Putting It Up to the College

ON the street the other morning I met my college president.

‘Good morning. Pardon my apparent perturbation,’said he. ‘ I have been talking with an industrialist.’

‘Did you solve his problems?’

‘It was n’t his problem, but my own, which makes it rather more difficult. You see, this industrialist has made a good deal of money by quantity-production methods. He has a sixteen-year-old son who is just graduating from high school this year, with high honors. Able, and apparently with a sense of intellectual responsibility, the boy seems rather unusual human material, even discounting his father’s pride in him. The father is naturally anxious that the boy shall have the best education possible, not for any particular career, but for life in general.'

‘Not an unnatural idea.’

‘ No. It is quite in our line, just what we claim we are doing for large numbers of boys in the liberal-arts colleges. So I suggested; but the father says he wants absolutely an individual education for his son, completely tailormade.’

‘Did you suggest private tutors?’

‘He wants a college education with all its concomitants, activities, athletics, and all, but without losing his son in what Leacock called the “convoy system of education.”He says that there are several colleges now where he can approximate his desires, but none where he can get a complete job to specification from first to last. He argues that he can go to any motor factory and, at a price, have turned out a motor capable of a specific performance. Our educational plants are as completely equipped as factories these days, and it is only a question of flexibility. We educational engineers with good material and on a cost-plus basis ought to be able to turn out an individual job superior to the usual quantity product.’

‘Did he suggest a contract price?’

‘I told him we were not cost accountants and he suggested ten thousand dollars a year — forty thousand for the boy delivered a superior product and properly hall-marked with a degree.’

‘Did you answer him?’

‘I did n’t. And yet the request is such a perfectly natural one that I wonder it has not been raised before. It brings up a surprising number of interesting questions, even if I choose to sidestep certain perennial disagreements as to the definition of a liberal education. In the first place, we are infinitely better equipped to meet the question than we were ten years ago, what with the introduction of mental tests, personnel departments, general reading courses, honors courses, tutorial systems, and numberless other devices for loosening formal requirements for the worthy. We are much more sympathetic with extraordinary methods for the extraordinary case. And yet I had to tell the father that it would necessarily be an educational experiment and that we could not guarantee the results of the most careful individual treatment.’

‘I presume he wished an ironclad contract specifying the exact intellectual dimensions of the product.’

‘Curiously enough, he did n’t. If he had, I could have avoided my difficulties without a confession of weakness. He knows Dasch of the Political Science Department. He suggested that, with Dasch as personal mental guide for the boy, and with the full resources of the college available, he was willing to gamble on the success of the experiment. He said it was only getting back to educational fundamentals and to the original teacher-pupil relationship, and that we probably needed the touch of simplicity to leaven our formality. I spoke to Dasch about it.’

‘How did he react to the prospect of becoming an intellectual chaperon?’

‘He was enthusiastic. He says it is just the type of educational experiment he has wanted to make for years, that he is sure he can benefit the boy and at the same time gain some interesting side lights on educational methods. There are not many men on the faculty I should be willing to trust with it, but Dasch is broad and thoroughly sound, as well as inspiring and sympathetic in his teaching. He says the money will allow him to hire a substitute for part of his teaching and enable him to devote a considerable portion of his time to the boy. He says the substitute can take on new work as well and so strengthen his entire department.’

‘Then you accepted the idea?’

‘No. I am still hesitating. I am convinced that the experiment would benefit the boy, Dasch, the college, and educational theory itself. But I had two doubts — one a material one and one a curious ethical one which I am at a loss to evaluate. You see, ours is an endowed college, which means that more than half its expenses are paid by donors, largely dead, who made gifts for the support of an education conceived of as largely social in purposes. Dasch’s particular chair happens to be endowed. In diverting Dasch’s time and other energies of the college to this purely individual experiment am I doing an injustice to the other students and to these socially minded donors? Or is there a sufficient social value to the experiment to justify me? I confess I am at a loss in weighing these intangibles.’

‘You feel yourself justified in devoting a greater share of attention to other, more able students.’

‘The chances of a social benefit are greater in educating the superior minds, If this boy were not above the normal I could never consider the proposal. Nor could the college make a practice of selling graduated education for graduated prices. But there is another, more practical consideration.'

‘And that is — ?’

‘You see, our degrees are conferred by the faculty as an outward and visible sign that the recipient has completed with certain specified grades a certain specified number of diversified courses taught in a certain professionally approved manner. How far can the faculty at Dasch’s request and on his responsibility release this young man from the usual requirements? I do not even know how far Dasch will consider it necessary to formulate the young man’s programme outside of the usual procedures. But if he does step outside, — and he will in some degree, — what method will the faculty have of testing the boy’s adequacy at the end of four years? And after all the standard of the degrees is a faculty responsibility. We could not force the degree, whatever the quality of the boy’s work or his mental progress.’

‘Did you explain all this to the father?'

’I tried to, and left him feeling that colleges were rather inefficient organizations. And I think he rather enjoyed putting me in a hole. He regards my perplexities as an indictment of the whole educational system, and with the zeal of a reformer is insistent on my accepting his offer. Do you know, I am rather inclined to wish that I had never seen the man and his forty thousand dollars? It embarrasses me to refuse such a challenge, and I am afraid to accept. I wish someone would advise me before some other plutocrat makes a similar attack on the omniscience of the college. It is discouraging to think that any rich industrialist has the power to put such a poser.’

‘I agree with you that his idea is provocative.’

‘ It is intended to be. Good morning.'