SHOULD COLLEGES BE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS?
An address before The University Club, Boston, January 7, 1928
A man was attacked and badly lacerated by a dog. The ambulance was called, and he was taken to the hospital. On examination the doctors pronounced the case serious and, receiving report in regard to the dog, they told the patient that he undoubtedly was in for an attack of the rabies.
He listened attentively and then called for pen, ink, and paper and began to write hurriedly. The doctor interposed objection and said that the case need not necessarily be fatal, in view of the treatment available, and that under any circumstances the man would have plenty of time in which to write a will. In surprise, the man looked up and said, "I'm writing no will; I'm making a list of the people I'm going to bite."
It is in somewhat this mood that I accept the opportunity offered me here before the University Club to discuss college problems.
America has gone in for education. Within the boundaries of the United States there is being conducted the greatest educational experiment the world has ever known. Visitors, individuals and groups, come from abroad to observe the phenomenon. Everywhere throughout Christendom intelligent men are watching with interest and admiration the development of this social experiment of making learning accessible to the whole of a great people.
As compared with the year 1890, there has been 79% increase in the population of this country. Meanwhile, the number attending public high schools and prepar atory schools has increased more than 2400%. In the colleges, there is at present nearly 400% the enrollment, as compared with this period of nearly four decades ago.
Coincidently, the cost of educating a single individual has increased rapidly, until now one pupil in our public school system requires an expenditure which has been stated to be ten times as great as in 1890. In the colleges and universities the increased cost per man has risen many times, even if not so high as in the public schools.
Unfortunately there has not been meanwhile any corresponding increase in public understanding of what education really is, to say .nothing of the fact of why it is.
Years ago, while in College, I took a course in ethics, the general discussion of which was upon the nature of goodness. In that we were taught that before one could estimate the goodne.ss of a given project or a given institution, it was necessary among other things to answer the question, "Good for what?"
For example, one upon his vacation may be planning to climb a mountain top. He arises in the morning and finds the air clear and the sun bright. He is justified in saying, "This is a good day." On another day he may be planning to go fishing at sunrise. He arises before dawn, looks out and finds mist all about, the sun behind a cloud, and every condition favorable to the for the day. He is again justified in saying, "This is a good day."
If conditions had been reversed, on the other hand, and if the mountain trip had been planned for the hazy day, and if the fishing trip had been planned for the day which proved to be bright and sunny, it would not have been possible to say of either day that it was good.
A couple of years ago I visited an agricultural fair with a friend of mine, a lover of horses. We first went to the paddocks where the trotting horses were awaiting the call to the track, and my friend went from one lithe, clean-limbed, nervously highstrung animal to another, saying again and again, "That's a good horse."
A little later we went over to see the dray horses in a weight-pulling contest. Here my friend looked at one and another of the heavy, stocky-legged, patiently placid animals awaiting their respective turns. Again, as he would stand before one of these horses, he would say, "That's a good horse." Obviously, however, he interpreted goodness in quite a different way, in viewing one group of animals from what he did in viewing the other group. One was good for the purposes of speed; the other was good for demands for strength.
We are an assembly of college men, met to consider the interest of the American college, and each is eager for the welfare and repute of his respective institution. In other words, we want to know that our colleges are "good" colleges. It therefore behooves us, from time to time, to give a few moments of consideration to what is the essential "goodness" of an institution of higher learning. That is the subject which I wish to discuss today.
I am going to start with the premise that educational institutions should be principally concerned to be educational. If this be so, then the nature of goodness in a college is the extent to which it understands what education really is, and can make its influence pervasive among men enrolled in the college, that they shall become interested in education, understanding of it, and eager for it.
An institution might be the greatest agency the world has ever known for developing physical vigor and stalwartness of physique, and yet not be, a good college. An institution might be the greatest stimulus imaginable to distinc tive athletic achievement and yet not be a good college. An institution might be an unprecede;ntedly effective finishingschool, whose men would know all that good form required, all that was demanded from courtesy, and would have, moreover, all other qualities that go with attractive personalities, and yet not be a good college. Even more important, an institution might be the greatest incentive to the development of pious motives within the minds of men, and yet not be a good college.
All of these are desirable by-products of the college relationship, but no one of them singly, nor all of them together, are as consequential to making a college good as the development of mentality to a point where it can se,ize upon the best that has been acquired in the field of knowledge in ages past, and utilizing this as data, can project itself intelligently and purposefully into the unconquered realms where new knowledge may be found.
Now, let us pause a moment to observe that this is all contrary to the instincts of any generation. Each generation labors under the delusion that it has largely come to know all that is knowable, that it has mastered the intricate problem of desirable social adjustments, that it has found the true basis of religious belief, and that it has arrived at all needful perfection in government.
For the man who is defining his aspirations for his college, it is well to acknowledge that the college which allows any of these assumptions to be questioned is not going to be considered good. It may even come to be considered quite the reverse. The really popular institution of higher learning would be the one which would most willingly accept the doctrine that "whatever is, is right," or, perhaps better, that "whatever is not, is wrong." Nevertheless, such a college would be very little an educational institution!
A few decades ago, a distinguished member of the Yale faculty, Professor Brewer, used to introduce his courses in Science with a series of lectures on "Geography When the World Was Flat." Herein, he undertook to trace the evolution of human thinking and to show how ignorance correlated with fear, and how freedom from fear was given with knowledge. He demonstrated how timidity in ancient man necessarily accompanied the lack of knowledge inevitable to the time, and how not only was this man limited in his thinking by taboos and inhibitions which came from ignorance, but how he was limited even in his physical movement from place to place.
The hypothetical monsters of the deep made him fear the, sea; the evil spirits made him afraid of the mountain; the mythical dragon made him hold back from exploration of the forest; and creatures of his imagination supplemented to intolerable extent the very real terrors of the darkness. Only as now and then some venturesome soul desired really to know and sought information, were these fears dispelled. Thus, it came about that some wise men gradually came to understand that ignorance was fear and that immunity from fear could only be acquired by knowledge and understanding.
The old Greek philosopher, Epictetus, summarized this essentially, when he said, "Your rulers say to you that the free men shall be educated; I say to you rather that the educated men shall be free."
What inference are we to draw, then, in regard to the jumpy nervousness of the people of this great republic of ours at the, present time, which makes them want censorship, repression, and prohibition, to an extent which would have seemed impossible a very few years ago? Here, in the enlightened city of Boston, there is a list of proscribed books, the influence of which is presumed to be harmful to the public mind. In the great city of Chicago we have the burlesque performances at the present time of a city government attempting to say what history ought to state, rather than indicating what history really is. In Tennessee we have, had the ridiculous Scopes trial, with the attempt therein to define what science should be allowed to discover, rather than to accept what science really has discovered. The unconscious assumption now, as in all similar periods in the past, is that man has possessed himself of so large a proportion of available knowledge, that any suggestion that more knowledge might be acquired is presumptuous.
Education, to be sure, is recognized as being responsible for transmitting what is conceived to be the best thinking of one generation to the next. It is to be considered, however, that in thought as in other things, the differentiation between that which is best and that which is average is very great. The spirit of the educational institution and the popular will are in agreement in so far as desirability is concerned of perpetuating the best thought of the time. The discrepancy arises when the popular will tries, likewise, to perpetuate the average thought of the time, with its inertia, its inherited prejudices, and its acquired apprehensions.
Herein can be found the greatest handicap to intellectual progress and to spiritual freedom. Herein lies the influence which most works against a college remaining an influence for mental development.
There is no proposition on which the college which desires to be an educational institution can speculate more profitably than on just how far we have got away from the ignorance which makes for fear, and how sincere is our desire for the knowledge which will make men free.
Careful scholars estimate the time since first man acquired the power of reflective thought to be not more than 25,000 years. Scientists estimate . the future of the earth at not less than a thousand million years. It has been pointed out, that reducing these figures to the proportions of a life of threescore years and ten, we are just beginning to live in the afternoon of the first day of life.
President Wilkins of Oberlin has well said of these facts, "The future is indeed more real than the past in that it summons to action while the past is silent. The past is unchangeable, the future, is plastic: for the past we have no moral concern, for the future we are responsible ; the past is a matter of record—the future belongs to the realm of the will.
"With this conception, the ultimacy of our own time vanishes. There is nothing peculiarly honorable in our chronological position. We are still the heirs of all the ages that have gone, but we are no less truly the ancestors of all the ages that are to come. And our progeny will be infinitely more numerous than our ancestry."
This is the dilemma of the college which genuinely desires to be an educational institution, that it must deal speculatively with the affairs of the future, while the average mind of contemporary civilization is insistent that it shall deal simply with the past. Always the man or the individual who strives to build for the future is subject to the condemnation of those who think in terms of the average, thought of the time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed himself on this years ago, when pointing out the danger of thought to cherished customs, and the momentum of the established order. He said, "Beware, when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk." Always mankind at large prefers to bear the ills we have and it thus comes about that widespread apprehension and popular condemnation attach to the efforts of the individual who desires to make creative thought a goal or to the desire of the institution which wishes to stimulate men to think. ,
However, it is a mistake, to assume that the forces antagonistic to colleges being educational institutions spring wholly from those who are ignorant or from those of average intelligence. Many a man who is highly intelligent and possessed of superior mentality, nevertheless, is astigmatic. In his complete absorption in specialized interests, he instinctively seeks confirmation of these from institutions of higher learning.
Because of the combined factors of my respect for Mr. Clarence W. Barron, and because of the widespread publicity which has been given to his attack upon the New England college, I wish to take up for a few moments his point of view,—that the New England college is a failure (I think that he used the word "curse") because it has not sufficiently been instrumental in enhancing material development, or especially that of New England.
To begin with, I wish to file my complete dissent to the proposition that the value of the American college is to be fairly judged on the basis of whether it enhances the prosperity of the country or not. I wish to dispute categorically the theory that it is the function of the college to make business successful. I am not convinced that the college has any indorsement to give to the current aspirations that prosperity shall become our sole objective as a people. These are all desirable conditions for mankind but they are not primarily the concern of the college. The concern of the college is, first, more and better thinking; that mental processes shall be disinterested, that they shall be true, and that they shall contribute to the ennoblement of man's soul as well as to the indulgence of his body. It is no rare thing in life to see comfort destroy power.
Thomas Aquinas was once invited by the Pope to visit the, Vatican. He was royally entertained and he was shown through the papal treasure vaults with all of their wealth of metal and of precious stones. When the visit had been completed, the Pope said to him, "No longer can the Church say, 'Silver and gold have I none.' " "No," said Thomas Aquinas, "And no longer can the Church say, 'Take up thy bed and walk.'"
One of the greatest problems which the American college faces in the present day is to preserve its function as an educational institution to an extent that shall give its men the proper outlook on life and that shall steel their wills and harden their minds against the tendencies toward materialism which are bred in a period of so gre,at economic surplus as is the present period in America.
Leaving this discussion aside, however, and meeting Mr. Barron on his own ground, I should take violent exception to his implication that the American college man has not proved his capacity to render his proportionate service to business. There are, in this country, only an infinitesimal percentage of the population who are college graduates. In comparison with the men who are graduates, I should wish to be the last man to discredit the accomplishment of those who have come through to large success and who have rendered vital service without the aid of the college education. All education is self-acquired and some men have the stamina and the will to acquire this without the aid of any formal help. Too much credit cannot be assigned to these.
However, this is an entirely different matter than Mr. Barron's implication that the percentage of college men who succeed largely is so small as to be an indictment of the college influence.
Let us take up for a moment the great industrial concerns of the country. In the steel trust, a Harvard graduate ha just been elected chairman of the board of directors, to succeed a Wheaton College man. In the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, a Dartmouth man is chairman of the board of directory and a Harvard man is president. In the General Electric Company, the chairman of the board is a graduate of St. Lawrence University and the president is a graduate of Tech. In the Westinghouse Company, the chairmanship of the board is vacant but the president is a graduate of Yale. In the International Harvester Company the chairman of the board is a graduate of Princeton. In the General Motors Corporation the chairman of the board and the president are both graduates of Tech. My long-time friend, the president of the United Fruit Company, who is presiding here, is not without a college diploma. And so it goes!
Moreover, there is another factor which bears upon this general proposition, namely, the success which college men have in advancing to positions of importance as subordinate executives in these great companies. The proportion of college men therein from among those employed far outruns the proportion of non-college men. Unless all these statistics have changed since times when I was familiar with employment conditions in the great corporations of America, men without a college degree find difficulty in making progress as fast as do the college men. In one company of major importance of which I know, college men constitute five per cent of the employees but among hundreds of executive positions college graduates hold forty per ce,nt.
Again I repeat, however, that if these facts were not so I would not accept the condition as being necessarily an indictment of the college process. The college function is to develop intellectuality and the question is not whether this intellectuality is applicable to the economic order or to the counting house. The real question is whether men are becoming more intelligent or not. It may be inquired further whether it is invariably intelligent for a man to give all of his attention to the accumulating of material wealth.
The attitude which Mr. Barron has expressed always reminds me a little bit of the story of the foundation of William and Mary, when Dr. James Blair went to the Attorney-General with a request for a collegiate charter and urged that the people of Virginia had souls to be cared for. The Governors of Virginia had been practical men and the Attorney-General was desirdus of being appointed Governor. In response to the plea for the souls of the people of Virginia, so eloquently put up by Dr. Blair, the Attorney-General exploded, "Damn their souls! Let them make tobacco."
I do not contend that material welfare and an abundance of comfort are incompatible with culture. The fact ought to be quite the contrary. Given the instinct for culture it can be afforded in much larger dimensions and in greater variety in the home where there is a liberal economic margin. Nevertheless, I think that it has to be conceded that the material prosperity of the United States has not yet been accompanied by any corresponding development in. the cultural field. I think further that it will have to be conceded that. the citizens of this Republic are miich more amply provided with bodily comforts than with refinements of the soul.
If indictment is to be made of the American college, and many indictments can be made,, they are more logical in regard to its cultural influence than in regard to its economic.
Mr. Barron says, "A university could never have brought forth a Vanderbilt in transportation, a Rockefeller in oil, an Edison with more than a thousand inventions, or a Henry Ford with a pioneering genius."
It is to be added, however, that there would have been no transportation system to utilize a Vanderbilt's ability except for the laboratory researches in regard to the applicability of steam to the development of power. Mr. Rockefeller would be the first to acknowledge the indebtedness of the oil industry to the geologists and the chemists: Mr. Edison has himself worked from premises discovered and proved by many another. Henry Ford certainly could not have found an outlet for his pioneering genius except for the painstaking years in lab oratories of men who searched for and developed the principles of the internalcombustion engine.
It is not the primary business of the college or of the university in attempting to extend the boundaries of the knowledge to consider utility. The Cambridge University professor, who gave the toast, "Here's to pure mathematics. May it never be of any practical use to anybody," did not mean what the layman understands him to mean by this statement, but he meant that the search for knowledge was one thing and the utilization of knowledge, when found, was another.
Michael Faraday reasoned that if passing an electric current through wire around a piece of iron made the; iron a magnet, you could reverse the process and turn a magnet around in a coil of wire and produce a current. He went up to lecture before the Royal Institution in London, where the experiment was not thought to be very impressive, and a woman voiced the feelings of most of the audience, probably, when she asked afterwards, "But, Professor Faraday, even if the effect you explained is obtained, what is the use of it?" The memorable reply was, "Madam, will you tell me the use of a new-born child?"
It is further related that whe;n Faraday performed the experiment to which the electric dynamo owes its origin, though scientific men understood the significance of the experiment, others did not. Mr. Gladstone, for instance, was uninterested and again his comment was, "But, Professor Faraday, after all, what use is it?" "Why, sir," replied Faraday, "There is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it!"
Fifty years ago, James Clerk-Maxwell, a great mathematical physicist, developed a formula of the most abstract type and the most useless appearance. A thorough study of this formula convinced him that there were wave lengths of certain qualities and properties. Inasmuch as he was a laboratory research man, seeking for truth, he published this fact, and then went on to other researches.
Some time afterwards, a man by the name of He;rtz, working with Helmholtz, ran across this formula and after looking over the mathematical work, he came to the conclusion that if the theory was true mathematically, the waves could be developed in the laboratory. As a result, eventually there was the discovery of the Hertzian wave. He, likewise, being a research man, undertaking to discover truth, had his reward when he had made his investigation and had derived due knowledge therefrom.
Later, in 1899, Marconi took Hertz' work and threw the first wireless messag across the English Channel.
Cle,rk-Maxwell had no interest in the utility of his discovery, but someone has estimated that in a few years there will be a capital investment in projects springing from his formula to the value of a hundred million dollars for each letter of his hyphenated name.
The industrial life of America, manufacturing efficiency, mass production, and the economic surplus which these create, rest not on the platitudes of materialists but on the quiet, painstaking research of scholars, eager to extend the frontiers of knowledge and accepting as sufficient reward the self-consciousness of having discovered new truth.
Finally, there is one other point which I should like to submit for your consideration in this discussion of whether the college shall be an educational institution or not.
There is no function of education more important than the giving of a sense of proportion to men undergoing the educational process. Somewhere Mr. Dooley is represented as talking with Mr. Henessey, who inquires from him whether it is true that the colleges direct public opinion. Dooley takes this under consideration and then quietly asks whether it is true that waterwheels make the rivers run.
There is a deep, fundamental philosophy to which we need to give consideration in this answer. The colleges have to struggle against the lack of popular understanding and appreciation of the objectives which they seek. Nowhere ought they to be able to look with more confidence than to alumni groups, such as make up the membership of a university club, for correctives to the non-compre,hension of the public at large in regard to what education really is.
Is it true that acquisitiveness is the measure of success and that the man to whom the public returns the greatest monetary reward is to be considered as having rendered the greatest public service? Herein some light may be discovered on the respective attitudes of the public and of college administrators and faculty members in regard to the featuring of the student athlete and the opposition to the college man's making professional athletics his career.
Let us take the case of a college professor whose name France places above that of Napoleon, Louis Pasteur. His studies of the diseases of the silkworm saved the silk industry from extinction in France. His proof of the validity of the germ theory of disease revolutionized surgery and obstetrics. His discovery of the causes of puerperal fever reduced the fatalities among women at childbirth to a fraction of what they were before. He saved the. flocks and herds of France from extinction by the ravages of anthrax. He devised an antidote which eliminated the danger of death from attacks by rabid animals. Meanwhile, uninterested in wealth, he lived upon a modest salary, seeking and realizing little? from his discoveries. He amassed no wealth and it may be doubted if his total income throughout his life was as much as was paid to "Red" Grange for his first dozen game,s of professional football. Certainly he was not as great a man as Jack Dempsey judged by acquisitiveness of wealth.
Jenner was a student working in the laboratory when his interest first became aroused in the possibility of discovering a vaccination against smallpox. Years later, when every home in Europe had been relieved of its greatest terror, and when Jenner had become the associate of emperors and kings, he was given two grants by Parliament and treated with a munificence that has rarely attended the discovery of a new principle such as he had found. These grants aggregated thirty thousand pounds,—an amount less than the salary of Babe Ruth for two years.
For centuries the Isthmus of Panama was regarded as the white man's grave. Successively, Spaniards, French and English gave up their attempts to found colonies there. Of the force with which De Lesseps undertook to dig the Panama Canal, eighteen in every hundred men died and a dozen others became helpless invalids.
In 1900, Dr. Lazear, a member of the Walter Reed Commission, permitted himself as a servant of science to be bitten by a mosquito which had just previously bitten a man suffering from yellow fever, with the result that he contracted the disease and died in a few days. However, he had made his contribution to knowledge. This he did on his salary as an army surgeon.
It is a detail that this experimental search for new knowledge made possible the later building of the Panama Canal. What is important, as bearing upon the immediate point which we are considering, is that the hazard was accepted and the benefit for mankind was gained on a salary less per year than has been offered to football players of my acquaintanceship for a single professional game.
It is from considerations such as these that I ask the question of you men, whether you wish your colleges to be educational institutions or social finishing-schools for the polishing of person ality ;or do you wish your colleges to be educational institutions or training schools for businessor, again, do you wish your colleges to be educational institutions or the homes of champion football teams.
The proposition is not that any one of these objectives necessarily needs to be sacrificed but rather that the emphasis and interest should be given where emphasis and interest are due.
In the year 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome by the Inquisition. His crime was denouncing the customs of the age in which he lived. Just before the faggots were, lighted, he turned to his j udges and said,. "It is not I who is afraid; it is you."
In 1889 the city of Rome built a monument to his memory on the spot where his ashes rest. It stands in the public square, where the peasants come, to sell their flowers, and there the visitor can read this inscription, "Raised to Giordano Bruno by the generation which he foresaw." It is the responsibility of education to scan the far horizon; it is the obligation of education, if need be, to undergo attack, to accept contempt, and to endure derision from contemporaries who are more interested in maintaining their own opinions than they are in knowing what is really so. It is the function of education, when error is found, to denounce it; it is the privilege of education, when truth is found, to proclaim it.
These are matters germane, for your consideration. Do you wish our colleges to be educational institutions?
A Diet Kitchen in Dick's House
