PROBLEMS IN EDUCATION AT DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

An address by President Hopkins to the Amherst Alumni Council,November 6, 1925.

At the outset I crave the privilege of making statement of my appreciation of the honor of the invitation which has been extended to me to meet with you in this conference. I prize the opportunity of discussing here the attributes of the American college. In doing so, however, I wish to add that the subject assigned to me is not of my choosing, and nothing but the arguments of your persuasive Secretary made me willing to agree to it.

Still, titles are not over important and I have been willing to yield this point, in view of the fact that the title will have only minor influence on what I am about to say.

Years ago a greatly respected teacher of English used to correct my themes and to charge me not to use dashes or blanks in my writing, but to give people and places actual names if I wished my narratives to have any semblance of interest. Presumably, the principle applies to a talk of this kind.

To refer to "blank" college or to College "X" might seem supposititious. To talk about Amherst would be presumptuous; to talk about Dartmouth at least has the merit of seeming to discuss that about which I should know something, whatever the limitations of my knowledge even in regard to this.

Yet, I would be false to the spirit of my associates cooperatively striving for the welfare of the college with which I am connected if I did not bespeak the humility we feel for the opportunities we have not realized and for the visions we have not had. This being understood, I will endeavor to interpret the kind of thinking from which I believe the educational policy of Dartmouth College at the present time is derived to some extent, and if my interpretation proves to be at fault, the fault is mine and not that of the able men with whom I work in daily companionship.

College policy is almost as elusive when one tries to find its substance, as is the public sentiment which Mr. Lippmann discusses so lucidly in his recent book, "The Phantom Public." So-called educational policy at Dartmouth, at Amherst, or elsewhere is a resultant from forces exerted by varied and varying groups, among which faculties, trustees, administrations, undergraduates and alumni do not at all comprise the entire list. If the college existed alone for any one of these groups, the fact cited of these influences might be a grave misfortune, but conditions being as they are, it is well for us to be philosophical in regard to the checks and balances which govern educational policy. Indeed, if the experience of thankfulness be as familiar to others as it is to myself, as I view in retrospect sundry courses of events which I have not been able to alter, any influential group within the college constituency may rejoice at its own lack of omnipotence, unless, perchance, there be a group persuaded of its own omniscience.

Something more than a decade ago I sat at dinner in a Chicago hotel with a group of men discussing college affairs. There came to the table that master columnist, the witty B.L.T. Immediately, he began to rally his friends upon their college loyalties. "Of what use is a college education, anyway," he said, and after a pause added, "I think I have discovered. It .is much like the possession of a dress suit. Being attired in one does not amount to much except that it keeps you from hanging around the livery stable."

Thus, I suspect, many think of the college purely in terms of negative virtues. I will only pause to argue that even this attribute, if rightly ascribed, is not a vice. It has its value in a time when the odoriferous heap behind the stable and its surrounding slime and stagnant scum so often is enshrined in literature and on the stage as being more real than the adjoining meadows, the singing brooks and the purple hills which stretch beyond. I have no liking for the mincing niceties and the pharisaical affectations of the Victorian age, but I like as little the assumption that nothing pleasant is real. If the influence of the college leads away from the world's back yard it has not lived in vain. lam therefore not prepared to consider the enforced absence from the livery stable as being a total loss in values, if proof shall be adduced that Mr. Taylor's appraisal was correct.

But the call of the college of today, if rightly understood, is not simply a warning to beware of the depths. It is definitely a call to the heights whereon men may first see the light of the coming day and whence they may reflect this in the r faces and their deeds. The college of today leads into life and not away from it.

The kind of contribution useful to one period would* be sheer waste, oftentimes, in another. For instance, Simon Stylites, living his life apart on the top of a lofty pedestal, stretching his arms at morning toward the rising sun and at evening toward the west as the sun went down, was one of the exemplifications of the working of the Mediaeval mind. So he spent his decades in contemplation and adoration. Finally the day arrived when, at morning, he did not rise, when no line was let down by which lift his basket of food, and when, at night, the vultures circled overhead, and he was deemed to have completed an admirable and a useful life. Such a life, valuable to its period, would, m other periods, be futile.

The college of today must be of the life of the time and not apart from it. Meanwhile, with no clear knowledge of how the needs of the time may best be served, civilization will most be aided by the effort on the part of the respective colleges each to develop its own theory and each to devise its own working hypothesis.

One of the most desirable features of higher education in America is its freedom from standardization. Thus we have universities which have evolved from colleges and colleges which have developed within universities. We have institutes of technology and colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts. We have colleges and universities supported and controlled by the states and we have institutions of the same designation in name, but very different qualities in fact, supported by private endowment and under private control.

All contribute to the improvement and to the advantage df society, each is the outgrowth of special conditions and specific theories of how the needs of particular times might best be met. Each in its own way undertakes to modify its processes and to utilize its resources in conformity with changing requirements and changing opportunities of a world undergoing continuous and frequently rapid transformation.

Whatever else we do, consequently, let us not forego respect for the purposes and methods of others. As definitely let us not be unduly influenced by others to the loss of our own individualities. Not only is it not poss'ble, but it is not desirable, that the University of California should be like Columbia, or that the University of Chicago should be like Harvard, or that the University of Virginia should be like Amherst, or that Dartmouth should be like Cornell. In institutions of higher education, as elsewhere, it is vital that

"Each in his separate star Shall paint the thing as he sees it For the God of things as they are."

Obviously, in adopting the policy of ''live and let live," there is no requirement that we forego preserving our own lives, nor indeed that, in letting live, we ourselves accept translation to some other sphere. I wish, therefore, thus early in this discussion to assert the dignity, the worth and the need to the American commonwealth of that kind of institution of higher learning which is known as the liberal college, and in much the form which natural evolution has given it.

Incidentally, with all due admiration and respect for the work of colleges of other sorts, I wish to emphasize my belief in the value of the existence of the self-contained, separate unit college under control specifically interested in the college, such as Amherst or Dartmouth. Herein the needs of American youth of undergraduate age are a primary consideration. Such colleges are not only valuable to society, but likewise they are indispensable to any system of education wherein sense of the unity of knowledge is to be emphasized and wherein understanding of the scope of life, its atmosphere and its background, are to be held of equal importance to specialized study with its tendency towards the bulk-heading of facts into idea-tight compartments.

Furthermore, let us not ignore another vital thing. The present day situation of the college is a hazardous one. Too little has been said about this. With the rise of the great universities, the building up of the graduate schools and the professional schools, the college has become the Cinderella among its sisters in the family of higher learning, and left to their tender mercies would be given short shift but for the presence of the legendary prince in person of the American public.

If this statement seems extreme I refer you to the Treasurer's reports of mixed institutions of colleges and graduate schools for which great drives have been made. Or I suggest a study of apportionment of unassigned funds received as gifts in any specific year, as between graduate and undergraduate work. Or I commend to your attention the superiority complex which afflicts most of the men of graduate school posilions, though there are notable exceptions, in their attitudes toward men who work exclusively among undergraduates.

That transformation which could not be made in the college from the outside may conceivably be made in the course of time from the inside if the colleges fall under the necessity of being more largely manned by instructors narrowed in interest by the graduate schools, by men who have not yet seen the vision of the college and who underestimate the social significance of good teaching. These of necessity have been brought into college faculties in increasing proportions during the rapid growth of colleges in recent years. Herein the college suffers in that the only accepted method of training college teachers unfits them to considerable degree for interest in, apprec'ation of, or contribution to the college until the effect of the graduate school has worn off and the ideals of professionalized scholarship requisite for the teacher have been transmuted into ideals of amateur scholarship requisite for the citizen. I would beg you not to misconstrue my attitude. It is not an undervaluation of research for the teacher. It is a question in regard to the value of research as a substitute for teaching, in the college teacher.

A brilliant young instructor in Dartmouth was warned, within a year, by the men of the school in which he had done his graduate work, that he had best change his ways: "For," they 'said, "you have made your courses interesting and have become popular, both of which are detrimental to your standing scholastically. Avoid giving any cause to be considered a good teacher of undergrade uates if you wish to maintain standing as a scholar."

The rise of the junior colleges, the planned elimination of the first two years of college work and the taking over o*f two years of graduate work at one eastern university and the proposal for like moves elsewhere, the encroachments of the professional courses, notably the medical, upon the preserves of undergraduate work,—all alike are indicative of the thinking which sees no virtue in the college, and may even become antagonistic to it.

My belief grows stronger as I study and gain fuller acquaintanceship with the college problem that we who are interested in the development of educational policy in the college are mistaken in apologizing for or regretting certain aspects typical of our work and inseparable from it. Rather it seems to me that we should accept these as offering us opportunities that would otherwise be lacking.

It is not necessary for us to question the validity of the claims as to what might be accomplished in research if more men went into graduate work to argue that great good accrues to soc:ety from the existence of the college in its present form,—a good which could not be duplicated if such changes as those advocated were adopted and the college were squeezed out from between the preparatory school and the graduate school.

It is to be recognized, however, that those who have rendered great service to the world of education by carrying through the development of great universities, or by carrying through to new accomplishment work within graduate schools, naturally tend to forget the values, or at least too much to subordinate them, which attach to the English and American colleges. Rightly interpreted as emphasis upon the need of more scholars of advanced accomplishment, there is no contradicting such a statement as that made by Sir Ernest Rutherford in pleading that Oxford and Cambridge drop undergraduate work and make themselves purely graduate schools. He says, "I appeal to the heads of our Universities to take care that they are riot diverted by the magnitude of the undergraduate body, but see plainly that the future of the Universities and the reputation of the countries to which they belong, will ultimately depend to a large extent on the development of Post-Graduate training."

In like way, rightly understood, objection ought not to be made to the view of that great pioneer in the creation of American university values, President Eliot, when he says, "Nevertheless, to this day there are many Harvard Bachelors of Arts who hold that graduates of Harvard professional schools cannot be considered to be genuine sons of Harvard, and do not yet see that the service Harvard University renders to the country through its graduate professional schools is greater than that it renders through Harvard College proper. A Harvard tradition that is still an obstacle to progress!"

Again, as bearing upon distinction among colleges, I quote from Professor Seligman's address at Columbia delivered in 1916 on "The Real University." "The internal perils I should characterize as the college and the professional school. The college is indeed a part of the university, but only in the sense of being a threshold to the university."

It is commonly agreed that there is truth in the saying that God helps those who help themselves. May it not be argued then that for the sake of balance in our educational system the selfcontained individual unit college needs to be much more assertive in regard to its rights and prerogatives than has been its custom and that it needs to acquire a militant sense of self-respect which shall make it both feel and declare the dignity of its function as compared with any other kind of institution, whether graduate school, professional school or any other ?

In the last half cetatury the college has ceased to be what it had largely become,—merely a link between the preparatory school and the graduate school. It has become the last step in formal education for the majority of the men enrolled within it. The significance of this fact to society ought not to be overlooked nor ought the opportunity which this offers to the college to be undervalued.

Moreover, even assuming, if one wishes it to be assumed, that with all of the increased enrollment in the American colleges no greater number of outstanding leaders are being developed than heretofore, is this a fatal indictment from the point of view of society at large? The new leadership of the world is not mastery so much as influence and oftentimes the public symbol is neither the source of this influence nor its sustaining power.

If, in our assumption about the American college, we may justifiably assume that it makes for a more intelligent discrimination among the public as to what influences and what tendencies shall be given right of way in public affairs, as to what ideals shall govern personal conduct, and as to what satisfaction shall be sought by the individual, are these alone not enough to give high distinction to the colllege and its accomplishments?

Man is not a disembodied intellect and is not likely to become so. lam not even willing to grant that it would be desirable for hm to become so, were it possible. He is influenced by heredity and environment. He is susceptible to subconscious impulses about which we know little. He is subject to stimuli from within and without of whose origin we know nothing.

If complete and unadulterated rationalization be the chief end of education we have been given to play upon instruments too imperfect to sound our notes. If it be not the chief end, then not all schools of higher learning ought to sacrifice all concern or all responsibility save for the development of the intellect.

I recognize the dangers of being misunderstood in expressing such a view. May I then say I have no desire to see scholarly interest and intellectual effort in our colleges considered as of anything except major importance. But along with this I do desire to have frank recognition of the fact that we are dealing with human beings who are composites of spiritual aspirations, emotional complexes, and human passions, the disregard of which is at best foolish and at worst dangerous.

The development of manhood as a legitimate and needful function of the college is not merely a phrase. Thus while we recognize that the intellect is the most vitally distinguishing mark of man let us not think it to be all of man! Neither let us assume that we can take boys at the height of the moral, emotional and physical melee which characterizes the latter days of adolescence and safely disregard all but their mental development. Or at least, if we insist on doing this, let us not do it in any spirit of self-complacency as regards our own intelligence.

When men first began in great numbers to seek the instruction and inspiration to be derived from the great teachers at the beginning of the middle ages they were not freed from the necessities of eating, drinking or being clothed. They were not freed from the necessities of the give and take in personal relations which are necessary in any group living together. Nor were they de-humanized as to appetites or passions, the control of which is the first step in developing true manhood. Hence began and has continued to this day the development of the college as a community alongside of and intertwined with its development as an agency for cultivating the individual mind. Traditionally one process is as old as the other.

This community aspect of life within the American college, never unimportant, assumes increased importance in these days of tendency towards collapse of the American home. Not only in the divorce courts and at the country clubs is this tendency seen, but in the rapidly developing shift in our status from a rural to an urban population, in the changed conditions which distinguish the city apartment from the village residence, and in the decentralization of interests from the family circle to the multiform activities which lie far outside this,—and which differ vitally in the nature of their appeal.

All of these changes are natural and all are easily explained, but likewise all of them are existent. Out of them arise new importance and new responsibilities in the community life which attaches to the American college. This responsibility which, in higher education, has been accepted to any degree by the college alone cannot be ignored and ought not to be slighted. In a world where associationalism is becoming increasingly important and where men daily have to adjust themselves to living and working in conjunction with others, the curriculum process can do nothing except to teach the basic theories of how men may best live together. This practice, confined to the student community, deserves far more consideration and more definite recognition than has ever been given to it.

Sense of such indispensable attributes as the will for cooperation, and forgetfulness of self for advantage of the group, are inculcated largely in the community life of the colleges and very little elsewhere. It behooves us, therefore, to ascribe positive value to that form of institution in the field of higher education which includes this phase of interest and not to commiserate the college because this matter is included in its responsibilities. In human beings living in and influenced by such environments, consciously or unconsciously adapting themselves to them, the values of stimulated intellects will be doubly effective in years of later life as occasion arises for applying these to men's relations with each other.

Still, I repeat, in making such a statement let us not fall into error and forget that the primary functions of the college are to stir imagination, to enhance the inclination to think, to impart knowledge which offers standards by which judgment may measure worth and to make mental processes subject to self-disci-pline. With what, for instance, then should educational policy concern itself to secure these results? How can these be influenced except within the curriculum.

It is always easier and generally safer to hold to an enunciation of general principles than to advocate the mechanistic processes by which it is hoped these may be attained. Socrates' resentment against the invention of the alphabet finds company in many a modern objection to the importance attached in the modern college to the conventional devices by which it seeks to transmit the educational impulse to undergraduates.

Nevertheless, the necessary existence of the community factor in college life requires organization without as well as within the curriculum life of the college. To what extent, then, can the organization of the college outside the curriculum enhance its potentiality as an educational factor in modern life?

In answer to this query as an example I would mention a device which is not at all exclusively ours at Dartmouth, but which, I think, has had a subtle and advantageous influence upon all our educational processes, namely, the open forum.

Encouraged by the college and subsidized as supplementary to the curriculum, as well as oftentimes bridging the voids between instruction in different departments, to this forum have been brought first those speakers from outside whom the undergraduates wished to hear, rather than those whom either the administration, the faculty, or the trustees would have chosen for them to hear.

In view of the wide discussion of this policy and the private agitation against Dartmouth which for a time prevailed and is not yet quiescent, I welcome the opportunity to make statement of my personal theory on this point.

The former custom at Dartmouth was for the President's Office to take the funds available for outside "lecturers," to select the speakers and to offer these to the undergraduate body. This was done with no ulterior motive but simply conformed to precedent, the value of which had never been examined. Apparently no occasion had arisen to doubt the advisability of the custom.

After consultation with the Trustees, we experimentally adopted a new procedure that we would apportion our moneys available to the undergraduate organizations, such as the Round Table, the Arts, and others, as well as to the various departments of instruction, and that, supplementing their funds, we would also make available auditoriums for speakers whom they might choose.

I should freely admit that if Dartmouth were a training school, trying to discipline men into an acceptance of the theory that all present-day procedures were permanently desirable and for the advantage of group welfare, the college ought definitely to assume responsibility not only for what should be taught in every course, but what should be said by every member of the faculty, and what men should be allowed to speak before the student body even on invitation of independent undergraduate organizations.

Believing definitely, however, that the function of an educational institution is to allow men access to different points of view, and to secure their adherence to conclusions on the basis off their own thinking rather than to attempt to corral them within given mental areas, I was bound to hold to the theory that freedom of speech and even the presenting of pernicious doctrine was not antagonistic to the college purpose so long as like access was not denied to the student to other points of view, and so long as stimulation was given to his mind to weigh conflicting data for himself. However, 1 believed that as a matter of practice, entirely aside from the theory which I have enunciated, repression and censorship never work within an intellectually alert group of boys such as constitute the college.

I could name a considerable number of cases of various types of men, prohibition of whose appearance in college halls has given the apparent value of their contentions such inflated worth that undergraduate bodies have to an almost hundred per cent degree attended open air meetings or scheduled meetings in neighboring communities. The whole theory of allowing complete freedom of speech, and the use of the college plant for meetings of this sort chanced in my case to be based on conviction in regard to the matter and on a sincere belief that freedom of thought is practically impossible if freedom of speech is denied, and that therefore without freedom of speech, education is impossible. However, if I had no conviction on the subject, I should be perfectly willing to argue the matter on the basis of expediency, and I am certain that we should arrive at the same conclusion.

My opinions on these matters were formed far outside academic halls. During the years when I was in industrial work I saw in Chicago, in Pittsburg, in Philadelphia, and in other cities, the gates of industrial plants opening at night to boys and young men, swarming out to listen to the earnest presentation of all sorts of wild social theories. I attended workingmen's clubs in the evenings, in which I heard earnest discussion of the same points of view. In saloons, Y. M. C. A's. and various homes of organizations, I have seen uneducated and untrained minds striving to grope their way through the maze of fallacies and partisan statements with which they were coming into contact day after day in private discussion, even more completely than in public speech.

It seemed to me not extreme to call a situation a tragic circumstance in which thousands of the youth who had not gone to college, had, through fuller knowledge of various contentions and longer consideration of these, acquired a mental lead which made the college men of like age who ought to have been their intellectual superiors, actually inferior and weak when it came to the discussion of these questions. The college men, just out of the various institutions of learning, had no knowledge of widely discussed arguments and social theories on which thousands of these boys and young men had whetted their minds for years. The net result of this condition was not that the college men became any factor or any leavening influence towards conservation oif the situation, but the real result as a matter of fact, was that the college man, coming newly from the institutions of learning into the industrial field, fell rather more easily and more quickly subject to fallacy than did his companions without college education. Also, college men, at least for a time, proved far less keen in distinguishing obvious truth from conspicuous error.

It has not infrequently been stated that the progress of the world is dependent upon men who are capable of seeing familiar things with a detachment which reveals unfamiliar features. Our educational policy at Dartmouth is based upon an attempt to live up to this theory. Our curriculum method is designed to be a policy of continuously asking "Why ?"

The value to the individual of a belief which he cannot defend is small and its potentiality for harm to the progress of society is large. Preconceived opinions, conventions and customs, habits of thought, and motives for action are either right or wrong. If right they should have something more than perfunctory support from the individual. If wrong they should be displaced.

To that end we are striving to modify our method of instruction away from categorical assertions as to what truth is and towards assistance to the individual to help him to learn how truth may best be sought. We deliberately aim to challenge belief. We provide courses in our freshman year as mind-stretchers designedly beyond the capacity of the average freshman mentality fully to comprehend. We believe as Dean Hawkes has so aptly said, that because a course would be a better course for seniors does not deny it value as a course for freshmen.

I should like to speak at length in regard to processes of selection of an undergraduate body, of the gain that has come to us by the faculty action organizing departments of instruction as committees with rotating chairmanships and of our expectations as to the benefits of our new curriculum, but time does not allow.

After all, the spirit which animates a body is the vital thing. If this be eager and alert, unselfish and intelligent, tolerant and cooperative, any mechanism which it dominates will seem good

We have been blessed at Dartmouth by the service of a devoted band of men in our Faculty to whom these qualities can be ascribed and through whom in considerable measure transmission of like attitudes of mind has been made to some undergraduates. From our Faculty as a whole the motto might have emanated which Theodore Parker adopted as his, "Truth for authority, not authority for Truth." This is the spirit of our educational policy as interpreted by the Faculty and by them made operative in the large.

Contrasting his own times with earlier times when the late descendant was occupied in treading into paths the footprints of his distant ancestors, Froude says, "So absolutely has change become the law of our present condition, that it is identified with energy and moral health; to cease to change is to lose place in the great race; and to pass away from off the earth with the same convictions which we found when we entered it, is to have missed the best object for which we now seem to exist."

May no man of Amherst, of Dartmouth, or of any other college in the land ever have reason to blame his college for encouragement to or acceptance of a mental attitude which in our rapidly changing world holds to frozen opinions. May no man in any college have ultimate cause to blame his college for his having missed "the best object for which we seem to exist."

The Main Stairway in Parkhurst Hall