PENSIONS AND PROGRESS

Doctor Pritchett's Sixth Annual Report of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which the editor of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE has asked me to summarize briefly, includes the usual annual statistics and a stimulating discussion of two important questions,—the need and moral influence of pension systems for aged servants, and the progress which is being made in American education from a national point of view. Doctor Pritchett's criticisms are keen, unflinching, and not without many flashes of humor. Some of the things he says of other institutions and educators must make presidents and trustees squirm most uncomfortably. But squirming usually leads to reform. For instance, Doctor Flexner reported that Illinois officials were not even enforcing the state laws in regard to entrance conditions to medical schools; the state officials squirmed, but five of the so-called medical schools with which the single city of Chicago was too abundantly blessed soon disappeared below the surface.

In the course of the past year Mr. Carnegie transferred to the Foundation $1,000,000, as the first installment of the extra five million which he offered in 1908. This installment brings the amount of the money actually in the hands of the trustees to something over $12,000,000, with an income during the past year of nearly $600,000. Aside from about $50,000 in salaries, publications, etc., this income was nearly expended in pension allowances to 373 persons, of which 178 were granted for age (i. e., over sixty-five years of age), 104 for service (i. e., over twenty-five -years teaching as professor or thirty years as professor and instructor), 7 for temporary disability (which are not intended to be permanent grants), and 73 for the benefit of widows. The demands upon the funds of the Foundation have grown so rapidly that the Foundation finds itself forced to refuse to make any exceptions to its general rules, even in meritorious cases of great hardship. It has also decided to restrict its grants to promote research. Its high hopes from such grants have not been fulfilled. Human nature being what it. is, experience showed, says Doctor Pritchett, that under the encouragement thus offered a considerable number of teachers who had hitherto done nothing in research suddenly discovered that they had a mission in that direction; some college authorities recommended, as qualified for research, professors whom they had found ineffective as teachers; and even in cases of men genuinely interested in research and prepared to undertake it effectively it is a question whether such subsidizing grants do not weaken the sense of responsibility among the colleges toward research and the undertaking of it.

One of the marked moral awakenings of our time is the increasing recognition of the duty of corporations, and even of governments, to provide for their aged or disabled servants. The German government set the example in 1891 by the introduction of a national insurance system in which the beneficiary is part contributor. Very recently the English government adopted a noncontributory system in which the whole burden is borne by the state and none by the beneficiary. Of the two types of insurance systems, the German contributory and the English non-contributory, the former is less burdensome to the tax-payer, encourages more thrift and appreciation in the beneficiary, and, in spite of legal embarrassments which are more likely to rise under it, "appears to be the type which in the long run is likely to prove the more satisfactory. But to reach any wide number and be effective the contributory system must be also compulsory. For experience has shown that persons do not largely take advantage of a voluntary contributory system of insurance; and this is especially true of improvident persons who are precisely the ones who need it most for themselves and their families. Persons like college professors, who are usually tolerably provident and protect themselves with some private insurance, and who are of a more than ordinarily independent and individualistic type of mind, would probably resent any compulsory contributory scheme: It is fortunate therefore that the Carnegie pension system is voluntary and non-contributory. It comes to the poor college professor as a boon, lessening the burden of private insurance.

Doctor Pritchett brushes aside with brief argument the economic objections to pensions in general that they depress wages, and the moral objection that they undermine the sturdy virtues of individual independence and thrift. We are inclined to agree with him that these objections are not serious; that the prospect of a serene and secure old age afforded by a pension is neither humiliating nor demoralizing to men of high intellectual training. Any such injurious effects are more than overbalanced by the good effects, particularly in the case of teachers whose labor is partly of a creative nature and upon subjects of no immediate personal benefit. Anxiety and apprehension as to the future are the most deadly foes not only to mental exertion, but to the higher intellectual qualities of imagination and invention. Profitable study and cheerful performance of mental drudgery are aided, not by perplexity, but by serenity of mind.

Doctor Pritchett thinks that the colleges, in failing to lead the way in this modern social movement of making provision for aged and infirm employees, have failed in the ethical leadership which might have been expected of them. He urges trustees of colleges to take steps in this direction now, warning them that it is a great mistake to be under the impression that the creation of the Carnegie Foundation has lifted from their shoulders all obligations to care for those aged and faithful professors who have borne the burden and heat of the long day. The very opposite is the fact. The Foundation has sought to arouse and spread an appreciation of the obligation of colleges in this matter, but it can itself never provide retiring allowances for more than a small fraction of the college teachers in America. A practical hint is suggested by the new rule of the Foundation,' allowing it to continue to a professor in an accepted institution, after he attains the age of sixty-five, a retiring allowance previously paid to him by his institution after the completion of twenty-five years' of service as a professor, or after thirty years of service as a professor and as an instructor. This new rule will enable a college to retire a teacher a year or two earlier than the minimum age limit, in case the college and the teacher desire such action.

The last half of Doctor Pritchett's report is a review of the haphazard, uncontrolled and competing manner in which American colleges and universities have grown into being. He contrasts them with the state-regulated and more or less national universities of Germany. We have had no national legislation upon education, except the Morrill Act making a somewhat accidental and careless appropriation for state agricultural schools, and the act establishing a rather impotent federal commissioner of education. We have, he thinks, no national feeling with regard to education, and not even much loyalty to higher education in itself. Instead of loyalty to national ideals in education our loyalty is to a particular institution whose success is too often measured by its bigness of growth or its athletic achievement. Loyalty in America is intensely local and personal; such loyalty may be a splendid thing, but for it we have sacrificed many advantages that a national system of education in Germany has secured.

Space does not permit of even the briefest summary of Doctor Pritchett's interesting statistical survey showing the excessive number and infinite variety of the educational institutions and methods in the different states and even in a dozen different parts of the same state. Among the evils which arise in part from our lack of national control and national ideals in education, he names the excessive number of our institutions, the low scholarship standards of a great many of them, their foolish competition with each other for numbers, and their failure to secure a good articulation with the secondary schools. But in all these matters he notes a decided improvement during the last ten years. The number of medical schools, for instance, has been reduced from 160 in 1905 to 120 at present. Though he refrains with proper modesty from saying so, there can be no doubt that the credit for much of this improvement is due to the activity and influence of the Carnegie Foundation. Its influence may have been unfortunate in forcing some institutions to yield up some of their individuality and independence, but this is slight when compared with the tremendous good for the country as a whole which it has accomplished through its fearless and unprejudiced exposure of existing evils and its forceful suggestion for improvements. It is filling, in some part, the functions of a national bureau of education.