Review of Veblen's "The Higher Learning in America."

The Nation (New York), Vol. 108, No. 2799, (Feb., 22, 1919), p. 286-288.
['article: Our Commercialized Universities'.]
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[286]
Our Commercialized Universities

The Higher Learning in America. A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by 
Business Men. By Thorstein Veblen. New York. B. Huebsch. $2.

Mr. Veblen's arraignment of the American universities is so complete, so 
unreserved, so confident in its finality, that it requires statement in the 
author’s own vigorous words. The universities have failed utterly of their true 
end and aim, by reason of their control by business men, animated by a false 
competitive spirit, everywhere pursuing the shadow and losing the substance. 
Schoolmasters and narrow-visioned utilitarians infused with a barbarian 
pragmatism are bred by the system, and continue and intensify its futility. The 
clerical bias has been replaced by the business bias; both forsake the 
disinterested path of learning. Yet the avowed ideal remains; learning is 
tolerated, smuggled in, and dissimulated under some plausible pretexts of 
practicality. Neither professional schools nor disciplinary colleges belong in a 
university, whose sole purpose is to advance the higher learning. Experts in 
short-term political prestige have brought the money-changers into the temple 
and even look to the popular esteem of money-changing to give the traffic 
sanctity. Yet they continue to seek the prestige of the temple of learning. "The 
graver issues of academic policy which now tax the discretion of the directive 
powers, reduce themselves in the main to a question between the claims of 
science and scholarship on the one hand and those of business principles and 
pecuniary gain on the other hand."

"Business success is by common consent, and quite uncritically, taken to be 
conclusive evidence of wisdom even in matters that have no relation to business 
affairs." "Full of the same faith that business success 'answereth all things,' 
these business men ... exercise full discretion in these matters with which they 
have no special familiarity." "The American business is a spirit of quietism, 
caution, compromise, collusion, and chicane,” as America is "the land of the 
unearned increment.” Justifying the control of universities by the large 
financial interests, they extend it to all matters, including those of utterly 
unrelated and sharply opposed animus, in which the true life of learning 
consists. The common argument that college learning unfits for business carries 
with it the converse that fitness for business has no relation to fitness for 
control of fitness for business has no relation to fitness for control of 
learning. The parallel implication, that what is of no use in business is not 
worth while, is less avowedly professed. To ignore or excuse the ‘‘surveillance 
of the academic work” which is exercised through the budget shows a strange lack 
of practical sense, while it in no way touches the futility and "ingenious 
folly" of the entire arrangement.

The members of the board select a president in their own image and impose him as 
a "captain of erudition" on a complacent and unconsulted faculty. For this 
autocratic individual "a modicum of scholarship and scholarly ideals" is a 
perquisite, and a combination of astuteness with a gift for popular appeal the 
chief requirement. The general result is "wasteful defeat" of the university’s 
purpose. The perversion runs far and wide, and cuts deep. The governing spirit 
of the institution is false. The competitive idea introduced from the business 
world rules everywhere and combines with the acceptance of the criterion of 
popular approval, counting upon a rhetorical appeal to the gallery. One 
university wastefully competes with another; catalogue pretensions ridiculously 
overstate facilities. Departments compete with one another for students; 
professors compete by way of class-rolls and truculence to superiors. Every item 
of the mechanism of teaching must be standardized and made to tell a statistical 
tale, which alone falls within the comprehension of the laity. The captains of 
erudition and their subordinates may know better, but they are either helpless 
or complacent. Their relation to the captain is simple: "They have eaten his 
bread, and it is for them to do his bidding." "The faculty is conceived as a 
body of employees, [287] hired to render certain services and turn out certain 
scheduled vendible results." To them is left inconsequential detail. Preferment 
goes to those affected by the same temper as directs the enterprise, and thus 
are recruited deans and henchmen and "the many committees-for-the-sifting-of-
sawdust into which the faculty of a well administered university is organized."

The root source of the untoward development is the extraneous control. Its 
consequences are many. Under the "Keeper of the Tape and Sealing Wax" the 
imponderables and incommensurables of learning are spread upon the record in 
terms of units and hours; and bookkeeping rules supreme. Popularity and 
notoriety are assets; salesmanship is cultivated above workmanship. Advertising 
becomes an essential industry developing in the extreme to "a ravenous 
megalomania" prolonging "a shout into polysyllables." Cheapening the product by 
increasing the output is the maxim, ever recognizing that it is bad business to 
offer better goods than the market demands. Puerile "student activities," 
temporizing schools of commerce, vociferous university extension, showy 
architecture in bastard antique, scholars underpaid and overworked, diplomatic 
mischief-makers seeking crumbs of control, stultification and waste and 
inefficiency everywhere - not even substitution by way of compromise, but crude 
displacement and abject surrender.

The evil is concentrated, aided, abetted, and reenforced in the president, who 
exalts administrative frills and through his autocratic appointing power creates 
a faculty after his own image. With a boyish imitation of business enterprise, 
with "a serene and voluble loyalty to current conventions," this masquerading 
captain of erudition becomes "an itinerant dispensary of salutary verbiage” and 
the discourager, even the sterilizer, of learning, the agent of the angel of 
decay, rejoicing in his function, glorifying it, seeking the centre of the 
stage, and spreading perversion with every move - all in as uncritical and mixed 
a temper as this eclectic delineation. When more pointedly and colloquially 
expressed, the epithets gain in sincerity what they lack in elegance, until the 
eavesdropper upon confidential comment might well conclude that "the typical 
academic head, under these latterday conditions, will be a feeble-minded rogue." 
"With all due endeavor to avoid the appearance of a study in total depravity, 
the foregoing analysis has come, after all, to converge upon the growth and 
derivation of those peculiar ambiguities and obliquities that give character to 
the typical academic executive."

Yet the office rather than the man is to blame. "It is the duties of the office, 
not a run of infirmities peculiar to the incumbents of office, that make the 
outcome. Very much like that of the medicine-man, the office is one which will 
not abide a tolerant and ingenuous incumbent." For success in such an 
"enterprise m meretricious notoriety" implies less native gift and previous 
training than the simpler issue of submitting to the discipline and by natural 
drift conforming to the type. As for remedies, there are various ways of 
mitigating symptoms; the only radical cure is the dissolution of the “trust”-
like university (which would hurt the feelings of the trustees), the abolition 
of the executive, and the reduction of administration to a minor place. 
Correctively, the removal of a futile control; constructively, the self-
determination of faculties and professors; in brief, the placing of authority, 
with responsibility, in the faculty is the sole path of redemption.

It would be an entire misconception of Mr. Veblen's essay to counter its thrust 
by exposing its weaknesses and its exaggerations. It would be peculiarly 
impertinent to take the attitude tempting to many a professor, and reply that he 
personally is not suffering (much as the anti-suffragists of comfortable station 
disavow any inconvenience through the absence of the vote), and thus deny the 
relevancy of the thesis. Mr. Veblen is quite prepared to admit all manners and 
measures of "reservations and abatements," is careful to emphasize that the 
results may (under favorable circumstances do) approximate to a creditable 
consummation under the conditions that obtain. But, first as last, the trend of 
the system is in the wrong direction, even when tolerantly relieved by the 
inconsistency that refrains from exercising authority. First as last, no 
profession can worthily carry on its mission upon uncertain rations of 
"reservations and abatements." To move enthusiastically and vigorously a career 
must proceed upon sound inspiring principles, and enjoy the freedom of growth 
and service that can come only by self-direction. As Lowell put it, compromise 
makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof. The academic shelter is exposed to 
untoward forces, because the occupants are tenants on probation, when they 
should be landlords.

When all is said that may be said in extenuation and excuse, and all is done 
that may be done in mitigation and relief, the system of extraneous control 
under which American universities operate stands bare of defence and convicted 
of the serious charges that the Veblens and Cattells and many another less 
articulate protagonist of reform lay against it. The system, if not "ingeniously 
foolish," is at least strangely and cumulatively inept. Unquestionably, the 
commercializing-even admitting its inevitability in some measure has been 
hastened and aggravated by the false spirit of concession, even the warm 
adoption of the programme which the academy should have resisted wisely and 
vigorously and well. "Good work, that is to say sufficiently good work to be 
worth while, requires a free hand and a free margin of time and energy." If the 
pursuit of learning is to furnish a career reasonably promising of achievement 
and satisfaction, it must cease to take on the character of an obstacle-race. An 
open highway on a firm foundation is indispensable; plodding through mud and 
sand discourages, the more so when it is the consequence of misguided 
engineering and an interfering desire for control. There is no consolation in 
the reflection that there are redeeming bits of roadway where the course, 
running through difficult country, has been left to the more expert. It is Mr. 
Veblen’s merit that he has enunciated principles and presented a perspective; he 
has sketched the promised land that the present generation will not enter, but 
might have possessed. More than that: he has made it possible openly and 
honorably to state an adherence which has been invidiously interpreted as the 
evidence of a private grudge or a soured disposition. The utterly foolish 
injection of personal references and carping criticism into the momentous 
question of university control has made it almost impossible to discuss it 
calmly in academic circles. The local reference overshadows the objective 
consideration. The complacency of the profession in the presence of harrassing 
evils, the lack of professional spirit that stands up for cause (for others less 
fortunate if not for oneself), the surrender of ideals to the lure of easement 
and preferment, the temptation of the mess of pottage: these qualities cannot be 
gainsaid, and invite the conclusion that such a temper deserves nothing better 
than the employeeship which it accepts.

The point at which one may legitimately take exception to Mr. Veblen’s thesis is 
his conception of the desirable or necessary limitations of the professorial 
career, granted its primary devotion to the higher learning. In his assumption 
that the scholar desires to be or should be, nothing more than a scholar, he 
will fail of a following. It is plainly uneconomical to cultivate scholarship 
and not use it to the full. Every man is something more than his profession; the 
scholar’s influence in the community is a general asset. Many of the activities 
that a modern university calls upon the professor to perform - if he chances to 
have the ability - are helpful to his career. Versatility is not a lost gift, 
and the limitations of the specialist and the cloistering of the 'Gelehrter' are 
not commendable products in this wide-awake world. Moreover, every practical man 
is ready to make concessions, and pay for his liberty. The scholar may well 
prefer to do so by way of collegiate work, accepting some measure of drudgery. 
But he agrees that he must not be given to do what will maim or hamper his main 
fitness, what will divert or endanger the broad possibility of his best talents. 
He rightfully demands stimulus as he goes, and an atmosphere that incites him to 
the optimum of endeavor. Many things contribute [288] to that end; many more 
hinder. The issue is converged upon the function of trustees and the too 
expansive, too Prussianeering, executive. Mr. Veblen places them in the class of 
undesirable influences in the higher learning of America.

In illustration of the animus of learning, he cites the ingenious question of 
Benjamin Franklin: Of what use is a baby? Learning, like a baby, justifies 
itself; trustees and presidents do not. They exist (or are mistakenly permitted 
to exist) for the sake of a definite end; by that service they must be measured. 
Yet with all this granted, those sympathetic with the thesis will raise the 
issue whether the spirit of university control could not be decidedly altered by 
alteration of the temper, without abandoning the established instruments of 
control. Therein lie the practical hope and the adjustment to the status quo. 
The placing of a considerable group of faculty members on the board of control 
seems the simplest step to prevent the evils from growing worse; how far it will 
rectify them remains to be seen. It is frankly a compromise, and as such can 
find justification only as an umbrella, not as a permanent structure. To alter 
the figure: such shared direction will remove the feeling that the scholars are 
eating at the second table, which in fact they are. With so much of concession 
to those who insist that ways and means and balances of powers are the true ends 
of man, let the concluding emphasis of the book remain: that Mr. Veblen, like 
President Wilson, places himself with those who believe in principles first. In 
the reconstruction that is upon us, for political relations as for those of 
learning, that is the largest stake, the supreme issue. To Mr. Veblen belongs 
the glory, as yet not conspicuously acknowledged, of a leader in a momentous 
issue.
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