The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of
Universities By Business Men
by Thorstein Veblen
1918


PREFACE

    It is something more than a dozen years since the following
observations on American academic life were first assembled in
written form. In the meantime changes of one kind and another
have occurred, although not such as to alter the course of policy
which has guided American universities. Lines of policy which
were once considered to be tentative and provisional have since
then passed into settled usage. This altered and more stable
state of the subject matter has permitted a revision to avoid
detailed documentation of matters that have become commonplace,
with some resulting economy of space and argument. But,
unhappily, revision and abridgment carries its own penalties, in
the way of a more fragmentary presentation and a more repetitious
conduct of the argument; so that it becomes necessary to bespeak
a degree of indulgence on that ground.
    Unhappily, this is not all that seems necessary to plead in
extenuation of recurrent infirmities. Circumstances, chiefly of a
personal incidence, have repeatedly delayed publication beyond
what the run of events at large would have indicated as a
propitious date; and the same circumstances have also enjoined a
severer and more repressive curtailment in the available data. It
may not be out of place, therefore, to indicate in the most
summary fashion what has been the nature of these fortuitous
hindrances.
    In its earlier formulation, the argument necessarily drew
largely on first-hand observation of the conduct of affairs at
Chicago, under the administration of its first president. As is
well known, the first president's share in the management of the
university was intimate, masterful and pervasive, in a very high
degree; so much so that no secure line of demarcation could be
drawn between the administration's policy and the president's
personal ruling. It is true, salient features of academic policy
which many observers at that time were inclined to credit to the
proclivities of Chicago's first president, have in the later
course of things proved to belong to the impersonal essence of
the case; having been approved by the members of the craft, and
so having passed into general usage without abatement. Yet, at
the time, the share of the Great Pioneer in reshaping American
academic policy could scarcely have been handled in a detached
way, as an impersonal phenomenon of the unfolding historical
sequence. The personal note was, in fact, very greatly in
evidence.
    And just then, presently, that Strong Man's life was brought
to a close. So that it would unavoidably have seemed a breach of
decorum to let these observations seek a hearing at that time,
even after any practicable revision and excision which filial
piety would enjoin. Under the rule of Nihil nisi bonum, there
seemed nothing for it but a large reticence.
    But swiftly, with the passage of years, events proved that
much of what had appeared to be personal to the Great Pioneer was
in reality intrinsic to the historical movement; so that the
innovations presently lost their personal colour, and so went
impersonally to augment the grand total of human achievement at
large. Meanwhile general interest in the topic had nowise abated.
Indeed, discussion of the academic situation was running high and
in large volume, and much of it was taking such a turn --
controversial, reproachful, hortatory, acrimonious -- that
anything in the way of a temperate survey should presumably have
been altogether timely.
    But fortuitous circumstances again intervened, such as made
it seem the part of insight and sobriety again to defer
publication, until the colour of an irrelevant personal equation
should again have had time to fade into the background. With the
further passage of time, it is hoped that no fortuitous shadow
will now cloud the issue in any such degree as to detract at all
sensibly from whatever value this account of events and their
causes may have.
    This allusion to incidents which have no material bearing on
the inquiry may tolerantly be allowed, as going to account for a
sparing use of local information and, it is hoped, to extenuate a
degree of reserve and reticence touching divers intimate details
of executive policy.

    It goes without saying that the many books, papers and
addresses brought out on the academic situation have had their
share in shaping the essay. More particularly have these various
expressions of opinion and concern made it possible to take many
things for granted, as matter of common notoriety, that would
have appeared to require documentation a dozen or fifteen years
ago, as lying at that time still in the field of surmise and
forecast. Much, perhaps the greater bulk, of the printed matter
issued on this head in the interval has, it is true, been of a
hortatory or eloquently optimistic nature, and may therefore be
left on one side. But the academic situation has also been
receiving some considerable attention with a view to getting an
insight into what is going forward. One and another of these
writers to whom the present essay is in debt will be fond
referred to by name in the pages which more particularly lean on
their support; and the like is true for various utterances by men
in authority that have been drawn on for illustrative
expressions. But a narrow scrutiny would doubtless make it appear
that the unacknowledged indebtedness greatly exceeds what so is
accredited and accounted for. That such is the case must not be
taken as showing intentional neglect of the due courtesies.
    March 1916.

    In the course of the past two years, while the manuscript has
been lying in wait for the printer, a new situation has been
forcing itself on the attention of men who continue to take an
interest in the universities. On this provocation a few
paragraphs have been added, at the end of the introductory
chapter. Otherwise there appears to be no call for a change in
the general argument, and it has not been disturbed since the
earlier date, which is accordingly left as it stands.

    June 1918.


CHAPTER ONE

Introductory: The Place of the University in Modern Life

                                I

     In any known civilization there will be found something in
the way of esoteric knowledge. This body of knowledge will vary
characteristically from one culture to another, differing both in
content and in respect of the canons of truth and reality relied
on by its adepts. But there is this common trait running through
all civilizations, as touches this range of esoteric knowledge,
that it is in all cases held, more or less closely, in the
keeping of a select body of adepts or specialists -- scientists,
scholars, savants, clerks, priests, shamans, medicinemen --
whatever designation may best fit the given case.
    In the apprehension of the given society within which any
such body of knowledge is found it will also be found that the
knowledge in question is rated as an article of great intrinsic
value, in some way a matter of more substantial consequence than
any or all of the material achievements or possessions of the
community. It may take shape as a system of magic or of religious
beliefs, of mythology, theology, philosophy or science. But
whatever shape it falls into in the given case, it makes up the
substantial core of the civilization in which it is found, and it
is felt to give character and distinction to that civilization.
    In the apprehension of the group in whose life and esteem it
lives and takes effect, this esoteric knowledge is taken to
embody a systematization of fundamental and eternal truth;
although it is evident to any outsider that it will take its
character and its scope and method from the habits of life of the
group, from the institutions with which it is bound in a web of
give and take. Such is manifestly the case in all the historic
phases of civilization, as well as in all those contemporary
cultures that are sufficiently remote from our everyday interests
to admit of their being seen in adequate perspective. A passably
dispassionate inquiry into the place which modern learning holds
in modern civilization will show that such is also the case of
this latest, and in the mind of its keepers the most mature,
system of knowledge. It should by no means be an insuperably
difficult matter to show that this "higher learning" of the
modern world, the current body of science and scholarship, also
holds its place on such a tenure of use and wont, that it has
grown and shifted in point of content, aims and methods in
response to the changes in habits of life that have passed over
the Western peoples during the period of its growth and
ascendancy. Nor should it be embarrassingly difficult to reach
the persuasion that this process of change and supersession in
the scope and method of knowledge is still effectually at work,
in a like response to institutional changes that still are
incontinently going forward.(1*)
    To the adepts who are occupied with this esoteric knowledge,
the scientists and scholars on whom its keeping devolves, the
matter will of course not appear in just that light; more
particularly so far as regards that special segment of the field
of knowledge with the keeping and cultivation of which they may,
each and several, be occupied. They are, each and several,
engaged on the perfecting and conservation of a special line of
inquiry, the objective end of which, in the view of its adepts,
will necessarily be the final and irreducible truth as touches
matters within its scope. But, seen in perspective, these adepts
are themselves to be taken as creatures of habit, creatures of
that particular manner of group life out of which their
preconceptions in matters of knowledge, and the manner of their
interest in the run of inquiry, have sprung. So that the terms of
finality that will satisfy the adepts are also a consequence of
habituation, and they are to be taken as conclusive only because
and in so far as they are consonant with the discipline of
habituation enforced by that manner of group life that has
induced in these adepts their particular frame of mind.
    Perhaps at a farther remove than many other current
phenomena, but none the less effectually for that, the higher
learning takes its character from the manner of life enforced on
the group by the circumstances in which it is placed. These
constraining circumstances that so condition the scope and method
of learning are primarily, and perhaps most cogently, the
conditions imposed by the state of the industrial arts, the
technological situation; but in the second place, and scarcely
less exacting in detail, the received scheme of use and wont in
its other bearings has its effect in shaping the scheme of
knowledge, both as to its content and as touches the norms and
methods of its organization. Distinctive and dominant among the
constituent factors of this current scheme of use and wont is the
pursuit of business, with the outlook and predilections which
that pursuit implies. Therefore any inquiry into the effect which
recent institutional changes may have upon the pursuit of the
higher learning will necessarily be taken up in a peculiar degree
with the consequences which an habitual pursuit of business in
modern times has had for the ideals, aims and methods of the
scholars and schools devoted to the higher learning.
    The Higher Learning as currently cultivated by the scholars
and scientists of the Western civilization differs not
generically from the esoteric knowledge purveyed by specialists
in other civilizations, elsewhere and in other times. It engages
the same general range of aptitudes and capacities, meets the
same range of human wants, and grows out of the same impulsive
propensities of human nature. Its scope and method are different
from what has seemed good in other cultural situations, and its
tenets and canons are so far peculiar as to give it a specific
character different from these others; but in the main this
specific character is due to a different distribution of emphasis
among the same general range of native gifts that have always
driven men to the pursuit of knowledge. The stress falls in a
somewhat obviously different way among the canons of reality by
recourse to which men systematize and verify the knowledge
gained; which is in its turn due to the different habituation to
which civilized men are subjected, as contrasted with the
discipline exercised by other and earlier cultures.
    In point of its genesis and growth any system of knowledge
may confidently be run back, in the main, to the initiative and
bias afforded by two certain impulsive traits of human nature: an
Idle Curiosity, and the Instinct of Workmanship.(2*)
    In this generic trait the modern learning does not depart
from the rule that holds for the common run. Men instinctively
seek knowledge, and value it. The fact of this proclivity is well
summed up in saying that men are by native gift actuated with an
idle curiosity, -- "idle" in the sense that a knowledge of things
is sought, apart from any ulterior use of the knowledge so
gained.(3*) This, of course, does not imply that the knowledge so
gained will not be turned to practical account. In point of fact,
although the fact is not greatly relevant to the inquiry here in
hand, the native proclivity here spoken of as the instinct of
workmanship will unavoidably incline men to turn to account, in a
system of ways and means, whatever knowledge so becomes
available. But the instinct of workmanship has also another and
more pertinent bearing in these premises, in that it affords the
norms, or the scheme of criteria and canons of verity, according
to which the ascertained facts will be construed and connected up
in a body of systematic knowledge. Yet the sense of workmanship
takes effect by recourse to divers expedients and reaches its
ends by recourse to varying principles, according as the
habituation of workday life has enforced one or another scheme of
interpretation for the facts with which it has to deal.
    The habits of thought induced by workday life impose
themselves as ruling principles that govern the quest of
knowledge; it will therefore be the habits of thought enforced by
the current technological scheme that will have most (or most
immediately) to say in the current systematization of facts. The
working logic of the current state of the industrial arts will
necessarily insinuate itself as the logical scheme which must, of
course, effectually govern the interpretation and generalizations
of fact in all their commonplace relations. But the current state
of the industrial arts is not all that conditions workmanship.
Under any given institutional situation, -- and the modern scheme
of use and wont, law and order, is no exception,workmanship is
held to a more or less exacting conformity to several tests and
standards that are not intrinsic to the state of the industrial
arts, even if they are not alien to it; such as the requirements
imposed by the current system of ownership and pecuniary values.
These pecuniary conditions that impose themselves on the
processes of industry and on the conduct of life, together with
the pecuniary accountancy that goes with them -- the price system
have much to say in the guidance and limitations of workmanship.
And when and in so far as the habituation so enforced in the
traffic of workday life goes into effect as a scheme of logic
governing the quest of knowledge, such principles as have by
habit found acceptance as being conventionally salutary and
conclusive in the pecuniary conduct of affairs will necessarily
leave their mark on the ideals, aims, methods and standards of
science and those principles and scholarship. More particularly,
standards of organization, control and achievement, that have
been accepted as an habitual matter of course in the conduct of
business will, by force of habit, in good part reassert
themselves as indispensable and conclusive in the conduct of the
affairs of learning. While it remains true that the bias of
workmanship continues to guide the quest of knowledge, under the
conditions imposed by modern institutions it will not be the
naive conceptions of primitive workmanship that will shape the
framework of the modern system of learning; but rather the
preconceptions of that disciplined workmanship that has been
instructed in the logic of the modern technology and
sophisticated with much experience in a civilization in whose
scheme of life pecuniary canons are definitive.
    The modern technology is of an impersonal, matter-of-fact
character in an unexampled degree, and the accountancy of modern
business management is also of an extremely dispassionate and
impartially exacting nature. It results that the modern learning
is of a similarly matter-of-fact, mechanistic complexion, and
that it similarly leans on statistically dispassionate tests and
formulations. Whereas it may fairly be said that the personal
equation once -- in the days of scholastic learning -- was the
central and decisive factor in the systematization of knowledge,
it is equally fair to say that in later time no effort is spared
to eliminate all bias of personality from the technique or the
results of science or scholarship. It is the "dry light of
science" that is always in request, and great pains is taken to
exclude all color of sentimentality.
    Yet this highly sterilized, germ-proof system of knowledge,
kept in a cool, dry place, commands the affection of modern
civilized mankind no less unconditionally, with no more
afterthought of an extraneous sanction, than once did the highly
personalized mythological and philosophical constructions and
interpretations that had the vogue in the days of the schoolmen.
    Through all the mutations that have passed over this quest of
knowledge, from its beginnings in puerile myth and magic to its
(provisional) consummation in the "exact" sciences of the current
fashion, any attentive scrutiny will find that the driving force
has consistently been of the same kind, traceable to the same
proclivity of human nature. In so far as it may fairly be
accounted esoteric knowledge, or a "higher learning," all this
enterprise is actuated by an idle curiosity, a disinterested
proclivity to gain a knowledge of things and to reduce this
knowledge to a comprehensible system. The objective end is a
theoretical organization. a logical articulation of things known,
the lines of which must not be deflected by any consideration of
expediency or convenience, but must run true to the canons of
reality accepted at the time. These canons of reality, or of
verity, have varied from time to time, have in fact varied
incontinently with the passage of time and the mutations of
experience. As the fashions of modern time have come on,
particularly the later phases of modern life, the experience that
so has shaped and reshaped the canons of verity for the use of
inquiring minds has fallen more and more into the lines of
mechanical articulation and has expressed itself ever more
unreservedly in terms of mechanical stress. Concomitantly the
canons of reality have taken on a mechanistic complexion, to the
neglect and progressive disuse of all tests and standards of a
more genial sort; until in the off-hand apprehension of modern
men, "reality" comes near being identified with mechanical fact,
and "verification" is taken to mean a formulation in mechanical
terms. But the final test of this reality about which the
inquiries of modern men so turn is not the test of mechanical
serviceability for human use, but only of mechanistically
effectual matter-of-fact.

    So it has come about that modern civilization is in a very
special degree a culture of the intellectual powers, in the
narrower sense of the term, as contrasted with the emotional
traits of human nature. Its achievements and chief merits are
found in this field of learning, and its chief defects elsewhere.
And it is on its achievements in this domain of detached and
dispassionate knowledge that modern civilized mankind most
ingenuously plumes itself and confidently rests its hopes. The
more emotional and spiritual virtues that once held the first
place have been overshadowed by the increasing consideration
given to proficiency in matter-of-fact knowledge. As prime movers
in the tide of civilized life, these sentimental movements of the
human spirit belong in the past, -at least such is the
self-complacent avowal of the modern spokesmen of culture. The
modern technology, and the mechanistic conception of things that
goes with that technology, are alien to the spirit of the "Old
Order." The Church, the court, the camp, the drawing-room, where
these elder and perhaps nobler virtues had their laboratory and
playground, have grown weedy and gone to seed. Much of the
apparatus of the old order, with the good old way, still stands
over in a state of decent repair, and the sentimentally
reminiscent endeavors of certain spiritual "hold-overs" still
lend this apparatus of archaism something of a galvanic life. But
that power of aspiration that once surged full and hot in the
cults of faith, fashion, sentiment, exploit, and honor, now at
its best comes to such a head as it may in the concerted
adulation of matter-of-fact.
    This esoteric knowledge of matter-of-fact has come to be
accepted as something worth while in its own right, a
self-legitimating end of endeavor in itself, apart from any
bearing it may have on the glory of God or the good of man. Men
have, no doubt, always been possessed of a more or less urgent
propensity to inquire into the nature of things, beyond the
serviceability of any knowledge so gained, and have always been
given to seeking curious explanations of things at large. The
idle curiosity is a native trait of the race. But in past times
such a disinterested pursuit of unprofitable knowledge has, by
and large, not been freely avowed as a legitimate end of
endeavour; or such has at any rate been the state of the case
through that later segment of history which students commonly
take account of. A quest of knowledge has overtly been rated as
meritorious, or even blameless, only in so far as it has appeared
to serve the ends of one or another of the practical interests
that have from time to time occupied men's attention. But
latterly, during the past few generations, this learning has so
far become an avowed "end in itself" that "the increase and
diffusion of knowledge among men" is now freely rated as the most
humane and meritorious work to be taken care of by any
enlightened community or any public-spirited friend of
civilization.
    The expediency of such "increase and diffusion" is no longer
held in doubt, because it has ceased to be a question of
expediency among the enlightened nations, being itself the
consummation upon which, in the apprehension of civilized men,
the advance of culture must converge. Such has come to be the
long-term common sense judgment of enlightened public opinion. A
settled presumption to some such effect has found lodgment as a
commonplace conviction in the popular mind, in much the same
measure and in much the same period of time as the current body
of systematic knowledge has taken on the character of matter of
fact. For good or ill, civilized men have come to hold that this
matter-of-fact knowledge of things is the only end in life that
indubitably justifies itself. So that nothing more irretrievably
shameful could overtake modern civilization than the miscarriage
of this modern learning, which is the most valued spiritual asset
of civilized mankind.
    The truth of this view is borne out by the professions even
of those lieutenants of the powers of darkness who are straining
to lay waste and debauch the peoples of Christendom. In
high-pitched concert they all swear by the name of a "culture"
whose sole inalienable asset is this same intellectual mastery of
matters of fact. At the same time it is only by drawing on the
resources of this matter-of-fact knowledge that the protagonists
of reaction are able to carry on their campaign of debauchery and
desolation.

    Other interests that have once been held in higher esteem
appear by comparison to have fallen into abeyance, -- religious
devotion, political prestige, fighting capacity, gentility,
pecuniary distinction, profuse consumption of goods. But it is
only by comparison with the higher value given to this enterprise
of the intellect that such other interests appear to have lost
ground. These and the like have fallen into relative disesteem,
as being sordid and insubstantial by comparison. Not that these
"lower" human interests, answering to the "lower" ranges of human
intellect, have fallen into neglect; it is only that they have
come to be accounted "lower," as contrasted with the quest of
knowledge; and it is only on sober second thought, and perhaps
only for the ephemeral present, that they are so accounted by the
common run of civilized mankind. Men still are in sufficiently
hot pursuit of all these time-worn amenities, and each for
himself is, in point of fact, more than likely to make the
pursuit of such self-seeking ends the burden of his life; but on
a dispassionate rating, and under the corrective of deliberate
avowal, it will appear that none of these commend themselves as
intrinsically worth while at large. At the best they are rated as
expedient concessions to human infirmity or as measures of
defense against human perversity and the outrages of fortune. The
last resort of the apologists for these more sordid endeavours is
the plea that only by this means can the ulterior ends of a
civilization of intelligence be served. The argument may fairly
be paraphrased to the effect that in order to serve God in the
end, we must all be ready to serve the Devil in the meantime.

    It is always possible, of course, that this pre-eminence of
intellectual enterprise in the civilization of the Western
peoples is a transient episode; that it may eventually -- perhaps
even precipitately, with the next impending turn in the fortunes
of this civilization -- again be relegated to a secondary place
in the scheme of things and become only an instrumentality in the
service of some dominant aim or impulse, such as a vainglorious
patriotism, or dynastic politics, or the breeding of a commercial
aristocracy. More than one of the nations of Europe have moved so
far in this matter already as to place the primacy of science and
scholarship in doubt as against warlike ambitions; and the
aspirations of the American community appear to be divided --
between patriotism in the service of the captains of war, and
commerce in the service of the captains of finance. But hitherto
the spokesmen of any such cultural reversion are careful to
declare a perfunctory faith in that civilization of disinterested
intellectual achievement which they are endeavouring to suborn to
their several ends. That such pro forma declarations are found
necessary argues that the faith in a civilization of intelligence
is still so far intact as to require all reactionaries to make
their peace with it.
    Meantime the easy matter-of-course presumption that such a
civilization of intelligence justifies itself goes to argue that
the current bias which so comes to expression will be the outcome
of a secure and protracted experience. What underlies and has
brought on this bent in the temper of the civilized peoples is a
somewhat intricate question of institutional growth, and can not
be gone into here; but the gradual shifting of this
matter-of-fact outlook into the primacy among the ideals of
modern. Christendom is sufficiently evident in point of fact, to
any attentive student of modern times. Conceivably, there may
come an abrupt term to its paramount vogue, through some
precipitate sweep of circumstances; but it did not come in by
anything like the sudden intrusion of a new invention in ideals
-- after the fashion of a religious conversion nor by the
incursion of a hitherto alien element into the current scheme of
life, but rather by force of a gradual and unintended, scarcely
perceptible, shifting of emphasis between the several cultural
factors that conjointly go to make up the working scheme of
things.
    Along with this shifting of matter-of-fact knowledge into the
foreground among the ideals of civilized life, there has also
gone on a similarly unpremeditated change in the attitude of
those persons and establishments that have to do with this
learning, as well as in the rating accorded them by the community
at large. Again it is a matter of institutional growth, of
self-wrought changes in the scheme of use and wont; and here as
in other cases of institutional growth and displacement, the
changes have gone forward for the most part blindly, by impulse,
without much foreknowledge of any ulterior consequences to which
such a sequence of change might be said to tend. It is only after
the new growth of use and wont has taken effect in an altered
range of principles and standards, that its direction and
ulterior consequences can be appreciated with any degree of
confidence. But this development that has thrown up
matter-of-fact knowledge into its place of paramount value for
modern culture has in a peculiar degree been unintended and
unforeseen; the like applies to the case of the schools and the
personnel involved; and in a peculiar degree the drift and
bearing of these changes have also not been appreciated while
they have been going forward, doubtless because it has all been a
peculiarly unprecedented phenomenon and a wholly undesigned drift
of habituation. History records nothing that is fairly
comparable. No era in the historic past has set a pattern for
guidance in this matter, and the experience of none of the
peoples of history affords a clue by which to have judged
beforehand of the probable course and outcome of this
specifically modern and occidental phase of culture.
    Some slight beginnings and excursions in the way of a
cultivation of matter-of-fact learning there may have been, now
and again, among the many shifting systems of esoteric lore that
have claimed attention here and there, early and late; and these
need by no means be accounted negligible. But they have on the
whole come to nothing much better than broken excursions, as seen
from the point of view of the latterday higher learning, and they
have brought into bearing nothing appreciable in the way of
establishments designed without afterthought to further the
advance of disinterested knowledge. Anything like a cultural era
that avowedly takes such a quest of knowledge as its chief and
distinctive characteristic is not known to history. From this
isolated state of the case it follows, unfortunately, that this
modern phase is to be studied only in its own light; and since
the sequence of development has hitherto reached no secure
consummation or conclusion, there is also much room for
conflicting opinions as to its presumptive or legitimate outcome,
or even as to its present drift.

                                II

    But notorious facts make this much plain, that civilized
mankind looks to this quest of matter-of-fact knowledge as its
most substantial asset and its most valued achievement, -- in so
far as any consensus of appreciation or of aspirations is to be
found among civilized mankind; and there is no similar consensus
bearing on any other feature of that scheme of life that
characterizes modern civilization. It is similarly beyond dispute
that men look to the modern system of schools and related
establishments of learning for the furtherance and conservation
of this intellectual enterprise. And among the various items of
this equipment the modern university is, by tradition, more
closely identified with the quest of knowledge than any other. It
stands in a unique and peculiarly intimate relation to this
intellectual enterprise. At least such is the current
apprehension of the university's work. The university is the only
accepted institution of the modern culture on which the quest of
knowledge unquestionably devolves; and the visible drift of
circumstances as well as of public sentiment runs also to making
this the only unquestioned duty incumbent on the university.
    It is true, many other lines of work, and of endeavor. that
may not fairly be called work, are undertaken by schools of
university grade; and also, many other schools that call
themselves "universities" will have substantially nothing to do
with the higher learning. But each and several of these other
lines of endeavor, into which the universities allow themselves
to be drawn, are open to question. Their legitimacy remains an
open question in spite of the interested arguments of their
spokesmen, who advocate the partial submergence of the university
in such enterprises as professional training, undergraduate
instruction, supervision and guidance of. the secondary school
system, edification of the unlearned by "university extension"
and similar excursions into the field of public amusement,
training of secondary school teachers, encouragement of amateurs
by "correspondence," etc. What and how much of these extraneous
activities the university should allow itself is a matter on
which there is no general agreement even among those whose
inclinations go far in that direction; but what is taken for
granted throughout all this advocacy of outlying detail is the
secure premise that the university is in the first place a
seminary of the higher learning, and that no school can make good
its pretensions to university standing except by proving its
fitness in this respect.(4*)
    The conservation and advancement of the higher learning
involves two lines of work, distinct but closely bound together:
(a) scientific and scholarly inquiry, and (b) the instruction of
students.(5*) The former of these is primary and indispensable.
It is this work of intellectual enterprise that gives its
character to the university and marks it off from the lower
schools. The work of teaching properly belongs in the university
only because and in so far as it incites and facilitates the
university man's work of inquiry, -- and the extent to which such
teaching furthers the work of inquiry is scarcely to be
appreciated without a somewhat extended experience. By and large,
there are but few and inconsequential exceptions to the rule that
teaching, as a concomitant of investigation, is distinctly
advantageous to the investigator; particularly in so far as his
work is of the nature of theoretical inquiry. The instruction
necessarily involved in university work, therefore, is only such
as can readily be combined with the work of inquiry, at the same
time that it goes directly to further the higher learning in that
it trains the incoming generation of scholars and scientists for
the further pursuit of knowledge. Training for other purposes is
necessarily of a different kind and is best done elsewhere; and
it does not become university work by calling it so and imposing
its burden on the men and equipment whose only concern should be
the higher learning.
    University teaching, having a particular and special purpose
-- the pursuit of knowledge -- it has also a particular and
special character, such as to differentiate it from other
teaching and at the same time leave it relatively ineffective for
other purposes. Its aim is to equip the student for the work of
inquiry, not to give him facility in that conduct of affairs that
turns such knowledge to "practical account." Hence the
instruction that falls legitimately under the hand of the
university man is necessarily subsidiary and incidental to the
work of inquiry, and it can effectually be carried on only by
such a teacher as is himself occupied with the scrutiny of what
knowledge is already in hand and with pushing the inquiry to
further gains. And it can be carried on by such a teacher only by
drawing his students into his own work of inquiry. The student's
relation to his teacher necessarily becomes that of an apprentice
to his master, rather than that of a pupil to his schoolmaster.
    A university is a body of mature scholars and scientists, the
"faculty," -- with whatever plant and other equipment may
incidentally serve as appliances for their work in any given
case. The necessary material equipment may under modern
conditions be very considerable, as may also the number of
care-takers, assistants, etc.; but all that is not the
university, but merely its equipment. And the university man's
work is the pursuit of knowledge, together with whatever advisory
surveillance and guidance he may consistently afford such
students as are entering on the career of learning at a point
where his outlook and methods of work may be of effect for them.
No man whose energies are not habitually bent on increasing and
proving up the domain of learning belongs legitimately on the
university staff. The university man is, properly, a student, not
a schoolmaster. Such is the unmistakable drift of sentiment and
professed endeavour, in so far as it is guided by the cultural
aspirations of civilized mankind rather than by the emulative
strategy of individuals seeking their own preferment.(6*)
    All this, of course, implies no undervaluing of the work of
those men who aim to prepare the youth for citizenship and a
practical career. It is only a question of distinguishing between
things that belong apart. The scientist and the scholar on the
one hand, and the schoolmaster on the other hand, both belong
within the later growth of civilization; but a differentiation of
the two classes, and a division of their work, is indispensable
if they are to do their work as it should be done, and as the
modern community thoughtfully intends that it should be done. And
while such a division of labour has hitherto not been carried
through with any degree of consistency, it is at least under way,
and there is nothing but the presumption of outworn usage that
continues to hold the two lines of work together, to the
detriment of both; backed, it is true, by ambitions of
self-aggrandizement on the part of many schools and many of their
directorates.
    The schoolmaster and his work may be equally, or more,
valuable to the community at large -- presumably more rather than
less -- but in so far as his chief interest is of the pedagogical
sort his place is not in the university. Exposition, instruction
and drill belong in and professional schools. The consistent aim
there is, and should be, to instruct, to inculcate a knowledge of
results, and to give the pupil a working facility in applying it.
On the university level such information and training is (should
be) incidental to the work of research. The university man is
almost unavoidably a teacher, by precept and example, but he can
not without detriment to his work as scientist or scholar serve
as a taskmaster or a vehicle of indoctrination. The student who
comes up to the university for the pursuit of knowledge is
expected to know what he wants and to want it, without
compulsion. If he falls short in these respects, if he has not
the requisite interest and initiative, it is his own misfortune,
not the fault of his teacher. What he has a legitimate claim to
is an opportunity for such personal contact and guidance as will
give him familiarity with the ways and means of the higher
learning, -- any information imparted to him being incidental to
this main work of habituation. He gets a chance to make himself a
scholar, and what he will do with his opportunities in this way
lies in his own discretion.
    The difference between the modern university and the lower
and professional schools is broad and simple; not so much a
difference of degree as of kind. There is no difficulty about
apprehending or appreciating this difference; the dispute turns
not on the practicability of distinguishing between the two, but
on the desirability of letting such a distinction go into effect.
It is a controversy between those who wish to hold fast that
which once was good and those who look to make use of the means
in hand for new ends and meet new exigencies.
    The lower schools (including the professional schools) are,
in the ideal scheme, designed to fit the incoming generation for
civil life; they are therefore occupied with instilling such
knowledge and habits as will make their pupils fit citizens of
the world in whatever position in the fabric of workday life they
may fall. The university on the other hand is specialized to fit
men for a life of science and scholarship; and it is accordingly
concerned, with such discipline only as will give efficiency in
the pursuit of knowledge and fit its students for the increase
and diffusion of learning. It follows that while the lower
schools necessarily take over the surveillance of their pupils'
everyday life, and exercise a large measure of authority and
responsible interference in that behalf, the university assumes
(or should assume) no responsibility for its students' fortunes
in the moral, religious, pecuniary, domestic, or hygienic
respect.
    Doubtless the larger and more serious responsibility in the
educational system belongs not to the university but to the lower
and professional schools. Citizenship is a larger and more
substantial category than scholarship; and the furtherance of
civilized life is a larger and more serious interest than the
pursuit of knowledge for its own idle sake. But the proportions
which the quest of knowledge is latterly assuming in scheme of
civilized life require that the establishments the to which this
interest is committed should not be charged with extraneous
duties; particularly not with extraneous matters themselves of
such grave consequence as this training for citizenship and
practical affairs. These are too serious a range of duties to be
taken care of as a side-issue, by a seminary of learning, the
members of whose faculty, if they are fit for their own special
work, are not men of affairs or adepts in worldly wisdom.

                III

    In point of historical pedigree the American universities are
of another derivation than their European counterpart; although
the difference in this respect is not so sharp a matter of
contrast as might be assumed at first sight. The European
(Continental) universities appear to have been founded,
originally, to meet the needs of professional training, more
particularly theological (and philosophical) training in the
earlier times. The American universities are, historically, an
outgrowth of the American college; and the latter was installed,
in its beginnings, largely as a means of professional training;
chiefly training for Divinity, secondarily for the calling of the
schoolmaster. But in neither case, neither in that of the
European university nor in that of the American College, was this
early vocational aim of the schools allowed to decide their
character in the long run, nor to circumscribe the lines of their
later growth. In both cases, somewhat alike, the two groups of
schools came to their mature development, in the nineteenth
century, as establishments occupied with disinterested learning,
given over to the pursuit of intellectual enterprise, rather than
as seminaries for training of a vocational kind. They still had a
vocational value, no doubt, and the vocational needs of their
students need not have been absent from the considerations that
guided their directorates. It would particularly be found that
the (clerical) directorates of the American colleges had more
than half an eye to the needs of Divinity even at so late a date
as when, in the third quarter of the century, the complexion of
the American college situation began seriously to change. It is
from this period -- from the era of the Civil War and the
Reconstruction -- that the changes set in which have reshaped the
academic situation in America.
    At this era, some half a century ago, the American college
was, or was at least pressed to be, given over to disinterested
instruction, not specialized with a vocational, or even a
denominational, bias. It was coming to take its place as the
superior or crowning member, a sort of capstone, of the system of
public instruction. The life history of any one of the state
universities whose early period of growth runs across this era
will readily show the effectual guidance of such an ideal of a
college, as a superior and definitive member in a school system
designed to afford an extended course of instruction looking to
an unbiassed increase and diffusion of knowledge. Other
interests, of a professional or vocational kind, were also
entrusted to the keeping of these new-found schools; but with a
conclusive generality the rule holds that in these academic
creations a college establishment of a disinterested,
non-vocational character is counted in as the indispensable
nucleus, -- that much was at that time a matter of course.
    The further development shows two marked features: The
American university has come into bearing; and the college has
become an intermediate rather than a terminal link in the
conventional scheme of education. Under the names "undergraduate"
and "graduate," the college and the university are still commonly
coupled together as subdivisions of a complex whole; but this
holding together of the two disparate schools is at the best a
freak of aimless survival. At the worst, and more commonly, it is
the result of a gross ambition for magnitude on the part of the
joint directorate. Whether the college lives by itself as an
independent establishment on a foundation of its own, or is in
point of legal formality a subdivision of the university
establishment, it takes its place in the educational scheme as
senior member of the secondary school system, and it bears no
peculiarly close relation to the university as a seat of
learning. At the closest it stands to the university in the
relation of a fitting school; more commonly its relations are
closer with the ordinary professional and vocational schools; and
for the most part it stands in no relation, beyond that of
juxtaposition, with the one or the other.
    The attempt to hold the college and the no means together in
bonds of ostensible Solidarity is by university an advisedly
concerted adjustment to the needs of scholarship as they run
today. By historical accident the older American universities
have grown into bearing on the ground of an underlying college,
and the external connection so inherited has not usually been
severed; and by ill-advised, or perhaps unadvised, imitation the
younger universities have blundered into encumbering themselves
with an undergraduate department to simulate this presumptively
honourable pedigree, to the detriment both of the university and
of the college so bound up with it. By this arrangement the
college -- undergraduate department -- falls into the position of
an appendage, a side issue, to be taken care of by afterthought
on the part of a body of men whose chief legitimate interest runs
-- should run -- on other things than the efficient management of
such an undergraduate training-school, -- provided always that
they are a bona fide university faculty, and not a body of
secondary-school teachers masquerading under the assumed name of
a university.
    The motive to this inclusion of an undergraduate department
in the newer universities appears commonly to have been a
headlong eagerness on the part of the corporate authorities to
show a complete establishment of the conventionally accepted
pattern, and to enroll as many students as possible.
    Whatever may have been true for the earlier time, when the
American college first grew up and flourished, it is beyond
question that the undergraduate department which takes the place
of the college today cannot be rated as an institution of the
higher learning. At the best it is now a school for preliminary
training, preparatory to entering on the career of learning, or
in preparation for the further training required for the
professions; but it is also, and chiefly, an establishment
designed to give the concluding touches to the education of young
men who have no designs on learning, beyond the close of the
college curriculum. It aims to afford a rounded discipline to
those whose goal is the life of fashion or of affairs. How well,
or how ill, the college may combine these two unrelated purposes
is a question that does not immediately concern the present
inquiry. It is touched on here only to point the contrast between
the American college and the university.
    It follows from the character of their work that while the
university should offer no set curriculum, the college has,
properly, nothing else to offer. But the retention or inclusion
of the college and its aims within the university corporation has
necessarily led to the retention of college standards and methods
of control even in what is or purports to be university work; so
that it is by no means unusual to find university (graduate) work
scheduled in the form of a curriculum, with all that
boarding-school circumstance and apparatus that is so unavoidable
an evil in all undergraduate training. In effect, the outcome of
these short-sighted attempts to take care of the higher learning
by the means and method of the boys' school, commonly is to
eliminate the higher learning from the case and substitute the
aims and results of a boys' training-school.
    Undergraduate work being task work, it is possible, without
fatal effect, to reduce it to standard units of time and volume,
and so control and enforce it by a system of accountancy and
surveillance; the methods of control, accountancy and coercion
that so come to be worked out have all that convincing appearance
of tangible efficiency that belongs to any mechanically defined
and statistically accountable routine, such as will always
commend itself to the spirit of the schoolmaster; the temptation
to apply such methods of standardized routine wherever it is at
all feasible is always present, and it is cogently spoken for by
all those to whom drill is a more intelligible conception than
scholarship. The work of learning, which distinctively belongs in
the university, on the other hand, is a matter of personal
contact and co-operation between teacher and student, and is not
measurable in statistical units or amenable to mechanical tests;
the men engaged in this work can accordingly offer nothing of the
same definite character in place of the rigid routine and
accountancy advocated by the schoolmasters; and the outcome in
nearly all cases where the control of both departments vests in
one composite corporate body, as it usually does, is the gradual
insinuation of undergraduate methods and standards in the
graduate school; until what is nominally university work settles
down, in effect, into nothing more than an extension of the
undergraduate curriculum. This effect is had partly by reducing
such of the graduate courses as are found amenable to the
formalities of the undergraduate routine, and partly by
dispensing with such graduate work as will not lend itself, even
ostensibly, to the schoolmaster's methods.

    What has been said of the college in this connection holds
true in the main also of the professional and technical schools.
In their aims, methods and achievements these schools are, in the
nature of the case, foreign to the higher learning. This is, of
course, not said in disparagement of their work; rather the
contrary. As is the case with the college, so these schools also
are often included in the university corporation by ties of an
external and factitious kind, frequently by terms of the charter.
But this formal inclusion of them under the corporate charter
does not set aside the substantial discrepancy between their
purpose, work and animus and those of the university proper. It
can only serve to trouble the single-mindedness of both. It
leaves both the pursuit of learning and the work of preparation
for the professions somewhat at loose ends, confused with the
bootless illusion that they are, in some recondite way, parallel
variants of a single line of work.
    In aim and animus the technical and professional schools are
"practical," in the most thorough going manner; while the pursuit
of knowledge that occupies the scientists and scholars is not
"practical" in the slightest degree. The divergent lines of
interest to be taken care of by the professional schools and the
university, respectively, are as widely out of touch as may well
be within the general field of human knowledge. The one is
animated wholly by considerations of material expediency, and the
range of its interest and efforts is strictly limited by
consideration of the useful effect to which the proficiency that
it gives is to be turned; the other knows nothing of expediency,
and is influenced by no consideration of utility or disutility,
in its appreciation of the knowledge to be sought. The animus of
the one is worldly wisdom; of the other, idle curiosity. The two
are incommensurably at variance so far as regards their purpose,
and in great measure also as regards their methods of work, and
necessarily so.
    But with all this divergence of purpose and animus there is
after all a broad and very substantial bond of community between
the technical schools, on the one hand, and the proper work of
the university, on the other hand, in that the two are, in great
measure, occupied with the same general range of materials and
employ somewhat the same logical methods in handling these
materials. But the relation that results from this community of
material is almost wholly external and mechanical. Nor does it
set up any presumption that the two should expediently be
included in the same corporate establishment, or even that they
need be near neighbors or need maintain peculiarly close
relations of personnel. The technical schools, and in a less
degree the professional schools not properly classed as
technical, depend in large measure on results worked out by the
scientists, who properly belong in the universities. But the
material so made use of for technical ends are taken over and
turned to account without afterthought. The technologist's work
is related to that of the scientists very much as the work of the
designer is related to that of the inventor. To a considerable
extent the scientists similarly depend on the work of the
technical men for information, and for correction and
verification of their own theoretical work. But there is, on this
account, nothing to gain by associating any given technical
school with any given university establishment; incorporation in
any given university does not in any degree facilitate the
utilization of the results of the sciences by the technical men;
nor is it found in practice to further the work of the sciences.
The schools in question do not in any peculiar degree draw on the
work of the scientists attached to their particular university,
nor do these scientists, on the other hand, have any special use
for the work of their associated technical schools. In either
case the source drawn on is the general literature of the
subject, the body of materials available at large, not the work
of particular men attached to particular schools. The
generalizations of science are indispensable to the technical
men; but what they draw on is the body of science at large,
regardless of what any given university establishment may have
had to do with the work out of which the particular items of
scientific information have emerged. Nor is this scientific
material useful to the technologists for the further pursuit of
science; to them the scientific results are data, raw material to
be turned to practical use, not means by which to carry
scientific inquiry out to further results.
    Similarly, the professions and the technical schools afford
valuable data for the use of the professed scholars and
scientists, information that serves as material of Investigation,
or that will at least be useful as a means of extending
correcting, verifying and correlating lines of inquiry on which
they are engaged. But the further bearing of these facts upon the
affairs of life, their expediency or futility, is of no interest
or consequence. The affairs of life, except the affairs of
learning, do not touch the interest of the university man as a
scholar or scientist. What is of importance to him in all these
matters with which the professions and technologists are busy is
their bearing on those matters of fact into which his scientific
interest leads him to inquire. The tests and experiments carried
out at these technical schools, as well as the experience
gathered by the members of their staff, will occasionally afford
him material for further inquiry or means whereby to check
results already arrived at; but for such material he does not by
preference resort to any one of the technical schools as
contrasted with any other, and it is quite an idle question
whether the source of any such serviceable information is a
school attached to his own university. The investigator finds his
material where he can; which comes to saying that he draws on the
general body of technical knowledge, with no afterthought as to
what particular technical school may have stood in some relation
or other to the information which he finds useful.
    Neither to the man engaged in university work nor to the
technical schools that may serve him as occasional sources of
material is there any advantage to be derived from their
inclusion in the university establishment. Indeed, it is a
detriment to both parties, as has already been remarked, but more
decidedly to the university men. By including the technical and
professional schools in the university corporation the
technologists and professional men attached to these schools are
necessarily included among the academic staff, and so they come
to take their part in the direction of academic affairs at large.
In what they so do toward shaping the academic policy they will
not only count for all they are worth, but they are likely to
count for something more than their due share in this respect;
for they are to some extent trained to the conduct of affairs,
and so come in for something of that deference that is currently
paid to men of affairs, at the same time that this practical
training gives them an advantage over their purely academic
colleagues, in the greater assurance and adroitness with which
they are able to present their contentions. By virtue of this
same training, as well as by force of current practical interest,
the technologist and the professional man are, like other men of
affairs, necessarily and habitually impatient of any scientific
or scholarly work that does not obviously lend itself to some
practical use. The technologist appreciates what is mechanically
serviceable; the professional man, as, for instance, the lawyer,
appreciates what promises pecuniary gain; and the two unite with
the business-man at large in repudiating whatever does not look
directly to such a utilitarian outcome. So that as members of the
academic staff these men are likely to count at their full weight
toward the diversion of the university's forces from
disinterested science and scholarship to such palpably
utilitarian ends.

    But the active measures so taken by the academic authorities
at the instance of the schoolmasters and "practical" men are by
no means the only line along which their presence in the academic
corporation affects the case. Intimate association with these
"utilitarians" unavoidably has its corrupting effect on the
scientists and scholars, and induces in them also something of
the same bias toward "practical" results in their work; so that
they no longer pursue the higher learning with undivided
interest, but with more or less of an eye to the utilitarian main
chance; whereby the advantages of specialization, which are the
reason for these schools, are lost, and the pride of the modern
community is wounded in its most sensitive spot -- the efficiency
of its specialists.
    So also, on the other hand, the formal incorporation of these
technological and professional men in the academic body, with its
professedly single-minded interest in learning, has its effect on
their frame of mind. They are, without intending it, placed in a
false position, which unavoidably leads them to court a specious
appearance of scholarship, and so to invest their technological
discipline with a degree of pedantry and sophistication; whereby
it is hoped to give these schools and their work some scientific
and scholarly prestige, and so lift it to that dignity that is
pressed to attach to a non-utilitarian pursuit of learning.
Doubtless this pursuit of scholarly prestige is commonly
successful, to the extent that it produces the desired conviction
of awe in the vulgar, who do not know the difference; but all
this make-believe scholarship, however successfully staged, is
not what these schools are designed for; or at least it is not
what is expected of them, nor is it what they can do best and
most efficiently.
    To the substantial gain of both parties, though with some
lesion of the vanity of both, the separation between the
university and the professional and technical schools should be
carried through and made absolute. Only on such conditions can
either the one or the other do its own work in a workmanlike
manner. Within the university precincts any aim or interest other
than those of irresponsible science and scholarship -- pursuit of
matter-of-fact knowledge -- are to be rated as interlopers.

                                IV

    To all this there is the ready objection of the schoolmasters
and utilitarians that such a project is fantastic and
unpractical, useless and undesirable; that such has not been the
mission of the university in the past, nor its accepted place and
use in the educational system of today and yesterday,. that the
universities of Christendom have from their first foundation been
occupied with professional training and useful knowledge; that
they have been founded for utilitarian purposes and their work
has been guided mainly or altogether by utilitarian
considerations; -- all of which is conceded without argument. The
historical argument amounts to saying that the universities were
founded before modern civilization took on its modern character,
before the disinterested pursuit of knowledge had come to take
the first place among the ideals of civilized mankind, and that
they were established to take care of those interests which were
then accounted of first importance, and that this intellectual
enterprise in pursuit of disinterested knowledge consequently was
not at that time confided to the care of any special
establishment or freely avowed as a legitimate interest in its
own right.
    It is true that, by historical accident, the university at
large has grown out of professional training-schools, primarily
schools for training in theology, secondarily in law and
medicine. It is also true, in like wise and in like degree, that
modern science and scholarship have grown out of the technology
of handicraft and the theological philosophy of the
schoolmen.(7*) But just as it would be a bootless enterprise to
cut modern science back into handicraft technology, so would it
be a gratuitous imbecility to prune back the modern university to
that inchoate phase of its life-history and make it again a
corporation for the training of theologians, jurists and doctors
of medicine. The historical argument does not enjoin a return to
the beginning of things, but rather an intelligent appreciation
of what things are coming to.
    The genesis of the university at large, taken as an
institution of civilized life, is an incident of the transition
from the barbarian culture of the middle ages to modern times,
and its later growth and acquirement of character is an incident
of the further growth of modern civilization; and the character
of this later growth of the university reflects the bent of
modern civilization, as contrasted with the barbarian spirit of
things in the mediaeval spiritual world.
    In a general way, the place of the university in the culture
of Christendom is still substantially the same as it has been
from the beginning. Ideally, and in the popular apprehension, it
is, as it has always been, a corporation for the cultivation and
care of the community's highest aspirations and ideals. But these
ideals and aspirations have changed somewhat with the changing
scheme of the Western civilization; and so the university has
also concomitantly so changed in character, aims and ideals as to
leave it still the corporate organ of the community's dominant
intellectual interest. At the same time, it is true, these
changes in the purpose and spirit of the university have always
been, and are always being, made only tardily, reluctantly,
concessively, against the protests of those who are zealous for
the commonplaces of the day before yesterday. Such is the
character of institutional growth and change; and in its
adaptation to the altered requirements of an altered scheme of
culture the university has in this matter been subject to the
conditions of institutional growth at large. An institution is,
after all, a prevalent habit of thought, and as such it is
subject to the conditions and limitations that surround any
change in the habitual frame of mind prevalent in the community.
    The university of medieval and early modern times, that is to
say the barbarian university, was necessarily given over to the
pragmatic, utilitarian disciplines, since that is the nature of
barbarism; and the barbarian university is but another, somewhat
sublimated, expression of the same barbarian frame of mind. The
barbarian culture is pragmatic, utilitarian, worldly wise, and
its learning partakes of the same complexion. The barbarian, late
or early, is typically an unmitigated pragmatist; that is the
spiritual trait that most profoundly marks him off from the
savage on the one hand and from the civilized man on the other
hand. "He turns a keen, untroubled face home to the instant need
of things."
    The high era of barbarism in Europe, the Dark and Middle
Ages, is marked off from what went before and from what has
followed in the cultural sequence, by a hard and fast utilitarian
animus. The all-dominating spiritual trait of those times is that
men then made the means of life its end. It is perhaps needless
to call to mind that much of this animus still survives in later
civilized life, especially in so far as the scheme of civilized
life is embodied in the competitive system. In that earlier time,
practical sagacity and the serviceability of any knowledge
acquired, its bearing on individual advantage, spiritual or
temporal, was the ruling consideration, as never before or since.
The best of men in that world were not ashamed to avow that a
boundless solicitude for their own salvation was their worthiest
motive of conduct, and it is plain in all their speculations that
they were unable to accept any other motive or sanction as final
in any bearing. Saint and sinner alike knew no higher rule than
expediency, for this world and the next. And, for that matter, so
it still stands with the saint and the sinner, -- who make up
much of the commonplace human material in the modern community;
although both the saint and the sinner in the modern community
carry, largely by shamefaced subreption, an ever increasing
side-line of other and more genial interests that have no merit
in point of expediency whether for this world or the next.
    Under the rule of such a cultural ideal the corporation of
learning could not well take any avowed stand except as an
establishment for utilitarian instruction, the practical
expediency of whose work was the sole overt test of its
competency. And such it still should continue to be according to
the avowed aspirations of the staler commonplace elements in the
community today. By subreption, and by a sophisticated
subsumption under some ostensibly practical line of interest and
inquiry, it is true, the university men of the earlier time spent
much of their best endeavour on matters of disinterested
scholarship that had no bearing on any human want more to the
point than an idle curiosity; and by a similar turn of subreption
and sophistication the later spokesmen of the barbarian ideal
take much complacent credit for the "triumphs of modern science"
that have nothing but an ostensible bearing on any matter of
practical expediency, and they look to the universities to
continue this work of the idle curiosity under some plausible
pretext of practicality.
    So the university of that era unavoidably came to be
organized as a more or less comprehensive federation of
professional schools or faculties devoted to such branches of
practical knowledge as the ruling utilitarian interests of the
time demanded. Under this overshadowing barbarian tradition the
universities of early modern times started out as an avowed
contrivance for indoctrination in the ways and means of
salvation, spiritual and temporal, individual and collective, --
in some sort a school of engineering, primarily in divinity,
secondarily in law and politics, and presently in medicine and
also in the other professions that serve a recognized utilitarian
interest. After that fashion of a university that answered to
this manner of ideals and aspirations had once been installed and
gained a secure footing, its pattern acquired a degree of
authenticity and prescription, so that later seminaries of
learning came unquestioningly to be organized on the same lines;
and further changes of academic policy and practice, such as are
demanded by the later growth of cultural interests and ideals,
have been made only reluctantly and with a suspicious reserve,
gradually and by a circuitous sophistication; so that much of the
non-utilitarian scientific and scholarly work indispensable to
the university's survival under modern conditions is still
scheduled under the faculties of law or medicine, or even of
divinity.
    But the human propensity for inquiry into things,
irrespective of use or expediency, insinuated itself among the
expositors of worldly wisdom from the outset; and from the first
this quest of idle learning has sought shelter in the university
as the only establishment in which it could find a domicile, even
on sufferance, and so could achieve that footing of consecutive
intellectual enterprise running through successive generations of
scholars which is above all else indispensable to the advancement
of knowledge. Under the régime of unmitigated pragmatic aims that
ruled the earlier days of the European universities, this pursuit
of knowledge for its own sake was carried on as a work of
scholarly supererogation by men whose ostensibly sole occupation
was the promulgation of some accredited line of salutary
information. Frequently it had to be carried on under some
colourable masquerade of practicality. And yet so persistent has
the spirit of idle curiosity proved to be, and so consonant with
the long-term demands even of the laity, that the dissimulation
and smuggling-in of disinterested learning has gone on ever more
openly and at an ever increasing rate of gain; until in the end,
the attention given to scholarship and the non-utilitarian
sciences in these establishments has come far to exceed that
given to the practical disciplines for which the several
faculties were originally installed. As time has passed and as
successive cultural mutations have passed over the community,
shifting the centre of interest and bringing new ideals of
scholarship, and bringing the whole cultural fabric nearer to its
modern complexion, those purposes of crass expediency that were
of such great moment and were so much a matter of course in
earlier academic policy, have insensibly fallen to the rank of
incidentals. And what had once been incidental, or even an object
of surreptitious tolerance in the university, remains today as
the only unequivocal duty of the corporation of learning, and
stands out as the one characteristic trait without which no
establishment can claim rank as a university.
    Philosophy -- the avowed body of theoretical science in the
late medieval time -- had grown out of the schoolmen's
speculations in theology, being in point of derivation a body of
refinements on the divine scheme of salvation; and with a view to
quiet title, and to make manifest their devotion to the greater
good of eschatological expediency, those ingenious speculators
were content to proclaim that their philosophy is the handmaid of
theology -- Philosophia theologiae ancillans. But their
philosophy has fallen into the alembic of the idle curiosity and
has given rise to a body of modern science, godless and
unpractical, that has no intended or even ostensible bearing on
the religious fortunes of mankind; and their sanctimonious maxim
would today be better accepted as the subject of a limerick than
of a homily. Except in degree, the fortunes of the temporal
pragmatic disciplines, in Law and Medicine, have been much the
same as that of their elder sister, Theology. Professionalism and
practical serviceability have been gradually crowded into the
background of academic interests and overlaid with
quasi-utilitarian research -- such as the history of
jurisprudence, comparative physiology, and the like. They have in
fact largely been eliminated.(8*)
    And changes running to this effect have gone farthest and
have taken most consistent effect in those communities that are
most fully imbued with the spirit of the modern peaceable
civilization. It is in the more backward communities and schools
that the barbarian animus of utilitarianism still maintains
itself most nearly intact, whether it touches matters of temporal
or of spiritual interest. With the later advance of culture, as
the intellectual interest has gradually displaced the older
ideals in men's esteem, and barring a reactionary episode here
and there, the university has progressively come to take its
place as a seat of the higher learning, a corporation for the
pursuit of knowledge; and barring accidental reversions, it has
increasingly asserted itself as an imperative necessity, more and
more consistently, that the spirit of disinterested inquiry must
have free play in these seminaries of the higher learning,
without afterthought as to the practical or utilitarian
consequences which this free inquiry may conceivably have for the
professional training or for the social, civil or religious
temper of the students or the rest of the community. Nothing is
felt to be so irremediably vicious in academic policy as a
coercive bias, religious, political, conventional or
professional, in so far as it touches that quest of knowledge
that constitutes the main interest of the university.
    Professional training and technological work at large have of
course not lost ground, either in the volume and the rigour of
their requirements or in the application bestowed in their
pursuit; but as within the circle of academic interests, these
utilitarian disciplines have lost their preferential place and
have been pushed to one side; so that the professional and
technical schools are now in fact rated as adjuncts rather than
as integral constituents of the university corporation. Such is
the unmistakable sense of this matter among academic men. At the
same time these vocational schools have, one with another,
progressively taken on more of a distinctive, independent and
close-knit structure; an individual corporate existence,
autonomous and academically self-sufficient, even in those cases
where they most tenaciously hold to their formal connection with
the university corporation. They have reached a mature phase of
organization, developed a type of personnel and control peculiar
to themselves and their special needs, and have in effect come
out from under the tutelage of the comprehensive academic
organization of which they once in their early days were the
substantial core. These schools have more in common among
themselves as a class than their class have with the academic
aims and methods that characterize the university proper. They
are in fact ready and competent to go on their own recognizances,
-- indeed they commonly resent any effective interference or
surveillance from the side of the academic corporation of which
they nominally continue to be members, and insist on going their
own way and arranging their own affairs as they know best. Their
connection with the university is superficial and formal at the
best, so far as regards any substantial control of their affairs
and policy by the university authorities at large; it is only in
their interference with academic policy, and in injecting their
own peculiar bias into university affairs, that they count
substantially as corporate members of the academic body. And in
these respects, what is said of the professional and technical
schools holds true also of the undergraduate departments.
    It is quite feasible to have a university without
professional schools and without an undergraduate department; but
it is not possible to have one without due provision for that
non-utilitarian higher learning about which as a nucleus these
utilitarian disciplines cluster. And this in spite of the
solicitous endeavours of the professional schools to make good
their footing as the substantial core of the corporation.

                             V

    As intimated above, there are two main reasons for the
continued and tenacious connection between these schools and the
universities: (a) ancient tradition, fortified by the solicitous
ambition of the university directorate to make a brave show of
magnitude, and (b) the anxiety of these schools to secure some
degree of scholarly authentication through such a formal
connection with a seat of learning. These two motives have now
and again pushed matters fairly to an extreme in the reactionary
direction. So, for instance, the chances of intrigue and
extra-academic clamour have latterly thrown up certain men of
untempered "practicality" as directive heads of certain
universities, and some of these have gone so far as to avow a
reactionary intention to make the modern university a cluster of
professional schools or faculties, after the ancient barbarian
fashion.(9*) But such a policy of return to the lost crudities is
unworkable in the long run under modern conditions. It may serve
excellently as a transient expedient in a campaign of popularity,
and such appears to have been its chief purpose where a move of
this kind has been advocated, but it runs on superficial grounds
and can afford neither hope nor fear of a permanent diversion in
the direction so spoken for.
    In the modern community, under the strain of the price system
and the necessities of competitive earning and spending, many men
and women are driven by an habitual bias in favour of a higher
"practical" efficiency in all matters of education; that is to
say, a more single-minded devotion to the needs of earning and
spending. There is, indeed, much of this spirit abroad in the
community, and any candidate for popular favour and prestige may
find his own advantage in conciliating popular sentiment of this
kind. But there is at the same time equally prevalent through the
community a long-term bias of another kind, such as will not
enduringly tolerate the sordid effects of pursuing an educational
policy that looks mainly to the main chance, and unreservedly
makes the means of life its chief end. By virtue of this
long-term idealistic drift, any seminary of learning that plays
fast and loose in this way with the cultural interests entrusted
to its keeping loses caste and falls out of the running. The
universities that are subjected in this fashion to an
experimental reversion to vocationalism, it appears, will
unavoidably return presently to something of the non-professional
type, on pain of falling into hopeless discredit. There have been
some striking instances, but current not ions of delicacy will
scarcely admit a citation of nam es and dates. And while the
long-term drift of the modern idealistic bias may not permit the
universities permanently to be diverted to the service of Mammon
in this fashion, yet the unremitting endeavours of "educators"
seeking prestige for worldly wisdom results at the best in a
fluctuating state of compromise, in which the ill effects of such
bids for popularity are continually being outworn by the drift of
academic usage.
    The point is illustrated by the American state universities
as a class, although the illustration is by no means uniformly
convincing. The greater number of these state schools are not, or
are not yet, universities except in name. These establishments
have been founded, commonly, with a professed utilitarian
purpose, and have started out with professional training as their
chief avowed aim. The purpose made most of in their establishment
has commonly been to train young men for proficiency in some
gainful occupation; along with this have gone many
half-articulate professions of solicitude for cultural interests
to be taken care of by the same means. They have been installed
by politicians looking for popular acclaim, rather than by men of
scholarly or scientific insight, and their management has not
infrequently been entrusted to political masters of intrigue,
with scant academic qualifications; their foundations has been
the work of practical politicians with a view to conciliate the
good will of a lay constituency clamouring for things tangibly
"useful" -- that is to say, pecuniarily gainful. So these experts
in short-term political prestige have made provision for schools
of a "practical" character; but they have named these
establishments "universities" because the name carries an air of
scholarly repute, of a higher, more substantial kind than any
naked avowal of material practicality would give. Yet, in those
instances where the passage of time has allowed the readjustment
to take place, these quasi-"universities," installed by men of
affairs, of a crass "practicality," and in response to the
utilitarian demands of an unlearned political constituency, have
in the long run taken on more and more of an academic,
non-utilitarian character, and have been gradually falling into
line as universities claiming a place among the seminaries of the
higher learning. The long-term drift of modern cultural ideals
leaves these schools no final resting place short of the
university type, however far short of such a consummation the
greater number of them may still be found.

    What has just been said of the place which the university
occupies in modern civilization, and more particularly of the
manner in which it is to fill its place, may seem something of a
fancy sketch. It is assuredly not a faithful description of any
concrete case, by all means not of any given American university;
nor does it faithfully describe the line of policy currently
pursued by the directorate of any such establishment. Yet it is
true to the facts, taken in a generalized way, and it describes
the type to which the American schools unavoidably gravitate by
force of the community's long-term idealistic impulsion, in so
far as their drift is not continually corrected and offset by
vigilant authorities who, from motives of their own, seek to turn
the universities to account in one way and another. It describes
an institutional ideal; not necessarily an ideal nursed by any
given individual, but the ideal logically involved in the scheme
of modern civilization, and logically coming out of the
historical development of Western civilization hitherto, and
visible to any one who will dispassionately stand aside and look
to the drift of latterday events in so far as they bear on this
matter of the higher learning, its advancement and conservation.
    Many if not most of those men who are occupied with the
guidance of university affairs would disown such a projected
ideal, as being too narrow and too unpractical to fit into the
modern scheme of things, which is above all else a culture of
affairs; that it does not set forth what should be aimed at by
any who have the good of mankind at heart, or who in any sensible
degree appreciate the worth of real work as contrasted with the
leisurely intellectual finesse of the confirmed scientist and man
of letters. These and the like objections and strictures may be
well taken, perhaps. The question of what, in any ulterior sense,
ought to be sought after in the determination of academic policy
and the conduct of academic affairs will, however, not coincide
with the other question, as to what actually is being
accomplished in these premises, on the one hand, nor as to what
the long-term cultural aspirations of civilized men are setting
toward, on the other hand.
    Now, it is not intended here to argue the merits of the
current cultural ideals as contrasted with what, in some ulterior
sense, ought to be aimed at if the drift of current aspirations
and impulse should conceivably permit a different ideal to be put
into effect. It is intended only to set forth what place, in
point of fact and for better or worse, the higher learning and
the university hold in the current scheme of Western
civilization, as determined by that body of instinctive
aspirations and proclivities that holds this civilization to its
course as it runs today; and further to show how and how far
certain institutional factors comprised in this modern scheme of
life go to help or hinder the realization of this ideal which
men's aspirations and proclivities so make worth while to them.
The sketch here offered in characterization of the university and
its work, therefore, endeavours to take account of the
community's consensus of impulses and desires touching the animus
and aims that should move the seminaries of the higher learning,
at the same time that it excludes those subsidiary or alien
interests in whose favour no such consensus is found to prevail.
    There are many of these workday interests, extraneous to the
higher learning, each and several of which may be abundantly good
and urgent in its own right; but, while they need not be at cross
purposes with the higher learning, they are extraneous to that
disinterested pursuit of knowledge in which the characteristic
intellectual bent of modern civilization culminates. These others
are patent, insistent and palpable, and there need be no
apprehension of their going by default. The intellectual
predilection -- the idle curiosity -- abides and asserts itself
when other pursuits of a more temporal but more immediately
urgent kind leave men free to take stock of the ulterior ends and
values of life; whereas the transient interests, preoccupation
with the ways and means of life, are urgent and immediate, and
employ men's thought and energy through the greater share of
their life. The question of material ways and means, and the
detail requirements of the day's work, are for ever at hand and
for ever contest the claims of any avowed ulterior end; and by
force of unremitting habituation the current competitive system
of acquisition and expenditure induces in all classes such a bias
as leads them to overrate ways and means as contrasted with the
ends which these ways and means are in some sense designed to
serve.
    So, one class and another, biassed by the habitual
preoccupation of the class, will aim to divert the academic
equipment to some particular use which habit has led them to rate
high; or to include in the academic discipline various lines of
inquiry and training which are extraneous to the higher learning
but which the class in question may specially have at heart; but
taking them one with another, there is no general or abiding
consensus among the various classes of the community in favour of
diverting the academic establishment to any other specific uses,
or of including in the peculiar work of the university anything
beyond the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
    Now, it may be remarked by the way, that civilized mankind
should have come so to set their heart on this chase after a
fugitive knowledge of inconsequential facts may be little to the
credit of the race or of that scheme of culture that so centres
about this cult of the idle curiosity. And it is perhaps to their
credit, as well as to the credit of the community whose creatures
they are, that the spokesmen of some tangible ideal, some
materially expedient aspiration, embodying more of worldly
wisdom, are for ever urging upon the institutions of the higher
leaning one or another course of action of a more palpably
expedient kind. But, for better or worse, the passage of time
brings out the fact that these sober and sensible courses of
policy so advocated are after all essentially extraneous, if not
alien, to those purposes for which a university can be
maintained, on the ground afforded by the habits of thought
prevalent in the modern civilized community.
    One and another of these "practical" and expedient interests
have transiently come to the front in academic policy, and have
in their time given a particular bent to the pursuit of knowledge
that has occupied the universities. Of these extraneous interests
the two most notable have, as already indicated above, been the
ecclesiastical and the political. But in the long run these
various interests and ideals of expediency have, all and several,
shown themselves to be only factional elements in the scheme of
culture, and have lost their preferential voice in the shaping of
academic life. The place in men's esteem once filled by church
and state is now held by pecuniary traffic, business enterprise.
So that the graver issues of academic policy which now tax the
discretion of the directive powers, reduce themselves in the main
to a question between the claims of science and scholarship on
the one hand and those of business principles and pecuniary gain
on the other hand. In one shape or another this problem of
adjustment, reconciliation or compromise between the needs of the
higher learning and the demands of business enterprise is for
ever present in the deliberations of the university directorate.
This question gathers in its net all those perplexing details of
expediency that now claim the attention of the ruling bodies.

                            VI

    Since the paragraphs that make up the foregoing chapter were
written the American academic community has been thrown into a
new and peculiar position by the fortunes of war. The progress
and the further promise of the war hold in prospect new and
untried responsibilities, as well as an unexampled opportunity.
So that the outlook now (June 1918) would seem to be that the
Americans are to be brought into a central place in the republic
of learning; to take a position, not so much of dominance as of
trust and guardianship; not so much by virtue of their own
superior merit as by force of the insolvency of the European
academic community.
    Again, it is not that the war is expected to leave the lines
of European scholars and scientists extinct; although there is no
denying the serious inroads made by the war, both in the way of a
high mortality among European men of learning, and in the way of
a decimation of the new men on whom the hopes of the higher
learning for the incoming generation should have rested. There is
also a serious diversion of the young forces from learning to
transiently urgent matters of a more material, and more ephemeral
nature. But possibly more sinister than all these losses that are
in a way amenable to statistical record and estimate, is the
current and prospective loss of morale.
    Naturally, it would be difficult and hazardous to offer an
appraisal of this prospective loss of morale, with which it is to
be expected that the disintegrated European community of learned
men will come through the troubled times. But that there is much
to be looked for on this score, that there is much to be written
off in the way of lowered aggregate efficiency and loss of the
spirit of team-work, -- that much there is no denying, and it is
useless to blink the fact.
    There has already a good deal of disillusionment taken effect
throughout the nations of Christendom in respect of the temper
and trustworthiness of German scholarship these past three or
four years, and it is fairly beyond computation what further
shift of sentiment in this respect is to be looked for in the
course of a further Possible period of years given over to the
same line of experience. Doubtless, the German scholars, and
therefore the German seats of learning whose creatures and whose
custodians these German scholars are, have earned much of the
distrust and dispraise that is falling to their share. There is
no overlooking the fact that they have proved the frailty of
their hold on those elementary principles of sobriety and single
mind that underlie all sound work in the field of learning. To
any one who has the interest of the higher learning at heart, the
spectacle of maudlin chauvinism and inflated scurrility
unremittingly placed on view by the putative leaders of German
science and scholarship can not but be exceedingly disheartening.
    It may be argued, and it may be true, of course, that much of
this failure of intelligence and spiritual force among Germany's
men of learning is of the nature of a transient eclipse of their
powers; that with the return of settled conditions there is due
to come a return of poise and insight. But when all due argument
has been heard, it remains true that the distrust set afoot in
the mind of their neighbours, by this highly remarkable
exhibition of their personal equation, will long inure to the
disability of Germany's men of learning as a force to be counted
on in that teamwork that is of the essence of things for the
advancement of learning. In effect, Germany, and Germany's
associates in this warlike enterprise, will presumably be found
bankrupt in this respect on the return of peace, even beyond the
other nations.
    These others have also not escaped the touch of the angel of
decay, but the visible corruption of spiritual and intellectual
values does not go the same length among them. Nor have these
others suffered so heavy a toll on their prospective scholarly
man power. It is all a matter of degree and of differential
decline, coupled with a failure of corporate organization and of
the usages and channels of communion and co-operation.
Chauvinistic self-sufficiency and disesteem of their neighbours
have apparently also not gone so deep and far among the other
nations; although here again it is only a relative degree of
immunity that they enjoy.
    And all this holds true of the Americans in much the same way
as of the rest; except that the Americans have, at least
hitherto, not been exposed to the blight in anything like the
same degree as any one of those other peoples with whom they come
in comparison here. It is, of course, not easy to surmise what
may yet overtake them, and the others with them; but judged on
the course of things hitherto, and on the apparent promise of the
calculable future, it is scarcely to be presumed that the
Americans are due to suffer so extreme a degree of dilapidation
as the European peoples, -- even apart from the accentuated evil
case of the Germans. The strain has hitherto been lighter here,
and it promises so to continue, whether the further duration of
the war shall turn out to be longer or shorter. The Americans
are, after all, somewhat sheltered from the impact; and so soon
as the hysterical anxiety induced by the shock has had time to
spend itself, it should reasonably be expected that this people
will be able soberly to take stock of its assets and to find that
its holdings in the domain of science and scholarship are, in the
main, still intact.
    Not that no loss has been incurred, nor that no material
degree of derangement is to be looked for, but in comparison with
what the experience of the war is bringing to the Europeans, the
case of the Americans should still be the best there is to be
looked for and the best is always good enough, perforce. So it
becomes a question, what the Americans will do with the best
opportunity which the circumstances offer. And on their conduct
of their affairs in this bearing turns not only their own fortune
in respect of the interests of science and scholarship, but in
great measure the fortunes of their overseas friends and
co-partners in the republic of learning as well.
    The fortunes of war promise to leave the American men of
learning in a strategic position, in the position of a strategic
reserve, of a force to be held in readiness, equipped and
organized to meet the emergency that so arises, and to retrieve
so much as may be of those assets of scholarly equipment and
personnel that make the substantial code of Western civilization.
And so it becomes a question of what the Americans are minded to
do about it. It is their opportunity, and at the same time it
carries the gravest responsibility that has yet fallen on the
nation; for the spiritual fortunes of Christendom are bound up
with the line of policy which this surviving contingent of
American men of learning shall see fit to pursue. They are not
all that is to be left over when the powers of decay shall begin
to retire, nor are they, perhaps, to be the best and most
valuable contingent among these prospective survivors; but they
occupy a strategic position, in that they are today justly to be
credited with disinterested motives, beyond the rest, at the same
time that they command those material resources without which the
quest of knowledge can hope to achieve little along the modern
lines of inquiry. By force of circumstances they are thrown into
the position of keepers of the ways and means whereby the
republic of learning is to retrieve its fortunes. By force of
circumstances they are in a position, if they so choose, to
shelter many of those masters of free inquiry whom the one-eyed
forces of reaction and partisanship overseas will seek to
suppress and undo; and they are also in a position, if they so
choose, to install something in the way of an international
clearing house and provisional headquarters for the academic
community throughout that range of civilized peoples whose
goodwill they now enjoy -- a place of refuge and a place of
meeting, confluence and dissemination for those views and ideas
that live and move and have their being in the higher learning.

    There is, therefore, a work of reconstruction to be taken
care of in the realm of learning, no less than in the working
scheme of economic and civil institutions. And as in this other
work of reconstruction, so here; if it is to be done without
undue confusion and blundering it is due to be set afoot before
the final emergency is at hand. But there is the difference that,
whereas the framework of civil institutions may still, with
passable success, be drawn on national lines and confined within
the national frontiers; and while the economic organization can
also, without fatal loss, be confined in a similar fashion, in
response to short-sighted patriotic preconceptions; the interests
of science, and therefore of the academic community, do not run
on national lines and can not similarly be confined within
geographical or political boundaries. In the nature of the case
these interests are of an international character and can not be
taken care of except by unrestricted collusion and collaboration
among the learned men of all those peoples whom it may concern.
Yet there is no mistaking the fact that the spirit of invidious
patriotism has invaded these premises, too, and promises to
bungle the outcome; which makes the needed work of reconstruction
all the more difficult and all the more imperative. Unhappily,
the state of sentiment on both sides of the line of cleavage will
presumably not admit a cordial understanding and co-operation
between the German contingent and the rest of the civilized
nations, for some time to come. But the others are in a frame of
mind that should lend itself generously to a larger measure of
co-operation in this respect now than ever before.
    So it may not seem out of place to offer a suggestion,
tentatively and under correction, looking to this end. A
beginning may well be made by a joint enterprise among American
scholars and universities for the installation of a freely
endowed central establishment where teachers and students of all
nationalities, including Americans with the rest, may pursue
their chosen work as guests of the American academic community at
large, or as guests of the American people in the character of a
democracy of culture. There should also be nothing to hinder the
installation of more than one of these academic houses of refuge
and entertainment; nor should there be anything to hinder the
enterprise being conducted on such terms of amity, impartiality
and community interest as will make recourse to it an easy matter
of course for any scholars whom its opportunities may attract.
The same central would at the same time, and for the time being,
take care of those channels of communication throughout the
academic world that have been falling into enforced neglect under
the strain of the war. So also should provision be made, perhaps
best under the same auspices, for the (transient) taking-over of
the many essential lines of publicity and publication on which
the men engaged in scholarly and scientific inquiry have learned
to depend, and which have also been falling into something of a
decline during the war.
    Measures looking to this end might well be made, at the same
time, to serve no less useful a purpose within the American
Academic community. As is well known, there prevails today an
extensive and wasteful competitive duplication of plant,
organization and personnel among the American universities, as
regards both publications and courses of instruction.
Particularly is this true in respect of that advanced work of the
universities that has to do with the higher learning. At the same
time, these universities are now pinched for funds, due to the
current inflation of prices. So that any proposal of this nature,
which might be taken advantage of as an occasion for the pooling
of common issues among the universities, might hopefully be
expected to be welcomed as a measure of present relief from some
part of the pecuniary strain under which they are now working.
    But competition is well ingrained in the habitual outlook of
the American schools. To take the issue to neutral ground,
therefore, where this competitive animus may hopefully be counted
on to find some salutary abatement, it may be suggested that a
practicable nucleus for this proposed joint enterprise can well
be found in one or another -- perhaps in one and another -- of
those extra-academic foundations for research of which there
already are several in existence, -- as, e.g., the Carnegie
Institution. With somewhat enlarged powers, or perhaps rather
with some abatement of restrictions, and with such additional
funds as may be required, the necessary work and organization
should readily be taken care of by such an institution. Further
growth and ramification would be left to future counsel and
advisement.
    The contemplated enterprise would necessarily require a
certain planning and organization of work and something in the
way of an administrative and clerical staff,a setting up of
something in the way of "organization tables"; but there can be
no question of offering detailed proposals on that head here. Yet
the caution may well be entered here that few specifications are
better than many, in these premises, and that the larger the
latitude allowed from the outset, the fewer the seeds of eventual
defeat, -- as is abundantly illustrated by contraries.
    It is also evident that such an enterprise will involve
provision for some expenditure of funds; presumably a somewhat
generous expenditure; which comes near implying that recourse
should be had to the public revenues, or to resources that may
legitimately be taken over by the public authorities from private
hands where they now serve no useful purpose. There are many
items of material resources in the country that come legitimately
under this head. At the same time it is well in this connection
to call to mind that there is no prospect of the country's being
in any degree impoverished in the course of the war; so that
there need be no apprehension of a shortage of means for the
carrying on of such an enterprise, if only the available sources
are drawn on without prejudice. In the mind of any disinterested
student of the American economic situation, there can be no
serious apprehension that the American people, collectively, will
be at all worse off in point of disposable means at the close of
the war than they were at its beginning; quite the contrary in
fact. To any one who will look to the facts it is evident that
the experience of the war, and the measures taken and to be
taken, are leading to a heightened industrial productiveness and
a concomitant elimination of waste. The resulting net gain in
productive efficiency has not gone at all far, and there need be
no apprehension of its going to great lengths; but, for more or
less, it is going so far as safely to promise a larger net annual
production of useful goods in the immediate future than in the
immediate past; and the disposable means of any people is always
a matter of the net annual production, and it need be a question
of nothing else. The manner in which this net product is, and is
to be, shared among the classes and individuals of the community
is another question, which does not belong here.
    A question of graver weight and of greater perplexity touches
the presumptive attitude of the several universities and their
discretionary authorities in the face of any proposed measure of
this kind; where the scope of the enterprise is so far beyond
their habitual range of interest. When one calls to mind the
habitual parochialism of the governing boards of these seminaries
of the higher learning, and the meticulous manoeuvres of their
executives seeking each to enhance his own prestige and the
prestige of his own establishment, there is not much of an
evident outlook for large and generous measures looking to the
common good. And yet it is also to be called to mind that these
governing boards and executives are, after all, drawn from the
common stock of humanity, picked men as they may be; and that
they are subject, after all, to somewhat the same impulses and
infirmities as the common run, picked though they may be with a
view to parochialism and blameless futility. Now, what is
overtaking the temper of the common run under the strain of the
war situation should be instructive as to what may be also looked
for at the bands of these men in whose discretion rest the
fortunes of the American universities. There should be at least a
fighting chance that, with something larger, manlier, more
substantial, to occupy their attention and to shape the day's
work for them, these seminaries of learning may, under instant
pressure, turn their best efforts to their ostensible purpose,
"the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men," and to
forego their habitual preoccupation with petty intrigue and
bombastic publicity, until the return of idler days.

NOTES:

1. An inquiry of this kind has been attempted elsewhere: Cf. The
Instinct of Workmanship. chapter vii, pp. 321-340; "The Place of
Science in Modern Civilization", American Journal of Sociology.
Vol. XI (March, 1906), pp. 585-609; "The Evolution of the
Scientific Point of View," University of California Chronicle
(1908), Vol. X, No. 4, pp. 395-416.

2. Cf. The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the
Industrial Arts, ch.i and pp. 30-45, 52-62, 84-89.

3. In the crude surmises of the pioneers in pragmatism this
proposition was implicitly denied; in their later and more
advisedly formulated positions the expositors of pragmatism have
made peace with it.

4. The essential function of the university is to bring together,
for the transmission of experience and impulse, the sages of the
passing and the picked youths of the coming generation. By the
extent and fulness with which they establish these social
contacts, and thus transmit the wave of cumulative experience and
idealist impulse -- the real sources of moral and intellectual
progress -- the universities are to be judged. -- Victor
Branford, Interpretations and Forecasts, ch. VI. "The Present as
a Transition." p 288.

5. Cf., Geo. T. Ladd, University Control, p. 349.

6. Cf., e.g., J. McKeen Cattell, University Control, Part III,
ch. V., "Concerning the American University." "The university is
those who teach and those who learn and the work they do." "The
university is its men and their work. But certain externals are
necessary or at least usual -- buildings and equipment, a
president and trustees."
    "The papers by other writers associated with Mr Cattell in
this volume run to the same effect whenever they touch the same
topic; and, indeed, it would be difficult to find a deliberate
expression to the contrary among men entitled to speak in these
premises.
    It may be in place to add here that the volume referred to,
on University Control, has been had in mind throughout the
following analysis and has served as ground and material for much
of the argument.

7. Cf. The Instinct of Workmanship, ch. vi, vii.

8. With the current reactionary trend of things political and
civil toward mediaeval-barbarian policies and habits of thought
in the Fatherland, something of a correlative change has also
latterly come in evidence in the German universities; so that
what is substantially "cameralistic science" -- training and
information for prospective civil servants and police magistrates
is in some appreciable measure displacing disinterested inquiry
in the field of economics and political theory. This is
peculiarly true of those corporations of learning that come
closely in touch with the Cultus Ministerium.

9. Cf. "Some Considerations On the Function of the State
University." (Inaugural Address of Edmund Janes James, Ph.D.,
LL.D.), Science, November 17, 1905.


CHAPTER II

The Governing Boards

    In the working theory of the modern civilized community, --
that is to say in the current common-sense apprehension of what
is right and good, as it works out in the long run, -- the
university is a corporation of learning, disinterested and
dispassionate. To its keeping is entrusted the community's joint
interest in esoteric knowledge. It is given over to the
single-minded pursuit of science and scholarship, without
afterthought and without a view to interests subsidiary or
extraneous to the higher learning. It is, indeed, the one great
institution of modern times that works to no ulterior end and is
controlled by no consideration of expediency beyond its own work.
Typically, normally, in point of popular theory, the university
is moved by no consideration other than "the increase and
diffusion of knowledge among men." This is so because this
profitless quest of knowledge has come to be the highest and
ulterior aim of modern culture.
    Such has been the case, increasingly, for some generations
past; but it is not until quite recently that such a statement
would hold true unequivocally and with an unqualified generality.
That the case stands so today is due to the failure of
theoretical interests of a different kind; directly and
immediately it is due to the fact that in the immediate present
the cult of knowledge has, by default, taken over that primacy
among human interests which an eschatologically thrifty religious
sentiment once held in the esteem of Christendom. So long as the
fear of God still continued to move the generality of civilized
men in sufficient measure, their theoretical knowledge was
organized for "the glory of God and the good of man," -- the
latter phrase being taken in the eschatological sense; and so
long the resulting scheme of learning was laid out and cultivated
with an eye to the main chance in a hereafter given over, in the
main and for its major effect, to pains and penalties. With the
latterday dissipation of this fear of God, the scheme of
knowledge handed down out of a devout past and further amplified
in the (theoretically) Godless present, has, by atrophy of
disuse, lost its ulterior view to such spiritual expediency, and
has come to stand over as an output of intellectual enterprise
working under the impulsion and guidance of an idle curiosity
simply. All this may not be much to the credit of civilized
mankind, but dispassionate reflection will not leave the fact in
doubt. And the outcome for the university, considered as an
institution of this modern culture, is such as this conjuncture
of circumstances will require.
    But while such is the dispassionate working theory, the
long-term drift of modern common sense as touches the work of the
university, it is also a matter of course that this ideally
single-minded course of action has never been realized in any
concrete case. While it holds true, by and large, that modern
Christendom has outlived the fear of God, -- that is to say of
"the Pope, the Turk, and the Devil," -- it does not therefore
follow that men take a less instant interest in the affairs of
life, or carry on the traffic of their lives with a less alert
eye to the main chance, than they once did under the habitual
shadow of that barbarian fear. The difference is, for the purpose
in hand, that the same solicitous attention that once converged
on such an avoidance of ulterior consequences now centres on
questions of present ways and means. Worldly wisdom has not
fallen into decay or abeyance, but it has become a wisdom of ways
and means that lead to nothing beyond further ways and means.
Expediency and practical considerations have come to mean
considerations of a pecuniary kind; good, on the whole, for
pecuniary purposes only; that is to say, gain and expenditure for
the sake of further gain and expenditure, with nothing that will
stand scrutiny as a final term to this traffic in ways and means,
-- except only this cult of the idle curiosity to which the seats
of learning are, in theory, dedicate. But unremitting habituation
to the competitive pursuit of ways and means has determined that
"practical" interests of this complexion rule workday life in the
modern community throughout, and they are therefore so intimately
and ubiquitously bound up with current habits of thought, and
have so strong and immediate a hold on current workday sentiment,
that, hitherto, in no case have the seats of learning been able
to pursue their quest of knowledge with anything like that
single-mindedness which academic men are moved to profess in
their moments of academic elation.
    Some one vital interest of this practical sort, some variant
of the quest of gain, is always at hand and strenuously effective
in the community's life, and therefore dominates their everyday
habits of thought for the time being. This tone-giving dominance
of such a workday interest may be transient or relatively
enduring; it may be more or less urgently important and
consequential under the circumstances in which the community is
placed, or the clamour of its spokesmen and beneficiaries may be
more or less ubiquitous and pertinacious; but in any case it will
have its effect in the counsels of the "Educators," and so it
will infect the university as well as the lower levels of the
educational system. So that, while the higher learning still
remains as the enduring purpose and substantial interest of the
university establishment, the dominant practical interests of the
day will, transiently but effectually, govern the detail lines of
academic policy, the range of instruction offered, and the
character of the personnel; and more particularly and immediately
will the character of the governing boards and the academic
administration so be determined by the current run of popular
sentiment touching the community's practical needs and aims;
since these ruling bodies stand, in one way or another, under the
critical surveillance of a lay constituency.

    The older American universities have grown out of underlying
colleges, -- undergraduate schools. Within the memory of men
still living it was a nearly unbroken rule that the governing
boards of these higher American schools were drawn largely from
the clergy and were also guided mainly by ecclesiastical, or at
least by devotional, notions of what was right and needful in
matters of learning. This state of things reflected the ingrained
devoutness of that portion of the American community to which the
higher schools then were of much significance. At the same time
it reflected the historical fact that the colleges of the early
days had been established primarily as training schools for
ministers of the church. In their later growth, in the recent
past, while the chief purpose of these seminaries has no longer
been religious, yet ecclesiastical prepossessions long continued
to mark the permissible limits of the learning which they
cultivated, and continued also to guard the curriculum and
discipline of the schools.
    That phase of academic policy is past. Due regard at least
is, of course, still had to the religious proprieties -- the
American community, by and large, is still the most devout of
civilized countries -- but such regard on the part of the
academic authorities now proceeds on grounds of businesslike
expediency rather than on religious conviction or on an
ecclesiastical or priestly bias in the ruling bodies. It is a
concessive precaution on the part of a worldly-wise directorate,
in view of the devout prejudices of those who know no better.
    The rule of the clergy belongs virtually to the prehistory of
the American universities. While that rule held there were few if
any schools that should properly be rated as of university grade.
Even now, it is true, much of the secondary school system,
including the greater part, though a diminishing number, of the
smaller colleges, is under the tutelage of the clergy; and the
academic heads o£ these schools are almost universally men of
ecclesiastical standing and bias rather than of scholarly
attainments. But that fact does not call for particular notice
here, since these schools lie outside the university field, and
so outside the scope of this inquiry.
    For a generation past, while the American universities have
been coming into line as seminaries of the higher learning, there
has gone on a wide-reaching substitution of laymen in the place
of clergymen on the governing boards. This progressive
secularization is sufficiently notorious, even though there are
some among the older establishments the terms of whose charters
require a large proportion of clergymen on their boards. This
secularization is entirely consonant with the prevailing drift of
sentiment in the community at large, as is shown by the uniform
and uncritical approval with which it is regarded. The
substitution is a substitution of businessmen and politicians;
which amounts to saying that it is a substitution of businessmen.
So that the discretionary control in matters of university policy
now rests finally in the hands of businessmen.
    The reason which men prefer to allege for this state of
things is the sensible need of experienced men of affairs to take
care of the fiscal concerns of these university corporations; for
the typical modern university is a corporation possessed of large
property and disposing of large aggregate expenditures, so that
it will necessarily have many and often delicate pecuniary
interests to be looked after. It is at the same time held to be
expedient in case of emergency to have several wealthy men
identified with the governing board, and such men of wealth are
also commonly businessmen. It is apparently believed, though on
just what ground this sanguine belief rests does not appear, that
in case of emergency the wealthy members of the boards may be
counted on to spend their substance in behalf of the university.
In point of fact, at any rate, poor men and men without large
experience in business affairs are felt to have no place in these
bodies. If by any chance such men, without the due pecuniary
qualifications, should come to make up a majority, or even an
appreciable minority of such a governing board, the situation
would be viewed with some apprehension by all persons interested
in the case and cognizant of the facts. The only exception might
be cases where, by tradition, the board habitually includes a
considerable proportion of clergymen:

                "Such great regard is always lent
                By men to ancient precedent."


    The reasons alleged are no doubt convincing to those who are
ready to be so convinced, but they are after all more plausible
at first sight than on reflection. In point of fact these
businesslike governing boards commonly exercise little if any
current surveillance of the corporate affairs of the university,
beyond a directive oversight of the distribution of expenditures
among the several academic purposes for which the corporate
income is to be used; that is to say, they control the budget of
expenditures; which comes to saying that they exercise a
pecuniary discretion in the case mainly in the way of deciding
what the body of academic men that constitutes the university may
or may not do with the means in hand; that is to say, their
pecuniary surveillance comes in the main to an interference with
the academic work, the merits of which these men of affairs on
the governing board are in no special degree qualified to judge.
Beyond this, as touches the actual running administration of the
corporation's investments, income and expenditures, -- all that
is taken care of by permanent officials who have, as they
necessarily must, sole and responsible charge of those matters.
Even the auditing of the corporation's accounts is commonly
vested in such officers of the corporation, who have none but a
formal, if any, direct connection with the governing board. The
governing board, or more commonly a committee of the board, on
the other hand, will then formally review the balance sheets and
bundles of vouchers duly submitted by the corporation's fiscal
officers and their clerical force, -- with such effect of
complaisant oversight as will best be appreciated by any person
who has bad the fortune to look into the accounts of a large
corporation.

    So far as regards its pecuniary affairs and their due
administration, the typical modern university is in a position,
without loss or detriment, to dispense with the services of any
board of trustees, regents, curators, or what not. Except for the
insuperable difficulty of getting a hearing for such an
extraordinary proposal, it should be no difficult matter to show
that these governing boards of businessmen commonly are quite
useless to the university for any businesslike purpose. Indeed,
except for a stubborn prejudice to the contrary, the fact should
readily be seen that the boards are of no material use in any
connection; their sole effectual function being to interfere with
the academic management in matters that are not of the nature of
business, and that lie outside their competence and outside the
range of their habitual interest.
    The governing boards -- trustees, regents, curators, fellows,
whatever their style and title -- are an aimless survival from
the days of clerical rule, when they were presumably of some
effect in enforcing conformity to orthodox opinions and
observances, among the academic staff. At that time, when means
for maintenance of the denominational colleges commonly had to be
procured by an appeal to impecunious congregations, it fell to
these bodies of churchmen to do service as sturdy beggars for
funds with which to meet current expenses. So that as long as the
boards were made up chiefly of clergymen they served a pecuniary
purpose; whereas, since their complexion has been changed by the
substitution of businessmen in the place of ecclesiastics, they
have ceased to exercise any function other than a bootless
meddling with academic matters which they do not understand. The
sole ground of their retention appears to be an unreflecting
deferential concession to the usages of corporate organization
and control, such as have been found advantageous for the pursuit
of private gain by businessmen banded together in the
exploitation of joint-stock companies with limited liability.(1*)
    The fact remains, the modern civilized community is reluctant
to trust its serious interests to others than men of pecuniary
substance, who have proved their fitness for the direction of
academic affairs by acquiring, or by otherwise being possessed
of, considerable wealth.(2*) It is not simply that experienced
businessmen are, on mature reflection, judged to be the safest
and most competent trustees of the university's fiscal interests.
The preference appears to be almost wholly impulsive, and a
matter of habitual bias. It is due for the greater part to the
high esteem currently accorded to men of wealth at large, and
especially to wealthy men who have succeeded in business, quite
apart from any special capacity shown by such success for the
guardianship of any institution of learning. Business success is
by common consent, and quite uncritically, taken to be conclusive
evidence of wisdom even in matters that have no relation to
business affairs. So that it stands as a matter of course that
businessmen must be preferred for the guardianship and control of
that intellectual enterprise for the pursuit of which the
university is established, as well as to take care of the
pecuniary welfare of the university corporation. And, full of the
same naive faith that business success "answereth all things,"
these businessmen into whose hands this trust falls are content
to accept the responsibility and confident to exercise full
discretion in these matters with which they have no special
familiarity. Such is the outcome, to the present date, of the
recent and current secularization of the governing boards. The
final discretion in the affairs of the seats of learning is
entrusted to men who have proved their capacity for work that has
nothing in common with the higher learning.(3*)
    As bearing on the case of the American universities, it
should be called to mind that the businessmen of this country, as
a class, are of a notably conservative habit of mind. In a degree
scarcely equalled in any community that can lay claim to a
modicum of intelligence and enterprise, the spirit of American
business is a spirit of quietism, caution,