The Critics of the College

‘I AM nothing, if not critical,’ said Iago of himself. His phrase aptly describes a tendency of our day. We live in a social order self-conscious and critical.

This critical spirit — this touch of nature which makes the whole world kin — has characterized every complex civilization. Even in their decay, Greece and Rome developed their critics — not only keen, but wise. In our day the critics are perhaps no wiser, but they are more numerous. In a people given over, as ours is, to the daily paper and to the uplift magazine, the touch of nature is intensified. We are a nation of critics.

Uncomfortable as this is for all of us who live in glass houses, we dare not forget that the ability to learn from just criticism is perhaps the highest test of civilization. Individual success is measured by it; the progress of an institution or a state is conditioned upon the capacity to avail itself of criticism.

It must be confessed that few attain that serene plane where the critic is really welcome. Charm he never so wisely, your critic is generally an Ahithophel. Those who most need to heed him call him academic, and after that nobody pays any further attention to what he says. One does not need a long memory to recall the rise of criticism of our railway management. The critics objected to rebates; to railway politics; to discrimination between shippers. They were laughed at as academic. Today these abuses are being stamped out by legislative and executive action far more drastic than anything that these academic critics ever dreamed of. Who knows but that some future president may appoint an interstate college commission whose function it shall be to squeeze the water out of the colleges, just as President Wilson is preparing to squeeze it out of the other trusts?

For it is inevitable that in an age so critical our chief agency of higher education should come in for its full share of censure. Furthermore, the critics assume (of course unreasonably) that the college, as an exponent of our highest intelligence, will receive these censures with a sweet reasonableness and will promptly bring forth fruits of reform.

Whatever be the origin of this criticism of the college, though much of it be wide of the mark and some of it unjust, it still remains true that in no way can the college justify itself more completely than by meeting such criticism in good temper, by dealing with it patiently and honestly; and while it discards the censures of the carping, by availing itself of whatsoever wisdom such criticism offers.

I

Who are the critics of the college, and what are they saying about it?

To make a catalogue of the critics and their complaints would outrun the limit of a magazine. Everything about the college is under the fire of the critics— its government and administration, its teaching, its financial conduct, its ideals of social life, its right to exist at all. These criticisms run into details so varied as to confuse the general reader, and for that matter the student of education. Is it possible so to classify them under a few heads as to show in the first place the points of view of the critics, and secondly to indicate the nature and sweep of their criticisms? It is this which I have attempted to do.

The first difficulty which one meets in such an effort arises out of the incongruities of our educational situation. In our country the very name college has no definite meaning.

In the United States there are approximately nine hundred institutions called colleges and empowered to grant degrees. Illinois, Iowa,Ohio, and Pennsylvania have more than forty each; Georgia, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, more than thirty each. Iowa has one such degree-granting college for each 50,000 of her inhabitants, Ohio one for each 100,000, Massachusetts one for each 200,000, and New York one for each 300,000. England has one degree-granting institution for every three millions.

These establishments bearing the name college differ so widely in what they undertake to do and in the methods by which they undertake to do it, that they cannot be discussed as if they belonged to a homogeneous group. Some of them are real-estate ventures. A very large proportion are preparatory schools in whole or in part. The majority of them have vague and uncertain relations to the system of schools in their region.

Many attempts have been made to simplify this situation. The suggestion most often put forward is that colleges should be segregated into groups comparable with each other, as the American Medical Association classifies the medical schools, so that the public may know whether a given institution is a No. 1 college, a No. 2 college, or a No. 3 college, just as it now thinks of the medical schools as belonging to Class A, B, or C. A study intended to provide an approximate grouping of colleges was prepared a few years ago in the office of the United States Commissioner of Education, but under the gentle pressure of politics the results have never been allowed to reach the public eye.

There are, in truth, no specific marks by which colleges can be sharply divided into classes, and this notwithstanding the fact that many things about a college can be sharply and definitely appraised. For example, it is quite possible to determine whether a given college maintains a wholesome and fruitful relation to the publicschool system, whether it has a reasonable and honestly enforced system of admission to its classes, whether it offers courses which are of high quality given by good teachers, whether its laboratories and its physical equipment are of a generous and suitable kind.

All this does not enable one to separate colleges into sharply divided classes. These are externals. It is not so easy to determine in what way are defined the intellectual and moral forces which ought to form the real college. Take a single matter, that of entrance requirements. An arbitrary standard of comparison in this matter cannot be instituted. A college having a lower standard of entrance requirements than another may be maintaining a much better relation to the publicschool system; it may be proceeding with far greater honesty; it may be exercising a much stronger influence for education and enlightenment than another whose standards of admission are artificially higher. In other words, nearly all these matters of which we talk so much — such as admission requirements, courses of study, laboratory equipment — are relative, not absolute.

Are there any absolute criteria upon which colleges may be classified ?

There probably are not; and if there were, so long as the use of such criteria is affected by the personal equation of the man who applies them, there is nothing definitive in the conclusions. There is no sure method by which t he college goats may be separated from the college sheep. Like all human institutions, however, the things which differentiate colleges most surely from one another are not complex intellectual qualities, but rather the fundamental moral ones. Colleges can be classified more accurately upon a comparison of their relative honesty than upon the basis of their relative intellectuality.

To be convinced of this one needs to visit many colleges. He must be able to think in terms of education in the nation rather than in terms of the aspirations of his own particular college; he must visualize education as one thing from elementary school to university, not as a series of unconnected things. When he has had this experience he will come, slowly it may be, but none the less surely, to the conclusion that the test applied to banks and churches and all other human agencies — the test or common honesty — is on the whole the most fair and the most applicable in any attempt to differentiate among colleges.

Not only is this method of comparing colleges fair and just, but the colleges furnish the means for its universal application. Every college sets before the public a statement of its offerings, in the form of an annual catalogue. If one will take the time and labor and expense (for it is at once a time-consuming, laborious, and expensive process) to compare the offerings of a number of colleges as presented in their catalogues with the actual fulfilment of these claims as carried out on the college campus, he will conclude that an honest catalogue is the noblest work of a college and the surest mark of college virtue.

Perhaps the college catalogue is nowhere so misleading as in its references to what President Wilson once called the side shows. Many colleges lend the shelter of their charters to various technical or professional schools which they neither support nor control, such as conservatories of music, commercial schools, medical schools, engineering schools, and graduate schools. Many a good college which guards its bachelorof-arts degree with watchful care will, without the quiver of an eyelash, shelter a weak engineering school or a commercial medical school of the lowest type. The tenderest part of the college conscience lies apparently in the bachelor-of-arts course, and the most callous in the medical course.

There are few colleges which have not felt the effect of the universal scramble for numbers, few which have not become in greater or less measure agencies of promotion, few which do not participate, in some degree at least, in our national tendency to superficiality; but on the whole one may with some fair degree of justice divide these 900 colleges into two groups — those which publish catalogues measurably honest and those which do not. Now the criticisms which I have undertaken to summarize are those which are directed at the first group. This simplifies the matter enormously. Not only do we get rid at one stroke of the great mass of material, but we reduce the criticisms to matters of large college policy instead of matters of detail. With regard to the second group one may only reflect, ’If they do these things in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?’

And now, having concluded this long introduction, let us turn to our critics and their criticisms.

II

The serious critics of the college fall into three groups: the college teachers, students of the social order, and the business men. To state the matter in a different way, the college is being criticized to-day from three points of view: that of the college teacher, that of the social reformer, and that of the business man.

Of these the college teacher is the most severe, and no other critic has so long a bill of indictment or one containing so many specifications. His charges may be reduced to something like the following. The college, as it is conducted to-day, provides intellectual offerings of great variety and of high intrinsic value, but fails to create an atmosphere in which these opportunities appeal to students. Good courses, good teachers, unequaled equipment, characterize the modern American college; a rare table is spread for the student, but there is no appetite for the feast. Scholarly enthusiasm among undergraduates is absent save in rare cases, and scholarly attainment commands no reward and little attention. The college has become a place where other things than intellectual power count.

The reasons for this state of affairs are stated by the teachers to be these. Colleges, they say, are ruled by presidents and college boards having little interest in the ideals of the teacher and little sympathy for them. Rarely is the president himself a teacher. The president and the board are swayed by the all-devouring lust for numbers, and everything is sacrificed to that end. To maintain such numbers the standards are lowered, examinations are made easy, discipline is softened. In consequence, complains the college professor, other interests than intellectual ones absorb the minds of the college community.

The most injurious of these he believes to be intercollegiate athletics, whose overshadowing importance has affected not only the intellectual life, but the moral and social life as well, and has gone far to increase the scale of expenditures of the college boy. Only a board of trustees and a college president out of sympathy with the ideals of the true college would tolerate this situation, says the college teacher, and lays the blame in the main on the promoter president.

The remedy which the college teacher proposes for all this is to reorganize the college government: to create a small board of trustees in the place of the present large one, composed of men of college training whose function shall be primarily to find the ways and means; to appoint a president who shall be rather an intellectual leader than an administrator and promoter; and to turn over to the faculty the government of the college in such measure as shall enable its members to carry out their ideals of intellectual and moral standards and to maintain what they believe to be the true purposes of the college. If the college is turned over to us, say the teachers, we will make it once more a centre of intellectual life, not a promotion agency or an athletic training-ground.

The criticisms directed against the college from the point of view of the social reformer run along two lines. One has to do with the ideal of democracy and the other with that of religion. It is impossible to discuss one without the other. There is a strong tendency in the college, say these critics, to forget that ideal of democracy which we call American, to segregate rich and poor into different groups, to increase class distinctions in our society rather than to diminish them, to make the groups of students who attend the colleges rather more conscious of class than less so.

Another group of social reformers insists that the college, which was twenty-five years ago distinctly a religious agency with a definite religious atmosphere, has become, if not irreligious, at least unreligious; that there exists in few colleges an active religious spirit such as makes itself felt upon any student who enters the college circle. On account of these two changes, the reformers say, the colleges are accentuating the tendency of the country away from democratic and away from religious ideals.

The third criticism comes from the business world, and is directed both against the college as an organization and against the quality of the product which the college turns out. As an organization, say the business men, the college is expensive, uncritical of its own processes, and grows continually by accretion. Departments, studies, and new divisions are added; nothing is ever subtracted. As an organization, the business man claims, the college never receives the critical administrative examination to which all other organizations are compelled to submit. While a newly started college may therefore, they say, be soundly organized, all colleges become after a greater or less time ill organized and expensive beyond a reasonable limit. In the second place, say the business men, notwithstanding the very great expenditures of the college, the men it turns out are on the whole ill-trained, are able to do nothing well, as a class are not fond of work, and need in most cases a thorough breaking-in and additional discipline before they are available for serious occupations. The college, therefore, they say, is not only poorly organized and inordinately expensive, but unsuccessful in what it undertakes to do; and it makes no serious effort to remedy these obvious defects.

III

How far are these criticisms justified ?

This question I do not undertake to answer. The Carnegie Foundation, as is well known, exercises but a modest function in educational criticism. I have endeavored rather to classify the criticisms and to reduce them to some form in which they may be applicable to groups of colleges and to large policies.

It is of small value to prove that this or that study is being ill-taught. No outside critic can better such details. The criticisms which are here brought together are fundamental. They are directed at the organization and the government of every college. If they are true criticisms, they are worthy of the very closest attention on the part of thehose who govern colleges and of those who teach in them; and again I venture to recall the fact that the ability to make use of intelligent criticism is the surest mark of a high order of civilization.

I venture only to call attention briefly to the source of the criticisms themselves, and the claims which these various groups have upon the attention of college trustees, of college presidents, and of college faculties.

That the criticism of the college teacher is in large measure deserved there can be small doubt on the part of any one who cares to know the facts. The rage for numbers, the hot pursuit of gifts, the extraordinary demoralization due to intercollegiate athletics, are all factors in bringing about the situation of which the teacher complains and in which he himself is a factor. The indictment he brings against the government of the colleges is in a very large number of cases true. Outside of a few of the older colleges, governing boards are unwieldy in size, and their members are selected generally upon material grounds. It is entirely natural that such boards should choose for president a promoter rather than a scholar. The lack of a capable governing board is to-day perhaps the greatest weakness in our college organization, and it is the point at which reform must begin if the evils which are now recognized and admitted are to be corrected.

Whether the remedy which the teacher puts forward, that the governance of the college be handed over to the faculty, will solve these difficulties is another question. I have not yet encountered a teacher critic who favored the revision or even the scrutiny of his own work or his own budget.

The distortion of our present, college relations produces upon the mind of a European visitor an effect of which we are seldom conscious. We have gradually grown accustomed to a situation in which athletics overshadows all else. To the European this discovery comes with something of a shock. A distinguished teacher and jurist recently visited a number of our universities in a study of legal education. His dismay and astonishment at the overpowering rôle of college athletics were complete, and he expressed the naïve hope that in some way the candidates for law might get their pre-legal education without being exposed to the demoralizing atmosphere of the college!

The charge that the college is undemocratic and unreligious has never seemed to me to have the weight which certain reformers attach to it. Our American colleges, even the older and richer ones, still remain wholesome, democratic centres of student life. There are few places in the world where a human being finds himself in more sincere relations.

My own experience makes me suspect that, in general, the reformer underestimates the capacity of the American college student for serious things. The American youth is strongly inclined to pursue heartily those things which represent in the society in which he lives the prizes of life. He throws himself into athletics with such vigor because, on the whole, in the present college régime it seems the most important thing to do, the thing which really demands enthusiasm and devotion and hard work, the thing which brings recognition and reward.

As for t he religious side of student life, that reflects t he prevailing attitude of the American people, with this difference. The college student is going through an experience in which he is learning to place growing emphasis upon intellectual sincerity. At such a period in the development of any human being the forms of religion are sure to be looked at critically, but there has never been a time in our history when the college student was more ready to take kindly to a simple, straightforward conception of religion, or when he was more ready to accept the ideal of religious service and of unselfish devotion. The tendencies of the college life still seem to me to be democratic, and if the college boy does sometimes put his devotion and his effort into the wrong thing, it is because he believes, in the environment in which he lives, that thing to be of most importance.

Concerning the complaint of the business man, what I have to say has to do, not with the accuracy of his charge, but with the point of view from which it comes.

Two reasons have combined in the last two decades to make business men more critical of the college. The first lies in the fact that only within the last twenty-five years has the business man’s son, as a rule, gone to college; and business men are now beginning to test in great numbers in the records of their own sons the result of present-day college training. It is very difficult to convince an energetic, alert, driving business man that the college is a fruitful agency in education when his sons come home lacking serious purpose, deficient in the elements of an education, unable to write a good letter, and utterly uninterested in the details or the development of business. The son who comes out of college a failure is to the business man an argumentum ad hominem hard to overcome.

A second reason for the accentuation of criticism from business men is found in the systematic exploitation of business men by the colleges. The business world has begun to feel that it is giving so much money to support the colleges that it has a right to know how the money is spent and what results from it.

We read in the daily papers halfhumorous allusions to the college president as a beggar, but few appreciate how large a business college-begging has become. It is a business; and it has come to be prosecuted in the most systematic and persistent way. The amount of money annually ‘lifted’ in cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis, as the result of these systematic and continuous efforts, aggregates many millions. When a new college is organized in any part of the United States, the first move is to send an agent — generally the president, sometimes a salaried solicitor — to canvass first the Eastern cities, then the near-by cities. In New York the business men have for the last twenty years subscribed to nearly all such efforts as a matter of course. It has been assumed that any college was necessarily a good thing to help. The business man has had no means of scrutinizing these efforts. He gives as the Lord sends his rain, to the just and to the unjust. The total which he contributes is enormous.

The applications made to these men would in many cases not bear the simplest scrutiny. The causes which they represent vary from actual frauds to the most sincere and praiseworthy educational efforts. The amount of fraud connected with the business of soliciting money for colleges will astonish any one who has not looked into it. There are enterprises in this country bearing the name college or university which have never taught a class, which have not a single college building, but which have for years collected money from a confiding public.

Such cases are, of course, extreme. Nearly always the college beggar is sincere in the belief that his institution represents a real cause. I have rarely found an educational enterprise whose promoters did not believe that it represented an unusual and unique opportunity. The most unsanitary and impossible medical school persuades itself that students are somehow better off with it than they would be under better conditions.

Some years ago the collector for a small institution, a college in name only, came to me and suggested that if I would give him a recommendation for his college, he thought he could collect a large sum of money from some charitably inclined men and women of New York. My reply was that, in my judgment, his institution was in no position to solicit such aid. In the first place, it was not a college; in the second place, it was essentially a proprietary institution; in the third place, it was engaged in demoralizing the publicschool system of the state in which it stood. For all these reasons I declined to be a factor in the situation. Three weeks later he called with the utmost good nature, merely to say good-bye, and as he left, he added, ’I got the money all right.’

It is the realization of these two things which has made the business men more critical toward the college. First, they have been conscious of many failures which touch them closely. In the second place, they have become more and more sensitive to the fact that they are contributing at an enormously increasing rate to institutions of whose merit they begin to have serious doubts.

The charge which the business man makes against the college is practically that of inefficiency. The word has a very offensive sound in the ears of the college man. I am creditably informed that in some college faculties the word efficient is no longer considered fit for decent society.

This feeling on the part of the college professor is readily understood. The word efficiency has been overworked and badly applied. It is perfectly true that one cannot gauge the work and cost of an educational agency by the hard-and-fast tests of business. No one has seriously proposed to do this save a few extraordinary state officers. In one state a board was at one time appointed to test the efficiency of every teacher. The absurdity of the proposal was enough to dispose of it.

This crude use of the term has, however, been no justification for the extreme tenderness of many college professors and presidents. College professors are human and colleges are human institutions. Selfishness and waste may flourish in them as in other organizations. What the business man has said in criticism of them is almost equivalent to what the college professor himself has said. It is simply expressed in terms of business vernacular. There are in our country to-day institutions which spend annually larger sums than any single institution of learning ever spent in the previous history of the world.

These vast sums have been used at times selfishly. The college tends to grow all the time by accretion. It has not set itself to study its own organization and improvement. What the business man really means to say in his charge of inefficiency is that the college president and the college professor, instead of continually asking more money, instead of always urging the needs of this department or that, should seriously set themselves to examine what they are doing with the money generously supplied them in the last quarter century.

After all, this suggestion is not very far from that which is implied in the criticism of the college teacher. It is not that the teacher or the college shall be judged by impossible materialistic criteria, but that the college make its own examination and that there should be some sort of relation between the vast endowments of the colleges and the work which they actually perform.

IV

How far do these criticisms apply to the women’s colleges?

I think it may be fairly said that the women’s colleges are not open to exactly the same sort of criticism as men’s colleges. First of all, they have not shared to the same degree the flood of money which has gone to the older men’s colleges; secondly, intercollegiate athletics has certainly not distorted their ideals of college life; and finally, it will be admitted that the young woman in such a college takes her work on the average more seriously and more conscientiously than her brother who goes to Harvard or Yale or Princeton.

There is a feeling that, notwithstanding her greater seriousness and more conscientious attitude toward study, the college girl does not get quite so much out of college as her brother. The youth who goes to college does not cut himself off during these four years from participation in the social order. Sometimes he sees much more of the fascinating young women of the college town than he had ever seen of those at home in his previous history. As a rule, he comes out of college with what might be called a more normal social experience than his sister who goes to a woman’s college.

Whether justly or unjustly, the college world believes that the woman’s college is a somewhat secluded institution separated from other social life, and that on the whole the young woman in such a college gets more study, but less development as a member of society than falls to the lot of the average youth.

It is my pleasant duty now and again to attend a commencement in one of the old-time colleges for women. They exist now only in remote parts of our country. The curriculum would be beneath contempt from the standpoint of the modern woman’s college. It has scarcely begun to have psychology, and every one understands what a rudimentary stage that signifies. Yet I confess that there is something very charming about these old-time schools; and while the girls lack psychology, they seem to know a deal about other matters. I have noticed that invariably such colleges are placed conveniently near a man’s college or a military academy or some similar institution; and there are nearly always interesting goings on between these two. They have a social life in common, which adds spice to the chapters on psychology. I have wondered sometimes whether, after all, this arrangement did not make for a social education that looked toward charm and consideration for others and a knowledge of human nature; and in this sinful world charm and a knowledge of human nature serve many good ends.

A notable opportunity is offered at Bryn Mawr for such reciprocity. At its door stands one of the best American colleges. What a charming arrangement it would be if there were some social interchange between Bryn Mawr and Haverford! It seems an odd social conception which permits them to sit side by side year in and year out and take no notice of each other’s existence. Of course, the fact that both these colleges are under the auspices of the same body of Christians makes an additional difficulty in any social rapprochement; but, after all, this might not prove an insuperable obstacle. What delightful opportunities are available for Barnard and Radcliffe!

I venture a single word more with regard to all these criticisms. All that such criticisms can do is to point the way by which those who are charged with the responsibility may bring about reforms. One can at least say that these criticisms call for a sincere selfexamination on the part of the colleges, a self-examination on the part not only of those who teach, but of those who govern — a self-examination in which the trustees shall make clear to themselves their own function and the fitness of their organization to perform this function; in which the president shall make clear to himself his own duty and his own relations; and in which the members of the faculty shall shoulder honestly the actual problems of their teaching, shall squarely take the responsibility for the use of the large sums of money now entrusted to them, and shall sincerely undertake to answer the question whether or not the responsibility for the present failings of the college does not rest partly with them.

To one whose work day by day brings him in contact not only with many colleges, but with many business men, with many social workers, there is a feature of the whole college situation which always brings a reassurance of comfort and of confidence.

Notwithstanding the weaknesses of the college to-day, notwithstanding the fact that many a youth comes away from it injured for life rather than helped, notwithstanding the fact that it has not yet resolutely faced the present-day problems, the fact still remains that it is the best agency society has yet devised for the training of leaders; and I apprehend that this remains true largely for the reason that, notwithstanding all these weaknesses, the youth during his college life is under the sway of ideals which make him for all the rest of his life — in part, at least —an idealist. These ideals are not always the highest. In too many cases the boy gets them from the training coach rather than from the teacher, from an obscure instructor rather than from an experienced professor, from the college treasurer rather than from the college president; but nevertheless they express devotion, service, unselfishness, patriotism. It is because the college is still a place in which ideals grow that the college remains the most fruitful training place for the world’s leaders.