Robert Maynard HutchinsThe Higher Learning in America(Yale University Press, 1936). |
II. THE DILEMMAS OF THE HIGHER LEARNING
Here is a conflict between one aim of the university, the pursuit of truth for its own sake, and another which it professes too, the preparation of men and women for their life work. This is not a conflict between education and research. It is a conflict between two kinds of education. Both kinds are found in all parts of a university. As I shall show in a moment, professional training is given in almost every department, and the pursuit of truth for its own sake may occasionally be met with even in a professional school.
I need not tell you which of these two aims of the modem university has lately been more popular. A mere recital of the new schools, avowedly professional in purpose, that have appeared in the past thirty-five years will convince you that we have seen a dramatic shift in the composition of our universities. Since the beginning of the century the following units designed to fit students for specific occupations have appeared and have become respectable: schools of journalism, business, librarianship, social service, education, dentistry, nursing, forestry, diplomacy, pharmacy, veterinary surgery, and public administration. There are many others chat have appeared, but have not yet become respectable. I have confined myself to what might be called the standard subjects.
These new schools, of course, consume a very large portion of the attention of students, faculty, and administrators. New developments in older professional disciplines are having the same effect. The growth of university medicine since 1910 has been phenomenal. The total assets contributing to medical education and research at the University of Chicago are more than forty million dollars, and medicine now consumes 25 per cent of the University's annual budget. Full-time faculties in law and engineering lead, of course, to greater expense than we were formerly put to; for part-time professors ordinarily carried away little or nothing as direct salary. In engineering the equipment becomes more elaborate as technology advances, and no end to the process is in sight. The modest requirements of a classics group of ten professors pale into insignificance beside the demands of the same number of engineers.
Emphasis on professionalism is further promoted by the increasing practice of pointing work from the junior year onward toward some professional school. The modern university is full of prelaw, prebusiness, predentistry, preengineering, and premedical students whose course of study is determined by their professional ambitions. In some institutions the professional schools themselves begin with the junior year. This, as I shall show later, would be a sound organization under certain circumstances. Unfortunately those circumstances do not obtain today.
We find, moreover, that outside professional schools and in departments of arts, literature, and science the atmosphere in which the student labors is highly professional. Students do graduate work in organic chemistry because industry engages a large number of Ph.D.'s in this field every year. Students study for the M.A. because it is becoming necessary for positions in secondary schools. In the Middle West 45 per cent of the graduates of colleges of liberal arts go into teaching. In some colleges this proportion rises to go per cent. These colleges have been forced to offer the Master's degree so that their students may teach in secondary schools. They must also offer professional courses in education because state laws and accrediting agencies require such training for the prospective teacher at all levels of the public schools. In the universities students study for the Ph.D. because it is almost impossible to secure a college or university post without it. Seventyfive per cent of them have no interest in research; at least, that percentage never does any more after the exertions of the dissertation. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that university departments exist to train people to teach in university departments.
The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is being rapidly obscured in universities and may soon be extinguished. Every group in the community that is well enough organized to have an audible voice wants the university to spare it the necessity of training its own recruits. They want to get from the university a product as nearly finished as possible, which can make as large and as inexpensive a contribution as possible from the moment of graduation. This is a pardonable, perhaps even a laudable, desire. But the effect of it on the universities will be that soon everybody in a university will be there for the purpose of being trained for something.
You may ask, what of it? You may suggest, and with reason, that the surroundings of a university are better than those in which the young practitioner might otherwise learn to practice. You may point out that a desirable uniformity may be obtained by insisting on educational requirements through which all neophytes must pass. You may say that the legal profession, for example, is not to be trusted with the education of the young lawyer; and if you do, you will, I am afraid, be right. My answer is that the burdens imposed upon the universities by this arrangement are bad for them and bad for the professions, and that the hope of doing a better job of training young people in the practices of a profession by having the universities do it is quite illusory.
It is plain enough, I suppose, that it is bad for the universities to vocationalize them. I do not deny that the professional atmosphere has an electrical effect on some -students. I have seen Big Men at Yale, football heroes and social luminaries, wake up in the Law School under the stimulus of the incentives and competition of professional work. The close connection between law-school'grades and law-office jobs and the fact that it is the fashion to work in law school accomplish a good many miracles of ' this variety. Undergraduate study can make no such appeal: it has no apparent connection with anything; and the fashion of working at it would be difficult to start.
On the other hand, the vocational atmosphere is ruinous to attempts to lead the student to understand the subject. By hypothesis he is learning to practice the profession. You must, therefore, make clear to him at every step that the questions you are discussing have a direct bearing on his future experi ences and on his success in meeting them. You must give him practical advice. A friend of mine recently took an hour to explain to his law-school class the economic and social background of the fellow-servant rule. At the end of the discussion one student inquired, "What's this got to do with the law?" There is a good deal to be said for the boy's position; he had come to the university under the impression that it would prepare him for the bar examinations and teach him the rules of the game. He felt that he was being cheated. Under these circumstances the temptation is irresistible to tell your students stirring anecdotes of your own days at the bar, to let them in on the tricks of the trade, and to avoid confusing their minds by requiring them to think about anything except what the courts will do.
The curriculum of such a school is what you might expect it to be. It is confined to those subjects which experience, tradition, or the state examinations have sanctified. The emphasis of the school is determined by vocational pressures: if, for example, big business is the thing, the course of study will revolve around conunercial law. It is conceivable that public law may take the place of commercial law if the public service as an occupation continues to be a popular topic of conversation. Criminal law, a subject of the greatest practical and theoretical importance, is required in law schools because nobody would study it otherwise: there is in general no money in it. jurisprudence, which should be central in any law curriculum, is studied by few and like legal history is regarded as a peripheral or ornamental subject.
If you set out to prepare a boy for a trade there are and can be no limits to the triviality to which you will descend except those imposed by the limitations on the time at your disposal. You can justify almost anything on the ground that it may be helpful to the young man in his profession. And if you take the view that a university may properly prepare boys for trades, there is no limit to the number of trades you can train them for except those imposed by the limitations on your resources. Since you can usually make a school pay ff you make it vocational enough, there are really no limits at all. Any occupation that wishes to be dignified will say that it is a profession and suggest that the university cooperate by offering a curriculum preparing young people for it. This is a free country, which in my business means that anybody is free to make suggestions to a university and demand that they be carried out.
It follows that the professors in a university so conceived and so dedicated will be selected not because of their intellectual capacity, but because of the length, breadth, and depth of their practical experience. An ability to think and interest in thinking about the subject might be a handicap to a member of the staff. Although the salary scale in law schools is higher than in nonprofessional departments, the standard of scholarship is lower. In few other fields can a considerable reputation be grounded on the production of textbooks, manuals, or teaching materials. Moreover, a law teacher is supposed to be a good teacher first of all, which in professional schools is likely to mean a popular teacher. Sins of omission in scholarship are forgiven him ff the boys agree that he knows the law. I have watched non-lawyers come into law schools as professors and observed that the first thing they feel called on to do is to act as though they had had brilliant careers at the bar. In some cases they have thus defeated the object of their appointment, which was to diminish rather than increase the amount of vocational instruction.
These attitudes of students and teachers have resulted in the isolation of professional schools from the less frankly vocational elements in a university. Whether other departments are actually pursuing the truth for its own sake or not, they usually pretend that they are. The result is that there is hardly a law school in the United States that is really part of the university to which it nominally belongs. The Yale Law School, indeed, has gone so far as to get attached to the Harvard Business School and to cooperate with it in a way in which it would never think of doing with any Yale department, and in which the Harvard Law School would never think of doing with the Harvard Business School.
The Institute of Human Relations at Yale was an attempt to unify certain professional and nonprofessional disciplines. The centrifugal forces at work were so strong, however, that some elements were blown out of the Institute at an early date; and in spite of large resources and an elaborate plant the rest of the organization has been held together with some difficulty.
Superficially, at least, the law is connected with economics, ethics, politics, history, and psychology. Even in universities which have good departments in these fields the law school has little to do with them, and they have little to do with it. The engineering schools are notorious for their particularistic views of the natural sciences upon which engineering depends, and even of English composition, which, we are told, is something quite different in engineering from what it is in any other walk of life. Even in medical schools, which because of their organization into the clinical and preclinical years have a clearer notion of the relation of the sciences and the arts, you are likely to hear that a scientist outside the medical school can contribute little to medical progress and still less to medical education. If we assume that the professional disciplines have something that the rest of the university should know about and that the rest of the university might possibly shed some light on the professional disciplines, we must agree that isolation is bad for everybody. Indeed we can hardly make a case for including professional schools in universities at all except on the ground that mutual interchange with nonprofessional departments will give them something they could not otherwise get.
Vocationalism leads, then, to triviality and isolation; it debases the course of study and the staff. It deprives the university of its only excuse for existence, which is to provide a haven where the search for truth may go on unhampered by utility or pressure for "results." I do not need to tell you how hard it is in these times and in this country to keep this characteristic activity of a university alive. There is, as a matter of fact, no discernible enthusiasm for it in the United States. Think where research in any meaning of the word would be if it had not been for the Rockefeller, Camegie, and Harkness fortunes. The spirit of the age is not congenial to long-term, quiet investigations of matters which seem remote from daily life; nor is it in fact congenial to the impartial, detached study of subjects that touch daily life more nearly. Everybody wants the university to advance his special brand of propaganda, to join his private pressure group. He cannot imagine that the university is not interested in pressure or propaganda. He assumes that if it is not with him it must be against him. We have come to the point where the pursuit of truth for its own sake is actually regarded as dangerous by nervous newspaper publishers and worried business men.
Under these circumstances, we cannot cheerfully see the essential activity of a university submerged by wave after wave of vocationalism. But I suggest that vocationalism is not merely bad for the universities; it is bad also for the professions. I beg to lay down this fundamental proposition, that every profession requires for its continuous development the existence of centers of creative thought. To the extent to which universities and professional schools abandon creative thought and degenerate into trade schools the profession must degenerate into a trade. I attribute the decline of the church in this country to the decline of the theological schools, the plight of the law to the plight of the law schools, the condition of engineering to the condition of the engineering schools, and the comparative excellence of medicine to the comparative excellence of the medical schools developed since 1910.
If we examine those medical schools we see that they were made part of universities in order to secure for them the benefit of any thinking that might be going on in them. The professors were to be in the main men who could think about medicine. Hence it was provided that they must have time to do it. The number of students was to be small enough to give the faculty opportunity to encourage and direct the thinking of students. The emphasis was not on hospital beds or on classroom facilities: it was on laboratories. A connection was sought not with large hospitals but with strong departments in the basic sciences. Throughout all the modifications which these schools have undergone, where close association with the basic sciences has been preserved, their excellence has been maintained. Where those departments have been weak or have become the slaves of a professional group, the medical school has deteriorated. It is not too much to say that an intimate relationship with strong scientific departments is the indispensable requirement for a strong medical school. Such a school may become strong temporarily through assembling a distinguished group of clinicians and through the excellence of its supply of clinical material. The pressure of clinical work is such, however, that it becomes routine and the school becomes routine if it is cut off from a center of creative thought.
It is for this reason that the location of professional schools is of more significance than at first appears. Putting law schools near the courts and medical schools near the hospitals may have some advantages; they are nothing compared to the disadvantages of removing them from the university. Emphasis on the practical is not an emphasis that professional schools need. The demands of the profession are pressed upon them constantly. Only by a close association with a university can these demands be minimized and the emphasis placed where it needs to be, on the intellectual problems of the profession.
But location is not enough. Why is it that the clergy do not command the respect that we should all like to feel for them? I think you will find the answer by looking at the catalogue of any divinity school. It is now made up of subjects which, it is assumed, will assist the pastor in coping with his first charge. He learns about building management, and community singing, and church socials, and what is called religious education. Theology, which deals with the intellectual problems of his profession, has almost disappeared from the curriculum.
Why is it that American engineers do not in general rise to such commanding positions outside engineering practice as do the members of the profession in England? The answer is the relatively narrow vocational course of study which the American engineer must pursue. And if there are regrettable differences between the standards of the British bar and those of the American bar, is it not possible that one reason for them is that the American law school emphasizes training for the practice and the English universities emphasize understanding the law?
Turning professional schools into vocational schools degrades the universities and does not elevate the professions. I should also contend that it cannot accomplish the only purpose it can have, namely, the preparation of the student for the practice of his life work. It is, in short, bad for the student as well as for the universities and the professions.
My contention is that the tricks of the trade cannot be learned in a university, and that if they can be they should not be. They cannot be learned in a university because they get out of date and new tricks take their place, because the teachers get out of date and cannot keep up with current tricks, and because tricks can be learned only in the actual situation in which they can be employed.
I pass over the sad circumstance that a student who spends his university career in specific vocational preparation and then does not go into the vocation has wasted his university career. Since 50 per cent of engineering graduates do not become engineers, the engineering schools should try to give them an education useful in any occupation instead of teaching them tricks that are useful, if at all, only in engineering.
All that can be learned in a university is the general principles, the fundamental propositions, the theory of any discipline. The practices of the profession change so rapidly that an attempt to inculcate them may merely succeed in teaching the student habits that will be a disservice to him when he graduates. Efforts to keep up with the current events usually result in keeping up with the event before last, so that I should not be surprised to learn that law schools are just beginning to teach their students how to proceed under N. R. A. The case method in schools of business leads to the study of cases which occurred during a boom, a year or so after a depression has set in. The practices of the practical world are changing from day to day and even from , lour to hour. It is hard for the practitioner to keep up with them, to say nothing of the professor removed from the,practical world. But suppose he can keep up with them; he has no guarantee that they will still be in vogue when his students seek to apply them. In fact he knows that the chances are that they will have disappeared and others which he failed to mention will have taken their place. Consider the feelings of a professor who drilled his students in the manipulation of the rules of common-law practice in Illinois, only to see them radically altered by the Practice Act.
What should he have taught them? He should have tried to see to it that they understood the principles, if any, of pleading. If they did they could have worked out for themselves the rationale of the rules of any jurisdiction; they might even understand the Illinois Practice Act.
You may say that the university medical school shows that both the principles and the practice of a profession may be learned in a university. The example of medicine is misleading. To make the example apposite to any other profession you would have to have two things which medicine has: first, a well-developed group of preclinical sciences in close association with the professional school, and second the actual conditions of practice on the university campus. The first of these some professional disciplines have, though they usually fail to make use of them. Engineering, for example, can find the physical sciences on the campus if it is willing to associate with them. Other professional branches, like the law, have nowhere to turn, for even if we assume that the social sciences are the sciences preclinical to the law, we cannot pretend that they are well worked out. They are, in fact, so badly worked out that at present it may be better for the law schools to stick to the law than to confuse themselves further by association with the social sciences.
The second of the requirements for achieving the results in training for practice that the medical school achieves is not enjoyed by any other professional unit. Only in medicine do we find the actual conditions of practice on the university campus. In the university medical school the professors are practicing medicine; their patients are suffering from diseases just as real as those which appear in any doctor's office. The student learns to practice in the only way in which anybody can learn to practice anything, by practicing. In law, engineering, journalism, business, and other real and imitation professional schools, the conditions of practice do not exist, and hence the student cannot learn to practice. If we were to attempt to get in law the same results that the medical school gets in medicine, we should have to organize the law school like a law office, with the professors practicing their profession, for a suitable fee, and the students learning as their assistants. Under the present system attempts to teach law students the art of practicing law will not succeed; they will, moreover, do positive harm, for they will divert the law student from what he might learn in law school, which is the theory, the fundamental propositions, the general principles of the law.
It is for this reason that "practical" work should not be attempted in professional schools even if it were possible to succeed with it: it interferes with the education of the student. It seems reasonably clear that a member of a learned profession should be educated. An educated man knows what he is doing and why. It is possible, I suppose, to be a very good cook without knowing any chemistry. At least the cookbooks confine themselves to telling you what to do under certain circumstances. It is not yours to reason why; you follow the instructions. It is perhaps for this reason that cooking has never been regarded as one of the learned professions. A man can be a good automobile driver, or bricklayer, or ditch digger on the same terms. All he needs to know is the rules of the trade. He does not need to understand them. But a profession cannot be truly learned unless its members understand the subject matter with which it deals.
The subject matter of a learned profession is intellectual. Though the rules of the trade may be learned in the practice, and indeed can only be learned there, the intellectual content of the profession can generally be mastered only in a university; at least a university should be the ideal place for such study. To the extent to which the attention of the student is directed to vocational interests and away from the intellectual content of the discipline the university fails to do the only thing it might do and attempts something in which it is bound to fail.
Yet we live in a world that is not merely unintellectual but anti-intellectual as well. Even the universities are anti-intellectual. The college, we say, is for social adaptation; the university is for vocational adjustment. Nowhere does insistence on intellectual problems as the only problems worthy of a university's consideration meet such opposition as in the universities themselves. We try to adjust students to life by giving them information about it, though we know the information will be archaic when they graduate. We try to adjust students to their life work by telling them how a professional man operates; we seldom bother to tell them why. The result is a course of study which is anti-intellectual from beginning to end.
A student may, then, enter a professional school without ever having been compelled to think, without, in short, being educated. In the same innocent condition he may enter a learned profession. We cannot wonder that the learned professions are no more learned than they are. if the student has not learned to think and if the technical procedures that have been taught him are of little value, what has he acquired in the professional school that could not be better learned elsewhere? As we saw at the beginning, he has learned to work. It is too bad that he has not been put to work on something worthwhile. If he had been, he might have been just as successful in the practice of his profession; for paradoxically enough a grasp of theory might enable him to meet practical situations which were overlooked or not foreseen by his instructors.
From this inspection of the universities we can see what our dilemmas are. The first is the dilemma of professionalism. We do not feel safe in turning over education for the professions to the members of them. Universities are corporations not for profit, and can perhaps be trusted somewhat further. Many activities, such as public administration, are very important to the public. We see no way of preparing men to engage in them. The universities should be able to do something about this, too. Yet we know that a professional emphasis at present means a vocational emphasis and that such an emphasis is bad for the universities, bad for the professions, and bad for the students.1
Professionalism produces our second dilemma, which is the dilemma of isolation. To the extent to which professors are concerned with preparation for a specific trade they are isolated from professors interested in another specific trade, and both groups are isolated from those who are not interested in any trade at all but are attempting to pursue the truth for its own sake. On the other hand, all university departments with few exceptions are now engaged in professional training of some kind. The advantages of association with them are therefore highly dubious. University departments and professional schools now have no common frame of reference; it is possible that cooperation might increase confusion. An isolated vocational school can at least be certain that it is engaged in trying to prepare students for the vocation.
The third dilemma is that of anti-intellectualism. We are afflicted here again by the circularity of education and the national life. The professions and the public demand people trained according to their idea of what that training should be. How can their ideas be changed? Only by an education which they can get only in a university. Can a university train men for a profession in ways which the profession does not approve? Can a university make a profession learned in spite of itself ? One of the chief concems of a university department and a fortiori of a professional school is that its graduates shall get jobs. These departments and schools are not likely to break into a type of education with which the profession is unacquainted and of which it will be suspicious.
These dilemmas can, I think, be resolved; but it will take another chapter to do it. I will say here by way of suggestion and summary that the dilemma of professionalism can be met in part by a thoroughgoing revision of our notions of what a profession is. From the university standpoint, at least, a professional discipline to be a professional discipline must have intellectual content, and have it in its own right. All there is to journalism can be learned through a good education and newspaper work. All there is to teaching can be learned through a good education and being a teacher. All there is to public administration can be discovered by getting a good education and being a public servant. As Aristotle said in the Politics, "The same education and the same habits will be found to make a good man and a good statesman and king." If the universities can revert to a condition where the number of professional schools and courses is limited to those that have intellectual content in their own right, they will have gone some distance toward disposing of the dilemma of professionalism.
They will go still farther toward disposing of it if they can insist that the professional schools and departments that remain deal with their subject matters in the true university spirit, that is, in the spirit of studying them for their own sake. Every learned profession has a great intellectual heritage, and it is this which should be the prime object of the attention of professional schools. I believe that these schools will find that their students will be better prepared for practice if they are trained to think in the subject matter of the professional discipline than if they have been taught by the cookbook method.
Studying professional subject matters in this spirit will produce better practitioners. It will also help to meet the dilemma of isolation. Subject to a qualification that I shall introduce later3 the unifying principle of a university is the pursuit of truth for its own sake. So far as professional departments adopt this principle as their own they take their place in the university's community of scholars. If the number of professional groups can be limited to those that have intellectual content; if they and all other departments can conduct their work in the same spirit; if we can develop general education so that all advanced study will rest on a common body of knowledge, we may succeed in making our universities true communities and communities of true scholars.
Only by this route can we resolve the dilemma of anti-intellectualism. If the leading universities can develop ideals which are intelligible to them; if they can adhere to them even if for a time they lose students and money, it may be that they can sometime make themselves and their ideals intelligible to our people. The justification for the privileges of universities is not to be found in their capacity to take the sons of the rich and render them harmless to society or to take the sons of the poor and teach them how to make money. It is to be found in. the enduring value of having constantly before our eyes institutions that represent an abiding faith in the highest powers of mankind. The whole world needs this symbol now as never before. It is this symbol that I hope the American universities may become.
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1. Cf. the recent observation of Dean C. H. Wilkinson, Worcester College, Oxford, "Specialism has largely taken the place of education and, with its twin brother professionalism, is spreading like a blight over the land."
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