The University in American Life

I

IN order to determine the part which the university should play in American life, we must begin by taking into account our general educational scheme, however much we may hope in time to alter it. As things now stand, the scope of the elementary school is fairly clear; that of the high school is less clear; as to the college, general confusion prevails; the graduate and professional schools are, taken as a whole, chaotic. Elementary school, high school, college, all lack intensity, with the result that the more capable students emerge, at twenty-one or twenty-two, far too immature, intellectually speaking. For this situation, taken as a whole, I can suggest no rapid remedy. Not until the American home is more exacting, the training of teachers more severe, the recognition of the supreme importance of taste and intelligence far more common than at present, will the output of American schools and colleges be of sterner stuff; and not until the output of schools and colleges is better can the standards of graduate and professional work be generally raised, though there is absolutely no reason why any one institution might not now do anything it pleased.

For even within the extremely unsatisfactory general situation there are and have been bright spots, suggestive of what, despite obstacles, can be accomplished. Higher education in the United States, for example, had undergone no pronounced change for years until Mr. Eliot became President of Harvard and a few years later Mr. Gilman started the Johns Hopkins University. Both events produced effects little short of miraculous. Steady pressure, now at this point, now at that, patiently continued for forty years, converted Harvard College during Mr. Eliot’s presidency into a great, though very uneven, university. At one bound, Mr. Gilman established in Baltimore a graduate school and a medical faculty that quickly became world-famous. Neither Mr. Eliot nor Mr. Gilman waited for a general improvement before moving forward. Distinguished scholars had, to be sure, flourished in colleges, as in pulpits, here and there during the preceding three centuries; but that it was the concern of a university to operate at a high intellectual level was not made explicitly manifest until shortly after the American Civil War; that it is the sole concern of the university to live at this level is neither practised nor admitted yet.

In the theory of educational organization, we are, indeed, further from a sound conception than we were a generation ago in the heyday of the Johns Hopkins and near the beginning of the graduate schools of Harvard, Yale, and Chicago. Only sixty years have passed since the epoch-making events I have noted — a very short period in the life of a nation or in the life of an institution. These years, socially and historically viewed, have witnessed a tremendous expansion in American life. Everything has become bigger; everything has become more complex. We have more people, more money, more contacts, more activities, and, as the inevitable consequence, more problems and more serious problems. Universities have become bigger, richer, and more hectic. The best of them have at many points risen to their new opportunities and obligations. But simultaneously they have at other points sunk to depths at which Eliot and Gilman would have been horrified. So rapid has been their expansion that they have not taken time to survey critically many of the new activities which they have so lightly taken on. Once committed, they have justified their absurdities by mere words — ‘service,’ ‘democracy,’ or some other label that merely covers a running sore.

I cannot within the compass of this paper deal adequately with the entire educational situation, and yet it is only by viewing the university in relation to all the educational activities of the nation that the specific functions of a modern university can be formulated. We can perhaps best proceed by elimination.

So many kinds of training, so many grades and kinds of education, are nowadays needed that no single institution can hope to purvey them all. Very well; what shall we assign to other agencies? What shall we leave to take care of itself? What shall we reserve for the university?

Quite obviously, elementary education does not belong to the university. Quite as clearly, in my opinion, secondary education is not the function of a university, for secondary education, like elementary education, has to be decentralized so as to be brought within reach of a scattered population. So, also, practical training — that is, the ability to do different things without profoundly understanding the processes therein involved — does not belong to a university. It is no concern of a university to train plumbers, to train carpenters, secretaries, school-teachers, business men — to train anyone, in fact, who is more interested in acquiring skill and dexterity than in understanding the fundamental problems and processes involved in what he is doing. Finally, there are a thousand things which the individual must be left to acquire in the rough-and-tumble of life; the schools do not have to fill up every nook and cranny of experience in advance. Nay, it is, I think, of no little importance that education, instead of being a continuum, devoid of shock, should now and then, here and there, create a chasm, before which the student must halt, rally his forces, and leap at his peril. Sir J. J. Thomson has recently likened the action of the mind to that of the electric current in a magnetic field. ‘I think it helps,’ he says, ‘if every now and then the thread is broken.’ Whatever schools are expected to do, they need not be so nicely adjusted and so widely extended that they do everything without a jolt.

If, then, we eliminate elementary education, secondary education, all kinds of mere training involving drill in processes, and finally a variety of skills that the individual must acquire for himself, there is still left a considerable number of higher activities of predominantly intellectual and cultural character. In my judgment, these constitute the field of the university — these and these alone.

The reasons which lead me to exclude from universities so much that they now contain are numerous. Universities are, as a matter of size, usually too big; the best way to reduce them is to exclude things that can be as well or better done elsewhere or that need not be done at all. For bigness, intellectual or spiritual, is almost necessarily fatal to real greatness; it involves the devising and operating of machinery in which the finest values are inevitably lost. Size is not democratic; only quality is democratic. Moreover, size leads to excessive concentration of authority in the hands of presidents and deans and the gradual conversion of trustees into a body without understanding, influence, or power. The executive and administrative point of view thus tends to obscure the scholarly point of view — a change that has taken place almost everywhere in American universities. But, even so, universities do not stop growing. Unaware, apparently, of the pit into which they are stumbling, they grow bigger still, adding or annexing schools, institutes, and even affiliated institutions, most of them useless, or unsuitable, and all of them expensive if, however unfit, they are properly carried on. At this stage, excessive concentration gives place to disintegration; for no one knows or can possibly know what is happening in our overgrown universities.

This brings me to my second reason, closely related to the first. In modern society — complex, vast, shifting — cultural standards have got to be upheld. Where are we to go if we wish to know what in the intellectual realm is base metal, what is precious, what is inherently worth while, what is of inferior or merely instrumental importance? To be sure, even the highest and surest judgment cannot be infallible. But some sort of working scheme of values this world requires, if its energies are not to be dispersed and dissipated. The university, cognizant of the past, grappling with the present, straining toward the future, is the only institution capable of maintaining intellectual values. But the university cannot perform this task if it is itself distracted by the number and variety of the activities it sponsors; for between these inconsistent activities, some of high and many of low lineage, the university, having once admitted them, cannot as an institution judge. It sits there helplessly, while the inferior shout so loud that the superior can hardly be heard in the din.

II

If, now, the university is by its activities and interests to set up standards of value to the end that society will not deceive itself as to the relative importance of activities, it will, as I have said, exclude the things that I have already enumerated. It will confine itself to things that possess inherent intellectual or spiritual value. It will not seek to cater to every taste and need and whim. It will select, and in the very act of selecting and excluding will go far toward determining what should be prized. In the realm of activities belonging to schools, the university should play the part of Cartier and steadfastly decline to play the part of Woolworth; when it plays both rôles, as it now so commonly does, Cartier suffers, and American universities without exception are nowadays trying to do both.

I have just specified what I should exclude from a modern university. I should embrace at a high level the study and interpretation of the experience of mankind, its history, its philosophies, its successes, its failures; its literary, artistic, and other cultural records, all of which require concentrated facilities, high intellectual and scholarly interests, and a unique environment. The task of studying, ascertaining, and interpreting the past does not grow old. Every generation looks back in unbroken continuity from a new point of vantage. I conceive it to be one of the central functions of a university to-day, as it has always been in periods of great intellectual activity, to provide the facilities and the environment needed for studies of this kind — studies usually described as philosophic or humanistic.

The development of scientific method has opened other fields, — the natural sciences, the social sciences, the learned professions, — and these American universities have entered with increasing energy. There is no need for me to labor this point. No one will dispute that these fields belong to the university and cannot, for obvious reasons, be adequately developed anywhere else. All alike have a body of knowledge to master and interpret, all alike are confronted by problems — hygienic, economic, political — that tax the severest intellectual effort that man is capable of making. No one questions the right of humanistic or scientific studies to university recognition. There may well be those who either are skeptical about the learned professions or endeavor to bestow professional status upon activities that have not yet earned it. Now I know quite well that medical schools and law schools often operate at a relatively low level. In that case they have no place in our university scheme. Only if schools of law and medicine are pervaded throughout by the spirit of research, only if their best brains are continuously harassed by the study of problems, are these faculties entitled to be of university rank.

Training is, let me repeat, concerned with skills, techniques, and devices. One trains cooks, one trains plumbers, one trains bookkeepers, one trains business men; but one educates scholars, one educates philosophers, one educates economists, one educates physicians. The university which undertakes to educate and which excludes training will still face a larger field than any existing university in any country has thus far been able to cover with anything close to uniform adequacy. Training is on a distinctly lower intellectual level and aims at a distinctly lower, because an immediate, goal. If we are called on to decide whether or not a subject or an activity is worthy of inclusion within a university, we need only ask whether it involves education or whether it involves training. This criterion will serve to distinguish that which belongs to a university from that which belongs somewhere else. Opportunities for training in many directions ought of course to be created, precisely as elementary schools and secondary schools ought to be created. I am not undertaking to say just how they should be established. As to that, I am for the moment quite indifferent, though, of course, society cannot afford to be indifferent. I am asking what is the function of a modern university, and I am trying to shut out the activities that universities should not undertake — activities, indeed, that impair their ability to do the things which it is most important that they should do.

But modern universities cannot be described merely in terms of functions and activities. One must include, as of their very essence, the atmosphere, spirit, and associations amid which these activities are carried on. No one who lacks artistic conscience can conceive or direct a university; a person who would hang a Rembrandt, however fine, in a Chinese room or introduce Grand Rapids furniture into the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum lacks something that the makers of universities must possess — namely, a sense of intellectual and artistic value. Such incongruities, destructive of atmosphere, do not now appall university administrators in this country; indeed, no university that I know is free from them, and most universities fairly wallow in them.

I hold, then, that, while fully alive to all that is significant in current life, universities ought, in a word, to be a paradise for scholars — places where men are free, without constraint, to work out in their own way their spiritual and intellectual salvation. It matters not whether presidents and trustees think them wise or unwise, right or wrong. No administrative or executive or managerial influence should be permitted to infringe their spiritual freedom. To be sure, an academic body, worthy to be so called, should be heavily conscious of the responsibilities that freedom confers; and no man is fit to be professor who for expediency’s sake suppresses his own freedom. But in the cases in which men may be wrong the university, viewed from the administrative standpoint, should keep hands off. For the search for truth and the discovery of truth inevitably involve criticism of ideas, customs, and vested interests. The university has no concern to maintain the social, economic, or religious status quo. On the contrary, it ought to be the home of relentless questioning. An attack from the public or the alumni or the trustees on freedom of thought and speech should be resented as a threat to the very life of an institution of learning. Time can be trusted to deal justly with errors — if, indeed, errors they be.

III

Should the conception which I have thus briefly outlined be applied to American universities, what would happen? A large part of the undergraduate college would drop back into the high school, where it belongs; for the overcrowded American college is engaged in making a necessarily unsuccessful effort to teach boys and girls what they ought to have learned before they left their local high schools. I do not mean to say that a violent revolution in this respect can be generally effected to-day or to-morrow; but sooner or later the change must be made, or we shall never possess universities at all.

And it can be made. Fifty years ago, a student could get his A. B. degree at Johns Hopkins in two or three years, and the students who were thus graduated had no need to fear comparison with the four-year graduates of Yale, Harvard, Princeton, or any other college in the land. So I say the thing can be done. Secondary education can thus be unloaded, after due notice, by any university that chooses to concentrate its energies on higher things.

Some years since there was a distinct movement at Harvard toward shortening the course for able boys to three years. That movement has been snuffed out. Whereas twenty-five years ago 41 per cent of Harvard’s college students completed their undergraduate course in three years, to-day less than 5 per cent do so. I do not believe that any justification for the loss of this year can possibly be found. Moreover, if undergraduate education in this country were gradually unloaded on the high schools, the university problem would from the standpoint of finance, equipment, and organization be enormously simplified. The change will, of course, be resisted by alumni whose loyalties attach themselves mainly to their delightful undergraduate associations; but President Eliot showed plainly that he foresaw it when he said in his Harvard Memories that there was no reason in the world why a student in the graduate school or in one of the professional schools should not also be known, as he is not to-day known, as a Harvard man.

In the graduate and professional schools of the university mere training is destined to dwindle in importance as compared with the higher intellectual activities which should flourish in these schools. A law school has no particular reason to be proud because its most promising graduates are eagerly sought by Wall Street offices. Training lawyers who look upon law as a business or as an adjunct to business is not a particularly edifying occupation. Far better if more of these young men carried on their studies without view to practice at all, if they were students of institutions, students of procedure, students of government, and students of society; if, in other words, the functions and activities of a university law school were conceived from the standpoint of education as against the standpoint of training. When the time comes, an apprenticeship in a law office will make a better, a wiser, and a more cultivated lawyer out of one who has studied law and economics and philosophy in this spirit, without the prospect of court, jury, and corporations continuously before his eyes. I wish I had space in this connection to quote the penetrating and imaginative conception of professional training in law which Justice Holmes sketched in an address made on Harvard’s 250th anniversary, and on which, in the precious volume of his speeches, he makes frequent comments — always at a high intellectual and spiritual level.

During recent years American medical schools have shown decided activity in the right direction. Up to 1893 they were, without exception, training schools, and very poor ones at that. Though in the early seventies Mr. Eliot suggested to an astonished faculty that there should be a written examination of some sort before matriculation, no great progress was made until in 1893 the Johns Hopkins Medical School was opened and the word ‘research’ was heard throughout the land. Between that day and this a great revolution has been wrought. Doctors are still produced, but they are grown in an atmosphere in which education and research have become more and more the criteria by which schools judge themselves and by which they are judged. Once more one perceives the difference between training and education. A doctor who has merely been trained may have mastered the best technique extant. For a while things will run smoothly for him. Meanwhile physiologists, immunologists, pharmacologists, and others are undermining him. Thereupon the difference between training and education appears. The physician trained at the current level is shortly lost; the educated physician can keep abreast of the swift motion of the time.

At first sight, a graduate school of arts and science would seem necessarily to be an educational institution, as distinguished from a training school. Unfortunately the passion — often the quite artificial passion — for the Ph. D. degree has thrown into the American graduate school hordes of young men and women who have no interest in education, but who wish to be trained for the higher degree for the sake of its commercial value. Students of this type are easily discernible, for they are concerned, not about learning, but about courses. The ridiculous multiplication of special courses thus caters to a demand which no university should heed. In consequence, there is a distinct danger that the American graduate school may come to be just a normal school at a somewhat higher level than the normal schools in which the states train secondary teachers. Moreover, the expansion of the university has tended to demoralize the graduate schools which had made so promising a beginning. A large proportion of the graduate students of Harvard University, 56 per cent, to-day are merely part-time students — that is, having received a poor education in high school and college, they are now teaching or assisting or grading papers or waiting on table or tending furnaces, when their entire time and energy, concentrated upon study, would hardly make scholars of them. It is precisely at this time, their final opportunity to be educated, that an increasing number of them are devoting part of their time, often a considerable part, to occupations unrelated to their own education. How much better if a few millions lavished on demoralizingly luxurious buildings were employed as a fund to endow promising students unable to pay their own way!

In behalf of a graduate school, a law school, a medical school, a good case can be made that they are all, if properly inspired, staffed, and directed, essential parts of a modem university. They are more and more interested in the critical examination of experience, in the solution of hitherto unsolved problems, and in the indulgence of that spirit of curiosity out of which, in the long run, the most productive and satisfying activities of the human spirit come. Beyond these professional schools, no American university has yet succeeded in creating a professional school of university rank, — a school, I mean, interested in education rather than training, a school marked by unmistakable cultural and intellectual character and quality, — and very few have made a success even in the admitted professions.

IV

To a very considerable extent, American universities no longer pretend to an exclusive interest in intellectual activity. They call themselves service institutions or public service institutions, and as such they go into the market place and do a thriving business with the mob. They advertise their shoddy wares in newspapers and periodicals. ‘The spread of popular education, the bringing of the matter of education down to a level where everyone can reach it,’ writes Professor Morris Cohen, a distinguished philosopher educated at Harvard, ‘has certainly not been directed to emphasize the prolonged discipline necessary for the proper exercise of reason.’ Many of the activities carried on by numerous universities are little short of dishonest; but the business goes on, because it pays — for that and for no other reason.

Americans can readily be led to believe that education can be obtained without hard and continuous effort. Are we not a ‘democratic’ nation? More than 2500 years ago a Greek poet showed a clearer perception of fundamental principles than is nowadays apparent to the innocents who crowd our teachers’ colleges, summer schools, and home-study courses. ‘Before the gates of excellence,’ wrote Hesiod, ‘the high gods have placed sweat. Long is the road thereto, and rough and steep at the first. But when the height is achieved, then there is ease, though grievously hard in the winning.’ That wretched claptrap, flung into the market place, is interspersed here and there with something serious, and that among the thousands who take the bait there are persons who are intellectually helped, I do not deny; but I do most emphatically deny that adult education can be effectively carried on as a system by the methods employed by the homestudy and correspondence departments of Columbia, Chicago, or the state universities.

In their efforts to be of ‘service’ the American universities have not limited themselves to these cheap and trashy innovations. They have at times tried to camouflage them by some sort of approximation to genuine professional education. Thus schools of journalism, schools of business, schools of education, schools of practical arts, have been set up, looking like genuine professional schools, but like them in no essential respect. I cannot now discuss most of these mushroom enterprises, and they do not deserve it. But it is interesting to note in passing that perhaps the best-edited and the bestwritten newspaper published in the English language, the Manchester Guardian, has — so I was told by its late editor, Mr. C. P. Scott — always been staffed by Oxford graduates, who come straight from the classics, history, or mathematics into journalism. Schools of journalism, schools of practical art, and all sorts of other schools are too flimsy and have too little influence to deserve a moment’s consideration.

I cannot see that any of these schools can justify their present practices by dwelling upon the fact that so-called university schools of medicine once trained only practising physicians and university schools of law once trained only practising lawyers. We have learned something, from the standpoint of a university, from the history of law and medicine. If, for example, all universities were to embark upon the study of business, they should have begun, not where medicine and law were fifty or more years ago, but where they are to-day; and they should have chosen their ideals and selected their faculties as university schools of medicine and law endeavor to do to-day. I cannot but think that, to the extent that irrelevant and low-grade training establishments, whether of journalism or law or medicine, clutter up the campus, consume the budget, and, worst of all, taint the atmosphere, the American university is handicapped in its efforts to discharge the high functions which it should discharge and which it alone can discharge in modern society.

I began by saying and emphasizing the fact that the American university, with all its misdirected efforts, often rises to the highest scholarly level. There is scarcely a department in which the great universities have not earned international distinction. In history, philosophy, literature, philology, mathematics, and the natural sciences, some of the most distinguished names of the academic world are to be found on the roster of American universities. Why is this not enough? Why must these scholars and scientists be forcibly associated with advertisers, business forecasters, and job analysts? Why cannot the latter groups be suffered to shift for themselves? Consider for a moment how much more powerful the Harvard, Yale, or Chicago faculty would be if, without the addition of a brick or an institute, the respective irrelevancies of these institutions were dropped, and, in the purified atmosphere of the university, scholars and scientists were enabled to devote themselves, under improved social and financial conditions, to the activities which they have at heart — to the increase of knowledge, the education of scholars, and the maintenance of intellectual and cultural standards.