The North American Review, (New York), Vol. 209, (Mar., 1919), pp. 417-420.
Book Review by: editor
THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities By 
Business Men. By THORSTEIN VEBLEN.
(New York, N.Y.:, B.W. Huebsch, 1918, viii + 286p.)
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[417]
THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA. By Thorstein Veblen. New York: B. W. Huebsch.

Veteran politicians, experienced men of affairs, to say nothing of other 
profound students of human nature (by no means to be placed in the same ethical 
class), such as tramps and charlatans, are wont to boast at odd moments that 
they "Know things that are not in any book"; and the complacency with which such 
pronouncements are for the most part received points to a somewhat general 
skepticism as to the competency of the book-taught mind to reveal essential 
truths.

The popular notion that books are not as a rule saturated with the kind of truth 
that is most immediately wanted is perhaps not altogether an error. Doubtless 
the condition complained of is not due in any degree to timidity on the part of 
those authoritative persons who know best, nor to any discreditable motive on 
the part of anyone. The fact remains, however, that one may become exceedingly 
well read in the authoritative and polite literature of the times without 
learning much about life, unless, to be sure, one has acquired somehow an 
ability to read between the lines. And it is, moreover, true, as the common 
sense of the majority of men attests, that little relief is to be had by turning 
to those books which are ostensibly most ingenuous and outspoken, since these 
books are too often the work of extremists, doctrinaires, or otherwise 
indifferently responsible writers.

The result is that persons - especially young persons - are prone to have 
recourse to fiction, and particularly to the newer fiction, as a means of 
satisfying a quite natural craving for that alleged "knowledge of life" which 
appears so difficult to get elsewhere, except indeed through a heart-to-heart 
talk with the "man who knows."

But so far as it touches upon institutions rather than upon the common frailties 
of mankind, the satire embodied in the newer fiction is but an unsatisfactory 
substitute for scientific analysis. It is a safe conjecture that the somewhat 
burlesque representations of college life contained, for example, in Ernest 
Poole's The Harbor and in Sinclair Lewis's Trail of the Hawk, have added not a 
little to the interest and popularity of the tales in question. The like is true 
of the exquisite and (from a literary point of view) far more legitimate 
characterization of a would-be college president in Henry Sydney Harrison's 
Queed. These things amuse us chiefly because of a suspicion that they represent, 
though in a one-sided manner, real conditions. We would not care to read this 
kind of criticism if we did not secretly [418] feel that our most cherished 
institutions, like Launcelot Gobbo's father, do, after all, "something smack, 
something grow to, have a kind of taste" of the qualities more or less playfully 
ascribed to them. And yet this kind of institutional satire is little more than 
a rather aimless telling of tales out of school. The thing is perhaps worth 
doing; but it seems reasonable to hope that, if there is anything in it, it may 
be done in some better way.

To compare in point of interest such fictional criticism of college life with a 
perfectly serious passage from Thorstein Veblen's recently published book upon 
the higher learning in America, may be worth while. "It is toward the outside, 
in the face of the laity out of doors," writes Mr. Veblen, "that the high fence 
-'the eight-fold fence' -of scholarly prreetension is to be kept up. Hence the 
indicated means of its up-keep are such as will presumably hold the (transient) 
respect and affection of this laity - quasi-scholarly homiletical discourse, 
frequent, voluminous, edifying and optimistic; ritualistic solemnities, 
diverting and vacant; spectacular affectations of (counterfeit) scholastic usage 
in the way of droll vestments, bizarre and archaic; parade of (make-believe) 
gentility; encouragement and (surreptitious) subvention of athletic contests; 
promulgation of (presumably) ingenuous statistics touching the volume and 
character of the work done." Elsewhere Mr. Veblen, after scrupulously careful 
deliberation, describes the typical university executive as "in some sort an 
itinerant dispensary of salutary verbiage."

These quotations, though necessarily somewhat misleading when removed from their 
context, may serve to show that in raciness and vigor of expression, as in 
apparent candor, Mr. Veblen is far superior to the run of fictional satirists. 
As a matter of fact, his dry and precise style makes all ordinary irony seem by 
comparison clumsy and ineffectual, while his magnificent phlegm reduces most 
criticism of the kind called "bold" or "indiscreet" to the relative condition of 
tentative or peevish fault-finding. Unintentionally, no doubt, Mr. Veblen 
approaches more nearly the manner of Jonathan Swift than does any other 
contemporary writer. He might, indeed, be not inaccurately described as a modem, 
scientific Swift, dispassionate instead of bitter.

So much for the manner, but what of the substance? "Communia maledicta," as 
Bacon says, "is nothing much"; and the saying holds true no less for simple 
vituperation aimed at institutions or types than for that which is directed at 
individuals.

Of the justice of Mr. Veblen's arraignment of the universities, every reader 
must, of course, judge for himself. The reviewer feels warranted in saying this: 
that The Higher Learning in America bears all the marks of being one of those 
rare books which contain such truth as seldom finds its way into print - truth 
such as results from genuine experience intrepidly thought out, truth such as in 
the nature of the case cannot by the generality of writers be expressed with 
sufficient candor and at the same time with sufficient philosophy to make it 
either safe or acceptable. Here is the whole case against the universities, 
including some of the colloquial expressions (verging, it must be confessed, 
upon scurrility) of a suppressed body of opinion; the whole case set forth with 
so comprehensive a grasp, with so [419] impartial an eye to the working of cause and 
effect, that in the end no one is judged, no one need feel offended, no one has 
anything to quarrel with except facts (said to be capable of documentary proof 
when not notoriously true) and a perfectly impersonal, logically constructed 
conception of the relation of the universities to modern civilization in 
America.
Other books of Mr. Veblen's have been from time to time noticed in these pages. 
The fault found with these treatises (when any fault could be found) was simply 
that the author presented the "drift of events" as a fatally determined chain of 
causation, without any acknowledgment of purpose on his own part or any 
admission that the fatal chain might be in any way modified by a grasp of the 
ideas he was himself engaged in setting forth; the truth being that though 
events be fatally determined, our conscious thoughts are links in the chain, 
and, being such links, are at the same time our purposes; so that to deny 
purpose is to give up the possibility of thinking intelligibly (in the last 
analysis), and to encourage that false fatalism which resolves not to think.
Whether this criticism be just or not, it has no special application to the work 
under consideration. In this book, Mr. Veblen simply points out the obvious fact 
that the higher learning is the very core of our civilization. "For good or ill, 
civilized men have come to hold that this matter-of-fact knowledge of things is 
the only end in life that indubitably justifies itself. So that nothing more 
irretrievably shameful would overtake modem civilization than the miscarriage of 
this modem learning, which is the most valued spiritual asset of civilized 
mankind." He then proceeds to show what the fate of the higher learning in the 
hands of the universities is likely to be. The reader may draw his own 
conclusions, purposeful or not.

As an illustration of the lucidity of thought to which so impersonal a view may 
lead, one may cite the author's conclusion in regard to the long continued and 
fruitless controversy that has been carried on, under pressure of business 
influences, about the practical value of higher - i.e., of university, not 
college - education. "Pushed by this popular prejudice, and themselves drifting 
under compulsion of the same prevalent bias, even the seasoned scholars and 
scientists - Matthew Arnold's 'Remnant' - have taken to heart this question of 
the use of the higher learning in the pursuit of gain. Of course, it has no such 
use, and the many shrewdly designed solutions of the conundrum have necessarily 
run out in a string of sophistical dialectics. The place of disinterested 
knowledge in modern civilization is neither that of means to private gain, nor 
that of an intermediate step in 'the roundabout process of the production of 
goods.'"

The case is really as simple as that of the Emperor's Clothes. To be sure, a 
child could see that the emperor had no clothes, though older people remained 
under the illusion of habitual pretense. To see that the higher education has 
really no "practical" value requires something more than a child's institution. 
It requires, nowadays, a superior talent for straight thinking.

Others have pointed out the preposterous mixture of idealism and worship of 
business success which is characteristic of modern civilization everywhere and 
especially in America. No one has [420] brought the essential idea so effectively to 
bear upon any concrete problem as has Mr. Veblen upon the problem of the higher 
education. It is the intrusion of business ideals and business methods upon the 
true and professed interests of the university everywhere - in the governing 
boards, in the academic administration, in the work of the executive and of the 
teachers - that is doing the mischief. And this intrusion is so natural a result 
of the whole social system under which we live that it seems unavoidable.

Mr. Veblen is dispassionate, but his thought has a heat much more powerful to 
melt away obstacles than those more or less factitious bursts of indignation 
that are often supposed to accomplish this result. His book, unhopeful as it is 
in tone and intent, will certainly not be without an ultimate effect in bringing 
about a different state of affairs - which may or may not, according to Mr. 
Veblen's philosophy, be an improvement.
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