‘MR. VEBLEN’S GAS ATTACK ON OUR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES’
By Brander Matthews.
The New York Times, March 16, 1919, p. 125, 127, 138.

The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of 
Universities by Business Men. By Thorstein Veblen. New York: B. W. 
Huebsch. $1.
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At luncheon in a London club twenty years ago or more a 
distinguished Englishman, who had just returned from a visit to 
America, told me that what had most struck him in the United States 
was the widespread interest in education. “With you over there,” he 
said, “everybody is ready to talk about your schools and your 
colleges and your universities. Over here nobody ever talks about 
education, because nobody really cares about it.”

I felt at the time that my English friend was overestimating our 
interest in education as he was underestimating that of his own 
people. But there was truth in his remark, even if he had 
exaggerated the difference between the two English-speaking peoples. 
The British have of late been awakened to the supreme importance of 
education; and yet there are many among them who would echo the 
saying of the cynical Lord Melbourne that is it “a bore to educate, 
a bore to be educated, and a bore to talk about education.” Of 
course, as we all know, Matthew Arnold was ever insistent on calling 
attention to the inadequacy of the British system – if that could 
fairly be called a system fifty years ago when it was a thing of 
shreds and patches, a chaotic complex of revered traditions and of 
hesitating experiments. He was a voice crying in the wilderness; but 
in the thirty years since he left us not a few ardent disciples have 
joined in a chorus of warning against the old attitude of “letting 
well enough alone” and of “muddling through.”

On this side of the Western Ocean we began very early to believe in 
education. The men of Massachusetts founded a college in what was 
little better than a clearing in the woods. The Dutch brought over 
from Holland a deep-seated belief in the advantages of popular 
education; and there is a never-ending dispute as to whether our 
common-school system is to be credited to New York or to New 
England. We have in the past forty years superimposed a true 
university on the top of the four-year college course, as we are now 
engaged in underpinning the professional and the technical schools 
with two or three years of the college course. We have been forced 
to listen to prolonged debates over the merits and demerits of free 
electives, of the kindergarten, of manual training, of the 
Montessori method, of the Gary system, and of vocational training. 
This incessant discussion has been due to the fact that we have 
never been entirely satisfied with things as they are. Probably most 
of us were pleased to believe that we had done pretty well, even if 
we might have done better; and certainly some of us ewer not 
disposed to be content until we had done the very best we could. It 
may be doubted whether we were really more discontented with what we 
had than the French were or the English. The English have taken a 
great step in advance in the recent Education act; and the French 
have modified their educational organization three or four times in 
the half century of the Third Republic. Perhaps the debate over the 
maintenance of the classical tradition – the Question of Latin, as 
the French termed it – has been conducted even more energetically 
and more acrimoniously in France than in the United States.

But neither in France nor in England has there been so incessant an 
succession of books as we have had in this country attacking what 
the valiant assailants deemed to be the weaknesses in our 
educational system. At one moment it is the common school which is 
the target, and at another the college is the centre of fire. As 
might be expected, these books vary in value and vary in temper – 
most of them are mediocre, a few of them are excellent, and more 
than a few are feeble and foolish. In which of these three groups is 
the latest of them to be included?

One thing is obvious even to the casual and cursory reader of Mr. 
Thorstein Veblen’s “Higher Learning in America”: it is a most 
unusual book. And it is unusual in half a dozen different ways. It 
is unusual in the first place because of the illiteracy of the 
author – or, if this is putting it too discourteously, because the 
author is deficient in the craftsmanship of writing. His opinions 
are doubtfully weighty, but his pages are undoubtedly heavy. His 
style is painfully awkward, and his phrasing is painfully slovenly. 
He writes English as if it were a foreign language which he had 
acquired late in life. His vocabulary is limited and he indulges in 
a fatiguing repetition of a dozen or a score of adjectives. His 
grammar is woefully defective, and in fact, as we turn Mr. Veblen’s 
pages we have a feeling that we are at last entering into the 
grammatical millennium, foretold many years ago by the late George 
T. Lanigan, “when the plural noun shall lie down with the singular 
verb and a little conjunction shall lead them.”

On Page 28 Mr. Veblen asserts that “the material so made use of for 
technical ends are taken over and turned to account without 
afterthought.” and on Page 32 he tells us that “within the 
university precincts any aim or interest other than those of 
irresponsible science and scholarship – pursuit of matter-of-fact 
knowledge – are to be rated as interlopers.” Surely, it is not too 
much to ask that when a man invites us to consider what he has to 
say about the Higher Learning he shall first of all equip himself 
with the Lower Learning – at least, with the elementary grammar of 
the English language. Before he attempts to climb the lofty steps 
that lead to the university he ought to be able to prove that he has 
passed through the portals of the grammar school. So frequent and so 
flagrant are Mr. Veblen’s violations of accepted usage that I was 
moved to look him up in “Who’s Who,” and I was astonished to learn 
from the autobiography he contributed that he is not only a college 
graduate, but that he is even a Doctor of Philosophy. It may be 
possible that, with a humor unrevealed elsewhere in his pages, he 
desires to proffer himself as a Horrible Example of the deficiencies 
of our university instruction.

Nor is his rhetoric any less at fault than his grammar. It is 
evident enough that Mr. Veblen does not write cleanly, because he 
does not think clearly. His presentation of the results of his 
cogitation is so vague and so vaporous that the reader is often left 
in doubt as to what it is that the author believes he believes. He 
is verbose and repetitious, tautological and entangled, cumbrous and 
hazy. He ties himself in knots and trips over them. Words are his 
masters and not his servants. His metaphors play’ tag with one 
another: Here, for example, is a sentence on Pages 42 and 43:

“And while the long-time drift of the modern idealistic bias may not 
permit the universities permanently to be diverted to the service of 
Mammon in this fashion, yet the unremitting endeavors of educators 
seeking prestige for worldly wisdom results [sic] at the best in a 
fluctuating state of compromise, in which the ill effects of such 
bias for popularity are continually being outworn by the drift of 
academic usage.

It would be difficult to deny that bids which can be outworn by 
drifts are likely to have strange effects.

In the second place, this book is unusual in its tone of 
condescensions, in its attitude of impregnable superiority, in its 
toplofty contempt for all men and for all things. From a 
contributing editor to one or another of the subsided weeklies, 
which vaunt themselves as the friends of the New Freedom and as the 
organs of the Uplift, we have no right to expect the persuasive 
urbanity which characterized every page of Newman’s “Men of a 
University”; but we are justified in booking for that respect for 
others which is a necessary companion of self-respect. Apparently 
Mr. Veblen has not taken to heart Robert Louis Stevenson’s 
suggestive assertion that the pleasures of condescension are 
curiously on-sided: Mr. Veblen does not argue with his readers; he 
tells them. He demands [p. 127] compliance like one who has come 
down from the mountain with the tables of stone in his hand. He is 
like the bust of Moliere in Bunner’s little lyrie:

“Yet high his haughty head he heaves.”

The gentle reader is also the humble reader, but, however gentle or 
humble, he does not like to be trampled in the dust. We cannot help 
wondering what warrant Mr. Veblen believes himself to have for his 
arrogant assumption of the right to look down on the rest of 
mankind. In fact, one reader, in spite of the gentleness of his 
humility, was reminded of the protest of the British barrister to 
the brow-beating Judge before whom he was trying a case: “Your 
lordship seems to forget that I am after all a vertebrate animal, 
whereas your lordship’s tone to me would be unbecoming in God 
Almighty to a black beetle!”

In the third place, Mr. Veblen’s book is unusual in its disclosure 
of the author’s absolute ignorance of the institution he has taken 
for his topic. He does not understand the organization of a 
university – or, if he does, he misrepresents it completely. He does 
not perceive the interrelation of its several parts, nor the reasons 
for these interrelations, nor the manifold advantages of them. He 
imputes motives to boards of trustees, to university presidents, and 
to college professors – motives which are so absurd that they can 
only be termed grotesque. Mr. Veblen’s typical trustee, his typical 
president, his typical professor, cannot even be accepted as a 
caricature, because a caricature, however willfully distorted, mist 
be drawn from an actual original; and it is evident that Mr. Veblen 
has evolved out of his inner consciousness his idea of the trustee, 
the president, and the professor. His types are as unrelated to any 
possible originals as though Mr. Veblen had spent his life in a 
vacuum. His vision of the American university is not what he calls 
it (on Page 44) “something of a fancy sketch”; it is something 
altogether fantastic.

In would be fatiguing to catalogue all the stark misstatements of 
fact made by Mr. Veblen: but a few of them must be set down here. He 
says (Page 23) that the graduate school and the college “are still 
commonly coupled together as subdivisions of a complex whole; but 
this holding together of the two disparate schools is at best a 
freak of aimless survival.” The fact is that this coupling is 
advantageous to both partners, and especially – as I can testify 
from nearly thirty years’ experience – to the professor who is 
fortunate enough to teach both in the college and the graduate 
school. He says (Page 30) that “the technologist and the 
professional man are, like other men of affairs, necessarily and 
habitually impatient of any scientific and scholarly work that does 
not obviously lend itself to some practical use.” The fact is that 
nearly all the leaders in the professions, like many leaders among 
the men of affairs, have a very high regard for “work that does not 
lend itself to some practical use.”

He says (Page 40) that the professional and technical schools are 
now “autonomous and academically self-sufficient,” (whatever that 
may mean.) and that “their connection with the university is 
superficial and formal at the best, so far as regards any 
substantial control of their affairs and policy by the university 
authorities at large.” The fact is exactly the contrary: medical and 
law schools which used to be autonomous and even proprietary are now 
integrally connected with the university, to which they often owe 
the enlargement of their aims and the re-invigoration of their 
teaching. He says (Page 64) that “poor men and men without large 
experience in business affairs are fest to have no place” on Boards 
of Trustees. The fact is that such men are frequently elected as 
Trustees and are often among the most useful members of their 
boards.

He says (Page 117) that “under the stress of businesslike management 
in the universities the drift of things sets toward letting the work 
of science and scholarship to the lowest bidder, on a roughly 
applicable piece-wage plan.” The fact is – well, the fact is that 
this assertion is simply silly. But it is not sillier than a host of 
other assertions which companion it in Mr. Veblen’s volume. Indeed, 
I cannot now recall that I have ever read any book on any subject in 
which there is amassed such a mess of miscellaneous misinformation.

Fourthly and finally – for this Catalog of the Slips must not be 
allowed to become as fatiguing as its text – this book is unusual in 
its bad manners and perhaps, I should say, in its bad morals. There 
is a discourtesy very close to dishonesty in slandering by 
insinuation. The man who comes straight at us with a bowie knife in 
his hand may be dangerous, but he is not despicable, like the 
creature who creeps up [page 138] stealthily with a stiletto to deal 
a stab in the back. On Page 67 and on Page 70 Mr. Veblen seems to 
suggest that there are Boards of Trustees whose members make a 
personal profit out of the funds intrusted to them; the insinuation 
is hedged about with weasel words – i. e., “instances of the kind 
are not wholly unknown, though presumably (!) exceptional.” Mr. 
Veblen is ready to believe the worst about all college Trustees, 
since they are likely to be business men, and he holds that “the 
spirit of American business is a spirit of quietism, caution, 
compromise, collusion, and chicane,” (Page 70.) and that “success in 
business affairs * * * comes only by getting something for nothing.” 
(Page 71.)

We all know that the university President is an important figure in 
American public life and without exact parallel in European public 
life. No one would decry the high ability and the lofty character of 
Eliot of Harvard, Gilman of Johns Hopkins, White of Cornell; the 
every one recognizes the scholarly equipment of Butler of Columbia, 
Hadley of Yale, and Lowell of Harvard. But Mr. Veblen does not 
hesitate to declare (Page 83) it “a safe generalization that in 
point of fact the average of university Presidents fall short of the 
average of their academic staff in scholarly or scientific 
attainments.” He asserts also that “as to the requirements of 
scholarly or scientific competency, a plausible speaker with a large 
gift of assurance, a businesslike educator or clergyman, some urbane 
pillar of society, some astute veteran of the scientific demi-monde 
will meet all reasonable requirements.” On Page 269, but more or 
less diminished in prominence by the finer type of a foot note, may 
be found what we must regard as Mr. Veblen’s most characteristic 
utterance:

“A person widely conversant with current opinion and its expression 
among the personnel of the staff * * * might unguardedly come to the 
persuasion that the typical academic head, under these latter-day 
conditions, will be a feeble-minded rogue.”

The President of Mr. Veblen’s vision is naturally uncomfortable in 
the presence of a real scholar, and he is swift to oust any such 
person who has obtruded himself into the Faculty. On Pages 172-3 we 
are warned that “it is not any easy or a graceful matter for a 
businesslike executive to get rid of any undecorative or indecorous 
scientist whose only fault is an unduly pertinacious pursuit of the 
work for which alone the university claims to exist.” But on Pages 
178-9 we are informed how the scientist whose only fault is that he 
is truly a scientist may be crowded out: “By a judicious course of 
vexation and equivocation, an obnoxious scientist may be manoeuvred 
into such a position that his pride will force a voluntary 
resignation. Failing this, it may become necessary, however 
distasteful, delicately to defame his domestic life.”

These quotations must suffice to prove how truly unusual Mr. 
Veblen’s book is; indeed, I like to hope that it is not only 
unusual, but actually unique, in the exact sense of that abused 
word. “None but itself can be its parallel.”
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