AN ARISTOCRACY OF BRAINS

Address at the Opening of Dartmouth College September 21, 1922.

The opening of the college year, with its attendant assembling of upper class men for the continuation of their courses and the incoming of hundreds of men, new to college environment and to college work, is fitting time for recapitulation and reiteration of the college purpose.

For the individual undergraduate the question of self-determination begins at this period to assume greatly increased importance, both because of the stage of his advance towards maturity and because of the particular conditions of college life, wherein the responsibility is constantly thrust upon him for making decisions. Many of these decisions, under superficial guise of merely temporary consequence, as a matter of fact are destined to be significant to all subsequent phases of his life.

It is at this point, perhaps, that the college fails most definitely. It has not found any sufficient way to make evident to its men the enduring influence upon later career of even minor details of daily life through their influence in forming habit. It does not carry conviction to undergraduates in emphasizing the importance of cultivating those qualities which make for self-directed lives of purpose and strength, rather than of allowing those habits of inertia and indifference to become fastened upon us, which merely in being tolerated become more fixed each day.

It is at this point, likewise, that the undergraduate remains most oblivious of his own best interests. The processes helpful to acquiring mental strength and moral fortitude are at least as important and as rigorous as those required for gaining muscular strength and physical resistance. Nevertheless, it is to be doubted if the coaches and trainers of our athletic teams would be willing to trust solely to suddenly acquired desire to compete or to a sudden burst of enthusiasm on the part of individual men as justification for relying upon them in intercollegiate contests. And yet, the intelligence, the endurance, the consciousness of power, and the will to do, required in even the greatest of athletic contests do not exceed what is daily and hourly required of the man who goes forth from the college to compete with adverse circumstance in the struggle to make his life of consequence, useful to society, and satisfying to his own aspirations.

Shall we not then keep in mind the reason for our undertaking the course upon which today we set out and shall we not preserve or cultivate respect for the proved canons of training!

The great question in college life is at what point we are going to apply ourselves and the degree of devotion with which we are willing to commit ourselves to the different interests which will attract our attention. There is on the boards in London at the present time a play written by Mr. Galsworthy entitled, "Loyalties," which, night after night, draws capacity houses. It presents for consideration, in form of the drama, the confusion worked in the human mind by the cross purposes of conflicting loyalties of various sorts, respectively stimulated or repressed by such factors as instinct, desire, racial prejudice, class feeling, professional caste, family ties, or interest in abstract justice.

There is no greater problem in life than that of the authenticity of the ideas which we hold or of those which we are disposed to accept as our own. There is no greater necessity upon the College than that it shall proclaim the existence of this problem to the individual man within its halls, that he may be impelled to seek knowledge and command of mental processes wherewith to define for himself the desirable loyalties and that he may be influenced to cultivate the will to pledge himself and all his works wholeheartedly to these.

The college cannot do this for him. All that the college can do is to maintain an atmosphere or to create an influence which will be helpful to such ends for those men who seek to establish contact with the real purpose of the college. It can neither be emphasized too strongly nor too frequently that a college course does not of itself necessarily do away with ignorance, eliminate bigotry, or diminish partisanship, even in the case of many a man who seemingly fulfils all the requirements of the college. The most that can justifiably be claimed is that the college processes, rightly accepted and properly utilized, make it somewhat more feasible for the individual man to do these things intelligently for himself than would be the case otherwise.

Incidentally, it may be observed that within the college life itself, here and now, there are the calls of conflicting loyalties, none unworthy in themselves, but each susceptible to appraisal as to its relative worth in relation to the others. To men genuinely bewildered among these, this assurance can be held out,—that the self-discipline of serious effort to decide intelligently which of the loyalties are of major importance and which are of minor will probably be as helpful to their own development as any work undertaken within the college course.

For the fullest possible common understanding, and the earliest, a few principles applying to our mutual relationship may well be stated at this juncture. These principles are involved particularly at Dartmouth in such policies as the restriction of enrollment, the selective process of admission, and the permanent elimination from the college membership of men incompetent or unwilling to qualify according to the standards which the college seeks to maintain.

Too many men are going to college! The opportunities for securing an education byway of the college course are definitely a privilege and not at all a universal right. The funds available for appropriation to the uses of institutions of higher learning are not limitless and can not be made so, whether their origin be sought in the resources of public taxation or in the securable benefactions for the enhancing of private endowments. It consequently becomes essential that a working theory be sought that will operate with some degree of accuracy to define the individuals who shall make up the group to whom, in justice to the public good, the privilege shall be extended, and to specify those from whom the privilege should be withheld!

This is a two-fold necessity: on the one hand that men incapable of profiting by the advantages which the college offers, or indisposed, shall not be withdrawn from useful work to spend their time profitlessly, in idleness acquiring false standards of living; and on the other hand that the contribution which the college is capable of making to the lives of competent men and through them to society shall not be too largely lessened by the slackening of pace due to the presence of men indifferent or wanting in capacity.

We hear much of men seeking an education but too often they are only seeking membership in a social organization which has reputation for affording an education, from which reputation they expect to benefit, if they can avoid being detached from the association. The assumption would be humorous if it were not so serious, that enrollment with a college requires that the college shall either force education upon the individual man or surreptitiously bait him to it, rather than that he should crave and at the cost of any effort possess himelf of the utmost which the college can give.

It would be incompatible with all of the conceptions of democracy to assume that the privilege of higher education should be restricted to any class defined by the accident of birth or by the fortuitous circumstance of possession of wealth, but there is such a thing as an aristocracy of brains, made up of men intellectually alert and intellectually eager, to whom increasingly the opportunities of higher education ought to be restricted, if democracy is to become a quality product rather than simply a quantity one, and if excellence and effectiveness are to displace the mediocrity towards which democracy has such a tendency to skid.

I wish carefully to safeguard these statements, however, by iteration and reiteration that it behooves all of us to avoid confusing the symbols and the facts of intellectuality and I should hope that under any circumstances we might avoid confusing mental gymnastics and facility in appropriating the ideas of others with genuine thinking. Unfortunately intellectual hypocrisy and its complement, intellectual smugness, are not sufficiently infrequent even within college halls, while at the same time I believe that on the whole they are as much to be avoided and that they are as detrimental to the spirit of true scholarship as is ignorance.

In the last analysis, the stimulation in the individual man of his ability to think and the willingess to follow the logic of his carefully considered thought through to conviction is the desirable ambition for the college. This presupposes the acquisition of certain fundamental knowledge, the mastery of the technique of finding new knowledge when needed, acquaintanceship with the method of gaining access to original sources, a disposition to seek all facts and to sort these according to relative importance before accepting conclusions, and finally an open-minded tolerance for new facts if they shall appear and be proved valid, even though they attack conclusions already formed.

This all is simply another way of saying that the college ambition is that its men may be consecrated to the spirit of truth. Such is the essential loyalty. It is, moreover, at this time especially necessary to repeat the statement, for there never was a harder time to know where truth may be found than now, and we have nothing to designate the approach to it except the finely attuned and rigidly disciplined processes of the human mind.

The two great conflicting forces of the world at the present time are the spirit of truth and the spirit of propaganda, the former of which leads towards the light and to ultimate peace and happiness for mankind and the latter of which is not only the father of lies but a whole ancestral tree, ultimately making for confusion and distress. Many of us thought we were to have been done with any necessity for thinking of or discussing propaganda, once the war should have been ended, but instead we find ourselves confronted with the definite possibility that what was reluctantly accepted as a war necessity will be imposed upon us in larger dimensions and with greater thoroughness than ever before as a working procedure of daily life, despite its tendency to shrink minds and to soil souls in the muddied waters of things that are not so. Given the necessity for accepting the evils of war to avoid other evils even greater, I do not feel qualified to state the extent to which squeamishness can be expected to affect its conduct, but I assume that in the minds of thinking men there is agreement that in a world seeking a basis of cooperation rather than of conflict, the prevalent war-time practice of distorting truth and of clothing plausible falsehood with respectability should not prevail,—and yet it does prevail!

As a tangible and practical objective, college men could commit themselves to no purpose more in accord with the spirit of the foundation by which they seek to benefit than the early and utter elimination of the spirit of propaganda in the affairs of this world, and in the discussion of those of the next. There could be no more genuine consecration to the principle of the search for truth than in militant opposition to and repudiation of this spirit, whether it emanate from the manufacturer's association, the offices of organized labor, the editor's column, the preacher's pulpit, or the college officer's desk. The principle and the method are invariably wrong, however worthy be the motive.

In course of time I hope that some thinker will write a serious dissertation on the subject of labels as related to truth and propaganda. Unfortunately labels do not always accurately designate the goods. The buyer returning from Paris with a few Parisian hats but with a quantity of Parisian labels to be affixed to creations of domestic manufacture may do no great injury to the purchasers of his goods but he certainly will never advance the science of honest merchandising. The duty-dodger who sits on the edge of his berth industriously tearingout from his clothes the firm name of his English tailors and replacing them with labels forehandedly provided, bearing the name of his home town suitmaker, may not greatly damage society but he definitely damages his own capacity to be useful to society when he perjures himself to the government inspector. When we, however, somewhat less consciously disregard the true labels to be affixed to men or causes and, without care in ascertaining the facts, tag them with labels which designate them to be what we wish them to be thought to be, we destroy the essential evidence in regard to their true characteristics and make accurate designation impossible, and thus make unobtainable all thought or action dependent upon accurate knowledge.

We have all seen the effects of this on individuals. To the latent unpopularity of a clubmate, or- it may be a popularity so great as to arouse envy, there is attached, through irresponsibility or malice, the whispered implication of some disapproved action. It is immediately assumed that he is not of our kind. It begins to seem that he might be of the kind that he is accused of being, and of a sudden all which has been suggested becomes accepted as fact. The label is affixed and the man is outlawed.

Or again, to the lurking fear that some new movement will disturb the existing order and thus create personal complications for us, is added the suggestion that certain individual crimes of violence, increasingly prevalent, had their origin and instigation within the disliked movement. Immediately there is almost inevitable disposition to assume these things to be fact. We detest and fear the type of crime and we dislike and distrust people who think thus unorthodoxly. What more reasonable than that the two are associated! And immediately, without mental effort and almost without consciousness there is affixed to a group the label which signifies a condition which may or may not be true,— but the group is damned with the crimes ascribed to it by the suggestion of a label.

There would be less point to bringing any such comment as this before an undergraduate audience if judgments of men and policies in undergraduate life were not so frequently derived and held by responsible men on the basis of like labels affixed by other men irresponsible and for reasons insufficient. I am not going into this at length. You men of the college know the facts and can discuss the question as intelligently as can any one. I would simply inquire, as bearing upon any argument, to what extent among us merited and desirable confidence can be destroyed and real worth can be obscured by malevolence, irresponsibility, or carelessness in such cases as affixing the label "yellow" to an athlete, "weir" to a scholar, or "high-brow" to a policy.

If, among a carefully selected group of men, living in a presumably intellectual environment and with unusual freedom of contact with advantageous opportunities, we cannot free ourselves from the curse of judgment by label, then the hope is slim indeed that truth shall be sought and real values shall be conceded to men and policies in the world at large.

I advert once more to the statement which I have made heretofore that a standardized group is a mediocre group and that a conventionalized civilization is a dying civilizaton. The principles behind these statements are operative in college life as definitely as anywhere else.

The only standardization that I would willingly tolerate for the men of this college would be an imprint that marked them as men craving the mental abilities and the qualities of the soul to know the truth, and as possessing the stamina and constructive force to do it. Even then, with men's attributes as different as they are and with the realization of purpose as distant as it will always be, liberty must be conceded to the individual to choose his own path of approach to the far off goal.

It is undoubtedly a fact that the hopes of the world are centered now as never before so strongly in the youth of the world. Men trained in old schools of thought and worn by the mental and spiritual struggle of adapting these to new conditions seek relief from further responsibility. Men discouraged either by the inertia in their own ranks or by what seems to them lack of stability in the oncoming generation seek a basis of assurance in regard to the future. Men to whom the past is a sacred thing and to whom its experiences are precious treasure to be transmitted in trust to successors who will cherish and protect these, jostle elbows in our crowded world with those who believe tradition and precedent to be a ball and chain hindering progress, and each seeks a generation which will do its respective will.

It is at such a time, while the forces at the front in anxiety await the men of your generation, that you enter the training camp behind the lines to equip yourselves to take their places. Or, as understudies you stand in the wings while the tired principals play their parts. Are there, within your ranks, the qualities of earnestness, intelligence, goodness and forcefulness to justify the confidence which the world wishes to repose in you?

The answer cannot now be made, but in distant years when judgment is entered may it not only be found that the generation of which you are a part understood and met its responsibilities but also that specifically the promise of this fine group here gathered and the aspiration of this north country college were realized and that herein essential virtue was found and carried forth to dwell among men.