Cheap Bread and Costly Brains

I

PERHAPS the most hackneyed saying in the literature of American education is the definition of a college as ‘Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student at the other.’ This epigram has been used innumerable times during the past thirty years as a protest against mass education. Educators utilize it in their speeches and writings to drive home the idea that college education ought to aim at the closest individual contact between instructor and student. Those who want college enrollments kept down pounce upon it as a gospel text. Likewise those who urge the merits of preceptorial and tutorial instruction, or the division of college classes into small sections, have found this aphorism exactly what they want. It has become one of our natural-born pietisms — like the proposition that all men are created equal and that the office should seek the man, which it never does.

But age and reiteration do not make truth out of falsehood. Educators have been taking too much liberty with this epigram. They have turned its implications end for end, and pointed them in the wrong direction. It is time for someone to protest that there is no historical basis for the log definition as it is customarily used, nor was it ever intended to point the moral which is invariably drawn from it nowadays. In this instance there has happened what too often happens when a short paragraph is cut out of its context and passed along from pen to pen for a couple of generations. Its author, were he to rise up and reappear among us, would be amazed to find his words doing service on behalf of educational practices which he did not have in mind at all.

Thirty years ago I had the good fortune to serve for a time as an instructor in history at Williams College. It was my privilege to live in the house which Mark Hopkins had occupied during part of his term as president of Williams, for it was then in use as a faculty club. One stormy winter evening, as I idled in front of the fireplace which had been his, it occurred to me to wonder whether the famous log, of which I had heard so much, was being properly preserved in a museum as it ought to be. Or was it being left as a prey to the wintry blasts outside? Come to think of it, this landmark had never been pointed out to me, along with the haystack monument and various other things of historical interest in the little college town. Was the log merely a figment of someone’s imagination, a myth like Washington’s cherry tree, to which, indeed, it might be distantly related ?

At any rate, as a fledgling doctor of philosophy, just emerged from a sound pummeling in the methods of historical research at Harvard, it seemed appropriate to go and find out just when and where and how this whole log business originated. Even if the outcome did not add one tittle to the sum of human knowledge, it would demonstrate my fidelity to the cult of research, which has been defined as the art of taking things out of old books which nobody has ever read and putting them into a new book which nobody is ever going to read. So why not find out when, by whom, and under what provocation a college was defined as the head and tail of a fallen tree with a dialogue in between.

II

The quest, as matters turned out, proved neither difficult nor prolonged, for it quickly appeared that James Abram Garfield, twentieth President of the United States, was the author of the famous definition. But apparently he did not launch it in any such ambiguous form as had become traditional. A volume by B. A. Hinsdale, entitled President Garfield and Education, published in 1882, provided me with a direct quotation from an address made by General Garfield to the Williams alumni of New York City at a banquet there in 1871. The General was then a member of Congress, and had not yet become a dark-horse candidate for the Presidency.

Here was what seemed to be the passage from which, by a liberal amount of trimming and torturing, the illustrious epigram had been adduced: ‘I am not willing that this discussion should close,' said Garfield on this occasion to his fellow Williams men,

‘ without mention of the value of a true teacher. Give me a log hut, with only a simple bench, Mark Hopkins at one end and I at the other, and you may have all the buildings, apparatus and libraries without him.’

Not a log at all, but a log hut. And not a plea for the individualizing of instruction, but for a recognition of the teacher as the core of the academic community. James Russell Lowell expressed the same idea when he wrote that ‘the fame and glory of a college depend on the teachers who teach therein.’ Not a protest against mass education, moreover, but against the setting of undue emphasis upon buildings and apparatus to the neglect of those apostles of light who, like Mark Hopkins, were striving to pass the torch of learning to new generations. Usage, it would seem, had been sanctifying a misapprehension by attributing to General Garfield something that was not in his mind at all.

What was the circumstance that drew from him this tribute to the idol of his undergraduate days? It was the fact that a preceding speaker at the banquet had discoursed at length upon the backwardness of the physical Williams and the need for money with which to erect new buildings. Most of this speech had been addressed to that theme, as has so often been the case at gatherings of college alumni.

When Garfield was called upon he assented briefly to what had been said. Good buildings were worth having, he agreed. But he protested against the assumption that they were the chief collegiate objective, and insisted that capable professors were far more important to the effectiveness of a college. Men, not bricks and mortar, made a seat of learning, as he saw it. No amount of material apparatus would atone for the lack of them. Referring to his own college days, General Garfield declared that no array of buildings would have given him the amount of intellectual stimulus which he had ‘received from the faculty and particularly from the president.’

Virtually the whole address, in fact, was a plea for the recognition of the faculty, not the campus, as the supremely important thing in any collegiate community. Somewhat differing versions of Garfield’s exact language at the dinner have been given by various Williams alumni who heard him, but they all agree that his words were meant as a warning against bestowing too much attention upon the outward paraphernalia of education and too little upon the men who bear the burden and heat of the day.

It was a timely admonition, because the entire country, in 1871, was having an interlude of prosperity (which came to an abrupt end two years later), and every American college was trying to keep pace with it in a material way. Buildings were going up, but not professorial salaries. There were some who felt that Williams was dropping behind the procession. General Garfield took a different view. He was not anxious to have his Alma Mater join the others in philandering after a false goddess.

III

Nor was this banquet in 1871 the only occasion on which the General championed the same idea. A year later, as his more recent and comprehensive biography points out, he reiterated the conviction that the chief efforts made in behalf of the college should be directed ‘not so much to halls and buildings as to increased endowment for paying professors, for making tuition as nearly free as possible, and for putting the cost of living within the reach of students whose means are most slender.’ ‘So long as Williams College,’ he continued, ‘can offer salaries which will command and retain the very best teaching talent of the country, she will offer a far greater attraction to thoughtful and ambitious students than any splendor of her architecture or richness of her cabinets and libraries.... I believe, then, that the two great supports of the college are cheap bread and costly brains.’¹

A clarion sentiment, this, and just as timely to-day as when it was written, sixty years ago. Cheap bread and costly brains! What better objective could any board of trustees set up to-day as the unified goal of all their ideals and purposes? Most of them, unhappily, are not doing anything of the kind. In too many of our universities, colleges, and schools to-day the aim seems rather to be more and more costly classroom buildings to shelter a large and still larger assortment of immature brains that are hired at the minimum market price, whatever that happens to be. Anyone can point you to half-million-dollar academic structures, here and there all over the country, wherein two-thousand-dollar instructors are wearily quizzing small groups of listless undergraduates through their daily routine.

Too often an excessive proportion of the general college endowment is consumed in the maintenance of these expensive structures, so that there is not enough left to provide instruction above the level of mediocrity. Then, when an economic depression like the present one comes, and the income from endowment falls off, it is instruction and research that have to bear the brunt of retrenchment. A college can let instructors go, but not buildings. Thus it is that for every unendowed, non-revenue-producing building which a college erects, the faculty pays. It pays through the diversion of funds which would be available to maintain salaries when the rainy days arrive. It pays through the curtailment of funds that would be available for research if they were not so urgently needed for the maintenance of plant. It pays through the reduction of appropriations for the purchase of library books, for, although the library is the heart of the college, these bookpurchase appropriations are sometimes among the first to suffer when economizing becomes imperative.

At any rate, the saying on which the much-quoted ’log’ definition of a college is based was primarily a protest against overvaluing plant and undervaluing personnel. It had no relation whatever to the value of individual instruction as against the practice of teaching students in large classes. Nothing could have been farther from General Garfield’s mind than to promulgate the notion that the instruction given to him by Mark Hopkins was effective in inverse ratio to the number of students who assembled in the professor’s classroom. He knew full well that this illustrious teacher could stamp his impress, and would have used methods adapted to his end, no matter how many or how few undergraduates were listening in. He was therefore concerned with the eminence and capacity of the teacher, not with the number of students taught. And quite naturally so, for Garfield had received no individual instruction from Mark Hopkins, there being no provision for it in his day. Great teachers rarely have small classes. If they are small at the outset, they do not stay so.

Mark Hopkins was not a tutor in the Oxford sense. He had a well-filled classroom, not only because he was a great teacher, but for the additional reason that attendance was compulsory. In Garfield’s day he taught Evidences of Christianity, Logic, and Intellectual Philosophy. In addition, he preached one sermon to each class. Occasionally he gave a synoptic lecture at his home and invited students to it, and once in a while he asked some of his best students to hold a forum there; but Charles E. Harwood of Upland, California, the oldest living alumnus of Williams College, is my authority for the statement that individual students had little or no personal contact with Mark Hopkins unless they were called on the carpet by the president for some infraction of the rules. He could recall no occasion, during his four years at Williams, when the president met any of his students in a purely social way. On the other hand, Professor Albert Hopkins, a much less famous brother, was in very intimate contact with the undergraduates and received both their admiration and their affection in large measure. Mr. Harwood, whose recollections of these days are still perfectly clear, was graduated from Williams in the class of 1852. That was two years before General Garfield entered Williams as a freshman.

IV

In his physical frame Mark Hopkins was tall, rather gaunt, and awkward. His countenance, in later life, was strikingly like that of Gladstone, the great commoner. But he had what Gladstone lacked, a sense of humor. Among Williams graduates of the midcentury era there seems to have been general agreement that he was not a man of much originality, or one who had read widely. His point of view was strictly fundamentalist. He found Emerson ‘distasteful and shocking.’ To his classes he prescribed reading in Butler, Paley, and other exceedingly dry textbooks, some of which were from his own pen. For Mark Hopkins managed to produce each year a great many arid pages of print. Nevertheless it is by everyone conceded that his teaching was amazingly effective. In his time there was none to equal him. Years ago I talked with many of his old students, and they were unanimous in their praise of his classroom skill.

The reason, so far as I could discover from these conversations, lay in his extraordinarily adroit use of the Socratic method. He rarely lectured in any formal way, although he could both lecture and preach in powerful fashion when he tried. In this avoidance of formal lectures he was wise, but not because the lecture method is so deficient a medium of instruction, at all times and in all subjects, as some educational reformers would have us believe. A more serious objection to it is the inducement which this method gives the teacher to go on, year after year, presenting his material in the same way without any new infusion of freshness or vigor.

Some years ago, at Harvard, I knew a much-beloved colleague who had been long in the service of the University, so long that several sons of his former students were to be found in his lecture room. One day he noticed an undergraduate lolling in the front row, taking no notes of the lecture, and, in fact, unprovided with the paraphernalia of note-taking. Calling the young man to the desk at the close of the hour, the professor said to him: —

‘I see that you do not take notes of my lectures. Do you think that you can learn the subject that way?’

‘Oh, it’s all right,’replied the cheerful undergraduate. ‘I have a fine set of notes. I have my father’s notes. He was here way back in the nineties!’

The Mark Hopkins method was to give out a short lesson in advance; then, when the class assembled, it was for a frank, thorough, and informal discussion of this lesson. Most of these classroom discussions had to do with fundamental questions of moral conduct on which there was room for divergence of opinion — such questions, for example, as ‘ Is it ever justifiable to tell a lie?’ ‘Can anyone be saved by faith alone?’ ‘Is the law of love the highest law?’ In addition, any member of the class could propose a topic for controversy.

One day, when Mr. Harwood was taking the course, a student asked Mark Hopkins to indicate who would go to Heaven. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘whether this one or that one will go. But whoever would be likely to feel at home in Heaven will be found there when the time comes.’ That kind of answer was likely to stay in the student’s mind — as it has done in this instance for eighty years.

Much emphasis was placed on the habit of daily reading. Mark Hopkins did not require his students to read much, but he insisted that the reading be done regularly and thoughtfully, with time for reflection upon it. Such reading is of great and enduring value. Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros. ‘It softens the manners of men, and suffers them not to remain barbarians.’ The results, it may be surmised, were a good deal better than those obtained from our present-day fashion of giving the undergraduates their assignments of reading in homeopathic doses and often in ephemeral books that will never speak aloud for future times to hear.

Best of all, Mark Hopkins had a ready tolerance for opinions which differed from his own, and he welcomed the free expression of them. Three fourths of every hour in his classroom were devoted to questions, answers, and argumentative discussion. To procure a clash of minds was his principal objective, and he usually attained it before the hour neared its close. Then, when he had aroused the class to an adequate pitch of controversy, he usually gave a summing up in which he sometimes let the students know his own beliefs, but more often enjoined them to go home and cogitate further upon what they had heard. His intellectual cupboard was well stocked with bones of contention which he seemed always to bring out and throw into the arena at the right moment.

V

Numerous traditions regarding what might be called the pedagogic magnetism of Mark Hopkins persisted in the Williams circle long after the great teacher had passed to his reward. It was said, for example, that when he absent-mindedly forgot to come to his class, as infrequently happened, his students would send a delegation to ferret him out and fetch him. This tradition did not exactly square with undergraduate habits as I had encountered them, and the ways of youth have been much the same in all ages. So, on one occasion when I encountered a Williams graduate of the sixties, I asked him about this ‘find and fetch him’ story.

‘Yes, it’s quite true,’ he replied. ‘ Very often the old master would get us all worked up over some question based upon Butler’s Analogy or Paley’s Evidences, or his own Law of Love and Love as a Law. Then, at the close of the hour, he would dismiss us with a promise to give his categorical Yes or No at the next meeting of the class. Forthwith we would proceed to lay small wagers on what that decision would be, and sometimes quite a bit of small change would be in the pool. Of course we sent for Mark Hopkins when he failed to show up. We wanted those bets settled.’

I was sorry to see a pleasing tradition bowled over in this way, although it strengthened my belief that the age of collegiate miracles was past, even in Mark Hopkins’s day.

Nevertheless, a teacher who could stir the interest of his students to a point where his opinions were worth a wager must have been a teacher truly great. Mark Hopkins was unquestionably a master of dialectic.

For it is one thing to get an argument started and another to keep it going. The latter is a fine art. Hopkins seems to have taken a genuine delight in seeing some of his brightest boys on the wrong side of every question. But this method of teaching certainly did not lend itself to the individual instruction of students, one by one, at the end of a log or otherwise. It had no kinship with what we now call tutorial instruction or conferences between young instructors and individual students.

When James Abram Garfield sat in Mark Hopkins’s classroom, back in the middle fifties, there must have been forty or more students in it. It was not what they studied, or what they learned, or how many of them tried to learn it in the same classroom at the same time — it was none of these things that made the impression on him. What impressed Garfield was the calibre of the man who sat at the professor’s desk.

And that is where more emphasis should be placed by the colleges to-day, for there is no substitute for men in the process of education. Simple surroundings, student life on a modest scale, rooms and board at prices within reach of those who come from humble homes, low tuition fees, and high-priced professors— these are the things that constituted Garfield’s picture of the ideal college community and drew from him his homely definition of it to the Williams alumni in 1871. And this ideal of ‘cheap bread and costly brains,’ rather than the mere individualizing of instruction without any regard to cost or quality, is the one that our colleges ought to hold before themselves if they have a genuine desire to emulate Mark Hopkins and his log.