Word has just come of another Dartmouth
man's sacrifice for France. Somewhere in the Argonne, Howard Burchard Lines, member of the American Ambulance Corps, died on Christmas Day of pneumonia, contracted in the performance of his duty. Lines graduated at Dartmouth in the Class of 1912 and from the Harvard Law School three years later. It was immediately upon completion of the law school course that he volunteered for service in France. He stuck to his ambulance work with marvelous tenacity in spite of narrow escapes from death, and of suffering from several severe illnesses occasioned by fatigue and exposure. Twice he was operated on and twice incapacitated by contagious disease. But upon recovery, each time, he insisted upon returning to his duties.
The study of Latin and Greek has been prodded one step nearer the void. In his annual report, recently issued, President Butler of Columbia makes announcement that, henceforth, the college department of the university will offer but one degree, — that of bachelorof arts — for which neither Greek nor Latin will be held a pre-requisite. Forthwith the educational world sits up. Here, indeed, is an important, perhaps an overwhelming, precedent. Does it mean the real beginning of complete disestablishment of the ancient languages in American schools and colleges?
Evidently the thought that this is a consummation devoutly to be feared bulks large in the mind of Columbia's president. Wherefore, if he comes to bury Cæsar, he comes even more to praise. Upon the bier of Greek and Latin he lays a reverent wreath and therewithal delivers a most eloquent eulogium. They who lie prostrate before us were the thought medium of the forefathers of our civilization; and, in so far as our civilization is to think, it needs to know their mode at first hand. Unfortunately, it does not think — much. "Phrase making and vague aspirations for the improvement of other people are unfortunately now supposed to be a satisfactory substitute for an understanding of how civilization came to be what it is." And, further, "when we turn aside from the study of Greek and Latin, we not only give up the study of the embryology of civilization, but we lose the great advantage which follows from intimate association with some of the highest forms of intellectual and aesthetic achievement."
It seems clear, then, that Columbia has no desire to establish a destructive precedent. Indeed, the traditional requirement is abandoned not only with reluctance, but with grief. The necessity for it arises in the demands of the university's graduate departments. These offer virtually every kind of advanced training, appealing to every conceivable type of mind. Hence it is the unavoidable function of the college part of the organization to provide every conceivable type of appropriate preparation. Few can realize the dizzying complexities involved in meeting the requirement. They are, in fact, to be disentangled only by drastic simplification. First comes the abandonment of the confusion of degrees each implying some slight peculiarity of curriculum; and the substitution of a single degree. The unavoidable second step is the elimination of all specific subject requirements for that degree. Thus Greek and Latin are dispensed with not in response to the urgings of educational conviction, but to those, — more imperative — of administrative expediency.
And herein is revealed an unexpected, albeit inherent, weakness in the position of the collegiate attachment to an omniferous university. It becomes, as President) Butler himself puts it, "a vestibule" to the larger establishment, to which in turn all its architectural devices must be subordinated. It is an entrance, not an entity.
Yet there can be no considerable criticism of this for those who like it. Collegiate attachment plus graduate schoolshop, successively operating, probably represents the most prompt and efficient means of turning out professional lawyers, doctors, economists, pedagogs and what not else. There are no waste motions, no superfluities of material stolen from hours spent on topics that "do not function with life" — that is with the profession. It is, or it seems at any rate, thoroughly scientific. Perhaps just here a drawback lies. It may be too scientific. Surely it does not develop the well-furnished wind. The term has connotation if not meaning. There are minds with cold, tile floors, a sanitary base, and steel enameled fittings, — dust proof, germ proof, fire proof. Wonderful minds they are, and useful; no festering sentiment lies hidden in their output. And there are minds with nothing much in them but a roll-top desk and a filing case, and gaunt metal machines that record and tabulate. And they are useful. And there are other minds whose walls reflect the masterpieces of man's handiwork, whose burdened shelves compass the infinitude of man's thought and achievement, whose hospitable spaciousness of warmth and color invites the foregathering of man himself, and directs the forces of his great endeavor.
The figure might be more compelling if our modern educators were) not telling us that a good many minds are originally created with steel fixtures and a sanitary base, — or no base at all; and that it is a grievous waste of time trying to conceal the fact by ardently lugging in a lot of near-oriental rugs and Home Journal old masters.
If they prove right, our whole educational and social structure will, in due course have to undergo a pretty thorough overhauling. We shall be under necessity of finding means for the accurate classification of the tenements which are to be furnished and then persuade a greater degree of specialization on the part of the furnishers. In Utopia this will all be done by the state, through careful processes of mental and emotional measurement undertaken by skilled psychologists as soon as may be after a child is born, and continued to a given age when the child, completely classified and ticketed, will be forced, willy nilly, into that particular institution which is geared to produce most power from the mentality that objective investigation has discovered him to possess. Under this regime, society will stratify according to the nature of employments conditioned by native ability. But the strata will constantly shift their component parts as the vigorous material is forced up from below, and the weak is allowed to sink to the bottom. This, of course, is the natural tendency under existing conditions in a democracy. The process now, however, is both slow and waste ful. An organized Utopia will at all points, — not merely at those of farm and field — accelerate nature's procedure.
But, before Utopia, our endowed colleges might advisedly take counsel as to whether they are on the right track in their determination of end and their selection of means to achieve it. Those untrammeled with university affiliations would, for the most part, agree that they exist to provide the well-furnished mind. That they are fully succeeding not one of them would claim. The rea- son — a reason — may not be far to seek. Without exception the colleges are undertaking their contract not on the basis of the architectural form and frame of the minds which are presented, but on the basis of a hasty review of such scant stage properties as have been placed by previous practitioners. These may be appropriate. Probably they are not; but the colleges proceed on the assumption that they are.
Often, indeed, those minds are most fortunate whose doors and stairways are too narrow to admit the new furbishments, and whose windows will not allow for derricking them through. Such compel an early cancellation of contract, with the chance of more appropriate treatment somewhere and somehow else.
Coming to the matter from the point of view of the possessor of the hypothetical mind, the situation is not much better. He need's a furnisher and decorator. But in the choice of whither for the son and heir the prospectuses are all about the same, and the decision quite likely hangs on intimations of a musical career from recollections of a glee club concert, or on sister's fraternity pin, or on mother's noting of the table manners of undergraduate bodies, or on father's acquaintance at the club.
Really, it all seems like muddling, except that, of course, America doesn't muddle.
THE MAGAZINE surmises that the portal of the temple of fame is fronted with athletic columns.
