Editorial Comment

The Future Task

At the present time Dartmouth College is spending nearly $800,000 a year for salaries in the department of instruction as against $250,000 ten years ago. This means that it has kept to a fairly well marked program for improving the condition of its staff of teachers, as laid down by the Trustees some years ago, and that instead of the old figures, which gave mature professors only $3200 a' year, with beginners on the faculty starting at $900 or $1000, the college now has a schedule varying from something like $6000 for some professors of long service down to $1800 or $2000 for newcomers to the staff.

It represents roughly the general doubling of all values, but it is already apparent that it is merely the beginning. It is also clear that the rearrangement has benefited the new-comers somewhat more than the older members. Dartmouth's present rate for paying the newly enrolled instructor, just starting on his career as a teacher, is possibly adequate by comparison with the scale existing elsewhere; but it is wholly inadequate to hold these same men after they acquire experience and attain a greater value. We can attract young instructors, but we cannot expect to hold them long if they reveal exceptional promise. In short, the present set-up tends to make Dartmouth a sort of training school for the benefit of others.

If the College is to handle its problem adequately in this regard it is probable that within the next few years we must arrange somehow to enable a budget of something like $1,500,000 a year for this purpose. That will not be too easy, but if it isn't done there is sure to be a sagging in the record which is now so admirable. The sources of revenue for this purpose it is probable that every one knows. First, of course, there is the tuition fee but that, now fixed at $400, is pretty nearly as high as it seems possibe to go without discouraging the attendance of all but the sons of wealthy parents. No one in his senses wants to make Dartmouth a "rich man's college" exclusively. Second, there should be accretions to the general endowment—but these are certain to be slow. Third, there is the annual stop-gap of the Alumni Fund, which is the thing on which most reliance must be placed for the present, failing unexpected and notable additions to the permanent interest-bearing endowment of the College.

The MAGAZINE believes that alumni should be thoroughly aware of this situation a long time ahead. They should also be well informed as to why this condition arises. It is in part, of course, due to the great increase in the size of the student body and in part to the competitive bidding of the leaders among the 500 colleges of the land for teachers. In part also it is a corollary to the new curriculum, with its greater emphasis on the socalled "honor" courses to which any student in his junior and senior years is eligible if he has already a rank of 2.6. Men in those courses are largely their own masters, trusted to do the required work without daily attendance on set classes, but obviously in need of guidance and advice from competent instructors who can be expected to do good work only if the ratio between instructors and students is kept small. There is also to be remembered the "comprehensive examination" idea, whereby a student is held responsible for work, say in History, outside what can be covered in the classroom, so that there is an added need of faculty supervision of small groups. In other words, the effort to make the kind of education we give at Hanover square with the kind other leading colleges are striving to give is going to entail its price; and the College has no choice save between going steadily forward and dropping back into a position of inferiority which no true Dartmouth man could tolerate.

By a providential gift, the College has come into possession of a Library without which it could have done nothing along the lines projected. From the provision of the Library the alumni have therefore been relieved. Nothing is likely to relieve them in similar measure for several years to come from the task of providing for the better upkeep of the teaching force. We cannot keep our best men if other colleges are in position to lure them away—and at present they are attempting to do precisely that in more cases than one likes to consider. Once more it is a case of noblesse oblige. If we wish to keep our pride in the high position of our college, we must face the payment of the price which the maintenance of that position entails. The encouraging thing is that President Hopkins says he is much less appalled by the prospect of what we have to do in the next ten years than he was by the prospect of what we have already accomplished in the past ten. Possunt quia posse videntur, so to speakwhich is an involved way of saying that nothing succeeds like success. Having done what we have, far beyond the most sanguine expectation, we may well feel that it is possible to go on and do more.

A Neglected By-Product

East is East and West is West, and seldom the twain agree. It was made clear to President Hopkins when he went into the centre of the country a few weeks ago to attend the inauguration of his brother as president of Wabash College that a practical unanimity of opinion in the country west of the Alleghenies, if not actually west of the Hudson, at present rejects as unsound and impracticable the theory of liberal education which would ignore specialization with some professional or industrial end in view, in order to seek to develop a purely cultural background which might fit its possessor to get more value and enjoyment out of life, while qualifying him to serve others as well as himself.

This belief in a well-rounded general culture as the proper goal to be observed by the liberal colleges, in contradistinction to the professional schools and the universities, has been set forth with great force and conviction by Dr. Hopkins on many occasions and was emphasized again in his address at Wabash. It provoked active discussion among the educators gathered there and was by them opposed, in part because most appeared to feel that the one great aim of the higher learning must be to fit a man for some sort of gainful or serviceable work, and in part because of the feeling that if a vague and general ideal were set before the college youth there would be no proper incentive to apply himself. Where one's treasure is, there will one's heart be also. It is quite true that the students of the professional schools usually reveal an earnestness of purpose and a zeal to learn which far exceed that of the undergraduate in a college of the liberal arts, who is not fired by the knowledge that what he is studying means bread-and- butter to himself; but it is still a tenable belief that the function of the colleges should be kept distinct from that of the universities and of the graduate schools which compose them—and we must fur- ther believe that with the lapse of a few more decades the validity of Dr. Hop- kins's theory will become more apparent than it seems to be now to educators in the western parts of the United States.

The great reason is this: The United States is a prodigiously industrial country in which mechanic arts are annually increasing the power of production, with the result that less and less time is required for the process of satisfying the world's needs in a material way. In other words the by-product of American leisure is being steadily increased, not for the wealthy few alone, but also for the many. It is not amiss to anticipate this by recognizing the desirability of teaching the many, as far as may be done, the art of using their idle time in ways which will satisfy worthier ends. This is no mere vision of the dreamer; it is an intensely practical idea. In giving it voice, and direction, Dartmouth may well be a pioneer in lines which will come to be generally followed.

The old fashion was to speak rather scornfully of "culture" as a thing for dilettanti, for idlers with money, for high-brows. There is room for the belief that, in a country and an epoch circum- stanced as are ours, there is opportunity for making the higher mental development a much more general thing than that—not in the extreme sense of highly specialized appreciations for exotic literature and art, but in the widespread cultivation of a desire to make one's added leisure a source of sane and healthful delight, or of personal service to one's day not as the perquisite of the extraordinary few, but as the rightful possession of the ordinary many.

To that end we would add a voice to the support of the theory advanced by the president of the College. The notion that college training must be made to tell for some specialized activity designed to increase one's earning power and hurry him to the process of gaining a livelihood appears to us to be one which belongs to professional and technical schools rather than to the colleges of America. The "specialist" has been defined in England by some wit as"one who studies more and more about less and less." It is time that someone stood up for the furtherance of purely general cultivation among such as are destined to have leisure time to spend in some way. There is need of it, and the need is certain to increase in geometrical progression as our mechanical age advances in its power to satisfy material requirements with less and less expenditure of time and effort by individuals.

Education and the Public

If the Great War demonstrated one thing more clearly than another it may well have been the world's increasing need of wise and enlightened leadership and at the same time the rarity thereof. It has seemed a more deplorable rarity since the war than during the actual conflict, hut the dearth of really great commanders, especially in the realms of the mind, had become noteworthy long before the Armistice of 1918. There may be in this situation—which is a very general one—food for a moment's sobering thought on the part of such as take a genuine interest in American education and its current development, particularly as the problem relates to the American colleges. "

This is not to imply that the colleges of the Country should set for themselves the conscious task of purveying trained leadership for mankind, as a manufacturer might try to do in response to a material demand. The world's great leaders have always been few and always will be few. It is clear enough that they are born—not made. What a bewildered world lacks at this moment in this direction can hardly be supplied by artifice, but must as usual depend on God's providence. It does not follow, however, that mankind can do nothing at all about it. The raw material of which great leaders are made has a way of demonstrating its merit despite all neglects and the lack of early advantages; but if to native wit can be added something which education has to give, surely it should do no harm.

The main idea which we have presently in mind is one relating less to the world's leaders than the world's led. Not the smallest of our troubles, particularly in the United States, arises from our general reluctance as a people to hunger after the sort of leadership, political or social, that we ought to have. It is here that we believe the colleges may find a field not thus far sufficiently recognized, in the cultivation of which the idea should be to increase the masses of young men and women who are wholesomely appreciative of their own and the country's need for superlative talents in high places, rather than easily tolerant of mediocrity.

So far as concerns the politics of the United States, it is very plainly true that our public is but little insistent on proved merit or exceptional capacity in its public officials, save only in times of most compelling necessity. When facing a disaster, through earthquake, wind or fire, a community which in more humdrum times is content with wretchedly poor administration, or notoriously corrupt conditions, will usually lay aside its folly and entrust its destiny for the time being to manifestly capable hands. 'lt does this solely because it must. In a less exacting set of circumstances and with a freer choice, it not only seems indifferent to, but actually resents, the notion that one man may be far better fitted for high responsibilities than another. It indignantly asks if we are not all created equal—and reasons from this rash generalization to the result that because every man has an equal right with every other man to aspire, each has an equal right to attain.

It may be that one thing our country requires, in addition to wise leaders of public thought, is the disposition to pay heed to and make full use of such when they do appear. A glance at our lawmaking bodies, even the most august chosen by popular suffrage, is at present far' from indicating an exacting standard of measurement. Thus far the amazing increment in the numbers seeking higher education has produced deplorably little effect on the political estate of the country, but it ought to produce a salutary result in time. Such a general movement doubtless handicaps the desire to produce a "quality product" in the form of ripe scholarship, but it does give an opportunity to raise appreciably the general standard of appreciation for real ability, and to increase the number of people who will insist on calling that ability to the helm.

Self-governing democracies are prone to satisfy themselves with formulae which are only half true, or only halftruly interpreted. Having solemnly affirmed that all men are created equal and "have an equal right to seek their own put it, we are likely to rush on to the erroneous conclusion that there is one level for all and an equal right in every freeborn citizen to seize the tiller-ropes and steer. It is only a step to the notion that denial of equal ability to serve is a sort of snobbishness, at war with our political theories and therefore is something "unamerican."

The efficient leavening of the civic lump is no easy task, but it may well figure among the ends which American colleges should attempt to serve indeed probably do serve, even when not particularly specific in stressing the point.

Some such vague realization is doubtless what leads many an alumnus to manifest a sense of distrust and alarm over the so-called "Liberalism" in educational circles, with its not infrequent propensity to exploit idealism somewhat beyond its merit and to postulate too many things that ought to be true of human beings, but are not. There may be room for the thought that one of the very first essentials for democracy's success is a recognition of the limitations on its own doctrine. Those limits are both real and inexorable, and cannot be dismissed merely because to recognize them would upset a beautiful theory. One sometimes feels that what modern education requires is fewer Rousseaus and more blunt Sam Johnsons—fewer clever men to spin fine theories, and more men to blurt out plain common sense. Truth is not always palatable, and is not always new.

At all events the world needs something more than gifted men to guide its destinies. It needs a multitude to recognize the gifted few and to demand that more such shall serve its need, rather than so many of the incompetent. To use democracy aright is no easy task; but perhaps the colleges can assist in teaching this art.

Truth vs. Folly

Within a year or so a well known representative in Congress evoked some little sarcasm in the public prints by demanding that a college president first assure him that the college over which he presided was possessed of a faculty "free from Communists and Bolsheviks" before it could be regarded as a fit place to which to send the congressman's sons. The incident suffices to emphasize once more the feeling of old fashioned folk that more or less lunacy and a great deal of insidious social propaganda has been clothed in the livery of Academic Freedom.

In such matters it is impossible to suit every shade of belief, but one has a comfortable feeling that, after all is said and done, Truth runs but little risk of annihilation at the hands of Folly. There is a strain of Fundamentalism in most of us which operates to make us resist novelties in the case of things we have always revered—and likewise a strain of Progressiveness which makes us eager to welcome the abandonment of things we have always questioned. Much depends on what those things are in the individual case. Time was when oldline Republicans balked at having on any faculty professors of economics who had a weakness for the theory of free trade. The time now is when old-line religionists balk at having evolution considered in any sort of class, and when a certain restiveness is manifested over the science —or pseudo-science—of Sociology, with its sometimes exaggerated theories that men's minds will work thus and so because it would be so agreeable if they did work in those ways.

The best one may hope for is a courageous search for truth, and a no less courageous rejection of falsehood when parading in an inviting guise. It is impossible to defend the doctrine that everything new should be rejected—and equally impossible to defend the doctrine that everything new should be welcomed as having in its favor a sort of presumption of validity operating to reduce its need to offer proofs.

Meantime what no one seems to mention is the salubrious quality of doubt in the minds of self-convinced teachers concerning their own infallibility of judgment. The skepticism of the stand-patter is not all evil. The cocksureness of the progressivists is not all virtue. Is not part of the trouble that those who are devoted to novelty in human thinking are like their opposites, the Conservatives sometimes 0a little too sure of their own Tightness and a little too contemptuous of questioning?