Robert Maynard HutchinsThe Higher Learning in America(Yale University Press, 1936). |
I. EXTERNAL CONDITIONS
In the first of these chapters I propose to consider the external conditions under which American education operates. In the second I shall discuss the peculiar difficulties of universities, and especially of professional schools. In the third I shall suggest what a general education is, and in the fourth what a university might be.
The most striking fact about the higher learning in America is the confusion that besets it. This confusion begins in the high school and continues to the loftiest levels of the university. The high school cannot make up its mind whether it is preparing students for life or for college. Its student population is miscellaneous and variegated. The course of study is substantially uniform for all groups, whether they are prospective scientists, lawyers, clerks, or laboring men, and is apparently adjusted to the needs of only the smallest of these groups, that destined for the higher learning.
The junior college is in most places an extension of the high-school curriculum, which is there applied to an essentially similar though somewhat smaller student body. Here also the question whether the students are completing their education or are preparing to go on to the university has not been settled, and the aims of the institution are not clear.
The college of liberal arts is partly high school, partly university, partly general, partly special. Frequently it looks like a teacher-training institution. Frequently it looks like nothing at all. The degree it offers seems to certify that the student has passed an uneventful period without violating any local, state, or federal law, and that he has a fair, if temporary, recollection of what his teachers have said to him. As I shall show later, little pretense is made that many of the things said to him are of much importance.
The university is distinguished from the college by two things: professional schools and the Ph.D. degree. At present we do not know why the university should have professional schools or what they should be like. We do not even know what the professions are. Professional education consists either of going through motions that we have inherited or of making gestures of varying degrees of wildness that we hope may be more effectual. The Ph.D. degree, because it has become a necessary part of the insignia of the college or university teacher, has lost any other meaning. But universities also do research and hope to train research men. The same degree is awarded in recognition of research. The students who are going to be teachers are put through a procedure which was designed to produce investigators. The classes, the courses, the content, and the aims of graduate work are as confused as those of the high school.
For the sake of abbreviation I have of course exaggerated the plight of the higher learning. It has, in fact, many admirable qualities, not the least of which is its friendly reception of anybody who would like to avail himself of it. But we who are devoting our lives to it should learn something from the experience of recent years. Up to the onset of the present depression it was fashionable to call for more and more education. Anything that went by the name of education was a good thing just because it went by that name. I believe that the magic of the name is gone and that we must now present a defensible program if we wish to preserve whatever we have that is of value. Our people, as the last few years have shown, will strike out blindly under economic pressure; they will destroy the best and preserve the worst unless we make the distinction between the two somewhat clearer to them.
If then the problem is to clarify the higher learning, let us examine the causes of its confusion. The first of them is very vulgar; it is the love of money. It is sad but true that when an institution determines to do something in order to get money it must lose its soul, and frequently does not get the money. Money comes to education in three ways -- from students, from donors, and from legislatures. To frame a policy in order to appeal to any one of the three is fatal, and, as I have suggested, often futile as well. How much of the current confusion in universities would have been eliminated if boards of trustees had declined 'gifts which merely reflected the passing whims of wealthy men? Few restricted gifts have ever been made to a university that paid the expense of receiving them. If men are supported, they are not housed or given the books and equipment they need. If buildings are given, they are not maintained. If they are maintained, they are not manned. From the financial standpoint alone the university may be worse off after the gift than it was before. And from the educational or scientific standpoint it is likely to be unbalanced and confused. Dependence on the casual interests of donors means that nobody can tell from one year to another what a university's policy is. It will become next year whatever somebody is willing to pay to make it. I do not mean, of course, that universities do not need money and that they should not try to get it. I mean only that they should have an educational policy and then try to finance it, instead of letting financial accidents determine their educational policy.
Even more important is the influence on educational policy of student fees. It is probably fair to say that American universities above the junior year ought to do anything and everything that would reduce their income from students. This is true because most of the things that degrade them are done to maintain or increase this income. To maintain or increase it the passing whims of the public receive the same attention as those of millionaires. If the public becomes interested in the metropolitan newspaper, schools of journalism instantly arise. If it is awed by the development of big business, business schools full of the same reverence appear. If an administration enlarges the activities of the federal government and hence the staff thereof, training for the public service becomes the first duty of the universities. Today public administration, housing, forestry, and aeronautics are the absorbing subjects of university interest, just as international relations after the war was the topic to which we were to devote ourselves. At any moment crime, divorce, child labor, socialized medicine, or the corruption of lawyers may through some sensational incident become the most pressing problem of the higher learning. During the synthetic excitement of last year about communism, socialism, and other forms of redness, it suddenly became the duty of the colleges and universities to give courses in the eradication of these great evils and in the substitution for them of something called Americanism.
Undoubtedly the love of money and that sensitivity to public demands that it creates has a good deal to do with the service-station conception of a university. According to this conception a university must make itself felt in the community; it must be constantly, currently felt. A state university must help the farmers look after their cows. An endowed university must help adults get better jobs by giving them courses in the afternoon and evening. Yet it is apparent that the kind of professors that are interested in these objects may not be the kind that are interested either in developing education or in advancing knowledge. Since a university will not be able to have two kinds of professors and at the same time remain clear as to what it is about, it must follow that extension work can only confuse the institution.
Little more can be said in justification of the attempt to teach freshmen and sophomores under the same roof and with substantially the same staff as are employed for research and graduate and professional study. Unless we exclude from the first two years all students who are not likely to be scholars and professional men or who deserve unusual opportunities for the cultivation of the mind, we must confuse an institution which should be primarily devoted to scholarship, professional education, and the training of the mind. In most state universities, at least, no pretense is made that freshmen and sophomores are material for the kind of intellectual work that a university should sponsor. Here their presence is accounted for by a notion of democracy that I shall refer to later. In endowed institutions, however it may be rationalized, their presence is accounted for by the love of money. The university would lose income if it lost them. And since they are much less expensive than their elders and pay the same or higher fees, the loss of net income would be out of proportion to their number or the total fees they pay. Without these students, too, the whole apparatus of athletics, fraternities, and social life would have to be radically revised, and the voices of alumni would be raised in howls of anguished grief.
The presence of freshmen and sophomores leads to one of two results, both of them bad. On the one hand, the university may become an overgrown college where the success of a professor is determined by his ability to keep students awake and his extracurriculum influence on their morals and manners. In such an institution the guiding star of educational policy is what the students say or even what the student paper says. On the other hand, the university may exploit the freshmen and sophomores, placing them in the hands of graduate students, who are given teaching posts instead of fellowships. In these circumstances promotion depends upon research; an interest in the problem of teaching undergraduates may be a definite liability. A university that attempts to do freshman and sophomore work therefore ends up doing either a poor university job or a poor college job. And one or the other of these situations obtains at almost every American university today.
There is only one way that I have been able to think of in which a university can entertain freshmen and sophomores and do well by them and by its university obligations at the same time. That is to take the view that the university may well try to help the system of public education by working out for it what a general education ought to be. A general education, I believe, should be given between the junior year in high school and the end of the sophomore year in college. I do not see how the public schools are ever going to command the time and intelligence to develop the organization and content appropriate to general education. I can see how a university faculty might interest itself in the problem and accelerate a solution of it.
But even with such a hope and such an attitude the complexities of operating the first two years in a university are very serious. In the first place, few universities are so situated as to be interested or influential in the problems of public education. For those who are not so situated the only answer is the abolition of the freshman and sophomore years. In the second place, even if a university is so situated a& to develop a scheme for public education, it is doubtful whether it should do so. A university has enough trouble with the problems of the higher learning. Taking on the burden of philanthropic work, no matter how valuable, can only diminish its effectiven,ess in its proper field.
By one method such philanthropy can perhaps be conducted without this sad result: the faculty dealing with general education must be independent of and even isolated from the university, close enough to it to get the advantages of its facilities and a few of its men; remote enough from it to be able to work on its problems without the interference or control of the university faculty and without interfering with or controlling that faculty. It remains to be seen whether any such organization can ever be effected and if so whether it can succeed. Nothing short of it can bring order out of the confusion produced by the conflicting aims of collegiate and university work.
The love of money means that a university must attract students. To do this it must be attractive. This is interpreted to mean that it must go to unusual lengths to house, feed, and amuse the young. Nobody knows what these things have to do with the higher learning. Everybody supposes that students think they are important. The emphasis on athletics and social life that infects all colleges and universities has done more than most things to confuse these institutions and to debase the higher learning in America.
It is supposed that students want education to be amusing; it is supposed that parents want it to be safe. Hence the vast attention given by universities at enormous expense to protect the physical and moral welfare of their charges. Parents must feel that their children are in good hands. It makes no difference whether those hands are already full. The faculty must be diverted from its proper tasks to perform the uncongenial job of improving the conduct and the health of those entrusted to it.
The love of money leads to large numbers, and large numbers have produced the American system of educational measurement. Under this system the intellectual progress of the young is determined by the time they have been in attendance, the number of hours they have sat in classes, and the proportion of what they have been told that they can repeat on examinations given by the teachers who told it to them. Such criteria as these determine progress from one educational unit to another, and are the basis for entrance to and graduation from professional schools. Since it is clear that these criteria are really measures of faithfulness, docility, and memory, we cannot suppose that they are regarded as true indications of intellectual power. They are adopted because some arbitrary automatic methods are required to permit dealing with large masses of students, and these methods are the easiest. Any others would compel us to think about our course of study and to work out ways of testing achievement in it. But large numbers leave us no time to think.
The love of money makes its appearance in universities in the most unexpected places. One would look for it in presidents and trustees. One would think that the last place one could hear it mentioned would be in faculty meeting. On the contrary, a good many professors instantly react to any proposal for the improvement of education by displaying a concern for the university's income that is notably absent when they are pressing for increases in their own research budgets. Two answers are usually made when any such suggestion is advanced: it is said that the students cannot do the work and that the university by frightening away students will reduce its income. What these answers usually mean is that the professors who make them do not want to change the habits of their lives. Since this cannot be made a matter of public knowledge, some philanthropic reason must be put forward instead.
Actually students will respond to a program designed to give them a better education. It usually happens that after the horrid predictions of professors in these cases more and better students desire to enroll, and specifically because of the innovation that was expected to scare them off. This has happened in my own experience with honors courses, general courses, general examinations, and the abolition of course credits and of the requirement of attendance at classes.
Even more important than the love of money as a cause of our confusion is our confused notion of democracy. This affects the length, the content, and the control of education. According to this notion a student may stay in public education as long as he likes, may study what he likes, and may claim any degree whose alphabetical arrangement appeals to him. According to this notion education should be immediately responsive to public opinion; its subject matter and methods may be regulated in great detail by the community, by its representatives, or even by its more irresponsible members.
What determines the length of free education for all? The answer is economic conditions. When there was a scarcity of men and a multiplicity of jobs it was limited to a very short time. Even Thomas Jefferson proposed that it should be confined to three years in the grades. Adam Smith reminds us that in the American colonies a widow with four children was a brilliant match because her offspring would begin so early to make their contribution to the family treasury. Those happy days are gone forever. Now we can hope to solve the problem of the unemployed adult only by removing the adolescent and the superannuated from the labor market. The superannuated may perhaps devote themselves to reflection and advice. The adolescent cannot. Some kind of activity will have to be found for them.
Up to date we have found only education and the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Civilian Conservation Corps I regard as a somewhat confused extension of the educational system. It is an attempt to meet the defects of that system. The principal defect of that system is that it makes almost no provision for Pupils who cannot or will not learn from books. The Civilian Conservation Corps does, as to one sex at least, do something to meet this need. Sometime it may learn to do it better. The chief weakness of the Corps as an adjunct of the educational system is the absence of any intelligible basis for the selection of its members. ff at present schools are for those who can learn by traditional methods and the CCC is for tho se who cannot, it should follow that the CCC should release to the schools those who can learn by traditional methods and the schools should release to the CCC those who cannot.
I hope, of course, that the methods of the schools may improve and that they will discover how to communicate an education to those who cannot read. As they make this discovery the numbers in the CCC may diminish. But I am clear that under present economic conditions some kind of educational or semieducational activity must be provided for the young up to approximately their twentieth year. If the depression lifts, we shall be in the same position; for the technological advances of recent years suggest that industry will require in the future proportionately fewer workers than ever before.
Economic conditions, then, determine the length of free education for all; and present and prospective economic conditions are such that the terminus of the public education which the ordinary youth is expected to enjoy will be set at about the end of the sophomore year in college. This means that the public junior college will become the characteristic educational institution of the United States just as the public high school has been up to now.
I may digress at this point to say that when the junior college has become the characteristic educational institution of the United States, universities and colleges which have insisted on maintaining a four-year course beginning with the freshman year and leading to the Bachelor's degree will find themselves somewhat embarrassed. We may expect to see a junior college wherever there is a high school today. There are already 45o of them, public and private, in this country. Eighty-five per cent of the public ones are in high-school buildings. They will therefore find it easy to take over the last two years of high school and develop a four-year unit devoted to general education. Under these circumstances we may expect the ordinary youth to stay at home and complete the work of the sophomore year in college. He will not go away to the university, if he goes at all, until the junior year. Universities and colleges which begin their work with the freshman year will find their freshmen and sophomores limited to local students and those who are rich enough to leave home at a tenderer age than usual.
Already this process has gone very far. Analysis of the domiciles of the freshmen at almost any American college or university will show that at least 75 per cent of them come from an area within 100 miles of the institution. The proposed prize awards of the University of Rochester and the national scholarships at Harvard are attempts to minimize this situation. They will be unsuccessful; for they are against the inevitable and the desirable trend of American education. Universities may expect to have an overwhelming proportion of local students in their freshman and sophomore years; and they may expect the number of freshmen and sophomores to decline in relation to the total enrollment. Of the students who received the Bachelor's degree at the University of Chicago last year 64-3 per cent, or almost two-thirds, had attended one or more other institutions. Hence it is folly for us to talk about the freshman and sophomore years as preparation for later work; it is folly to discuss a four-year program of education beginning with the freshman year; and it is highly important that we should develop ourselves and encourage the junior colleges to develop an intelligible scheme of general education under which the student may either terminate his formal education at the end of the sophomore year or go on to university work.
But to return to democracy in education, you will observe that neither economic conditions nor anything else compels us to lengthen the span of public education for all beyond the end of the sophomore year in college. Free education should exist beyond this level, and exist in a fuller, richer form. But it should be open only to those who have demonstrated their ability to profit by it. It is perhaps the highest function of the state to provide opportunities for the development of scholarship, the improvement of the professions, and the cultivation of the mind. It can only debase these objects and prevent their attainment if it permits the children of taxpayers to wander at will through the higher learning. Under these circumstances university degrees cease to have any meaning and universities, indeed, cease to exist.
Our notion of democracy leads us to the view that everybody is entitled to the same amount and to the same kind of education. This is reflected in our national passion for degrees, a passion which the late Barrett Wendell hoped to assuage by conferring the Bachelor's degree on every American citizen at birth. My judgment is that we cannot expect students who should leave at the end of the sophomore year to depart in peace unless that degree is conferred upon them at that time.
If we confer it at that time, what shall it represent? It should represent a good general education. We do not know what a good general education is. We do not know how to communicate it to those who cannot read. We must find out the answers to both these questions. It is possible that if we can discover what a general education is the problem of communication may partially solve itself; for it might be that the first fruits of an intelligible curriculum would be an interest in understanding it, even on pain of doing so through books. Democracy should mean that this curriculum from beginning to end is open to everybody. Adjustments to individual capacities should be made by permitting the student to proceed at his own pace, taking the examinations whenever in his opinion he is ready to take them. Democracy does not require, however, that the higher learning should be open to anybody except those who have the interest and ability that independent intellectual work demands. The only hope of securing a university in this country is to see to it that it becomes the home of independent intellectual work. The university cannot make its contribution to democracy on any other terms.
The independent intellectual activity of universities is threatened by another consequence of our confusion about democracy, that which results from our confusion about democratic control. I will admit that the aims, methods, and subject matter of American education are so ill-defined that anybody might think that he could do better with it. Still one shudders to note that every citizen entertains the conviction that he is an educational expert of the most significant variety. In public institutions the financial control of the community is undoubted. But it is one thing to say how much money the community can spend on education and quite another to say how it shall be spent. The duly constituted representatives of the public may properly decide that the total expense of a state university must be cut. The decision as to which items should be reduced must rest with educators. In endowed institutions the interest of the community is in seeing to it that the corporation obeys the law. If the community doesn't like the conduct of the corporation, it may adopt legislation requiring changes in it. But an endowed university cannot modify its educational policies because newspaper editors are trying to increase their circulation or politicians their influence at its expense.
Academic freedom is simply a way of saying that we get the best results in education and research if we leave their management to people who know something about them. Attempts on the part of the public to regulate the methods and content of education and to determine the objects of research are encroachments on academic freedom. Attempts to control the private lives and public expressions of professors are of another order. They are attempts to interfere with the liberty of the citizen. The democratic view that the state may determine the amount of money to be spent on education and may regulate education and educators by law has nothing to do with the wholly undemocratic notion that citizens may tell educators how to conduct education and still less with the fantastic position that they may tell them how to live, vote, think, and speak.
In this country that strange phenomenon known as the alumni plays a weird and oftentimes a terrifying role. It is very odd, when you come to think of it, that people who have been the beneficiaries of an institution should think that they should control it, and for that very reason. If you think that the graduates believe they should control the university because they give money to it, I beg to disillusion you. The noise they make is in inverse proportion to the amount they give. The devotion of alumni is highly desirable. They can be useful in defending their alma mater from the public and in representing in their own persons the virtues for which it stands. Unfortunately their energies are often directed to quite other objects. They are interested in all the things that do not matter. And their oratorical powers and the hope that they may some day be induced to come forward with financial support intensify the interest of the university in the things that do not matter too. It is too much to expect that citizens who never went to college can understand what a university is when those upon whom the blessings of the higher learning have been showered understand it less well than anybody else. Any state university president will tell you that few things are so dangerous as an alumnus in the legislature. The presidents of most endowed universities will tell you that the most reactionary element in their constituencies is their most vociferous graduates. Of course it is not their fault. It is ours. Our confusion is so great that we cannot make clear even to our own students what we are trying to do.
Trustees are in a different category from alumni. They at least have the undoubted legal right to control the institution. The wiser they are the less they will attempt to do so. They are or ought to be more competent than the faculty to manage property and to interpret the university to the public. But a university that is run by its trustees will be badly run. How can it be otherwise? Ordinarily the trustees are not educators; usually they are nonresident. If they are alumni, they must overcome the vices inherent in that interesting group. If of their own motion they take an educational problem in hand, they can decide rightly only by accident.
The public may properly look to the trustees, therefore, for the intelligent management of the institution, without imposing on the board the duty of operating it in detail. The regents of a state university lately claimed the right to exclude the faculty from the consideration of a certain subject on the ground that the regents were responsible for the university by law. But the general responsibility of trustees cannot run to the content of courses, the content of the curriculum, or the qualifications of the staff. These are technical matters that are beyond their competence. They should limit themselves to the selection of an administration that is competent to deal with these questions. If it turns out to be incompetent, they should get another. The attempt to take these matters into their own hands can only confound confusion.
To the love of money and a misconception of democracy I would add as a major cause of our disorder an erroneous notion of progress. I shall deal with the various aspects of this notion more at large in the three remaining chapters. I may mention them now by way of index. Our notion of progress is that everything is getting better and must be getting better from age to age. Our information is increasing. Our scientific knowledge is expanding. Our technological equipment in its range and excellence is far superior to what our fathers or even our older brothers knew.
Although the depression has shaken our faith a little, we still remain true to the doctrine of progress and still believe in its universal application. Politics, religion, and even education are all making progress, too In intellectual fields, therefore, we have no hesitancy in breaking completely with the past; the ancients did not know the things we know; they had never seen steam engines, or aeroplanes, or radios, and seem to have had little appreciation of the possibilities of the factory system. Since these are among the central facts in our lives, how can the ancients have anything to say to us?"1
Descartes, Hume,, and Rousseau, for example, did not find it in the least absurd that they should begin to think as though nobody had ever thought before. They did not even regard it as egotistical. It was merely natural; mankind had progressed to the point where it was necessary to cast out old errors and begin to develop a really intelligent program.
The tremendous strides of science and technology seemed to be the result of the accumulation of data. The more information, the more discoveries, the more inventions, the more progress. The way to promote progress was therefore to get more information. The sciences one by one broke off from philosophy and then from one another, and that process is still going on. At last the whole structure of the university collapsed and the final victory of empiricism was won when the social sciences, law, and even philosophy and theology themselves became empirical and experimental and progressive.
In some way or other the theory of evolution got involved in these developments; it gave aid and comfort to empiricism and was particularly happy in its effect upon education. Evolution proves, you see, that there is steady improvement from age to age. But it shows, too, that everybody's business is to get adjusted to his environment. Obviously the way to get adjusted to the environment is to know a lot about it. And so empiricism, having taken the place of thought as the basis of research, took its place, too, as the basis of education. It led by easy stages to vocationalism; because the facts you learn about your prospective environment (particularly if you love money) ought to be as immediate and useful as possible.
We begin, then, with a notion of progress and end with an anti-intellectualism which denies, in effect, that man is a rational animal. He is an animal and perhaps somewhat more intelligent than most. As such, a man can be trained as the more intelligent animals can be. But the idea that his education should consist of the cultivation of his intellect is, of course, ridiculous. What it must consist of is surveys, more or less detailed, of the modem industrial, technological, financial, political, and social situation so that he can fit into it with a minimum of discomfort to himself and to his fellow men. Thus the modern temper produces that strangest of modern phenomena, an anti-intellectual university.
Since an anti-intellectual university is a contradiction in terms, it is no wonder that the theories justifying it are very odd. There is, for instance, the great-man theory of education. Under this theory you pay no attention to what you teach, or indeed to what you investigate. You get great men for your faculty. Their mere presence on the campus inspires, stimulates, and exalts. It matters not how inarticulate their teaching or how recondite their researches; they are, as the saying goes, an education in themselves. This is a variant of the nauseating anecdote about Mark Hopkins on one end of the log and the student on the other.
Under any conditions that are likely to exist in this country the log is too long and there are too many people sitting on both ends of it to make the anecdote apposite. Of course we should try to get great men into education, and each president should try to get as many of them as he can for his own faculty. But he can never hope to get very many, even if he knows one when he sees one. If a president succeeds in finding a few great men, he cannot hope to make them useful in an organization that ties them hand and foot and in a course of study that is going off in all directions at the same time and particularly in those opposite to the ones in which the great men are going. The fact is that the great-man theory is an excuse, an alibi, a vacuous reply to the charge that we have no intelligent program for the higher learning. It amounts to saying that we do not need one; we could give you one if we wanted to. But if you will only accept the greatman theory you will spare us the trouble of thinking.
Another theory we have developed is the character-building theory. It may be that we don't teach our students anything, but what of it? That isn't our purpose. Our purpose is to turn out well-tubbed young Americans who know how to behave in the American environment.2 Association with one another, with gentlemanly professors, in beautiful buildings will, along with regular exercise, make our students the kind of citizens our country needs.3 Since character is the result of choice it is difficult to see how you can develop it unless you train the mind to make intelligent choices. Collegiate life suggests that the choices of undergraduates are determined by other considerations than thought. Undoubtedly, fine associations, fine buildings, green grass, good food, and exercise are excellent things for anybody. You will note that they are exactly what is advertised by every resort hotel. The only reason why they are also advertised by every college and university is that we have no coherent educational program to announce.
The character-building theory turned inside out is the doctrine that every young person ought to learn to work hard; and that it is immaterial what he works at as long as he has to work. Under the theory in this form the subject matter of legal study, for example, might just as well be botany or ornithology or any subject that is of such scope and difficulty as to require a substantial amount of hard labor. The prospective lawyer would have learned to work; anything else he must learn in practice anyway.
We shall all admit, I suppose, that learning how to work is perhaps the prime requisite for a useful life. It does seem unfortunate, however, that the higher learning can contribute nothing which clerking, coal-heaving, or choir practice cannot do as well or better. It is possible that apprenticing the young in some trade from the age of fourteen on might get the result here sought after with less expense and trouble. The hard-work doctrine would seem to be a defense-mechanism set up to justify our failure to develop anything worth working on.
The great-man theory and the character-building theory amount to a denial that there is or should be content to education. Those among us who assert that there is a content to education are almost unanimous in holding that the object of the higher learning is utility, and utility in a very restricted sense. They write articles showing that the educated get better jobs and make more money. Or they advocate changes in education that will, they think, make it more effective in preparing students to get better jobs and make more money. Here we are brought back to the love of money as a cause of our confusion. As the institution's love of money makes it sensitive to every wave of popular opinion, and as the popular opinion is that insofar as education has any object it is economic, both the needs of the universities and the sentiments of the public conspire to degrade the universities into vocational schools. To these then a distorted notion of democracy leads us to admit any and all students; for should not all our youth have equal economic opportunities?
This is the position of the higher learning in America. The universities are dependent on the people. The people love money and think that education is a way of getting it. They think too that democracy means that every child should be permitted to acquire the educational insignia that will be helpful in making money. They do not believe in the cultivation of the intellect for its own sake. And the distressing part of this is that the state of the nation determines the state of education.
But how can we hope to improve the state of the nation? Only through education. A strange circularity thus afflicts us.4 The state of the nation depends on the state of education; but the state of education depends on the state of the nation. How can we break this vicious circle and make at last the contribution to the national life that since the earliest times has been expected of us? We can do so only if some institutions can be strong enough and clear enough to stand firm and show our people what the higher learning is. As education it is the singleminded pursuit of the intellectual virtues. As scholarship it is the single-minded devotion to the advancement of knowledge. Only if the colleges and universities can devote themselves to these objects can we look hopefully to the future of the higher learning in America.
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Notes 1. Cf. the recent remark of Sir R. W. Livingstone: "The Greeks could not broadcast the Aeschylean trilogy, but they could write it."
2. See the remarks attributed to Father R. I. Gannon, President of Fordham University, New York Herald Tribune, June 26, 1936, p. 21: "From now on we must realize that the task of the university is to graduate men of contacts, men whose social life has been developed quite as earnestly as their funds of information, men who bear a definite and easily recognizable university stamp."
3. For a variation on this theme see an article in the Yale Alumni Weekly, May 1, 1936, p. 7, in which the writer suggests that the curriculum is of little importance and that students really educate themselves best by informal association with one another and with professors. If this is true, there is no reason for worrying about what to teach.
4. On the difficulty of educating contrary to the prevailing views of society, see Plato, Republic, Book VI. And contrast Book IV: "'And moreover,' said I, 'the state, if it once starts well, proceeds as it were in a cycle of growth. I mean that a sound nurture and education if kept up creates good natures in the state, and sound natures in turn receiving an education of this sort develop into better men than their predecessors. . . .'"
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