Intellectual Emphasis Indicted
W. H. Cowley '24, President of Hamilton College, Says Lack of Emotion and Spirit Has Created Apathy
[At the winter commencement exercisesat the University of Minnesota, W. H.Cowley '24 of Hamilton College gave a stirring address on the subject "Mid-Twentieth Century Discipline." It is possible toquote only part of his talk here. As this issue of the MAGAZINE goes to press Mr. Coivley has not announced his decision in regard to accepting election to the presidency of Minnesota, recently reported inthe press. Parts of his speech in Minneapolis follow.—ED.]
MAY I MAKE IT ENTIRELY CLEAR that I am not being critical of intellectual development. Indeed, colleges and universities must be the place par excellence in our society for the highest intellectual achievement. I give way to no one in my insistence that the college has failed if it does not effectively train the minds of the students. I insist, however, that we must go a great deal further, that we must recognize that intelligence is not enough, that men are not mere thinking machines, and that to train the minds of students and to neglect their spirit is to give them stones for the bread they seek
The intellectualists have fallen into error which logicians call the disjunctive fallacy and which laymen call the either—or fallacy. Thus intellectualists assert that education must be one thing or the otherintellectual or anti-intellectual. This is a splendid example of the crooked thinking produced by the disjunctive fallacy. It's like asserting that all men are either tall or short, fat or thin, black or white, good or bad, brilliant or stupid, charming or gauche, egotistic or modest, etc., etc.
It would seem to be impossible for any intelligent individual to fall into the clutches of this fallacy, but the fact is that the intellectualists have done exactly that. They say in effect that colleges must devote their energies entirely to the intellectual development of students, and that it is impossible—or at least undesirable—to give time and thought to student social life, to athletics, to the persistent problem of personal purposes and values which every college student faces. In a word, they assert that the college must concentrate all of its attention upon intellectual training or else become a mere country club. They insist that the college must be either tall or short: tall and intellectual or short and country-clubbish. They admit no possibility of a middle ground where the whole student is educated—socially as well as intellectually, in spirit as well as in a professional specialty.
It would be interesting to explore the implications of this disjunction as it affects fraternities, athletic teams, and student life in general. I prefer, however, to discuss a much larger question: the bearing of intellectualism upon the spirit, upon the spirit of faculty members and therefore upon the spirit of students.
In his brilliant address given before the American Philosophical Society last spring one of our outstanding American poets, Archibald MacLeish, deplored the disappearance of fire, of passion, and of broad social purpose from among college professors, scholars, and writers. He entitled his address "The Irresponsibles" and described and criticized them in this passage:
"The irresponsibility of the scholar is the irresponsibility of the scientist upon whose laboratory insulation he has patterned all his work. The scholar in letters has made himself as indifferent to values, as careless of significance, as bored with meanings as the chemist. He is a refugee from consequences, an exile from the responsibilities of moral choice. His words of praise are the laboratory words—objectivity, detachment, dispassion. His pride is to be scientific, neuter, skeptical, detachedsuperior to final judgment or absolute belief
"It is not for nothing that the modern scholar invented the Ph.D. thesis as his principal contribution to literary form. The Ph.D. thesis is the perfect image of his world. It is work done for the sake of doing work—perfectly conscientious, perfectly laborious, perfectly irresponsible. The modern scholar at his best and worst is both these things—perfectly conscientious, laborious, and competent: perfectly irresponsible for the saving of his world He has his work to do. He has his book to finish.
He hopes the war will not destroy the manuscripts he works with. He is the pure, the perfect type of irresponsibility—the man who acts as though fire could not burn him because he has no business with the fire. He knows, because he cannot help but know, reading his papers, talking to his friendshe knows his fire has consumed the books, the spirit, everything he lives by, flesh itself, in other countries. He knows this but he will not know. It's not his business. Whose business is it then? He will not answer even that. He has his work to do. He has his book to finish."
Because the great majority of men and women who teach in our colleges and universities are consciously or subconsciously giving their allegiance to intellectualism, we have fallen into the bog of irresponsibility which MacLeish deplores.
Thus intellectualism has crippled us not only educationally but also in our national life. For decades we have been graduating young men and women who have been taught to look at everything intellectually, to be objective, to weigh all the evidence, to see both sides of every question, to be super-critical, to hold judgments in abeyance. This is all very well in the abstractions of science, but where the values of our civilization are at stake, it is criminally destructive. It has made of us a skeptical if not a cynical people. It has lulled us into a false impartiality. It has made us apathetic about our heritages of democracy, of freedom of speech and of the press. It has driven us individually and collectively into a selfish hunt for security. In brief, it has deprived us of emotion, of enthusiasm, of national spirit and passion.
