and at
the same time it carries the broad implication that in the
present state of popular sentiment, touching these matters of
control and administration, any effort that looks to reinstate
the universities as effectual seminaries of learning will
necessarily be nugatory; inasmuch as the popular sentiment runs
plainly to the effect that magnitude, arbitrary control, and
businesslike administration is the only sane rule to be followed
in any human enterprise. So that, while the measures called for
are simple, obvious, and effectual, they are also sure to be
impracticable, and for none but extraneous reasons.
    While it still remains true that the long-term common sense
judgment of civilized mankind places knowledge above business
traffic, as an end to be sought, yet workday habituation under
the stress of competitive business has induced a frame of mind
that will tolerate no other method of procedure, and no rule of
life that does not approve itself as a faithful travesty of
competitive enterprise. And since the quest of learning can not
be carried on by the methods or with the apparatus and incidents
of competitive business, it follows that the only remedial
measures that hold any promise of rehabilitation for the higher
learning in the universities can not be attempted in the present
state of public sentiment.
    All that is required is the abolition of the academic
executive and of the governing board. Anything short of this
heroic remedy is bound to fail, because the evils sought to be
remedied are inherent in these organs, and intrinsic to their
functioning.
    Even granting the possibility of making such 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 held 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 it is the
present scheme and organization that unavoidably work the
mischief, and since, also (as touches the interest of the higher
learning), they work nothing but mischief.
    It should be plain, on reflection, to any one familiar with
academic matters that neither of these official bodies serves any
useful purpose in the university, in so far as bears in any way
on the pursuit of knowledge. They may conceivably both be useful
for some other purpose, foreign or alien to the quest of
learning; but within the lines of the university's legitimate
interest both are wholly detrimental, and very wastefully so.
They are needless, except to take care of needs and emergencies
to which their own presence gratuitously gives rise. In so far as
these needs and difficulties that require executive surveillance
are not simply and flagrantly factitious, -- as, e.g., the
onerous duties of publicity -- they are altogether such needs as
arise out of an excessive size and a gratuitously complex
administrative organization; both of which characteristics of the
American university are created by the governing boards and their
executive officers, for no better purpose than a vainglorious
self-complacency, and with no better justification than an
uncritical prepossession to the effect that large size, complex
organization, and authoritative control necessarily make for
efficiency; whereas, in point of fact, in the affairs of learning
these things unavoidably make for defeat.
    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 lie simply in the popular
prejudice which puts implicit faith in 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 combinations
has been induced in the modern community by its experience with
the large-scale organization of the mechanical industries, and
still more particularly by the convincing pecuniary efficiency of
large capital, authoritative 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 coalition, -- 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, colleges, 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 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 standardization of the
several constituent schools and divisions, on a mechanically
specified routine and scale, which commonly 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 uniformity and mediocrity.
    These duties are, all and several, created by the imposition
of a central control, and in the absence of such control the need
of them would not arise. They are essentially extraneous to the
work on which each and several 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
accountancy, 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.
    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 constituent schools would fall apart, since
nothing holds them together except the strong hand of the present
central government. This would, of course, seem a monstrous and
painful outrage to all those persons who are infatuated with a
veneration of big thing; to whom a "great" -- that is to say
voluminous -- university is an object of pride and loyal
affection. This class of persons is a very large one, and they
are commonly not given to reJection 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 popular
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
occupied 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 suffer no sensible diminution.
Indeed, the contemplated change should bring a very appreciably
heightened efficiency of all the working units that are now tied
up in the university 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 coordination 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-aggregate under a centralized control gives a deceptive
appearance 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 coalition 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 subsisting between them, by virtue of
their common employment 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 faculties have in such matters
proved themselves notable 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,
however, that this latterday experience of confirmed incompetence
has been gathered under the overshadowing presence of a
surreptitiously and irresponsibly autocratic executive, vested
with power of use and abuse, and served by a corps of adroit
parliamentarians and lobbyists, 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 accountancy 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 practice, and of
necessity, the actual effective organization of each of these
constituent school units devolves on the working staff, in so far
as regards the effectual work to be done. even to the selection
of its working members 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, -- almost wholly inhibitory, in effect, even 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 incompetently. 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 régime 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 had carried over a good
share of the mechanistic frame of mind induced by their
experience under the régime 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 parcelment and
personal communion between teacher and student 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 competent -- 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 conversant with the
run of academic affairs as currently conducted on the grand
scale; inasmuch as it is altogether a matter of course and of
common notoriety within the precincts, that this is precisely
what these constituent schools and units now have to do, each and
several; with the sole qualification that they now have to take
care of these matters under the inhibitory surveillance of the
executive and his extraneous interests, and under the exactions
of a super-imposed scheme of mechanical 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
routine of control and accountancy exacted by the executive's
need of a creditable publicity (15*)
    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 Collegiate ("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 coming of electives. It was
in the introduction of electives, and presently of alternatives
and highly flexible curricula, that the move first set in which
carried the American college off 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
professions. It need not follow that the ancient curriculum would
be re-established, but it should seem reasonable that a move
would take effect in the direction of something like a modern
equivalent. The Graduate School, on the other hand, having lost
the drag of the collegiate division and the vocational schools,
should come into action as a shelter where the surviving remnant
of scholars and scientists might pursue their several lines of
adventure, in teaching and in inquiry, without disturbance to or
from the worldly-wise who clamour for the greater glory.

    Now, all this speculation as to what might happen has, of
course, little else than a speculative value. It is not intended,
seriously and as a practical measure, to propose the abolition of
the president's office, or of the governing board; nor is it
intended to intimate that the captain of erudition can be
dispensed with in fact. He is too dear to the commercialized
popular imagination, and he fits too convincingly into the
businessmen's preconceived scheme of things, to permit any such
sanguine hope of surcease from skilled malpractice and
malversation. All that is here intended to he said is nothing
more than the obiter dictum that, as seen from the point of view
of the higher learning, the academic executive and all his works
are anathema, and should be discontinued by the simple expedient
of wiping him off the slate; and that the governing board, in so
far as it presumes to exercise any other than vacantly
perfunctory duties, has the same value and should with advantage
be lost in the same shuffle.

NOTES:

1. "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
university of eminent wealth and volume, has followed a settled
policy of defeating any overt move looking to scientific or
scholarly 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
qualified 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
increased sufficiently to subdue his wayward bent; or, in an
incorrigible 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 quarter-century of preventive regimen, the resulting
academic staff had become a byword of nugatory intrigue and
vacant pedantry.

2. So far has this predilection made its way in the counsels of
the "educators" that much of the current discussion of
desideranda in academic policy reads like controversial argument
on "efficiency engineering," -- an "efficiency engineer" is an
accountant competent to advise business concerns how best to
increase their saleable output per unit of cost. And there has,
indeed, been at least one tour of inspection of American
universities by such an "efficiency engineer," undertaken in the
service 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
customary lines of "scientific management."

3. "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 educational institutions
or promote educational enterprise put themselves 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.

4. Indeed, the resemblance is visible. As among professional
politicians, so also as regards incumbents and aspirants for
academic 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 victuals 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.
"Indulgence" in ostensibly gluttonous bouts of this kind --
banquets, dinners, etc. -- is not so much a matter of taste as of
astute publicity, 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
consequences, physical and otherwise, are of much the same nature
in either case.

5. See pp. 68-73, 79-81, above.

6. As 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, 1913, on "The Third American
Sex," especially pp. 450-455.

7. Unfortunately, the language wants a competent designation for
public-minded personages of this class; which comprises something
appreciably more than the homiletical university executives
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 technical innovations. "Philandropist" has been suggested.
It is not a large innovation, and it has the merit of being
obviously self-explanatory. At the same time its phonetic
resemblance to an older term, already well accepted in the
language, should recommend it to the members of the craft whom it
is designed to signalize, and with whom phonetic considerations
are habitually allowed weight. The purists will doubtless find
"philandropist" a barbarism; but that is an infirmity that has
attached to many 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.

8.      "The 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 locum tenens appointed to take over the functions of the
home office for a term of years, while the captain himself "takes
the road" -- on an appreciably augmented salary -- to speak his
mind eloquently on many topics. The device can, however, scarcely
yet be said to have passed the experimental phase. This
illustrious exponent of philandropism commands an extraordinary
range 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
ordinary usage. But in any case it indicates a felt need of some
measure of relief, such as will enable the run of presidential
speech to gain a little something in amplitude and frequency.

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

10. These resulting canons of blameless anility will react on the
character of the academic personnel in a two-fold way: negatively
and by indirection they work out in an (uncertain but effectual)
selective elimination of such persons as are worth while in point
of scholarship and initiative; while positively and by direct
incitement it results that the tribe of Lo Basswood 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 such an executive with
plenary powers, driven to uncommonly fatuous lengths by this
calculus of expedient notoriety, and intent on putting a needed
patch on the seat of his honour, has endeavoured to save some
remnant of good-will among his academic acquaintance by
protesting, in strict and confidential privacy, that his course
of action taken in 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
knave is more to be esteemed than a fool, and overlooking the
great ease with which he has been able to combine the two
characters.

11. In all fairness it should be noted, as a caution against
hasty conclusions, that in both of these cases this initial
scholarly intention has been questioned -- or denied -- by men
well informed as to the later state of things in either of the
two universities in question. And it may as well be admitted
without much reservation that the later state of things has
carried no broad hint of an initial phase in the life-history of
these schools, in which ideals 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 with the relevant facts at the time. In both cases,
it is only in the outcome, only after the pressure of
circumstances has had time to act, that a rounded meretricious
policy has taken effect. What has misled hasty and late-come
observers in this matter is the relatively very brief --
inconspicuously brief -- time interval during which it was found
practicable to let the academic policy be guided primarily by
scholarly ideals.

12. As a commentary on the force of circumstances and the
academic 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 succession alluded to, the case of these fabled
majesties was specifically 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.

13. There is a word to add, as to the measure of success achieved
by these enterprises along their chosen lines of endeavour. Both
of the establishments spoken of are schools of some value in many
directions, and both have also achieved a large reputation among
the laity. Indeed, the captains under whose management the two
schools have perforce carried on their work, are commonly held in
considerable esteem as having achieved great things. There is no
desire here to understate the case; but it should be worth
noting, as bearing on the use and academic value of the
presidential office, that the disposal of very large means --
means of unexampled magnitude -- has gone to this achievement. A
consideration of these results, whether in point of scholarship
or of notoriety, as compared with the means which the captains
have disposed of, will leave one in doubt. It should seem
doubtful if the results could have been less excellent or less
striking, given the free disposal of an endowment of 20 or 30
millions, and upward, even under the undistinguished and
uneventful management of commonplace honesty and academic
traditions without the guidance of a "strong man." It is, indeed,
not easy to believe that less could have been achieved without
the captain's help. There is also evidence to hand 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.

14. 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 the executive. There are many expressions to be
met with, touching this matter, of a colloquial turn. These will
commonly have something of an underbred air, as may happen in
unguarded colloquial speech; but if it be kept in mind that their
personal incidence is duly to be read out of them, their tenor
may yet be instructive, and their scant elegance may be
over-looked for once, in view of that certain candour that is
scarcely to be had without a colloquial turn. They should serve
better than many elaborate phrases to throw into relief the kind
and measure of esteem accorded these mature incumbents of
executive office by the men who assist behind the scenes. So, in
bold but intelligible metaphor, one hears, "He is a large person
full of small potatoes," "The only white thing about him is his
liver," "Half-a-peck of pusillanimity," "A four-flusher."
Something after this kind is this aphoristic wisdom current in
the academic community, in so far as it runs safely above the
level of scurrility. In point of taste, it would be out of the
question to follow the same strain of discourteous expressions
into that larger volume of more outspoken appraisal that lies
below that level; and even what has so been sparingly cited in
illustration can, of course, not claim a sympathetic hearing as
being in any way a graceful presentment of the sense intended to
be conveyed in these figures of speech. Yet the apology may be
accepted, that it conveys this sense intelligibly even if not
elegantly.
    Indeed, a person widely conversant with current opinion and
its expression among the personnel of the staff, as touches the
character and academic value of a capable and businesslike
executive, might unguardedly come to the persuasion that the
typical academic head, under these latterday conditions. will be
a feebleminded 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
executive, tends to fall in with the lines so indicated; that the
exigencies of the executive office are of a kind that would
converge upon such an issue "in the long run" and "in the absence
of disturbing causes"; not that the effectual run of
circumstances will at all commonly permit a consummation of that
kind and degree.
    "Indeed... we may say as Dr Boteler said of strawberries.
'Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God
never did.'"

15. It will be objected, and with much reason, that these
underlying "school units" that 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,"
"affiliation." "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
connection 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.


                                 THE END