Failings of Our Graduate Schools

I

FOR all practical purposes, the first graduate school in the United States was founded by Johns Hopkins and opened in Baltimore in 1876. It was speedily and widely imitated, sometimes in form, sometimes in name, occasionally in both. Sixty years have now passed. Graduate schools dot the land. It is time to take stock. I propose to ask, first, what was Mr. Gilman’s conception of a graduate school; second, was it sound in his time; third, is it or is it not still sound; fourth, how do American graduate schools fare when measured by his standard to-day.

On the first of January, 1876, the governing principles of the new institution were announced. From this announcement I quote as follows:

The glory of the university should rest upon the character of the teachers and scholars here brought together and not upon their number, nor upon the buildings constructed for their use . . . the power of the university will depend upon the character of its resident staff of permanent professors. It is their researches in the library and the laboratory; their example as students and investigators and as champions of the truth . . . which will make the University an attraction to the best students, and serviceable to the intellectual growth of the land. ... In selecting a staff of teachers the Trustees have determined to consider especially the devotion of the candidate to some particular line of study and the certainty of his eminence in that specialty; the power to pursue independent and original investigation. . . . The Trustees will not be governed by denominational or geographical considerations in the appointment of any teacher, but will endeavor to select the best person whose services they can secure in the position to be filled, irrespective of the place where he was born, or the college in which he was trained, or the religious body with which he has been enrolled.

I have selected the distinctive sentences in Mr. Gilman’s announcement; they do no violence to the context, which I have not room to quote in full, but which can be found in a volume entitled The Launching of a University, published in 1906.

To Mr. Gilman’s mind, a university was primarily a graduate school, and a graduate school was the congenial home of the ablest scholars and students that could be assembled. The Johns Hopkins ‘was founded upon the idea of a university as distinct from a college.’ Further, ‘in the conduct of a university, secure the ablest men as professors, regardless of all other qualifications excepting those of personal merit and adaptation to the chairs that are to be filled. Give them freedom, give them auxiliaries, give them liberal support.’ Finally, let me quote a line from Gilman’s inaugural address: ‘Universities easily fall into ruts. Almost every epoch requires a fresh start.’

Such was Gilman’s conception of a graduate school. Was the conception sound? If almost every epoch requires a fresh start, did Gilman hit the bull’seye when he launched the Johns Hopkins? History is made very slowly; a half century is but a brief period. None the less, I venture to say that on this point the verdict is already reached and will never be disturbed. In 1876 there were, to be sure, learned men in the United States — Goodwin, Child, Hadley, Willard Gibbs, among others. But there was nothing remotely resembling an institution of learning. Such scholars and scientists as we then possessed led double lives — teaching boys at one time, pursuing their studies in their scant leisure. The graduate school at Baltimore shut out mere boys. The scholar’s life was thus unified; Rowland, Remsen, Sylvester, Gildersleeve, and their associates taught and worked with mature students — as good as the country could at that time provide. The graduate school which thus took form was not only sound, but timely. Eager and able young men flocked to Baltimore. Within a startlingly brief period, an American university became and was throughout the world recognized as a seat of learning. And with characteristic American vigor the older and then the newer universities followed in Gilman’s footsteps, utilizing largely Hopkins graduates. Scholarship and science became possible careers. A new world was opened to men and women who were highly endowed, intellectually and morally.

As long as funds sufficed, the Johns Hopkins lived up to Gilman’s ideals. It was a society of scholars. His own charming personality was subordinated; his pride was in the men he had brought together; his one ambition, to enable them to achieve their purposes. And in the selection of men he asked few questions: Is there something worth while to be done? Are you the best person in the world obtainable to do it? So he laid hands upon Rowland at twenty-eight, and upon Sylvester at sixty-three; upon Americans, English, Germans; upon Jew and Gentile. I answer my second question — Was Gilman’s conception sound? — in the affirmative.

I approach the third question: Is the conception upon which I have dwelt still sound or not? In the inaugural from which I have already quoted, Gilman said: ‘As it is impossible for any university to encourage with equal freedom all branches of learning, a selection must be made and that selection must depend on the requirements and deficiencies of a given people in a given period. What is more important at one time or place may be less needed elsewhere and otherwise.’ In these words Gilman expressly recognized the close relation between a living university and its social setting. But he was even then not unaware of the danger that lurks in adaptation. Hence he urged, ‘Remote utility is quite as worthy as immediate advantage’; ‘all sciences are worthy of promotion.’ The university must therefore be prepared to change; but immediate advantage is a criterion that requires careful scrutiny. ‘Be prepared to cultivate real learning in any field; select with all the wisdom and caution you can command.’ Upon these formulæ the last half century has not improved. In so far as universities satisfy them, they are real universities; in so far as universities do not satisfy them, they are something else.

II

I come then to my fourth query: How do American graduate schools fare to-day, when measured by the standards which Gilman defined in 1876? No simple answer is possible. In practically every subject that Gilman undertook, or would gladly have undertaken, the Hopkins of his day has been outstripped; compare his library with the great university collections of books in a score of places to-day; compare the laboratories of Martin and Rowland and Remsen with the facilities to be found to-day both East and West. A few of his men have not been excelled as individuals; but his departments were meagre compared with the opportunities that exist to-day in university laboratories and libraries and in the research departments of several industries. In hastening this development, the early Hopkins was not the only influence at work: German influence was enormous and is still indispensable; France and England made contributions of great importance and must not be overlooked. What with all these stimulating factors, the development of American graduate schools has been phenomenal. A capable and earnest student now has access to opportunities that are in most subjects as good as any in the world, and far superior to the opportunities offered by the Hopkins of Gilman’s day.

But there are other and less encouraging aspects. To a large extent — I cannot say how large — the graduate school is still collegiate. Dean Laing, who ought to know, holds that the progress made in the last fifty years ‘ is far from satisfactory’; that ‘scores of masters are graduating each year without the slightest appreciation of higher culture’; that ‘large numbers regard the degree as a gilt-edged teacher’s certificate’— a point to which I shall in a moment recur. And the graduate school is a college in other respects; with its requisites and prerequisites and majors and minors, with its excessive machinery and organization, it is a place for boys and girls who need to be shepherded, not for men and women who make their own way and take at least reasonable risks.

To the second point which marks the decadence of the graduate school I have already alluded. I cannot now recall any passage in which Mr. Gilman named as one of the functions of the graduate school the training of teachers for colleges and high schools. He held that scholars should be primarily concerned with advancing the knowledge of their subjects and educating those who could do likewise. He would, I suspect, have argued that men like these usually make stimulating teachers; that if one has to choose in the graduate school between a good teacher and a good investigator, the post should be given to the investigator; for men and women who have attained their majority ought not to require to be skillfully taught. Helmholtz was reputed to be a poor teacher; what of it? Should he have been disqualified for his university professorship? I take the opposite view; it is the student’s business to learn, as much so to-day as it was during the Middle Ages. If he possesses brains, industry, initiative, interest, he can in the laboratory of a so-called ‘ poor teacher,’ such as Helmholtz, get whatever else he needs; if he lacks those qualities, neither the laboratory of a Helmholtz nor the university of which it is a part is the proper place for him.

In other words, it is not the business of Helmholtz to train persons of mediocre ability to become college or highschool teachers, or to help mediocre students to grind out steadily mounting masses of Ph. D. theses that are worse than valueless. It is his business to work and to keep an open door so that those determined to work and to learn may work and learn; and there his business ends. Such, as I read Gilman, was his conception also. It turned out in Baltimore, as it always will, that some great scientists were superb and stimulating teachers and personalities. Excellent, if it happens so. But it also sometimes turned out that some great scholars were not conspicuously interested in teaching; they left it to their students to learn. Very well. The students were, I hold, fortunate rather than unfortunate if they fell under the influence of both types — and perhaps other types as well.

Now in this matter I suspect that, at first insidiously, later deliberately, a serious change for the worse has taken place in America. The teachers’ colleges, which have been operated with considerable business and political skill, have persuaded the general public that the art of teaching is something that can and must be deliberately acquired. Within limits, they are, I think, correct. Though they have generally inverted the relative importance of knowledge and technique, I concede that in the elementary and grammar schools they have accomplished some good. I am doubtful, however, whether in the secondary field the harm they do does not exceed the good they do. Beyond the secondary field, they have, as far as I can see, accomplished nothing at all. True enough, they have not tried very hard or very much; but they have somehow spread the notion that not only college teachers, but university teachers, have got to be good teachers, have even to be specially trained in method in order to be good teachers; that not even when students reach twenty or twenty-two can they forgo being skillfully taught. An altogether mischievous notion, in my opinion — bad for the student, for it extends the period of intellectual and moral immaturity; bad for the teacher, for it loads him with a responsibility which he should not bear, or furnishes him with an excuse for nonproductivity to which he is not entitled. This emphasis upon the teacher, this emphasis upon being taught, has converted our graduate schools more or less largely into supernormal schools. Though a few fortunate scholars have been able to escape by securing favored conditions, most university professors are heavily burdened by the task of training college graduates to be college and high-school teachers.

The assumption of this function has consequences, some of them disastrous. If, for instance, the graduate school is a kind of teacher-training establishment, it must be greatly enlarged — enlarged beyond the size that becomes an institution of learning. Perhaps the graduate schools could stand enlargement, as to some extent Continental universities do, if at the same time they left students and teachers free — the teachers free to teach as they please, the students free to work or not, as they please. But such indifference is quite un-American. The American is bound to be his brother’s keeper, no matter how old his brother is. And just as he will not let his brother drink, if he can help it, — as he can’t, — so he lays hold of an educational institution and takes the starch out of it by organizing it with a view to minimizing the peril which a poor or even an ordinary student may run if left largely to himself. He marshals the teaching staff under a dean; the dean invests considerable sums in colored cards, in filing cases, and in typists — with the result that when extravagant and often needless buildings, apparatus, equipment, and running expenses have been paid for, so little is left for the professors that to a large, though varying, extent they are compelled to make a living by doing odd jobs of every conceivable kind. And in certain fields, to get the jobs, they are at times forced to sell their very souls. Gilman’s dictum that money be invested in men, not buildings, has been almost everywhere forgotten. Of course, there are sensible and upright professors — many of them — who ignore the whole absurd thing. But there must be hundreds of professors and thousands of students who obey the law — and, in obeying it, weaken their intellectual and moral fibre.

Perhaps the worst consequence of the indiscriminate enlargement of the graduate school is the effect of numbers upon quality. We have in America no cultural tradition; we possess few or no cultural groups. Anyone familiar with Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, or the German universities will in a moment realize the idea I am trying to convey. If the graduate school were small, if its level were high, it might be culturally homogeneous; as such it might make culture homogeneous; as such it might make culture respectable. But in the atmosphere created by pedagogues, working for degrees in order to get jobs, rather than because they love books and pictures and truth and music, the occasional lover of truth and beauty does not warm up, come out of his shell, and fraternize with others; he is chilled, he withdraws within himself and lives a lonely life.

How strangely the organization of the graduate school to-day contrasts with the laissez faire methods of undergraduate Johns Hopkins in my days there! I went to Baltimore in 1884, conditioned in Greek and mathematics and weak in Latin. I wanted to work in classics, despite these handicaps. Nobody suggested that I should do well to try history or English because I did not qualify in classics. I was permitted to do as I pleased; so, unable to read Xenophon and never having tried Homer, I entered a class that was reading Isocrates; shaky in all things Latin beyond a few books of Cæsar and an oration or two of Cicero, I entered a class in Livy and, shortly after, Minton Warren’s class in Plautus and Terence. I was neither encouraged nor discouraged to do or not to do this; I was let alone. At that time the college course usually occupied three years; I obtained an A. B. and won a graduate scholarship in two. How did I do it? By the simple expedient of attending lectures in turn; I got the reading list suggested and in my leisure I read hard in subjects which I did not ‘take’ at all. A few years ago I told this story to President Goodnow, with the remark: ‘No Hopkins undergraduate could do that to-day.’ He replied: ‘I can’t believe that you did it in 1884.’ But an examination of the records then and there convinced him that my story was correct.

The absurd requirement of the Ph. D. as a qualification for college teachers has therefore overcrowded the graduate schools; most of the human material thus forced into the graduate school does not belong there, as both Dean Woodbridge and President Lowell have said in recent reports. In order to manage the mass, the uncongenial type of organization which I have described has had to be devised, a type that does not much help the weaker student and inevitably injures the better students and the better teachers. It is all a consequence of burdening the graduate school with the training of teachers. Revert to Gilman’s idea: there will be fewer students, better teachers, and certainly abler scholars and investigators. And primarily it is for the production of these that the university exists.

III

I may point out another aspect in which, I think, our higher institutions have changed for the worse. There was, from the start, an undergraduate department at the Johns Hopkins — unfortunately, as the consequences show. Why was it started? In Gilman’s set speeches there is almost no reference to it. In these he always stressed the university — that is, the graduate school. I have indeed been told that Mr. Gilman actually discouraged schools, outside of Baltimore, that wished to prepare undergraduate students for the Johns Hopkins. There were two reasons for starting a modest undergraduate college in Baltimore. First, the American colleges were weak in science. They were training few boys fit to enter a high-grade graduate school on the scientific side. Shortly the University expected to start its medical school; but the medical school was bound to require of its students training in the pre-medical sciences. That was one consideration that made for the establishment of an undergraduate department. There was another: the gift of Mr. Hopkins was for its day munificent — but it was none the less inadequate. Where were other gifts to come from? The great foundations did not exist. Alumni were far in the future. Mr. Gilman’s sole hope was the community. The undergraduate school was therefore designed to serve the city of Baltimore. But as long as the graduate school maintained its preëminence, the undergraduate department was inconspicuous. In my day it utterly lacked self-consciousness; there were no athletics, except lacrosse, no playing field; there were no undergraduate publications, fraternities, or activities. In consequence, the college absorbed both the seriousness and the freedom of the graduate school.

As matters now stand, the undergraduate department is the big element in the American university. It plays the tune; it makes the noise; it spends most of the money; it gets the headlines; its graduates are the alumni; it holds their interest and affections. The M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s are not, properly speaking, alumni; their ties as alumni bind them to the institutions where they were undergraduates. Such was not the case in Gilman’s Johns Hopkins. Gilman was, I believe, right. So the University itself came to believe when, a few years ago, it announced the discontinuance of the first two years of college work. But that policy has since been, alas, discarded. In any event, while the graduate-school idea has spread and has gained in importance, nowhere does it dominate the situation as it did at Baltimore under Gilman.

In another respect retrogression has taken place. Gilman organized two faculties, — the philosophical faculty and the medical faculty, — both incomplete at that time, both still incomplete. He spoke hopefully and expectantly of law, engineering, architecture; yet he added, warningly: ‘But in forming all these plans we must beware lest we are led away from our foundations; lest we make our schools technical instead of liberal, and impart a knowledge of methods rather than of principles. If we make this mistake, we may have an excellent polytechnic school, but not a university.’

Now quite plainly Gilman had an open mind; he was not trying to keep his university within the framework of existing institutions. But he was evidently fearful of what he called the polytechnic — the sort of institution in which students are trained to do things skillfully, without profound understanding of what lies beneath. What would he say to-day of the accretions which have vitiated the spirit of the university and undermined its structure — the graduate schools of business, journalism, library science, education, practical arts, and nondescript institutes in which faculties, mostly weak in scholarship, try to inculcate technique and methods which any educated person can readily acquire for himself, if they deserve to be acquired at all? What would he say of home-study, correspondence, and other courses, advertising their wares shamelessly and without academic standards at all? I cannot now discuss these schools and faculties in detail; none of them is within hailing distance of university standard. Worst of all, they are destroying the very concept of the university, apologizing for chaos by calling themselves ‘public service institutions.’ Monstrosities are defended, not because they pay, as is always the case, but because universities must be democratic. No need to worry about democracy; universities will be democratic if their professorships are filled and students are admitted upon the basis of intellectual capacity. Justice Holmes has spoken some vigorous words on this point: —

I think we should all agree that the passion for equality has passed far beyond the political or even the social sphere. When the effervescence of democratic negation extends its workings beyond the abolition of external distinctions of rank to spiritual things — when the passion for equality is not content with founding social intercourse upon universal human sympathy, and a community of interests in which all may share, but attacks the lines of Nature which establish orders and degrees among the souls of men — they are not only wrong, but ignobly wrong. Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.

IV

I have said that I cannot in this connection discuss the various pseudoprofessional schools that cling like barnacles to the university. But I shall make an exception of schools of business administration, because they threaten to be a malicious influence in American life; and of these I shall select for consideration the largest, richest, and most pretentious — the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.

Intellectually and culturally we are not on a par with older nations, and we could not possibly be. Our universities ought therefore to be bending their energies toward drawing in to intellectual and cultural activities the most promising young brains of the nation. We are a business nation, a nation bent upon getting along, upon making money; and to the extent that universities answer this tendency and help it, they are, in my judgment, harmful, not helpful influences in the creation of an American culture and an American civilization.

Professor Frankfurter of Harvard has recently quoted a passage from John Maynard Keynes that goes to the root of the matter. ‘It seems clearer every day,’ writes Mr. Keynes, ‘that the moral problem of our age is concerned with the Love of Money, with the habitual appeal to the Money Motive, with the social approbation of Money as the measure of constructive success. ’

In these words a fundamental objection to university business schools, as they now are, is stated. They poison the atmosphere of the university. They lure immature young bachelors of arts into money-making when the universities ought to be doing precisely the reverse, and they do it under the pretense that business is ‘the oldest of the arts and the youngest of the professions.’ As a matter of fact it is neither—neither an old art nor a young art, neither an old profession nor a new one. It is neither an art nor a profession at all; it is an occupation, a vocation, which no one with a proper sense of meanings would designate otherwise. The loose use of terms is indeed one of the causes of the degradation of what should be institutions of learning.

Let me make myself quite clear. Universities — modern universities, I mean — cannot discharge their cultural and intellectual functions unless they mingle in the stream of current life. The problems of government and commerce and industry and trade are tied up inextricably with the cultural and intellectual life of the nation. A university that does not cultivate politics and economics is as remiss as a university that does not cultivate philosophy or literature; so I am not seeking to avoid the complex problems which modern technology has created. I am merely asking the university to find a proper attitude toward them.

I have said that I do not believe that under existing circumstances business is a profession; I do not believe that the leaders of American business have as a class a professional feeling toward their activities. What is a profession? I brush aside at once journalists, trained nurses, dancing masters, equestrians, and chiropodists, who speak of themselves as professional. One hears of professional baseball players and professional football players, but the word ‘professional’ has no proper significance in any such connection. There are paid football players and unpaid football players. There are paid baseball players and unpaid baseball players; but, whether paid or unpaid, they are not professional in the correct sense of the term. Professions are intellectual in character. They derive their professional character from the free, resourceful, and unhampered play of intelligence. The application of a technique which has already been worked out is routine, not professional work. To be sure, a profession is not entirely academic and theoretical; it is not only intellectual and learned, but practical, though its essential processes are intellectual, whatever the kind of technique which may be employed. Finally, a profession is a brotherhood, almost a caste. Professional activities are so definite, so absorbing, so rich in duties and responsibilities, that they tend to engage completely the time and interest of their votaries. Of course not all members of the accepted professions rise to the standards which I have set up; that is their personal failure. It is not the failure of law or medicine if a lawyer or physician is mercenary.

Viewed from any such standard as I have thus briefly outlined, business is not a profession. It is no fault of any particular business man that he is bound to measure his success primarily in terms of profit. If he measured them by any other standard and ignored profits, he would be in the hands of a receiver. To be sure, business discharges important social functions, but over all these social functions there looms constantly the need of gain. Under our present social system a business man is primarily responsible to his pocket or the pockets of his stockholders. He must profit or go under. Business is important to the running of society. It is a phenomenon worthy of the keenest intellectual analysis. The economist who ignores it is living not in a real world but in a cloister. But meanwhile the business man himself can view none of these factors impartially. He is bound to advertise attractively, effectively, seductively, though there are limits beyond which sensitive business men do not go. In all these respects the business man to-day differs from a philologian or a philosopher or an artist or a lawyer or a physician, as the university should conceive each of these. If, therefore, he needs training, it is training below the university level and should be got somewhere else.

I have another very serious criticism of our so-called university schools of business. The frankest of them is the Harvard School, the faculty of which actually contains a few scholars who have a disinterested concern for the phenomena of the history of business and for the science of economics. These do not determine or greatly affect the character of the school. I call attention to a significant word in the title of the Harvard School. It is called the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. Note the word ‘administration.’ It means the successful carrying out of a business enterprise, which is technical, not intellectual, in quality. If there were such a thing as a university school of business, it would not be preoccupied with the training of executives and with working out a technique by which young men may win quick promotion. It would be concerned, as I shall point out in a moment, with something that might have no effect whatsoever upon business success or business promotion. ‘A law school does not undertake to teach success,’ said Justice Holmes, and he is right. The Harvard Business School takes the opposite position, and it is wrong.

The official register of the Harvard Business School claims to offer to young men going into business the training needed for practice and earlier opportunities for executive responsibility. The words that keep constantly recurring are ‘ executives, general executives, executive work, management, advertising as an instrument to be used by executives in order to obtain financial success.’ Sections dealing with social policies, with business history from a cultural or intellectual point of view, are brief. Now the executive is only one of the four or five elements that would be prominent in a university school of business if business were a profession. The laborer is as important as the executive. The consumer is as important as the laborer; more important than executive, laborer, or consumer is the all-enveloping statesmanlike problem of general business policy. A university might have an overwhelming interest in a statesmanlike economic policy which, while diminishing the profits of individual business concerns, might have prevented or tended to prevent the worldwide depression in which, to their surprise, the Harvard Business forecasters, like other business men, unexpectedly found themselves in 1929.

I can therefore sum up almost in a word my contention. It is the university’s concern to face fearlessly problems of political organization and political theory, of social organization and social theory, of business organization and business theory; but it is no concern of the university to train in a technical sense either politicians or business men. The university will make its outstanding contribution to human thought and, in the long run, to human society if it assists men to comprehend. And this is precisely what university schools of business do not do.

There is at Harvard one of the greatest of living philosophers, Professor Whitehead. It is with infinite regret that one is obliged to utter a word in criticism of him; but in what, I suspect, was an amiable moment, Professor Whitehead made an address which has been incorporated in a volume published by the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. There are not lacking in this address indications that Professor Whitehead perceives the importance of a broad and disinterested study of business phenomena; but this broad and disinterested study will not lead to the immediate result in which business technicians are interested, and somehow Professor Whitehead could not lose sight of the technicians. We come, therefore, upon this startling sentence in which he differentiates between understanding, which I take to be the university’s concern, and routine, which as such is no concern of the university at all except as a subject of investigation and criticism. Professor Whitehead says: ‘Routine is more fundamental than understanding, that is, routine modified by minor flashes of short-range intelligence.’ I call that a startling and significant sentence. The business mind is thus essentially the mind of the routineer, the darkness of which is from time to time illumined by striking a match, and Harvard University is obligated to such training. I should like to contrast Whitehead’s deadly sentence with a sentence spoken by Wilhelm von Humboldt: ‘The thing is not to let the scholars and universities go on in a drowsy and impotent routine. The thing is to raise the culture of the nation ever higher and higher by their means.’

Now it is not Professor Whitehead, apologizing for the teaching of routine, but it is Von Humboldt who gives us the cue to the correct attitude of the university toward the engulfing activities called business; and yet that Professor Whitehead rather than Von Humboldt describes the current trend of university business schools is abundantly illustrated not only by the catalogues in which the schools of business set forth their aims and their offerings, but by the specific tasks which they undertake while employing a university jargon. One wonders, for example, what the real scholars and scientists at Harvard think of ‘scientific research in advertising and coöperative analysis of broadcasting.’ Let me quote some of the questions employed in the ‘research’ for which Harvard has given a prize to the Association of National Advertisers.

What effect does the summer time have on listening habits?

How do the sexes vary in their preference?

How long can a campaign be run before it begins to wear out?

To such a pass has the Harvard of Agassiz, Child, Peirce, Eliot, Haskins, Turner, and Richards come!

V

There is another point at which deterioration has taken place since Gilman’s day. There was in 1876 no conflict between business and learning. I presume that even in that day occasionally a professor accepted a fee for expert services. But it was unthinkable that large numbers — large enough to cause considerable demoralization — should exploit their academic posts to their own pecuniary advantage. When consciousness of this insidious and degrading evil began to become acute, the Harvard Law School purified itself completely. It got rid of the tired lawyers and judges who had been lecturing on law in their odd moments. In a brief period the Harvard Law School became professional; the professors eschewed practice in order to teach and investigate; not without cause has the School risen to and maintained its present distinction. Some years later medical schools came under fire. Full-time teaching was introduced; professors on adequate salaries withdrew entirely from paid practice.

Commercialism is nowadays particularly rampant in departments of education, engineering, business, and economics, and of course in unreconstructed schools of law and medicine. The pay usually goes to an individual. But certain schools of education have in recent years organized ‘field divisions’ which are essentially businesses. The Field Division of Teachers College, Columbia University, some years since surveyed the school buildings of Baltimore, receiving therefor a fee of $25,000; since then the city has paid the college one fourth of one per cent — so the Baltimore Sun reports — on the cost of all school buildings constructed. The same Field Division is now surveying the Chicago schools — fee, $100,000. Now of course schools of education require ‘clinical’ material; students of administration should see for themselves how schools are administered. But, on the other hand, professors need quiet and repose in which to read and think. It is their main concern to educate themselves and their students; and this they cannot do by commuting between Baltimore and Chicago and New York. The only safe policy is to abolish fees. Then the field divisions will do only so much surveying as education requires. Business temptation will thus be once for all eliminated.

Similar abuses may be cited in connection with public utilities, installment buying, and many phases of engineering. In my opinion, there is one remedy: the reorganization of faculties on a full-time basis, with endowments large enough to pay salaries which will enable scholars to lead decent, self-respecting lives. American colleges and universities quite commonly rely far too largely on tuition fees; these they assume in advance. Their ability to do what is sound is thus subordinated to the necessity of doing what will pay. Teachers College, Columbia University, for example, reports that ‘more than 85 per cent of the current expenses of running the college comes from student fees.’ This state of things is perilously close to the ‘proprietary’ medical schools in which student fees represented the entire income and teaching was of the quality that might be expected under those circumstances.

The fact is that no institution should feel itself under the slightest obligation to undertake anything that it cannot really afford. It is idle to say that the universities cannot obtain the money. They obtain it now; but instead of investing it in brains, as Gilman urged, they sink it in overelaborate buildings, equipment, stadia, and so forth.

Meanwhile, the professorate is not free from blame. The faculties keep critical watch on presidents and trustees, as they should; but they have not yet established a code governing themselves, which would exorcise the spirit of commercialism that, in my judgment, is doing higher education in America as much harm as the occasional arbitrariness of a president or the occasional interference of a board of trustees — a code which should denounce racial and other discrimination and boldly proclaim that, in the interest of higher education, racial, sectional, and institutional factors should be totally eliminated, or, as Mr. Gilman declared, ‘all other qualifications except merit’ should be discarded.

Gilman was fortunate in having a clean slate. He had the whole world to choose from. It was currently believed in Baltimore that, while this policy was inevitable in forming the philosophical faculty, local medical men would form the medical faculty. Despite the wounded pride of the town and of local practitioners, which immediately injured the chances of the University in obtaining local support, Mr. Gilman stuck to his guns; he formed his medical faculty as he had formed his philosophical faculty, on the basis of merit alone. Welch and Halsted were called from New York; Osler and Kelly from Philadelphia; Abel from Michigan; Mall from Chicago; Howell alone was a Baltimorean and a Hopkins Ph. D., but neither consideration weighed in choosing him, for he was beyond doubt the best person available. What Gilman did in beginning is just as necessary now. As long as graduate schools are recruited largely from ‘our own men,’ they tend to fall into ruts. Yet this is precisely what is happening everywhere. Inbreeding is common in the ancient English universities and in America. Only in Germany does the rule hold that a man must demonstrate his worth somewhere else; and the vigor of the German universities is in no small measure due to the constant infusion of new blood into the faculty and to the wandering of the student body.

One more point going to the very root of the matter: American universities are in the last resort governed by a board of laymen, who are in contact with the faculty only through the president — an arrangement which taxes both president and trustees beyond their strength. The faculty ought not to be bothered with the details of administration; but it should be enabled to speak to the trustees itself, not through the president, who may or may not present a given case understandingly and impartially. In addition, trustees should be in position to utilize outside experience. I suggest, as an experiment, government by a board consisting of laymen, scholars and scientists connected with other institutions, as well as members of the faculty. Thus trustees will hear every relevant point of view.

In closing, let me briefly summarize my conclusions: —

1. There has been a genuine and spectacular improvement in facilities and opportunities for graduate study since the first graduate school was founded in the United States.

2. On the other hand, no graduate school in the land, with all the increase in money, libraries, equipment, and staff, is a clear-cut exemplification of what a graduate school should be. The graduate school has succumbed to the college in respect to numbers and organization; it has suffered grievously from the influx of degree hunters, and from the creation, on a graduate basis, of merely technical schools — often hardly that; its scholarly standards have been lowered by inbreeding and by irrelevant considerations in making appointments — consideration of the college from which the possible candidates were graduated, of the section from which they come, of the race or religious sect to which they belong.

The evils which I have enumerated cannot be rapidly cured; certainly they cannot be cured everywhere at once. Unfortunately, the plant must be kept going, and students’ fees supply a considerable part of the requisite funds. But at least universities could gradually be directed toward other and higher goals; and, as their funds grow, abuses that now bring income could be lopped off. The gradual process of discarding abuses and irrelevancies would in course of time completely change the quality and atmosphere of our universities, even if nothing else at all were done.