Thorstein Veblen
THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA:
A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities By Business Men
(New York, N.Y.:, B. W. Huebsch, 1918, viii + 286p.)
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[v]
PREFACE
It is something more than a dozen years since the following observations on 
American academic life were first assembled in written form. In the meantime 
changes of one kind and another have occurred, although not such as to alter the 
course of policy which has guided American universities. Lines of policy which 
were once considered to be tentative and provisional have since then passed into 
settled usage. This altered and more stable state of the subject matter has 
permitted a revision to avoid detailed documentation of matters that have become 
commonplace, with some resulting economy of space and argument. But, unhappily, 
revision and abridgment carries its own penalties, in the way of a more 
fragmentary presentation and a more repetitious conduct of the argument; so that 
it becomes necessary to bespeak a degree of indulgence on that ground.
Unhappily, this is not all that seems necessary to plead in extenuation of 
recurrent infirmities. Circumstances, chiefly of a personal incidence, have 
repeatedly delayed publication beyond what the run of events at large would have 
indicated as a propitious date; and the same circumstances have also enjoined a 
severer and more repressive curtailment in the available data. It may not be out 
of place, therefore, to indicate in the most summary fashion what has been the 
nature of these fortuitous hindrances.
In its earlier formulation, the argument necessarily drew largely on first-hand 
observation of the conduct of affairs at Chicago, under the administration of 
its first [vi] president. As is well known, the first president's share in the 
management of the university was intimate, masterful and pervasive, in a very 
high degree; so much so that no secure line of demarcation could be drawn 
between the administration's policy and the president's personal ruling. It is 
true, salient features of academic policy which many observers at that time were 
inclined to credit to the proclivities of Chicago's first president, have in the 
later course of things proved to belong to the impersonal essence of the case; 
having been approved by the members of the craft, and so having passed into 
general usage without abatement. Yet, at the time, the share of the Great 
Pioneer in reshaping American academic policy could scarcely have been handled 
in a detached way, as an impersonal phenomenon of the unfolding historical 
sequence. The personal note was, in fact, very greatly in evidence.
And just then, presently, that Strong Man's life was brought to a close. So that 
it would unavoidably have seemed a breach of decorum to let these observations 
seek a hearing at that time, even after any practicable revision and excision 
which filial piety would enjoin. Under the rule of Nihil nisi bonum, there 
seemed nothing for it but a large reticence.
But swiftly, with the passage of years, events proved that much of what had 
appeared to be personal to the Great Pioneer was in reality intrinsic to the 
historical movement; so that the innovations presently lost their personal 
colour, and so went impersonally to augment the grand total of human achievement 
at large. Meanwhile general interest in the topic had nowise abated. Indeed, 
discussion of the academic situation was running high and in large volume, and 
much of it was taking such a turn - controversial, reproachful, hortatory, 
acrimonious [vii] - that anything in the way of a temperate survey should 
presumably have been altogether timely.
But fortuitous circumstances again intervened, such as made it seem the part of 
insight and sobriety again to defer publication, until the colour of an 
irrelevant personal equation should again have had time to fade into the 
background. With the further passage of time, it is hoped that no fortuitous 
shadow will now cloud the issue in any such degree as to detract at all sensibly 
from whatever value this account of events and their causes may have.
This allusion to incidents which have no material bearing on the inquiry may 
tolerantly be allowed, as going to account for a sparing use of local 
information and, it is hoped, to extenuate a degree of reserve and reticence 
touching divers intimate details of executive policy.

It goes without saying that the many books, papers and addresses brought out on 
the academic situation have had their share in shaping the essay. More 
particularly have these various expressions of opinion and concern made it 
possible to take many things for granted, as matter of common notoriety, that 
would have appeared to require documentation a dozen or fifteen years ago, as 
lying at that time still in the field of surmise and forecast. Much, perhaps the 
greater bulk, of the printed matter issued on this head in the interval has, it 
is true, been of a hortatory or eloquently optimistic nature, and may therefore 
be left on one side. But the academic situation has also been receiving some 
considerable attention with a view to getting an insight into what is going 
forward. One and another of these writers to whom the present essay is in debt 
will be fond referred to by name in the pages which more particularly lean on 
[viii] their support; and the like is true for various utterances by men in 
authority that have been drawn on for illustrative expressions. But a narrow 
scrutiny would doubtless make it appear that the unacknowledged indebtedness 
greatly exceeds what so is accredited and accounted for. That such is the case 
must not be taken as showing intentional neglect of the due courtesies.
March 1916.

In the course of the past two years, while the manuscript has been lying in wait 
for the printer, a new situation has been forcing itself on the attention of men 
who continue to take an interest in the universities. On this provocation a few 
paragraphs have been added, at the end of the introductory chapter. Otherwise 
there appears to be no call for a change in the general argument, and it has not 
been disturbed since the earlier date, which is accordingly left as it stands.
June 1918.
[ix]
CONTENTS
Chapter                                                           Page
I. Introductory: The Place of the University in Modern Life          1
II. The Governing Boards                                            59
III. The Academic Administration and Policy                         85
IV. Academic Prestige and the Material Equipment                   135
V. The Academic Personnel                                          148
VI. The Portion of the Scientist                                   170
VII. Vocational Training                                           191
VIII. Summary and Trial Balance                                    219
[x]
THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA.
[1]
CHAPTER I
Introductory: The Place of the University in Modern Life
I.
In any known civilization there will be found something in the way of esoteric 
knowledge. This body of knowledge will vary characteristically from one culture 
to another, differing both in content and in respect of the canons of truth and 
reality relied on by its adepts. But there is this common trait running through 
all civilizations, as touches this range of esoteric knowledge, that it is in 
all cases held, more or less closely, in the keeping of a select body of adepts 
or specialists - scientists, scholars, savants, clerks, priests, shamans, 
medicinemen - whatever designation may best fit the given case.
In the apprehension of the given society within which any such body of knowledge 
is found it will also be found that the knowledge in question is rated as an 
article of great intrinsic value, in some way a matter of more substantial 
consequence than any or all of the material achievements or possessions of the 
community. It may take shape as a system of magic or of religious beliefs, of 
mythology, theology, philosophy or science. But whatever shape it falls into in 
the given case, it [2] makes up the substantial core of the civilization in 
which it is found, and it is felt to give character and distinction to that 
civilization.
In the apprehension of the group in whose life and esteem it lives and takes 
effect, this esoteric knowledge is taken to embody a systematization of 
fundamental and eternal truth; although it is evident to any outsider that it 
will take its character and its scope and method from the habits of life of the 
group, from the institutions with which it is bound in a web of give and take. 
Such is manifestly the case in all the historic phases of civilization, as well 
as in all those contemporary cultures that are sufficiently remote from our 
everyday interests to admit of their being seen in adequate perspective. A 
passably dispassionate inquiry into the place which modern learning holds in 
modern civilization will show that such is also the case of this latest, and in 
the mind of its keepers the most mature, system of knowledge. It should by no 
means be an insuperably difficult matter to show that this "higher learning" of 
the modern world, the current body of science and scholarship, also holds its 
place on such a tenure of use and wont, that it has grown and shifted in point 
of content, aims and methods in response to the changes in habits of life that 
have passed over the Western peoples during the period of its growth and 
ascendancy. Nor should it be embarrassingly difficult to reach the persuasion 
that this process of change and supersession in the scope and method of 
knowledge is still effectually at work, in a like response to institutional 
changes that still are incontinently going forward.(1*)
To the adepts who are occupied with this esoteric [3] knowledge, the scientists 
and scholars on whom its keeping devolves, the matter will of course not appear 
in just that light; more particularly so far as regards that special segment of 
the field of knowledge with the keeping and cultivation of which they may, each 
and several, be occupied. They are, each and several, engaged on the perfecting 
and conservation of a special line of inquiry, the objective end of which, in 
the view of its adepts, will necessarily be the final and irreducible truth as 
touches matters within its scope. But, seen in perspective, these adepts are 
themselves to be taken as creatures of habit, creatures of that particular 
manner of group life out of which their preconceptions in matters of knowledge, 
and the manner of their interest in the run of inquiry, have sprung. So that the 
terms of finality that will satisfy the adepts are also a consequence of 
habituation, and they are to be taken as conclusive only because and in so far 
as they are consonant with the discipline of habituation enforced by that manner 
of group life that has induced in these adepts their particular frame of mind.
Perhaps at a farther remove than many other current phenomena, but none the less 
effectually for that, the higher learning takes its character from the manner of 
life enforced on the group by the circumstances in which it is placed. These 
constraining circumstances that so condition the scope and method of learning 
are primarily, and perhaps most cogently, the conditions imposed by the state of 
the industrial arts, the technological situation; but in the second place, and 
scarcely less exacting in detail, the received scheme of use and wont in its [4] 
other bearings has its effect in shaping the scheme of knowledge, both as to its 
content and as touches the norms and methods of its organization. Distinctive 
and dominant among the constituent factors of this current scheme of use and 
wont is the pursuit of business, with the outlook and predilections which that 
pursuit implies. Therefore any inquiry into the effect which recent 
institutional changes may have upon the pursuit of the higher learning will 
necessarily be taken up in a peculiar degree with the consequences which an 
habitual pursuit of business in modern times has had for the ideals, aims and 
methods of the scholars and schools devoted to the higher learning.
The Higher Learning as currently cultivated by the scholars and scientists of 
the Western civilization differs not generically from the esoteric knowledge 
purveyed by specialists in other civilizations, elsewhere and in other times. It 
engages the same general range of aptitudes and capacities, meets the same range 
of human wants, and grows out of the same impulsive propensities of human 
nature. Its scope and method are different from what has seemed good in other 
cultural situations, and its tenets and canons are so far peculiar as to give it 
a specific character different from these others; but in the main this specific 
character is due to a different distribution of emphasis among the same general 
range of native gifts that have always driven men to the pursuit of knowledge. 
The stress falls in a somewhat obviously different way among the canons of 
reality by recourse to which men systematize and verify the knowledge gained; 
which is in its turn due to the different habituation to which civilized men are 
subjected, as contrasted with the discipline exercised by other and earlier 
cultures.
[5] In point of its genesis and growth any system of knowledge may confidently 
be run back, in the main, to the initiative and bias afforded by two certain 
impulsive traits of human nature: an Idle Curiosity, and the Instinct of 
Workmanship.(2*)
In this generic trait the modern learning does not depart from the rule that 
holds for the common run. Men instinctively seek knowledge, and value it. The 
fact of this proclivity is well summed up in saying that men are by native gift 
actuated with an idle curiosity, - "idle" in the sense that a knowledge of 
things is sought, apart from any ulterior use of the knowledge so gained.(3*) 
This, of course, does not imply that the knowledge so gained will not be turned 
to practical account. In point of fact, although the fact is not greatly 
relevant to the inquiry here in hand, the native proclivity here spoken of as 
the instinct of workmanship will unavoidably incline men to turn to account, in 
a system of ways and means, whatever knowledge so becomes available. But the 
instinct of workmanship has also another and more pertinent bearing in these 
premises, in that it affords the norms, or the scheme of criteria and canons of 
verity, according to which the ascertained facts will be construed and connected 
up in a body of systematic knowledge. Yet the sense of workmanship takes effect 
by recourse to divers expedients and reaches its ends by recourse to varying 
principles, according as the habituation of workday life has enforced one or 
another scheme of interpretation for the facts with which it has to deal.
[6] The habits of thought induced by workday life impose themselves as ruling 
principles that govern the quest of knowledge; it will therefore be the habits 
of thought enforced by the current technological scheme that will have most (or 
most immediately) to say in the current systematization of facts. The working 
logic of the current state of the industrial arts will necessarily insinuate 
itself as the logical scheme which must, of course, effectually govern the 
interpretation and generalizations of fact in all their commonplace relations. 
But the current state of the industrial arts is not all that conditions 
workmanship. Under any given institutional situation, - and the modern scheme of 
use and wont, law and order, is no exception, workmanship is held to a more or 
less exacting conformity to several tests and standards that are not intrinsic 
to the state of the industrial arts, even if they are not alien to it; such as 
the requirements imposed by the current system of ownership and pecuniary 
values. These pecuniary conditions that impose themselves on the processes of 
industry and on the conduct of life, together with the pecuniary accountancy 
that goes with them - the price system - have much to say in the guidance and 
limitations of workmanship. And when and in so far as the habituation so 
enforced in the traffic of workday life goes into effect as a scheme of logic 
governing the quest of knowledge, such principles as have by habit found 
acceptance as being conventionally salutary and conclusive in the pecuniary 
conduct of affairs will necessarily leave their mark on the ideals, aims, 
methods and standards of science and those principles and scholarship. More 
particularly, standards of organization, control and achievement, that have been 
accepted as an habitual matter of course in the conduct of business will, by 
force of habit, in good part reassert themselves as indispensable and conclusive 
[7] in the conduct of the affairs of learning. While it remains true that the 
bias of workmanship continues to guide the quest of knowledge, under the 
conditions imposed by modern institutions it will not be the naive conceptions 
of primitive workmanship that will shape the framework of the modern system of 
learning; but rather the preconceptions of that disciplined workmanship that has 
been instructed in the logic of the modern technology and sophisticated with 
much experience in a civilization in whose scheme of life pecuniary canons are 
definitive.
The modern technology is of an impersonal, matter-of-fact character in an 
unexampled degree, and the accountancy of modern business management is also of 
an extremely dispassionate and impartially exacting nature. It results that the 
modern learning is of a similarly matter-of-fact, mechanistic complexion, and 
that it similarly leans on statistically dispassionate tests and formulations. 
Whereas it may fairly be said that the personal equation once - in the days of 
scholastic learning - was the central and decisive factor in the systematization 
of knowledge, it is equally fair to say that in later time no effort is spared 
to eliminate all bias of personality from the technique or the results of 
science or scholarship. It is the "dry light of science" that is always in 
request, and great pains is taken to exclude all color of sentimentality.
Yet this highly sterilized, germ-proof system of knowledge, kept in a cool, dry 
place, commands the affection of modern civilized mankind no less 
unconditionally, with no more afterthought of an extraneous sanction, than once 
did the highly personalized mythological and philosophical constructions and 
interpretations that had the vogue in the days of the schoolmen.
Through all the mutations that have passed over this quest of knowledge, from 
its beginnings in puerile myth [8] and magic to its (provisional) consummation 
in the "exact" sciences of the current fashion, any attentive scrutiny will find 
that the driving force has consistently been of the same kind, traceable to the 
same proclivity of human nature. In so far as it may fairly be accounted 
esoteric knowledge, or a "higher learning," all this enterprise is actuated by 
an idle curiosity, a disinterested proclivity to gain a knowledge of things and 
to reduce this knowledge to a comprehensible system. The objective end is a 
theoretical organization, a logical articulation of things known, the lines of 
which must not be deflected by any consideration of expediency or convenience, 
but must run true to the canons of reality accepted at the time. These canons of 
reality, or of verity, have varied from time to time, have in fact varied 
incontinently with the passage of time and the mutations of experience. As the 
fashions of modern time have come on, particularly the later phases of modern 
life, the experience that so has shaped and reshaped the canons of verity for 
the use of inquiring minds has fallen more and more into the lines of mechanical 
articulation and has expressed itself ever more unreservedly in terms of 
mechanical stress. Concomitantly the canons of reality have taken on a 
mechanistic complexion, to the neglect and progressive disuse of all tests and 
standards of a more genial sort; until in the off-hand apprehension of modern 
men, "reality" comes near being identified with mechanical fact, and 
"verification" is taken to mean a formulation in mechanical terms. But the final 
test of this reality about which the inquiries of modern men so turn is not the 
test of mechanical serviceability for human use, but only of mechanistically 
effectual matter-of-fact.
[9] So it has come about that modern civilization is in a very special degree a 
culture of the intellectual powers, in the narrower sense of the term, as 
contrasted with the emotional traits of human nature. Its achievements and chief 
merits are found in this field of learning, and its chief defects elsewhere. And 
it is on its achievements in this domain of detached and dispassionate knowledge 
that modern civilized mankind most ingenuously plumes itself and confidently 
rests its hopes. The more emotional and spiritual virtues that once held the 
first place have been overshadowed by the increasing consideration given to 
proficiency in matter-of-fact knowledge. As prime movers in the tide of 
civilized life, these sentimental movements of the human spirit belong in the 
past, - at least such is the self-complacent avowal of the modern spokesmen of 
culture. The modern technology, and the mechanistic conception of things that 
goes with that technology, are alien to the spirit of the "Old Order." The 
Church, the court, the camp, the drawing-room, where these elder and perhaps 
nobler virtues had their laboratory and playground, have grown weedy and gone to 
seed. Much of the apparatus of the old order, with the good old way, still 
stands over in a state of decent repair, and the sentimentally reminiscent 
endeavors of certain spiritual "hold-overs" still lend this apparatus of 
archaism something of a galvanic life. But that power of aspiration that once 
surged full and hot in the cults of faith, fashion, sentiment, exploit, and 
honor, now at its best comes to such a head as it may in the concerted adulation 
of matter-of-fact.
This esoteric knowledge of matter-of-fact has come to be accepted as something 
worth while in its own right, a self-legitimating end of endeavor in itself, 
apart from any bearing it may have on the glory of God or the good of man. Men 
have, no doubt, always been possessed of a [10] more or less urgent propensity 
to inquire into the nature of things, beyond the serviceability of any knowledge 
so gained, and have always been given to seeking curious explanations of things 
at large. The idle curiosity is a native trait of the race. But in past times 
such a disinterested pursuit of unprofitable knowledge has, by and large, not 
been freely avowed as a legitimate end of endeavour; or such has at any rate 
been the state of the case through that later segment of history which students 
commonly take account of. A quest of knowledge has overtly been rated as 
meritorious, or even blameless, only in so far as it has appeared to serve the 
ends of one or another of the practical interests that have from time to time 
occupied men's attention. But latterly, during the past few generations, this 
learning has so far become an avowed "end in itself" that "the increase and 
diffusion of knowledge among men" is now freely rated as the most humane and 
meritorious work to be taken care of by any enlightened community or any public-
spirited friend of civilization.
The expediency of such "increase and diffusion" is no longer held in doubt, 
because it has ceased to be a question of expediency among the enlightened 
nations, being itself the consummation upon which, in the apprehension of 
civilized men, the advance of culture must converge. Such has come to be the 
long-term common sense judgment of enlightened public opinion. A settled 
presumption to some such effect has found lodgment as a commonplace conviction 
in the popular mind, in much the same measure and in much the same period of 
time as the current body of systematic knowledge has taken on the character of 
matter of fact. 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 
justi-[11]fies itself. So that nothing more irretrievably shameful could 
overtake modern civilization than the miscarriage of this modern learning, which 
is the most valued spiritual asset of civilized mankind.
The truth of this view is borne out by the professions even of those lieutenants 
of the powers of darkness who are straining to lay waste and debauch the peoples 
of Christendom. In high-pitched concert they all swear by the name of a 
"culture" whose sole inalienable asset is this same intellectual mastery of 
matters of fact. At the same time it is only by drawing on the resources of this 
matter-of-fact knowledge that the protagonists of reaction are able to carry on 
their campaign of debauchery and desolation.

Other interests that have once been held in higher esteem appear by comparison 
to have fallen into abeyance, - religious devotion, political prestige, fighting 
capacity, gentility, pecuniary distinction, profuse consumption of goods. But it 
is only by comparison with the higher value given to this enterprise of the 
intellect that such other interests appear to have lost ground. These and the 
like have fallen into relative disesteem, as being sordid and insubstantial by 
comparison. Not that these "lower" human interests, answering to the "lower" 
ranges of human intellect, have fallen into neglect; it is only that they have 
come to be accounted "lower," as contrasted with the quest of knowledge; and it 
is only on sober second thought, and perhaps only for the ephemeral present, 
that they are so accounted by the common run of civilized mankind. Men still are 
in sufficiently hot pursuit of all these time-worn amenities, and each for 
himself is, in point of fact, more than likely to make the pursuit of such self-
seeking ends the burden [12] of his life; but on a dispassionate rating, and 
under the corrective of deliberate avowal, it will appear that none of these 
commend themselves as intrinsically worth while at large. At the best they are 
rated as expedient concessions to human infirmity or as measures of defense 
against human perversity and the outrages of fortune. The last resort of the 
apologists for these more sordid endeavours is the plea that only by this means 
can the ulterior ends of a civilization of intelligence be served. The argument 
may fairly be paraphrased to the effect that in order to serve God in the end, 
we must all be ready to serve the Devil in the meantime.

It is always possible, of course, that this pre-eminence of intellectual 
enterprise in the civilization of the Western peoples is a transient episode; 
that it may eventually - perhaps even precipitately, with the next impending 
turn in the fortunes of this civilization - again be relegated to a secondary 
place in the scheme of things and become only an instrumentality in the service 
of some dominant aim or impulse, such as a vainglorious patriotism, or dynastic 
politics, or the breeding of a commercial aristocracy. More than one of the 
nations of Europe have moved so far in this matter already as to place the 
primacy of science and scholarship in doubt as against warlike ambitions; and 
the aspirations of the American community appear to be divided - between 
patriotism in the service of the captains of war, and commerce in the service of 
the captains of finance. But hitherto the spokesmen of any such cultural 
reversion are careful to declare a perfunctory faith in that civilization of 
disinterested intellectual achievement which they are endeavouring to suborn to 
their several ends. That such pro forma declarations are found necessary argues 
that the faith in [13] a civilization of intelligence is still so far intact as 
to require all reactionaries to make their peace with it.
Meantime the easy matter-of-course presumption that such a civilization of 
intelligence justifies itself goes to argue that the current bias which so comes 
to expression will be the outcome of a secure and protracted experience. What 
underlies and has brought on this bent in the temper of the civilized peoples is 
a somewhat intricate question of institutional growth, and can not be gone into 
here; but the gradual shifting of this matter-of-fact outlook into the primacy 
among the ideals of modern Christendom is sufficiently evident in point of 
fact, to any attentive student of modern times. Conceivably, there may come an 
abrupt term to its paramount vogue, through some precipitate sweep of 
circumstances; but it did not come in by anything like the sudden intrusion of a 
new invention in ideals - after the fashion of a religious conversion - nor by 
the incursion of a hitherto alien element into the current scheme of life, but 
rather by force of a gradual and unintended, scarcely perceptible, shifting of 
emphasis between the several cultural factors that conjointly go to make up the 
working scheme of things.
Along with this shifting of matter-of-fact knowledge into the foreground among 
the ideals of civilized life, there has also gone on a similarly unpremeditated 
change in the attitude of those persons and establishments that have to do with 
this learning, as well as in the rating accorded them by the community at large. 
Again it is a matter of institutional growth, of self-wrought changes in the 
scheme of use and wont; and here as in other cases of institutional growth and 
displacement, the changes have gone forward for the most part blindly, by 
impulse, without much foreknowledge of any ulterior consequences to which such a 
sequence of change might be said to tend. [14] It is only after the new growth 
of use and wont has taken effect in an altered range of principles and 
standards, that its direction and ulterior consequences can be appreciated with 
any degree of confidence. But this development that has thrown up matter-of-fact 
knowledge into its place of paramount value for modern culture has in a peculiar 
degree been unintended and unforeseen; the like applies to the case of the 
schools and the personnel involved; and in a peculiar degree the drift and 
bearing of these changes have also not been appreciated while they have been 
going forward, doubtless because it has all been a peculiarly unprecedented 
phenomenon and a wholly undesigned drift of habituation. History records nothing 
that is fairly comparable. No era in the historic past has set a pattern for 
guidance in this matter, and the experience of none of the peoples of history 
affords a clue by which to have judged beforehand of the probable course and 
outcome of this specifically modern and occidental phase of culture.
Some slight beginnings and excursions in the way of a cultivation of matter-of-
fact learning there may have been, now and again, among the many shifting 
systems of esoteric lore that have claimed attention here and there, early and 
late; and these need by no means be accounted negligible. But they have on the 
whole come to nothing much better than broken excursions, as seen from the point 
of view of the latterday higher learning, and they have brought into bearing 
nothing appreciable in the way of establishments designed without afterthought 
to further the advance of disinterested knowledge. Anything like a cultural era 
that avowedly takes such a quest of knowledge as its chief and distinctive 
characteristic is not known to history. From this isolated state of the case it 
follows, unfortunately, that this modern phase is [15] to be studied only in its 
own light; and since the sequence of development has hitherto reached no secure 
consummation or conclusion, there is also much room for conflicting opinions as 
to its presumptive or legitimate outcome, or even as to its present drift.
II.
But notorious facts make this much plain, that civilized mankind looks to this 
quest of matter-of-fact knowledge as its most substantial asset and its most 
valued achievement, - in so far as any consensus of appreciation or of 
aspirations is to be found among civilized mankind; and there is no similar 
consensus bearing on any other feature of that scheme of life that characterizes 
modern civilization. It is similarly beyond dispute that men look to the modern 
system of schools and related establishments of learning for the furtherance and 
conservation of this intellectual enterprise. And among the various items of 
this equipment the modern university is, by tradition, more closely identified 
with the quest of knowledge than any other. It stands in a unique and peculiarly 
intimate relation to this intellectual enterprise. At least such is the current 
apprehension of the university's work. The university is the only accepted 
institution of the modern culture on which the quest of knowledge unquestionably 
devolves; and the visible drift of circumstances as well as of public sentiment 
runs also to making this the only unquestioned duty incumbent on the university.
It is true, many other lines of work, and of endeavor that may not fairly be 
called work, are undertaken by schools of university grade; and also, many other 
schools that call themselves "universities" will have substantially nothing to 
do with the higher learning. But each and [16] several of these other lines of 
endeavor, into which the universities allow themselves to be drawn, are open to 
question. Their legitimacy remains an open question in spite of the interested 
arguments of their spokesmen, who advocate the partial submergence of the 
university in such enterprises as professional training, undergraduate 
instruction, supervision and guidance of the secondary school system, 
edification of the unlearned by "university extension" and similar excursions 
into the field of public amusement, training of secondary school teachers, 
encouragement of amateurs by "correspondence," etc. What and how much of these 
extraneous activities the university should allow itself is a matter on which 
there is no general agreement even among those whose inclinations go far in that 
direction; but what is taken for granted throughout all this advocacy of 
outlying detail is the secure premise that the university is in the first place 
a seminary of the higher learning, and that no school can make good its 
pretensions to university standing except by proving its fitness in this 
respect.(4*)
The conservation and advancement of the higher learning involves two lines of 
work, distinct but closely bound together: (a) scientific and scholarly inquiry, 
and (b) the instruction of students.(5*) The former of these is primary and 
indispensable. It is this work of intellectual enterprise that gives its 
character to the university and [17] marks it off from the lower schools. The 
work of teaching properly belongs in the university only because and in so far 
as it incites and facilitates the university man's work of inquiry, - and the 
extent to which such teaching furthers the work of inquiry is scarcely to be 
appreciated without a somewhat extended experience. By and large, there are but 
few and inconsequential exceptions to the rule that teaching, as a concomitant 
of investigation, is distinctly advantageous to the investigator; particularly 
in so far as his work is of the nature of theoretical inquiry. The instruction 
necessarily involved in university work, therefore, is only such as can readily 
be combined with the work of inquiry, at the same time that it goes directly to 
further the higher learning in that it trains the incoming generation of 
scholars and scientists for the further pursuit of knowledge. Training for other 
purposes is necessarily of a different kind and is best done elsewhere; and it 
does not become university work by calling it so and imposing its burden on the 
men and equipment whose only concern should be the higher learning.
University teaching, having a particular and special purpose - the pursuit of 
knowledge - it has also a particular and special character, such as to 
differentiate it from other teaching and at the same time leave it relatively 
ineffective for other purposes. Its aim is to equip the student for the work of 
inquiry, not to give him facility in that conduct of affairs that turns such 
knowledge to "practical account." Hence the instruction that falls legitimately 
under the hand of the university man is necessarily subsidiary and incidental to 
the work of inquiry, and it can effectually be carried on only by such a teacher 
as is himself occupied with the scrutiny of what knowledge is already in hand 
and with pushing the inquiry [18] to further gains. And it can be carried on by 
such a teacher only by drawing his students into his own work of inquiry. The 
student's relation to his teacher necessarily becomes that of an apprentice to 
his master, rather than that of a pupil to his schoolmaster.
A university is a body of mature scholars and scientists, the "faculty," - with 
whatever plant and other equipment may incidentally serve as appliances for 
their work in any given case. The necessary material equipment may under modern 
conditions be very considerable, as may also the number of care-takers, 
assistants, etc.; but all that is not the university, but merely its equipment. 
And the university man's work is the pursuit of knowledge, together with 
whatever advisory surveillance and guidance he may consistently afford such 
students as are entering on the career of learning at a point where his outlook 
and methods of work may be of effect for them. No man whose energies are not 
habitually bent on increasing and proving up the domain of learning belongs 
legitimately on the university staff. The university man is, properly, a 
student, not a schoolmaster. Such is the unmistakable drift of sentiment and 
professed endeavour, in so far as it is guided by the cultural aspirations of 
civilized mankind rather than by the emulative strategy of individuals seeking 
their own preferment.(6*)
[19] All this, of course, implies no undervaluing of the work of those men who 
aim to prepare the youth for citizenship and a practical career. It is only a 
question of distinguishing between things that belong apart. The scientist and 
the scholar on the one hand, and the schoolmaster on the other hand, both belong 
within the later growth of civilization; but a differentiation of the two 
classes, and a division of their work, is indispensable if they are to do their 
work as it should be done, and as the modern community thoughtfully intends that 
it should be done. And while such a division of labour has hitherto not been 
carried through with any degree of consistency, it is at least under way, and 
there is nothing but the presumption of outworn usage that continues to hold the 
two lines of work together, to the detriment of both; backed, it is true, by 
ambitions of self-aggrandizement on the part of many schools and many of their 
directorates.
The schoolmaster and his work may be equally, or more, valuable to the community 
at large - presumably more rather than less - but in so far as his chief 
interest is of the pedagogical sort his place is not in the university. 
Exposition, instruction and drill belong in and professional schools. The 
consistent aim there is, and should be, to instruct, to inculcate a knowledge of 
results, and to give the pupil a working facility in applying it. On the 
university level such information and training is (should be) incidental to the 
work of research. The university man is almost unavoidably a teacher, by precept 
and example, but he can not without detriment to his work as scientist or 
scholar serve as a taskmaster or a vehicle [20] of indoctrination. The student 
who comes up to the university for the pursuit of knowledge is expected to know 
what he wants and to want it, without compulsion. If he falls short in these 
respects, if he has not the requisite interest and initiative, it is his own 
misfortune, not the fault of his teacher. What he has a legitimate claim to is 
an opportunity for such personal contact and guidance as will give him 
familiarity with the ways and means of the higher learning, - any information 
imparted to him being incidental to this main work of habituation. He gets a 
chance to make himself a scholar, and what he will do with his opportunities in 
this way lies in his own discretion.
The difference between the modern university and the lower and professional 
schools is broad and simple; not so much a difference of degree as of kind. 
There is no difficulty about apprehending or appreciating this difference; the 
dispute turns not on the practicability of distinguishing between the two, but 
on the desirability of letting such a distinction go into effect. It is a 
controversy between those who wish to hold fast that which once was good and 
those who look to make use of the means in hand for new ends and meet new 
exigencies.
The lower schools (including the professional schools) are, in the ideal scheme, 
designed to fit the incoming generation for civil life; they are therefore 
occupied with instilling such knowledge and habits as will make their pupils fit 
citizens of the world in whatever position in the fabric of workday life they 
may fall. The university on the other hand is specialized to fit men for a life 
of science and scholarship; and it is accordingly concerned, with such 
discipline only as will give efficiency in the pursuit of knowledge and fit its 
students for the increase and diffusion of learning. It follows that while the 
lower [21] schools necessarily take over the surveillance of their pupils' 
everyday life, and exercise a large measure of authority and responsible 
interference in that behalf, the university assumes (or should assume) no 
responsibility for its students' fortunes in the moral, religious, pecuniary, 
domestic, or hygienic respect.
Doubtless the larger and more serious responsibility in the educational system 
belongs not to the university but to the lower and professional schools. 
Citizenship is a larger and more substantial category than scholarship; and the 
furtherance of civilized life is a larger and more serious interest than the 
pursuit of knowledge for its own idle sake. But the proportions which the quest 
of knowledge is latterly assuming in the scheme of civilized life require that the 
establishments to which this interest is committed should not be charged 
with extraneous duties; particularly not with extraneous matters themselves of 
such grave consequence as this training for citizenship and practical affairs. 
These are too serious a range of duties to be taken care of as a side-issue, by 
a seminary of learning, the members of whose faculty, if they are fit for their 
own special work, are not men of affairs or adepts in worldly wisdom.
III.
In point of historical pedigree the American universities are of another 
derivation than their European counterpart; although the difference in this 
respect is not so sharp a matter of contrast as might be assumed at first sight. 
The European (Continental) universities appear to have been founded, originally, 
to meet the needs of professional training, more particularly theological (and 
philosophical) training in the earlier times. The Amer-[22]ican universities 
are, historically, an outgrowth of the American college; and the latter was 
installed, in its beginnings, largely as a means of professional training; 
chiefly training for Divinity, secondarily for the calling of the schoolmaster. 
But in neither case, neither in that of the European university nor in that of 
the American College, was this early vocational aim of the schools allowed to 
decide their character in the long run, nor to circumscribe the lines of their 
later growth. In both cases, somewhat alike, the two groups of schools came to 
their mature development, in the nineteenth century, as establishments occupied 
with disinterested learning, given over to the pursuit of intellectual 
enterprise, rather than as seminaries for training of a vocational kind. They 
still had a vocational value, no doubt, and the vocational needs of their 
students need not have been absent from the considerations that guided their 
directorates. It would particularly be found that the (clerical) directorates of 
the American colleges had more than half an eye to the needs of Divinity even at 
so late a date as when, in the third quarter of the century, the complexion of 
the American college situation began seriously to change. It is from this period 
- from the era of the Civil War and the  Reconstruction - that the changes set in 
which have reshaped the academic situation in America.
At this era, some half a century ago, the American college was, or was at least 
pressed to be, given over to disinterested instruction, not specialized with a 
vocational, or even a denominational, bias. It was coming to take its place as 
the superior or crowning member, a sort of capstone, of the system of public 
instruction. The life-history of any one of the state universities whose early 
period of growth runs across this era will readily show the effectual guidance 
of such an ideal of a college, as a [23] superior and definitive member in a 
school system designed to afford an extended course of instruction looking to an 
unbiassed increase and diffusion of knowledge. Other interests, of a 
professional or vocational kind, were also entrusted to the keeping of these 
new-found schools; but with a conclusive generality the rule holds that in these 
academic creations a college establishment of a disinterested, non-vocational 
character is counted in as the indispensable nucleus, - that much was at that 
time a matter of course.
The further development shows two marked features: The American university has 
come into bearing; and the college has become an intermediate rather than a 
terminal link in the conventional scheme of education. Under the names 
"undergraduate" and "graduate," the college and the university are still 
commonly coupled together as subdivisions of a complex whole; but this holding 
together of the two disparate schools is at the best a freak of aimless 
survival. At the worst, and more commonly, it is the result of a gross ambition 
for magnitude on the part of the joint directorate. Whether the college lives by 
itself as an independent establishment on a foundation of its own, or is in 
point of legal formality a subdivision of the university establishment, it takes 
its place in the educational scheme as senior member of the secondary school 
system, and it bears no peculiarly close relation to the university as a seat of 
learning. At the closest it stands to the university in the relation of a 
fitting school; more commonly its relations are closer with the ordinary 
professional and vocational schools; and for the most part it stands in no 
relation, beyond that of juxtaposition, with the one or the other.
The attempt to hold the college and the university together in bonds of 
ostensible solidarity is by no means [24] an advisedly concerted adjustment to 
the needs of scholarship as they run today. By historical accident the older 
American universities have grown into bearing on the ground of an underlying 
college, and the external connection so inherited has not usually been severed; 
and by ill-advised, or perhaps unadvised, imitation the younger universities 
have blundered into encumbering themselves with an undergraduate department to 
simulate this presumptively honourable pedigree, to the detriment both of the 
university and of the college so bound up with it. By this arrangement the 
college - undergraduate department - falls into the position of an appendage, a 
side issue, to be taken care of by afterthought on the part of a body of men 
whose chief legitimate interest runs - should run - on other things than the 
efficient management of such an undergraduate training-school, - provided always 
that they are a bona fide university faculty, and not a body of secondary-school 
teachers masquerading under the assumed name of a university.
The motive to this inclusion of an undergraduate department in the newer 
universities appears commonly to have been a headlong eagerness on the part of 
the corporate authorities to show a complete establishment of the conventionally 
accepted pattern, and to enroll as many students as possible.
Whatever may have been true for the earlier time, when the American college 
first grew up and flourished, it is beyond question that the undergraduate 
department which takes the place of the college today cannot be rated as an 
institution of the higher learning. At the best it is now a school for 
preliminary training, preparatory to entering on the career of learning, or in 
preparation for the further training required for the professions; but it is 
also, and chiefly, an establishment designed to give the [25] concluding touches 
to the education of young men who have no designs on learning, beyond the close 
of the college curriculum. It aims to afford a rounded discipline to those whose 
goal is the life of fashion or of affairs. How well, or how ill, the college may 
combine these two unrelated purposes is a question that does not immediately 
concern the present inquiry. It is touched on here only to point the contrast 
between the American college and the university.
It follows from the character of their work that while the university should 
offer no set curriculum, the college has, properly, nothing else to offer. But 
the retention or inclusion of the college and its aims within the university 
corporation has necessarily led to the retention of college standards and 
methods of control even in what is or purports to be university work; so that it 
is by no means unusual to find university (graduate) work scheduled in the form 
of a curriculum, with all that boarding-school circumstance and apparatus that 
is so unavoidable an evil in all undergraduate training. In effect, the outcome 
of these short-sighted attempts to take care of the higher learning by the means 
and method of the boys' school, commonly is to eliminate the higher learning 
from the case and substitute the aims and results of a boys' training-school.
Undergraduate work being task work, it is possible, without fatal effect, to 
reduce it to standard units of time and volume, and so control and enforce it by 
a system of accountancy and surveillance; the methods of control, accountancy 
and coercion that so come to be worked out have all that convincing appearance 
of tangible efficiency that belongs to any mechanically defined and 
statistically accountable routine, such as will always commend itself to the 
spirit of the schoolmaster; the temptation to apply [26] such methods of 
standardized routine wherever it is at all feasible is always present, and it is 
cogently spoken for by all those to whom drill is a more intelligible conception 
than scholarship. The work of learning, which distinctively belongs in the 
university, on the other hand, is a matter of personal contact and co-operation 
between teacher and student, and is not measurable in statistical units or 
amenable to mechanical tests; the men engaged in this work can accordingly offer 
nothing of the same definite character in place of the rigid routine and 
accountancy advocated by the schoolmasters; and the outcome in nearly all cases 
where the control of both departments vests in one composite corporate body, as 
it usually does, is the gradual insinuation of undergraduate methods and 
standards in the graduate school; until what is nominally university work 
settles down, in effect, into nothing more than an extension of the 
undergraduate curriculum. This effect is had partly by reducing such of the 
graduate courses as are found amenable to the formalities of the undergraduate 
routine, and partly by dispensing with such graduate work as will not lend 
itself, even ostensibly, to the schoolmaster's methods.

What has been said of the college in this connection holds true in the main also 
of the professional and technical schools. In their aims, methods and 
achievements these schools are, in the nature of the case, foreign to the higher 
learning. This is, of course, not said in disparagement of their work; rather 
the contrary. As is the case with the college, so these schools also are often 
included in the university corporation by ties of an external and factitious 
kind, frequently by terms of the charter. But this formal inclusion of them 
under the corporate charter does not set aside the substantial discrepancy 
between [27] their purpose, work and animus and those of the university proper. 
It can only serve to trouble the single-mindedness of both. It leaves both the 
pursuit of learning and the work of preparation for the professions somewhat at 
loose ends, confused with the bootless illusion that they are, in some recondite 
way, parallel variants of a single line of work.
In aim and animus the technical and professional schools are "practical," in the 
most thorough going manner; while the pursuit of knowledge that occupies the 
scientists and scholars is not "practical" in the slightest degree. The 
divergent lines of interest to be taken care of by the professional schools and 
the university, respectively, are as widely out of touch as may well be within 
the general field of human knowledge. The one is animated wholly by 
considerations of material expediency, and the range of its interest and efforts 
is strictly limited by consideration of the useful effect to which the 
proficiency that it gives is to be turned; the other knows nothing of 
expediency, and is influenced by no consideration of utility or disutility, in 
its appreciation of the knowledge to be sought. The animus of the one is worldly 
wisdom; of the other, idle curiosity. The two are incommensurably at variance so 
far as regards their purpose, and in great measure also as regards their methods 
of work, and necessarily so.
But with all this divergence of purpose and animus there is after all a broad 
and very substantial bond of community between the technical schools, on the one 
hand, and the proper work of the university, on the other hand, in that the two 
are, in great measure, occupied with the same general range of materials and 
employ somewhat the same logical methods in handling these materials. But the 
relation that results from this [28] community of material is almost wholly 
external and mechanical. Nor does it set up any presumption that the two should 
expediently be included in the same corporate establishment, or even that they 
need be near neighbors or need maintain peculiarly close relations of personnel. 
The technical schools, and in a less degree the professional schools not 
properly classed as technical, depend in large measure on results worked out by 
the scientists, who properly belong in the universities. But the material so 
made use of for technical ends are taken over and turned to account without 
afterthought. The technologist's work is related to that of the scientists very 
much as the work of the designer is related to that of the inventor. To a 
considerable extent the scientists similarly depend on the work of the technical 
men for information, and for correction and verification of their own 
theoretical work. But there is, on this account, nothing to gain by associating 
any given technical school with any given university establishment; 
incorporation in any given university does not in any degree facilitate the 
utilization of the results of the sciences by the technical men; nor is it found 
in practice to further the work of the sciences. The schools in question do not 
in any peculiar degree draw on the work of the scientists attached to their 
particular university, nor do these scientists, on the other hand, have any 
special use for the work of their associated technical schools. In either case 
the source drawn on is the general literature of the subject, the body of 
materials available at large, not the work of particular men attached to 
particular schools. The generalizations of science are indispensable to the 
technical men; but what they draw on is the body of science at large, regardless 
of what any given university establishment may have had to do with the work out 
of [29] which the particular items of scientific information have emerged. Nor 
is this scientific material useful to the technologists for the further pursuit 
of science; to them the scientific results are data, raw material to be turned 
to practical use, not means by which to carry scientific inquiry out to further 
results.
Similarly, the professions and the technical schools afford valuable data for 
the use of the professed scholars and scientists, information that serves as 
material of Investigation, or that will at least be useful as a means of 
extending correcting, verifying and correlating lines of inquiry on which they 
are engaged. But the further bearing of these facts upon the affairs of life, 
their expediency or futility, is of no interest or consequence. The affairs of 
life, except the affairs of learning, do not touch the interest of the 
university man as a scholar or scientist. What is of importance to him in all 
these matters with which the professions and technologists are busy is their 
bearing on those matters of fact into which his scientific interest leads him to 
inquire. The tests and experiments carried out at these technical schools, as 
well as the experience gathered by the members of their staff, will occasionally 
afford him material for further inquiry or means whereby to check results 
already arrived at; but for such material he does not by preference resort to 
any one of the technical schools as contrasted with any other, and it is quite 
an idle question whether the source of any such serviceable information is a 
school attached to his own university. The investigator finds his material where 
he can; which comes to saying that he draws on the general body of technical 
knowledge, with no afterthought as to what particular technical school may have 
stood in some relation or other to the information which he finds useful.
[30] Neither to the man engaged in university work nor to the technical schools 
that may serve him as occasional sources of material is there any advantage to 
be derived from their inclusion in the university establishment. Indeed, it is a 
detriment to both parties, as has already been remarked, but more decidedly to 
the university men. By including the technical and professional schools in the 
university corporation the technologists and professional men attached to these 
schools are necessarily included among the academic staff, and so they come to 
take their part in the direction of academic affairs at large. In what they so 
do toward shaping the academic policy they will not only count for all they are 
worth, but they are likely to count for something more than their due share in 
this respect; for they are to some extent trained to the conduct of affairs, and 
so come in for something of that deference that is currently paid to men of 
affairs, at the same time that this practical training gives them an advantage 
over their purely academic colleagues, in the greater assurance and adroitness 
with which they are able to present their contentions. By virtue of this same 
training, as well as by force of current practical interest, the technologist 
and the professional man are, like other men of affairs, necessarily and 
habitually impatient of any scientific or scholarly work that does not obviously 
lend itself to some practical use. The technologist appreciates what is 
mechanically serviceable; the professional man, as, for instance, the lawyer, 
appreciates what promises pecuniary gain; and the two unite with the business-
man at large in repudiating whatever does not look directly to such a 
utilitarian outcome. So that as members of the academic staff these men are 
likely to count at their full weight toward the diversion of the [31] 
university's forces from disinterested science and scholarship to such palpably 
utilitarian ends.
But the active measures so taken by the academic authorities at the instance of 
the schoolmasters and "practical" men are by no means the only line along which 
their presence in the academic corporation affects the case. Intimate 
association with these "utilitarians" unavoidably has its corrupting effect on 
the scientists and scholars, and induces in them also something of the same bias 
toward "practical" results in their work; so that they no longer pursue the 
higher learning with undivided interest, but with more or less of an eye to the 
utilitarian main chance; whereby the advantages of specialization, which are the 
reason for these schools, are lost, and the pride of the modern community is 
wounded in its most sensitive spot - the efficiency of its specialists.
So also, on the other hand, the formal incorporation of these technological and 
professional men in the academic body, with its professedly single-minded 
interest in learning, has its effect on their frame of mind. They are, without 
intending it, placed in a false position, which unavoidably leads them to court 
a specious appearance of scholarship, and so to invest their technological 
discipline with a degree of pedantry and sophistication; whereby it is hoped to 
give these schools and their work some scientific and scholarly prestige, and so 
lift it to that dignity that is pressed to attach to a non-utilitarian pursuit 
of learning. Doubtless this pursuit of scholarly prestige is commonly 
successful, to the extent that it produces the desired conviction of awe in the 
vulgar, who do not know the difference; but all this make-believe [32] 
scholarship, however successfully staged, is not what these schools are designed 
for; or at least it is not what is expected of them, nor is it what they can do 
best and most efficiently.
To the substantial gain of both parties, though with some lesion of the vanity 
of both, the separation between the university and the professional and 
technical schools should be carried through and made absolute. Only on such 
conditions can either the one or the other do its own work in a workmanlike 
manner. 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.
IV.
To all this there is the ready objection of the schoolmasters and utilitarians 
that such a project is fantastic and unpractical, useless and undesirable; that 
such has not been the mission of the university in the past, nor its accepted 
place and use in the educational system of today and yesterday; that the 
universities of Christendom have from their first foundation been occupied with 
professional training and useful knowledge; that they have been founded for 
utilitarian purposes and their work has been guided mainly or altogether by 
utilitarian considerations; - all of which is conceded without argument. The 
historical argument amounts to saying that the universities were founded before 
modern civilization took on its modern character, before the disinterested 
pursuit of knowledge had come to take the first place among the ideals of 
civilized mankind, and that they were established to take care of those 
interests which were then accounted of first importance, and that [33] this 
intellectual enterprise in pursuit of disinterested knowledge consequently was 
not at that time confided to the care of any special establishment or freely 
avowed as a legitimate interest in its own right.
It is true that, by historical accident, the university at large has grown out 
of professional training-schools, primarily schools for training in theology, 
secondarily in law and medicine. It is also true, in like wise and in like 
degree, that modern science and scholarship have grown out of the technology of 
handicraft and the theological philosophy of the schoolmen.(7*) But just as it 
would be a bootless enterprise to cut modern science back into handicraft 
technology, so would it be a gratuitous imbecility to prune back the modern 
university to that inchoate phase of its life-history and make it again a 
corporation for the training of theologians, jurists and doctors of medicine. 
The historical argument does not enjoin a return to the beginning of things, but 
rather an intelligent appreciation of what things are coming to.
The genesis of the university at large, taken as an institution of civilized 
life, is an incident of the transition from the barbarian culture of the middle 
ages to modern times, and its later growth and acquirement of character is an 
incident of the further growth of modern civilization; and the character of this 
later growth of the university reflects the bent of modern civilization, as 
contrasted with the barbarian spirit of things in the mediaeval spiritual world.
In a general way, the place of the university in the culture of Christendom is 
still substantially the same as it has been from the beginning. Ideally, and in 
the popular apprehension, it is, as it has always been, a [34] corporation for 
the cultivation and care of the community's highest aspirations and ideals. But 
these ideals and aspirations have changed somewhat with the changing scheme of 
the Western civilization; and so the university has also concomitantly so 
changed in character, aims and ideals as to leave it still the corporate organ 
of the community's dominant intellectual interest. At the same time, it is true, 
these changes in the purpose and spirit of the university have always been, and 
are always being, made only tardily, reluctantly, concessively, against the 
protests of those who are zealous for the commonplaces of the day before 
yesterday. Such is the character of institutional growth and change; and in its 
adaptation to the altered requirements of an altered scheme of culture the 
university has in this matter been subject to the conditions of institutional 
growth at large. An institution is, after all, a prevalent habit of thought, and 
as such it is subject to the conditions and limitations that surround any change 
in the habitual frame of mind prevalent in the community.
The university of medieval and early modern times, that is to say the barbarian 
university, was necessarily given over to the pragmatic, utilitarian 
disciplines, since that is the nature of barbarism; and the barbarian university 
is but another, somewhat sublimated, expression of the same barbarian frame of 
mind. The barbarian culture is pragmatic, utilitarian, worldly wise, and its 
learning partakes of the same complexion. The barbarian, late or early, is 
typically an unmitigated pragmatist; that is the spiritual trait that most 
profoundly marks him off from the savage on the one hand and from the civilized 
man on the other hand. "He turns a keen, untroubled face home to the instant 
need of things."
The high era of barbarism in Europe, the Dark and [35] Middle Ages, is marked 
off from what went before and from what has followed in the cultural sequence, 
by a hard and fast utilitarian animus. The all-dominating spiritual trait of 
those times is that men then made the means of life its end. It is perhaps 
needless to call to mind that much of this animus still survives in later 
civilized life, especially in so far as the scheme of civilized life is embodied 
in the competitive system. In that earlier time, practical sagacity and the 
serviceability of any knowledge acquired, its bearing on individual advantage, 
spiritual or temporal, was the ruling consideration, as never before or since. 
The best of men in that world were not ashamed to avow that a boundless 
solicitude for their own salvation was their worthiest motive of conduct, and it 
is plain in all their speculations that they were unable to accept any other 
motive or sanction as final in any bearing. Saint and sinner alike knew no 
higher rule than expediency, for this world and the next. And, for that matter, 
so it still stands with the saint and the sinner, - who make up much of the 
commonplace human material in the modern community; although both the saint and 
the sinner in the modern community carry, largely by shamefaced subreption, an 
ever increasing side-line of other and more genial interests that have no merit 
in point of expediency whether for this world or the next.
Under the rule of such a cultural ideal the corporation of learning could not 
well take any avowed stand except as an establishment for utilitarian 
instruction, the practical expediency of whose work was the sole overt test of 
its competency. And such it still should continue to be according to the avowed 
aspirations of the staler commonplace elements in the community today. By 
subreption, and by a sophisticated subsump-[36]tion under some ostensibly 
practical line of interest and inquiry, it is true, the university men of the 
earlier time spent much of their best endeavour on matters of disinterested 
scholarship that had no bearing on any human want more to the point than an idle 
curiosity; and by a similar turn of subreption and sophistication the later 
spokesmen of the barbarian ideal take much complacent credit for the "triumphs 
of modern science" that have nothing but an ostensible bearing on any matter of 
practical expediency, and they look to the universities to continue this work of 
the idle curiosity under some plausible pretext of practicality.
So the university of that era unavoidably came to be organized as a more or less 
comprehensive federation of professional schools or faculties devoted to such 
branches of practical knowledge as the ruling utilitarian interests of the time 
demanded. Under this overshadowing barbarian tradition the universities of early 
modern times started out as an avowed contrivance for indoctrination in the ways 
and means of salvation, spiritual and temporal, individual and collective, - in 
some sort a school of engineering, primarily in divinity, secondarily in law and 
politics, and presently in medicine and also in the other professions that serve 
a recognized utilitarian interest. After that fashion of a university that 
answered to this manner of ideals and aspirations had once been installed and 
gained a secure footing, its pattern acquired a degree of authenticity and 
prescription, so that later seminaries of learning came unquestioningly to be 
organized on the same lines; and further changes of academic policy and 
practice, such as are demanded by the later growth of cultural interests and 
ideals, have been made only reluctantly and with a suspicious reserve, gradually 
and by a circuitous sophistication; so that much [37] of the non-utilitarian 
scientific and scholarly work indispensable to the university's survival under 
modern conditions is still scheduled under the faculties of law or medicine, or 
even of divinity.
But the human propensity for inquiry into things, irrespective of use or 
expediency, insinuated itself among the expositors of worldly wisdom from the 
outset; and from the first this quest of idle learning has sought shelter in the 
university as the only establishment in which it could find a domicile, even on 
sufferance, and so could achieve that footing of consecutive intellectual 
enterprise running through successive generations of scholars which is above all 
else indispensable to the advancement of knowledge. Under the régime of 
unmitigated pragmatic aims that ruled the earlier days of the European 
universities, this pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was carried on as a 
work of scholarly supererogation by men whose ostensibly sole occupation was the 
promulgation of some accredited line of salutary information. Frequently it had 
to be carried on under some colourable masquerade of practicality. And yet so 
persistent has the spirit of idle curiosity proved to be, and so consonant with 
the long-term demands even of the laity, that the dissimulation and smuggling-in 
of disinterested learning has gone on ever more openly and at an ever increasing 
rate of gain; until in the end, the attention given to scholarship and the non-
utilitarian sciences in these establishments has come far to exceed that given 
to the practical disciplines for which the several faculties were originally 
installed. As time has passed and as successive cultural mutations have passed 
over the community, shifting the centre of interest and bringing new ideals of 
scholarship, and bringing the whole cultural fabric nearer to its modern 
complexion, [38] those purposes of crass expediency that were of such great 
moment and were so much a matter of course in earlier academic policy, have 
insensibly fallen to the rank of incidentals. And what had once been incidental, 
or even an object of surreptitious tolerance in the university, remains today as 
the only unequivocal duty of the corporation of learning, and stands out as the 
one characteristic trait without which no establishment can claim rank as a 
university.
Philosophy - the avowed body of theoretical science in the late medieval time - 
had grown out of the schoolmen's speculations in theology, being in point of 
derivation a body of refinements on the divine scheme of salvation; and with a 
view to quiet title, and to make manifest their devotion to the greater good of 
eschatological expediency, those ingenious speculators were content to proclaim 
that their philosophy is the handmaid of theology - Philosophia theologiae 
ancillans. But their philosophy has fallen into the alembic of the idle 
curiosity and has given rise to a body of modern science, godless and 
unpractical, that has no intended or even ostensible bearing on the religious 
fortunes of mankind; and their sanctimonious maxim would today be better 
accepted as the subject of a limerick than of a homily. Except in degree, the 
fortunes of the temporal pragmatic disciplines, in Law and Medicine, have been 
much the same as that of their elder sister, Theology. Professionalism and 
practical serviceability have been gradually crowded into the background of 
academic interests and overlaid with quasi-utilitarian research - such as the 
history of jurisprudence, comparative physiology, and the like. They have in 
fact largely been eliminated.(8*)
[39] And changes running to this effect have gone farthest and have taken most 
consistent effect in those communities that are most fully imbued with the 
spirit of the modern peaceable civilization. It is in the more backward 
communities and schools that the barbarian animus of utilitarianism still 
maintains itself most nearly intact, whether it touches matters of temporal or 
of spiritual interest. With the later advance of culture, as the intellectual 
interest has gradually displaced the older ideals in men's esteem, and barring a 
reactionary episode here and there, the university has progressively come to 
take its place as a seat of the higher learning, a corporation for the pursuit 
of knowledge; and barring accidental reversions, it has increasingly asserted 
itself as an imperative necessity, more and more consistently, that the spirit 
of disinterested inquiry must have free play in these seminaries of the higher 
learning, without afterthought as to the practical or utilitarian consequences 
which this free inquiry may conceivably have for the professional training or 
for the social, civil or religious temper of the students or the rest of the 
community. Nothing is felt to be so irremediably vicious in academic policy as a 
coercive bias, religious, political, conventional or professional, in so far as 
it touches that quest of knowledge that constitutes the main interest of the 
university.
[40] Professional training and technological work at large have of course not 
lost ground, either in the volume and the rigour of their requirements or in the 
application bestowed in their pursuit; but as within the circle of academic 
interests, these utilitarian disciplines have lost their preferential place and 
have been pushed to one side; so that the professional and technical schools are 
now in fact rated as adjuncts rather than as integral constituents of the 
university corporation. Such is the unmistakable sense of this matter among 
academic men. At the same time these vocational schools have, one with another, 
progressively taken on more of a distinctive, independent and close-knit 
structure; an individual corporate existence, autonomous and academically self-
sufficient, even in those cases where they most tenaciously hold to their formal 
connection with the university corporation. They have reached a mature phase of 
organization, developed a type of personnel and control peculiar to themselves 
and their special needs, and have in effect come out from under the tutelage of 
the comprehensive academic organization of which they once in their early days 
were the substantial core. These schools have more in common among themselves as 
a class than their class have with the academic aims and methods that 
characterize the university proper. They are in fact ready and competent to go 
on their own recognizances, - indeed they commonly resent any effective 
interference or surveillance from the side of the academic corporation of which 
they nominally continue to be members, and insist on going their own way and 
arranging their own affairs as they know best. 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; it is only in their interfer-[41]ence with academic policy, and in 
injecting their own peculiar bias into university affairs, that they count 
substantially as corporate members of the academic body. And in these respects, 
what is said of the professional and technical schools holds true also of the 
undergraduate departments.
It is quite feasible to have a university without professional schools and 
without an undergraduate department; but it is not possible to have one without 
due provision for that non-utilitarian higher learning about which as a nucleus 
these utilitarian disciplines cluster. And this in spite of the solicitous 
endeavours of the professional schools to make good their footing as the 
substantial core of the corporation.
V.
As intimated above, there are two main reasons for the continued and tenacious 
connection between these schools and the universities: (a) ancient tradition, 
fortified by the solicitous ambition of the university directorate to make a 
brave show of magnitude, and (b) the anxiety of these schools to secure some 
degree of scholarly authentication through such a formal connection with a seat 
of learning. These two motives have now and again pushed matters fairly to an 
extreme in the reactionary direction. So, for instance, the chances of intrigue 
and extra-academic clamour have latterly thrown up certain men of untempered 
"practicality" as directive heads of certain universities, and some of these 
have gone so far as to avow a reactionary intention to make the modern 
university a cluster of professional schools or faculties, after the ancient 
barbarian fashion.(9*) But such a policy [42] of return to the lost crudities is 
unworkable in the long run under modern conditions. It may serve excellently as 
a transient expedient in a campaign of popularity, and such appears to have been 
its chief purpose where a move of this kind has been advocated, but it runs on 
superficial grounds and can afford neither hope nor fear of a permanent 
diversion in the direction so spoken for.
In the modern community, under the strain of the price system and the 
necessities of competitive earning and spending, many men and women are driven 
by an habitual bias in favour of a higher "practical" efficiency in all matters 
of education; that is to say, a more single-minded devotion to the needs of 
earning and spending. There is, indeed, much of this spirit abroad in the 
community, and any candidate for popular favour and prestige may find his own 
advantage in conciliating popular sentiment of this kind. But there is at the 
same time equally prevalent through the community a long-term bias of another 
kind, such as will not enduringly tolerate the sordid effects of pursuing an 
educational policy that looks mainly to the main chance, and unreservedly makes 
the means of life its chief end. By virtue of this long-term idealistic drift, 
any seminary of learning that plays fast and loose in this way with the cultural 
interests entrusted to its keeping loses caste and falls out of the running. The 
universities that are subjected in this fashion to an experimental reversion to 
vocationalism, it appears, will unavoidably return presently to something of the 
non-professional type, on pain of falling into hopeless discredit. There have 
been some striking instances, but current not ions of delicacy will scarcely 
admit a citation of names and dates. And while the long-term drift of the modern 
idealistic bias may not permit the [43] universities permanently to be diverted 
to the service of Mammon in this fashion, yet the unremitting endeavours of 
"educators" seeking prestige for worldly wisdom results at the best in a 
fluctuating state of compromise, in which the ill effects of such bids for 
popularity are continually being outworn by the drift of academic usage.
The point is illustrated by the American state universities as a class, although 
the illustration is by no means uniformly convincing. The greater number of 
these state schools are not, or are not yet, universities except in name. These 
establishments have been founded, commonly, with a professed utilitarian 
purpose, and have started out with professional training as their chief avowed 
aim. The purpose made most of in their establishment has commonly been to train 
young men for proficiency in some gainful occupation; along with this have gone 
many half-articulate professions of solicitude for cultural interests to be 
taken care of by the same means. They have been installed by politicians looking 
for popular acclaim, rather than by men of scholarly or scientific insight, and 
their management has not infrequently been entrusted to political masters of 
intrigue, with scant academic qualifications; their foundations has been the 
work of practical politicians with a view to conciliate the good will of a lay 
constituency clamouring for things tangibly "useful" - that is to say, 
pecuniarily gainful. So these experts in short-term political prestige have made 
provision for schools of a "practical" character; but they have named these 
establishments "universities" because the name carries an air of scholarly 
repute, of a higher, more substantial kind than any naked avowal of material 
practicality would give. Yet, in those instances where the passage of time has 
allowed the readjustment to take place, these quasi-"universities," [44] 
installed by men of affairs, of a crass "practicality," and in response to the 
utilitarian demands of an unlearned political constituency, have in the long run 
taken on more and more of an academic, non-utilitarian character, and have been 
gradually falling into line as universities claiming a place among the 
seminaries of the higher learning. The long-term drift of modern cultural ideals 
leaves these schools no final resting place short of the university type, 
however far short of such a consummation the greater number of them may still be 
found.

What has just been said of the place which the university occupies in modern 
civilization, and more particularly of the manner in which it is to fill its 
place, may seem something of a fancy sketch. It is assuredly not a faithful 
description of any concrete case, by all means not of any given American 
university; nor does it faithfully describe the line of policy currently pursued 
by the directorate of any such establishment. Yet it is true to the facts, taken 
in a generalized way, and it describes the type to which the American schools 
unavoidably gravitate by force of the community's long-term idealistic 
impulsion, in so far as their drift is not continually corrected and offset by 
vigilant authorities who, from motives of their own, seek to turn the 
universities to account in one way and another. It describes an institutional 
ideal; not necessarily an ideal nursed by any given individual, but the ideal 
logically involved in the scheme of modern civilization, and logically coming 
out of the historical development of Western civilization hitherto, and visible 
to any one who will dispassionately stand aside and look to the drift of 
latterday events in so far as they bear on this matter of the higher learning, 
its advancement and conservation.
[45] Many if not most of those men who are occupied with the guidance of 
university affairs would disown such a projected ideal, as being too narrow and 
too unpractical to fit into the modern scheme of things, which is above all else 
a culture of affairs; that it does not set forth what should be aimed at by any 
who have the good of mankind at heart, or who in any sensible degree appreciate 
the worth of real work as contrasted with the leisurely intellectual finesse of 
the confirmed scientist and man of letters. These and the like objections and 
strictures may be well taken, perhaps. The question of what, in any ulterior 
sense, ought to be sought after in the determination of academic policy and the 
conduct of academic affairs will, however, not coincide with the other question, 
as to what actually is being accomplished in these premises, on the one hand, 
nor as to what the long-term cultural aspirations of civilized men are setting 
toward, on the other hand.
Now, it is not intended here to argue the merits of the current cultural ideals 
as contrasted with what, in some ulterior sense, ought to be aimed at if the 
drift of current aspirations and impulse should conceivably permit a different 
ideal to be put into effect. It is intended only to set forth what place, in 
point of fact and for better or worse, the higher learning and the university 
hold in the current scheme of Western civilization, as determined by that body 
of instinctive aspirations and proclivities that holds this civilization to its 
course as it runs today; and further to show how and how far certain 
institutional factors comprised in this modern scheme of life go to help or 
hinder the realization of this ideal which men's aspirations and proclivities so 
make worth while to them. The sketch here offered in characterization of the 
university and its work, therefore, en-[46]deavours to take account of the 
community's consensus of impulses and desires touching the animus and aims that 
should move the seminaries of the higher learning, at the same time that it 
excludes those subsidiary or alien interests in whose favour no such consensus 
is found to prevail.
There are many of these workday interests, extraneous to the higher learning, 
each and several of which may be abundantly good and urgent in its own right; 
but, while they need not be at cross purposes with the higher learning, they are 
extraneous to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge in which the 
characteristic intellectual bent of modern civilization culminates. These others 
are patent, insistent and palpable, and there need be no apprehension of their 
going by default. The intellectual predilection - the idle curiosity - abides 
and asserts itself when other pursuits of a more temporal but more immediately 
urgent kind leave men free to take stock of the ulterior ends and values of 
life; whereas the transient interests, preoccupation with the ways and means of 
life, are urgent and immediate, and employ men's thought and energy through the 
greater share of their life. The question of material ways and means, and the 
detail requirements of the day's work, are for ever at hand and for ever contest 
the claims of any avowed ulterior end; and by force of unremitting habituation 
the current competitive system of acquisition and expenditure induces in all 
classes such a bias as leads them to overrate ways and means as contrasted with 
the ends which these ways and means are in some sense designed to serve.
So, one class and another, biassed by the habitual preoccupation of the class, 
will aim to divert the academic equipment to some particular use which habit has 
led them [47] to rate high; or to include in the academic discipline various 
lines of inquiry and training which are extraneous to the higher learning but 
which the class in question may specially have at heart; but taking them one 
with another, there is no general or abiding consensus among the various classes 
of the community in favour of diverting the academic establishment to any other 
specific uses, or of including in the peculiar work of the university anything 
beyond the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Now, it may be remarked by the way, that civilized mankind should have come so 
to set their heart on this chase after a fugitive knowledge of inconsequential 
facts may be little to the credit of the race or of that scheme of culture that 
so centres about this cult of the idle curiosity. And it is perhaps to their 
credit, as well as to the credit of the community whose creatures they are, that 
the spokesmen of some tangible ideal, some materially expedient aspiration, 
embodying more of worldly wisdom, are for ever urging upon the institutions of 
the higher leaning one or another course of action of a more palpably expedient 
kind. But, for better or worse, the passage of time brings out the fact that 
these sober and sensible courses of policy so advocated are after all 
essentially extraneous, if not alien, to those purposes for which a university 
can be maintained, on the ground afforded by the habits of thought prevalent in 
the modern civilized community.
One and another of these "practical" and expedient interests have transiently 
come to the front in academic policy, and have in their time given a particular 
bent to the pursuit of knowledge that has occupied the universities. Of these 
extraneous interests the two most notable have, as already indicated above, been 
the ec-[48]clesiastical and the political. But in the long run these various 
interests and ideals of expediency have, all and several, shown themselves to be 
only factional elements in the scheme of culture, and have lost their 
preferential voice in the shaping of academic life. The place in men's esteem 
once filled by church and state is now held by pecuniary traffic, business 
enterprise. So that 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. In one shape or 
another this problem of adjustment, reconciliation or compromise between the 
needs of the higher learning and the demands of business enterprise is for ever 
present in the deliberations of the university directorate. This question 
gathers in its net all those perplexing details of expediency that now claim the 
attention of the ruling bodies.
VI.
Since the paragraphs that make up the foregoing chapter were written the 
American academic community has been thrown into a new and peculiar position by 
the fortunes of war. The progress and the further promise of the war hold in 
prospect new and untried responsibilities, as well as an unexampled opportunity. 
So that the outlook now (June 1918) would seem to be that the Americans are to 
be brought into a central place in the republic of learning; to take a position, 
not so much of dominance as of trust and guardianship; not so much by virtue of 
their own superior merit as by force of the insolvency of the European academic 
community.
[49] Again, it is not that the war is expected to leave the lines of European 
scholars and scientists extinct; although there is no denying the serious 
inroads made by the war, both in the way of a high mortality among European men 
of learning, and in the way of a decimation of the new men on whom the hopes of 
the higher learning for the incoming generation should have rested. There is 
also a serious diversion of the young forces from learning to transiently urgent 
matters of a more material, and more ephemeral nature. But possibly more 
sinister than all these losses that are in a way amenable to statistical record 
and estimate, is the current and prospective loss of morale.
Naturally, it would be difficult and hazardous to offer an appraisal of this 
prospective loss of morale, with which it is to be expected that the 
disintegrated European community of learned men will come through the troubled 
times. But that there is much to be looked for on this score, that there is much 
to be written off in the way of lowered aggregate efficiency and loss of the 
spirit of team-work, - that much there is no denying, and it is useless to blink 
the fact.
There has already a good deal of disillusionment taken effect throughout the 
nations of Christendom in respect of the temper and trustworthiness of German 
scholarship these past three or four years, and it is fairly beyond computation 
what further shift of sentiment in this respect is to be looked for in the 
course of a further possible period of years given over to the same line of 
experience. Doubtless, the German scholars, and therefore the German seats of 
learning whose creatures and whose custodians these German scholars are, have 
earned much of the distrust and dispraise that is falling to their share. There 
is no overlooking the fact that they [50] have proved the frailty of their hold 
on those elementary principles of sobriety and single mind that underlie all 
sound work in the field of learning. To any one who has the interest of the 
higher learning at heart, the spectacle of maudlin chauvinism and inflated 
scurrility unremittingly placed on view by the putative leaders of German 
science and scholarship can not but be exceedingly disheartening.
It may be argued, and it may be true, of course, that much of this failure of 
intelligence and spiritual force among Germany's men of learning is of the 
nature of a transient eclipse of their powers; that with the return of settled 
conditions there is due to come a return of poise and insight. But when all due 
argument has been heard, it remains true that the distrust set afoot in the mind 
of their neighbours, by this highly remarkable exhibition of their personal 
equation, will long inure to the disability of Germany's men of learning as a 
force to be counted on in that teamwork that is of the essence of things for the 
advancement of learning. In effect, Germany, and Germany's associates in this 
warlike enterprise, will presumably be found bankrupt in this respect on the 
return of peace, even beyond the other nations.
These others have also not escaped the touch of the angel of decay, but the 
visible corruption of spiritual and intellectual values does not go the same 
length among them. Nor have these others suffered so heavy a toll on their 
prospective scholarly man power. It is all a matter of degree and of 
differential decline, coupled with a failure of corporate organization and of 
the usages and channels of communion and co-operation. Chauvinistic self-
sufficiency and disesteem of their neighbours have apparently also not gone so 
deep and far among the [51] other nations; although here again it is only a 
relative degree of immunity that they enjoy.
And all this holds true of the Americans in much the same way as of the rest; 
except that the Americans have, at least hitherto, not been exposed to the 
blight in anything like the same degree as any one of those other peoples with 
whom they come in comparison here. It is, of course, not easy to surmise what 
may yet overtake them, and the others with them; but judged on the course of 
things hitherto, and on the apparent promise of the calculable future, it is 
scarcely to be presumed that the Americans are due to suffer so extreme a degree 
of dilapidation as the European peoples, - even apart from the accentuated evil 
case of the Germans. The strain has hitherto been lighter here, and it promises 
so to continue, whether the further duration of the war shall turn out to be 
longer or shorter. The Americans are, after all, somewhat sheltered from the 
impact; and so soon as the hysterical anxiety induced by the shock has had time 
to spend itself, it should reasonably be expected that this people will be able 
soberly to take stock of its assets and to find that its holdings in the domain 
of science and scholarship are, in the main, still intact.
Not that no loss has been incurred, nor that no material degree of derangement 
is to be looked for, but in comparison with what the experience of the war is 
bringing to the Europeans, the case of the Americans should still be the best 
there is to be looked for and the best is always good enough, perforce. So it 
becomes a question, what the Americans will do with the best opportunity which 
the circumstances offer. And on their conduct of their affairs in this bearing 
turns not only their [52] own fortune in respect of the interests of science and 
scholarship, but in great measure the fortunes of their overseas friends and co-
partners in the republic of learning as well.
The fortunes of war promise to leave the American men of learning in a strategic 
position, in the position of a strategic reserve, of a force to be held in 
readiness, equipped and organized to meet the emergency that so arises, and to 
retrieve so much as may be of those assets of scholarly equipment and personnel 
that make the substantial code of Western civilization. And so it becomes a 
question of what the Americans are minded to do about it. It is their 
opportunity, and at the same time it carries the gravest responsibility that has 
yet fallen on the nation; for the spiritual fortunes of Christendom are bound up 
with the line of policy which this surviving contingent of American men of 
learning shall see fit to pursue. They are not all that is to be left over when 
the powers of decay shall begin to retire, nor are they, perhaps, to be the best 
and most valuable contingent among these prospective survivors; but they occupy 
a strategic position, in that they are today justly to be credited with 
disinterested motives, beyond the rest, at the same time that they command those 
material resources without which the quest of knowledge can hope to achieve 
little along the modern lines of inquiry. By force of circumstances they are 
thrown into the position of keepers of the ways and means whereby the republic 
of learning is to retrieve its fortunes. By force of circumstances they are in a 
position, if they so choose, to shelter many of those masters of free inquiry 
whom the one-eyed forces of reaction and partisanship overseas will seek to 
suppress and undo; and they are also in a position, if they so choose, to 
install something in the way of an [53] international clearing house and 
provisional headquarters for the academic community throughout that range of 
civilized peoples whose goodwill they now enjoy - a place of refuge and a place 
of meeting, confluence and dissemination for those views and ideas that live and 
move and have their being in the higher learning.

There is, therefore, a work of reconstruction to be taken care of in the realm 
of learning, no less than in the working scheme of economic and civil 
institutions. And as in this other work of reconstruction, so here; if it is to 
be done without undue confusion and blundering it is due to be set afoot before 
the final emergency is at hand. But there is the difference that, whereas the 
framework of civil institutions may still, with passable success, be drawn on 
national lines and confined within the national frontiers; and while the 
economic organization can also, without fatal loss, be confined in a similar 
fashion, in response to short-sighted patriotic preconceptions; the interests of 
science, and therefore of the academic community, do not run on national lines 
and can not similarly be confined within geographical or political boundaries. 
In the nature of the case these interests are of an international character and 
can not be taken care of except by unrestricted collusion and collaboration 
among the learned men of all those peoples whom it may concern. Yet there is no 
mistaking the fact that the spirit of invidious patriotism has invaded these 
premises, too, and promises to bungle the outcome; which makes the needed work 
of reconstruction all the more difficult and all the more imperative. Unhappily, 
the state of sentiment on both sides of the line of cleavage will presumably not 
admit a cordial understanding and co-operation between the German contingent and 
the rest of the [54] civilized nations, for some time to come. But the others 
are in a frame of mind that should lend itself generously to a larger measure of 
co-operation in this respect now than ever before.
So it may not seem out of place to offer a suggestion, tentatively and under 
correction, looking to this end. A beginning may well be made by a joint 
enterprise among American scholars and universities for the installation of a 
freely endowed central establishment where teachers and students of all 
nationalities, including Americans with the rest, may pursue their chosen work 
as guests of the American academic community at large, or as guests of the 
American people in the character of a democracy of culture. There should also be 
nothing to hinder the installation of more than one of these academic houses of 
refuge and entertainment; nor should there be anything to hinder the enterprise 
being conducted on such terms of amity, impartiality and community interest as 
will make recourse to it an easy matter of course for any scholars whom its 
opportunities may attract. The same central would at the same time, and for the 
time being, take care of those channels of communication throughout the academic 
world that have been falling into enforced neglect under the strain of the war. 
So also should provision be made, perhaps best under the same auspices, for the 
(transient) taking-over of the many essential lines of publicity and publication 
on which the men engaged in scholarly and scientific inquiry have learned to 
depend, and which have also been falling into something of a decline during the 
war.
Measures looking to this end might well be made, at the same time, to serve no 
less useful a purpose within the American Academic community. As is well known, 
there prevails today an extensive and wasteful competitive du-[55]plication of 
plant, organization and personnel among the American universities, as regards 
both publications and courses of instruction. Particularly is this true in 
respect of that advanced work of the universities that has to do with the higher 
learning. At the same time, these universities are now pinched for funds, due to 
the current inflation of prices. So that any proposal of this nature, which 
might be taken advantage of as an occasion for the pooling of common issues 
among the universities, might hopefully be expected to be welcomed as a measure 
of present relief from some part of the pecuniary strain under which they are 
now working.
But competition is well ingrained in the habitual outlook of the American 
schools. To take the issue to neutral ground, therefore, where this competitive 
animus may hopefully be counted on to find some salutary abatement, it may be 
suggested that a practicable nucleus for this proposed joint enterprise can well 
be found in one or another - perhaps in one and another - of those extra-
academic foundations for research of which there already are several in 
existence, - as, e.g., the Carnegie Institution. With somewhat enlarged powers, 
or perhaps rather with some abatement of restrictions, and with such additional 
funds as may be required, the necessary work and organization should readily be 
taken care of by such an institution. Further growth and ramification would be 
left to future counsel and advisement.
The contemplated enterprise would necessarily require a certain planning and 
organization of work and something in the way of an administrative and clerical 
staff, - a setting up of something in the way of "organization tables"; but 
there can be no question of offering detailed proposals on that head here. Yet 
the caution may well be entered here that few specifications are better [56] 
than many, in these premises, and that the larger the latitude allowed from the 
outset, the fewer the seeds of eventual defeat, - as is abundantly illustrated 
by contraries.
It is also evident that such an enterprise will involve provision for some 
expenditure of funds; presumably a somewhat generous expenditure; which comes 
near implying that recourse should be had to the public revenues, or to 
resources that may legitimately be taken over by the public authorities from 
private hands where they now serve no useful purpose. There are many items of 
material resources in the country that come legitimately under this head. At the 
same time it is well in this connection to call to mind that there is no 
prospect of the country's being in any degree impoverished in the course of the 
war; so that there need be no apprehension of a shortage of means for the 
carrying on of such an enterprise, if only the available sources are drawn on 
without prejudice. In the mind of any disinterested student of the American 
economic situation, there can be no serious apprehension that the American 
people, collectively, will be at all worse off in point of disposable means at 
the close of the war than they were at its beginning; quite the contrary in 
fact. To any one who will look to the facts it is evident that the experience of 
the war, and the measures taken and to be taken, are leading to a heightened 
industrial productiveness and a concomitant elimination of waste. The resulting 
net gain in productive efficiency has not gone at all far, and there need be no 
apprehension of its going to great lengths; but, for more or less, it is going 
so far as safely to promise a larger net annual production of useful goods in 
the immediate future than in the immediate past; and the dis-[57]posable means 
of any people is always a matter of the net annual production, and it need be a 
question of nothing else. The manner in which this net product is, and is to be, 
shared among the classes and individuals of the community is another question, 
which does not belong here.
A question of graver weight and of greater perplexity touches the presumptive 
attitude of the several universities and their discretionary authorities in the 
face of any proposed measure of this kind; where the scope of the enterprise is 
so far beyond their habitual range of interest. When one calls to mind the 
habitual parochialism of the governing boards of these seminaries of the higher 
learning, and the meticulous manœuvres of their executives seeking each to 
enhance his own prestige and the prestige of his own establishment, there is not 
much of an evident outlook for large and generous measures looking to the common 
good. And yet it is also to be called to mind that these governing boards and 
executives are, after all, drawn from the common stock of humanity, picked men 
as they may be; and that they are subject, after all, to somewhat the same 
impulses and infirmities as the common run, picked though they may be with a 
view to parochialism and blameless futility. Now, what is overtaking the temper 
of the common run under the strain of the war situation should be instructive as 
to what may be also looked for at the bands of these men in whose discretion 
rest the fortunes of the American universities. There should be at least a 
fighting chance that, with something larger, manlier, more substantial, to 
occupy their attention and to shape the day's work for them, these seminaries of 
learning may, under instant pressure, turn their best efforts to their 
ostensible [58] purpose, "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men," 
and to forego their habitual preoccupation with petty intrigue and bombastic 
publicity, until the return of idler days.
NOTES:
1. An inquiry of this kind has been attempted elsewhere: Cf. The Instinct of 
Workmanship, chapter vii, pp. 321-340; "The Place of Science in Modern 
Civilization", American Journal of [3] Sociology. Vol. XI (March, 1906), pp. 
585-609; "The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View," University of 
California Chronicle (1908), Vol. X, No. 4, pp. 395-416.
2. Cf. The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, ch. i 
and pp. 39-45, 52-62, 84-89.
3. In the crude surmises of the pioneers in pragmatism this proposition was 
implicitly denied; in their later and more advisedly formulated positions the 
expositors of pragmatism have made peace with it.
4. The essential function of the university is to bring together, for the 
transmission of experience and impulse, the sages of the passing and the picked 
youths of the coming generation. By the extent and fulness with which they 
establish these social contacts, and thus transmit the wave of cumulative 
experience and idealist impulse - the real sources of moral and intellectual 
progress - the universities are to be judged. - Victor Branford, Interpretations 
and Forecasts, ch. VI. "The Present as a Transition," p. 288.
5. Cf., Geo. T. Ladd, University Control, p. 349.
6. Cf., e.g., J. McKeen Cattell, University Control, Part III, ch. V., 
"Concerning the American University." "The university is those who teach and 
those who learn and the work they do." "The university is its men and their 
work. But certain externals are necessary or at least usual - buildings and 
equipment, a president and trustees."
"The papers by other writers associated with Mr. Cattell in this volume run to 
the same effect whenever they touch the same topic; and, indeed, it would be 
difficult to find a deliberate expression to the contrary among men entitled to 
speak in these premises.
[19] It may be in place to add here that the volume referred to, on University 
Control, has been had in mind throughout the following analysis and has served 
as ground and material for much of the argument.
7. Cf. The Instinct of Workmanship, ch. vi, vii.
8. With the current reactionary trend of things political and civil toward 
mediæval-barbarian policies and habits of thought [39] in the Fatherland, 
something of a correlative change has also latterly come in evidence in the German 
universities; so that what is substantially "cameralistic science" - training 
and information for prospective civil servants and police magistrates - is in 
some appreciable measure displacing disinterested inquiry in the field of 
economics and political theory. This is peculiarly true of those corporations of 
learning that come closely in touch with the Cultus Ministerium.
9. Cf. "Some Considerations On the Function of the State University." (Inaugural 
Address of Edmund Janes James, Ph.D., LL.D.), Science, November 17, 1905.
[59]
CHAPTER II
The Governing Boards
In the working theory of the modern civilized community, - that is to say in the 
current common-sense apprehension of what is right and good, as it works out in 
the long run, - the university is a corporation of learning, disinterested and 
dispassionate. To its keeping is entrusted the community's joint interest in 
esoteric knowledge. It is given over to the single-minded pursuit of science and 
scholarship, without afterthought and without a view to interests subsidiary or 
extraneous to the higher learning. It is, indeed, the one great institution of 
modern times that works to no ulterior end and is controlled by no consideration 
of expediency beyond its own work. Typically, normally, in point of popular 
theory, the university is moved by no consideration other than "the increase and 
diffusion of knowledge among men." This is so because this profitless quest of 
knowledge has come to be the highest and ulterior aim of modern culture.
Such has been the case, increasingly, for some generations past; but it is not 
until quite recently that such a statement would hold true unequivocally and 
with an unqualified generality. That the case stands so today is due to the 
failure of theoretical interests of a different kind; directly and immediately 
it is due to the fact that in the immediate present the cult of knowledge has, 
by default, taken over that primacy among human interests [60] which an 
eschatologically thrifty religious sentiment once held in the esteem of 
Christendom. So long as the fear of God still continued to move the generality 
of civilized men in sufficient measure, their theoretical knowledge was 
organized for "the glory of God and the good of man," - the latter phrase being 
taken in the eschatological sense; and so long the resulting scheme of learning 
was laid out and cultivated with an eye to the main chance in a hereafter given 
over, in the main and for its major effect, to pains and penalties. With the 
latterday dissipation of this fear of God, the scheme of knowledge handed down 
out of a devout past and further amplified in the (theoretically) Godless 
present, has, by atrophy of disuse, lost its ulterior view to such spiritual 
expediency, and has come to stand over as an output of intellectual enterprise 
working under the impulsion and guidance of an idle curiosity simply. All this 
may not be much to the credit of civilized mankind, but dispassionate reflection 
will not leave the fact in doubt. And the outcome for the university, considered 
as an institution of this modern culture, is such as this conjuncture of 
circumstances will require.
But while such is the dispassionate working theory, the long-term drift of 
modern common sense as touches the work of the university, it is also a matter 
of course that this ideally single-minded course of action has never been 
realized in any concrete case. While it holds true, by and large, that modern 
Christendom has outlived the fear of God, - that is to say of "the Pope, the 
Turk, and the Devil," - it does not therefore follow that men take a less 
instant interest in the affairs of life, or carry on the traffic of their lives 
with a less alert eye to the main chance, than they once did under the habitual 
shadow of that barbarian fear. The difference is, for the purpose in [61] hand, 
that the same solicitous attention that once converged on such an avoidance of 
ulterior consequences now centres on questions of present ways and means. 
Worldly wisdom has not fallen into decay or abeyance, but it has become a wisdom 
of ways and means that lead to nothing beyond further ways and means. Expediency 
and practical considerations have come to mean considerations of a pecuniary 
kind; good, on the whole, for pecuniary purposes only; that is to say, gain and 
expenditure for the sake of further gain and expenditure, with nothing that will 
stand scrutiny as a final term to this traffic in ways and means, - except only 
this cult of the idle curiosity to which the seats of learning are, in theory, 
dedicate. But unremitting habituation to the competitive pursuit of ways and 
means has determined that "practical" interests of this complexion rule workday 
life in the modern community throughout, and they are therefore so intimately 
and ubiquitously bound up with current habits of thought, and have so strong and 
immediate a hold on current workday sentiment, that, hitherto, in no case have 
the seats of learning been able to pursue their quest of knowledge with anything 
like that single-mindedness which academic men are moved to profess in their 
moments of academic elation.
Some one vital interest of this practical sort, some variant of the quest of 
gain, is always at hand and strenuously effective in the community's life, and 
therefore dominates their everyday habits of thought for the time being. This 
tone-giving dominance of such a workday interest may be transient or relatively 
enduring; it may be more or less urgently important and consequential under the 
circumstances in which the community is placed, or the clamour of its spokesmen 
and beneficiaries may be more or less ubiquitous and pertina-[62]cious; but in 
any case it will have its effect in the counsels of the "Educators," and so it 
will infect the university as well as the lower levels of the educational 
system. So that, while the higher learning still remains as the enduring purpose 
and substantial interest of the university establishment, the dominant practical 
interests of the day will, transiently but effectually, govern the detail lines 
of academic policy, the range of instruction offered, and the character of the 
personnel; and more particularly and immediately will the character of the 
governing boards and the academic administration so be determined by the current 
run of popular sentiment touching the community's practical needs and aims; 
since these ruling bodies stand, in one way or another, under the critical 
surveillance of a lay constituency.

The older American universities have grown out of underlying colleges, - 
undergraduate schools. Within the memory of men still living it was a nearly 
unbroken rule that the governing boards of these higher American schools were 
drawn largely from the clergy and were also guided mainly by ecclesiastical, or 
at least by devotional, notions of what was right and needful in matters of 
learning. This state of things reflected the ingrained devoutness of that 
portion of the American community to which the higher schools then were of much 
significance. At the same time it reflected the historical fact that the 
colleges of the early days had been established primarily as training schools 
for ministers of the church. In their later growth, in the recent past, while 
the chief purpose of these seminaries has no longer been religious, yet 
ecclesiastical prepossessions long continued to mark the permissible limits of 
the learning which they culti-[63]vated, and continued also to guard the 
curriculum and discipline of the schools.
That phase of academic policy is past. Due regard at least is, of course, still 
had to the religious proprieties - the American community, by and large, is 
still the most devout of civilized countries - but such regard on the part of 
the academic authorities now proceeds on grounds of businesslike expediency 
rather than on religious conviction or on an ecclesiastical or priestly bias in 
the ruling bodies. It is a concessive precaution on the part of a worldly-wise 
directorate, in view of the devout prejudices of those who know no better.
The rule of the clergy belongs virtually to the prehistory of the American 
universities. While that rule held there were few if any schools that should 
properly be rated as of university grade. Even now, it is true, much of the 
secondary school system, including the greater part, though a diminishing 
number, of the smaller colleges, is under the tutelage of the clergy; and the 
academic heads of these schools are almost universally men of ecclesiastical 
standing and bias rather than of scholarly attainments. But that fact does not 
call for particular notice here, since these schools lie outside the university 
field, and so outside the scope of this inquiry.
For a generation past, while the American universities have been coming into 
line as seminaries of the higher learning, there has gone on a wide-reaching 
substitution of laymen in the place of clergymen on the governing boards. This 
progressive secularization is sufficiently notorious, even though there are some 
among the older establishments the terms of whose charters require a large 
proportion of clergymen on their boards. This secularization is entirely 
consonant with the prevailing drift of [64] sentiment in the community at large, 
as is shown by the uniform and uncritical approval with which it is regarded. 
The substitution is a substitution of businessmen and politicians; which amounts 
to saying that it is a substitution of businessmen. So that the discretionary 
control in matters of university policy now rests finally in the hands of 
businessmen.
The reason which men prefer to allege for this state of things is the sensible 
need of experienced men of affairs to take care of the fiscal concerns of these 
university corporations; for the typical modern university is a corporation 
possessed of large property and disposing of large aggregate expenditures, so 
that it will necessarily have many and often delicate pecuniary interests to be 
looked after. It is at the same time held to be expedient in case of emergency 
to have several wealthy men identified with the governing board, and such men of 
wealth are also commonly businessmen. It is apparently believed, though on just 
what ground this sanguine belief rests does not appear, that in case of 
emergency the wealthy members of the boards may be counted on to spend their 
substance in behalf of the university. In point of fact, at any rate, poor men 
and men without large experience in business affairs are felt to have no place 
in these bodies. If by any chance such men, without the due pecuniary 
qualifications, should come to make up a majority, or even an appreciable 
minority of such a governing board, the situation would be viewed with some 
apprehension by all persons interested in the case and cognizant of the facts. 
The only exception might be cases where, by tradition, the board habitually 
includes a considerable proportion of clergymen:
"Such great regard is always lent
By men to ancient precedent."
[65] The reasons alleged are no doubt convincing to those who are ready to be so 
convinced, but they are after all more plausible at first sight than on 
reflection. In point of fact these businesslike governing boards commonly 
exercise little if any current surveillance of the corporate affairs of the 
university, beyond a directive oversight of the distribution of expenditures 
among the several academic purposes for which the corporate income is to be 
used; that is to say, they control the budget of expenditures; which comes to 
saying that they exercise a pecuniary discretion in the case mainly in the way 
of deciding what the body of academic men that constitutes the university may or 
may not do with the means in hand; that is to say, their pecuniary surveillance 
comes in the main to an interference with the academic work, the merits of which 
these men of affairs on the governing board are in no special degree qualified 
to judge. Beyond this, as touches the actual running administration of the 
corporation's investments, income and expenditures, - all that is taken care of 
by permanent officials who have, as they necessarily must, sole and responsible 
charge of those matters. Even the auditing of the corporation's accounts is 
commonly vested in such officers of the corporation, who have none but a formal, 
if any, direct connection with the governing board. The governing board, or more 
commonly a committee of the board, on the other hand, will then formally review 
the balance sheets and bundles of vouchers duly submitted by the corporation's 
fiscal officers and their clerical force, - with such effect of complaisant 
oversight as will best be appreciated by any person who has bad the fortune to 
look into the accounts of a large corporation.
So far as regards its pecuniary affairs and their due administration, the 
typical modern university is in a [66] position, without loss or detriment, to 
dispense with the services of any board of trustees, regents, curators, or what 
not. Except for the insuperable difficulty of getting a hearing for such an 
extraordinary proposal, it should be no difficult matter to show that these 
governing boards of businessmen commonly are quite useless to the university for 
any businesslike purpose. Indeed, except for a stubborn prejudice to the 
contrary, the fact should readily be seen that the boards are of no material use 
in any connection; their sole effectual function being to interfere with the 
academic management in matters that are not of the nature of business, and that 
lie outside their competence and outside the range of their habitual interest.
The governing boards - trustees, regents, curators, fellows, whatever their 
style and title - are an aimless survival from the days of clerical rule, when 
they were presumably of some effect in enforcing conformity to orthodox opinions 
and observances, among the academic staff. At that time, when means for 
maintenance of the denominational colleges commonly had to be procured by an 
appeal to impecunious congregations, it fell to these bodies of churchmen to do 
service as sturdy beggars for funds with which to meet current expenses. So that 
as long as the boards were made up chiefly of clergymen they served a pecuniary 
purpose; whereas, since their complexion has been changed by the substitution of 
businessmen in the place of ecclesiastics, they have ceased to exercise any 
function other than a bootless meddling with academic matters which they do not 
understand. The sole ground of their retention appears to be an unreflecting 
deferential concession to the usages of corporate organization and control, such 
as have been found advantageous for the pursuit of private gain by business-
[67]men banded together in the exploitation of joint-stock companies with 
limited liability.(1*)
The fact remains, the modern civilized community is reluctant to trust its 
serious interests to others than men [68] of pecuniary substance, who have 
proved their fitness for the direction of academic affairs by acquiring, or by 
otherwise being possessed of, considerable wealth.(2*) It is not simply that 
experienced businessmen are, on mature reflection, judged to be the safest and 
most competent trustees of the university's fiscal interests. The preference 
appears to be almost wholly impulsive, and a matter of habitual bias. It is due 
for the greater part [69] to the high esteem currently accorded to men of wealth 
at large, and especially to wealthy men who have succeeded in business, quite 
apart from any special capacity shown by such success for the guardianship of 
any institution of learning. 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. So that it stands as a matter of course 
that businessmen must be preferred for the guardianship and control of that 
intellectual enterprise for the pursuit of which the university is established, 
as well as to take care of the pecuniary welfare of the university corporation. 
And, full of the same naive faith that business success "answereth all things," 
these businessmen into whose hands this trust falls are content to accept the 
responsibility and confident to exercise full discretion in these matters with 
which they have no special familiarity. Such is the outcome, to the present 
date, of the recent and current secularization of the governing boards. The 
final discretion in the affairs of the seats of learning is entrusted to men who 
have proved their capacity for work that has nothing in common with the higher 
learning.(3*)
As bearing on the case of the American universities, it should be called to mind 
that the businessmen of this [70] country, as a class, are of a notably 
conservative habit of mind. In a degree scarcely equalled in any community that 
can lay claim to a modicum of intelligence and enterprise, the spirit of 
American business is a spirit of quietism, caution, compromise, collusion, and 
chicane. It is not that the spirit of enterprise or of unrest is wanting in this 
community, but only that, by selective effect of the conditioning circumstances, 
persons affected with that spirit are excluded from the management of business, 
and so do not come into the class of successful businessmen from which the 
governing boards are drawn. American inventors are bold and resourceful, perhaps 
beyond the common run of their class elsewhere, but it has become a commonplace 
that American inventors habitually die poor; and one does not find them 
represented on the boards in question. American engineers and technologists are 
as good and efficient as their kind in other countries; but they do not as a 
class accumulate wealth enough to entitle them to sit on the directive board of 
any self-respecting university, nor can they claim even a moderate rank as "safe 
and sane" men of business. American explorers, prospectors and pioneers can not 
be said to fall short of the common measure in hardihood, insight, temerity or 
tenacity; but wealth does not accumulate in their hands, and it is a common 
saying, of them as of the inventors, that they are not fit to conduct their own 
(pecuniary) affairs; and the reminder is scarcely needed that neither they nor 
their qualities are drawn into the [71] counsels of these governing boards. The 
wealth and the serviceable results that come of the endeavours of these 
enterprising and temerarious Americans habitually inure to the benefit of such 
of their compatriots as are endowed with a "safe and sane" spirit of "watchful 
waiting," - of caution, collusion and chicane. There is a homely but well-
accepted American colloquialism which says that "The silent hog eats the swill."
As elsewhere, but in a higher degree and a more cogent sense than elsewhere, 
success in business affairs, in such measure as to command the requisite 
deference, comes only by getting something for nothing. And, baring - accidents 
and within the law, it is only the waiting game and the defensive tactics that 
will bring gains of that kind, unless it be strategy of the nature of finesse 
and chicane. Now it happens that American conditions during the past one hundred 
years have been peculiarly favourable to the patient and circumspect man who 
will rather wait than work; and it is also during these hundred years that the 
current traditions and standards of business conduct and of businesslike talent 
have taken shape and been incorporated in the community's common sense. America 
has been a land of free and abounding resources; which is to say, when converted 
into terms of economic theory, that it is the land of the unearned increment. In 
all directions, wherever enterprise and industry have gone, the opportunity was 
wide and large for such as had the patience or astuteness to place themselves in 
the way of this multifarious flow of the unearned increment, and were endowed 
with the retentive grasp. Putting aside the illusions of public spirit and 
diligent serviceability, sedulously cultivated by the apologists of business, it 
will readily be seen that the [72] great mass of reputably large fortunes in 
this country are of such an origin; nor will it cost anything beyond a similar 
lesion to the affections to confirm the view that such is the origin and line of 
derivation of the American propertied business community and its canons of right 
and honest living.

It is a common saying that the modern taste has been unduly commercialized by 
the unremitting attention necessarily given to matters of price and of profit 
and loss in an industrial community organized on business principles; that 
pecuniary standards of excellence are habitually accepted and applied with undue 
freedom and finality. But what is scarcely appreciated at its full value is the 
fact that these pecuniary standards of merit and efficiency are habitually 
applied to men as well as to things, and with little less freedom and finality. 
The man who applies himself undeviatingly to pecuniary affairs with a view to 
his own gain, and who is habitually and cautiously alert to the main chance, is 
not only esteemed for and in respect of his pecuniary success, but he is also 
habitually rated high at large, as a particularly wise and sane person. He is 
deferred to as being wise and sane not only in pecuniary matters but also in any 
other matters on which he may express an opinion.
A very few generations ago, be fore the present pecuniary era of civilization 
had made such headway, and before the common man in these civilized communities 
had lost the fear of God, the like wide-sweeping and obsequious veneration and 
deference was given to the clergy and their opinions; for the churchmen were 
then, in the popular apprehension, proficient in all those matters that were of 
most substantial interest to the common man of that time. Indeed, the salvation 
of men's souls [73] was then a matter of as grave and untiring solicitude as 
their commercial solvency has now become. And the trained efficiency of the 
successful clergyman of that time for the conduct of spiritual and 
ecclesiastical affairs lent him a prestige with his fellow men such as to give 
his opinions, decisions and preconceptions great and unquestioned weight in 
temporal matters as well; he was then accepted as the type of wise, sane and 
benevolent humanity, in his own esteem as well as in the esteem of his fellows. 
In like manner also, in other times and under other cultural conditions the 
fighting-man has held the first place in men's esteem and has been deferred to 
in matters that concerned his trade and in matters that did not.
Now, in that hard and fast body of aphoristic wisdom that commands the faith of 
the business community there is comprised the conviction that learning is of no 
use in business. This conviction is, further, backed up and coloured with the 
tenet, held somewhat doubtfully, but also, and therefore, somewhat doggedly, by 
the common run of businessmen, that what is of no use in business is not worth 
while. More than one of the greater businessmen have spoken, advisedly and with 
emphasis, to the effect that the higher learning is rather a hindrance than a 
help to any aspirant for business success;(4*) more particularly to any man 
whose lot is cast in the field of business enterprise of a middling scale and 
commonplace circumstances. And notoriously, the like view of the matter prevails 
throughout the business community at large. What these men are likely to have in 
mind in passing this verdict, as shown by various expressions on this head, is 
not so much the higher learning in the proper sense, [74] but rather that slight 
preliminary modicum that is to be found embodied in the curriculum of the 
colleges, - for the common run of businessmen are not sufficiently conversant 
with these matters to know the difference, or that there is a difference, 
between the college and the university. They are busy with other things.
It is true, men whose construction of the facts is coloured by their wish to 
commend the schools to the good will of the business community profess to find 
ground for the belief that university training, or rather the training of the 
undergraduate school, gives added fitness for a business career, particularly 
for the larger business enterprise. But they commonly speak apologetically and 
offer extenuating considerations, such as virtually to concede the case, at the 
same time that they are very prone to evade the issue by dwelling on accessory 
and subsidiary considerations that do not substantially touch the question of 
trained capacity for the conduct of business affairs.(5*) The apologists 
commonly shift from the undebatable ground of the higher learning as related to 
business success, to the more defensible ground of the undergraduate curriculum, 
considered as introductory to those social amenities that devolve on the 
successful man of business; and in so far as they confine themselves to the 
topic of education and business they commonly spend their efforts in arguing for 
the business utility of the training afforded by the professional and [75] 
technical schools, included within the university corporation or otherwise. 
There is ground for their contention in so far as "university training" is (by 
subreption) taken to mean training in those "practical" branches of knowledge 
(Law, Politics, Accountancy, etc.) that have a place within the university 
precincts only by force of a non-sequitur. And the spokesmen for these views are 
commonly also, and significantly, eager to make good their contention by 
advocating the introduction of an increased proportion of these "practical" 
subjects into the schedule of instruction.
The facts are notorious and leave little room for cavil on the merits of the 
case. Particularly is the award of the facts unequivocal in America, - the 
native ground of the self-made businessman, and at the same time the most 
admirably thorough-paced business community extant. The American business 
community is well enough as it is, without the higher learning, and it is fully 
sensible that the higher learning is not a business proposition.
But a good rule works both ways. If scholarly and scientific training, such as 
may without shame be included under the caption of the higher learning, unfits 
men for business efficiency, then the training that comes of experience in 
business must also be held to unfit men for scholarly and scientific pursuits, 
and even more pronouncedly for the surveillance of such pursuits. The 
circumstantial evidence for the latter proposition is neither less abundant nor 
less unequivocal than for the former. If the higher learning is incompatible 
with business shrewdness, business enterprise is, by the same token, 
incompatible with the spirit of the higher learning. Indeed, within the ordinary 
range of lawful occupations these two lines of endeavour, and the animus that 
belongs to each, are as widely out of touch as may be. [76] They are the two 
extreme terms of the modern cultural scheme; although at the same time each is 
intrinsic and indispensable to the scheme of modern civilization as it runs. 
With the excision or serious crippling of either, Western Civilization would 
suffer a dislocation amounting to a revolutionary change.
On the other hand, the higher learning and the spirit of scientific inquiry have 
much in common with modern industry and its technological discipline. More 
particularly is there a close bond of sympathy and relationship between the 
spirit of scientific inquiry and the habit of mind enforced by the mechanical 
industries of the modern kind. In both of these lines of activity men are 
occupied with impersonal facts and deal with them in a matter-of-fact way. In 
both, as far as may be, the personal equation is sought to be eliminated, 
discounted and avoided, so as to leave no chance for discrepancies due to 
personal infirmity or predilection. But it is only on its mechanical side that 
the industrial organization so comes in touch with modern science and the 
pursuit of matter-of-fact knowledge; and it is only in so far as their habits of 
thought are shaped by the discipline of the mechanical industries that there is 
induced in the industrial population the same bent as goes to further or to 
appreciate the work of modern science. But it would be quite nugatory to suggest 
that the governing boards of the universities should be made up of, or should 
comprise, impecunious technologists and engineers.
There is no similar bond of consanguinity between the business occupations and 
the scientific spirit; except so far as regards those clerical and subaltern 
employments that lie wholly within the mechanical routine of business traffic; 
and even as regards these employments and the persons so occupied it is, at the 
most, doubtful whether [77] their training does not after all partake more of 
that astute and invidious character of cunning that belongs to the conduct of 
business affairs than of the dispassionate animus of scientific inquiry.
These extenuating considerations do not touch the case of that body of 
businessmen, in the proper sense of the term, from which the membership of the 
governing boards is drawn. The principles that rule business enterprise of that 
larger and pecuniarily effectual sort are a matter of usage, appraisement, 
contractual arrangement and strategic manœuvres. They are the principles of a 
game of competitive guessing and pecuniary coercion, a game carried on wholly 
within the limits of the personal equation, and depending for its movement and 
effect on personal discrepancies of judgment. Science has to do with the 
opaquely veracious sequence of cause and effect, and it deals with the facts of 
this sequence without mental reservation or ulterior purposes of expediency. 
Business enterprise proceeds on ulterior purposes and calculations of 
expediency; it depends on shrewd expedients and lives on the margin of error, on 
the fluctuating margin of human miscalculation. The training given by these two 
lines of endeavour - science and business - is wholly divergent; with the 
notorious result that for the purposes of business enterprise the scientists are 
the most ignorant, gullible and incompetent class in the community. They are not 
only passively out of touch with the business spirit, out of training by 
neglect, but they are also positively trained out of the habit of mind 
indispensable to business enterprise. The converse is true of the men of 
business affairs.(6*)
Plato's classic scheme of folly, which would have the [78] philosophers take 
over the management of affairs, has been turned on its head; the men of affairs 
have taken over the direction of the pursuit of knowledge. To any one who will 
take a dispassionate look at this modern arrangement it looks foolish, of 
course, - ingeniously foolish; but, also, of course, there is no help for it and 
no prospect of its abatement in the calculable future.
It is a fact of the current state of things, grounded in the institutional 
fabric of Christendom; and it will avail little to speculate on remedial 
corrections for this state of academic affairs so long as the institutional 
ground of this perversion remains intact. Its institutional ground is the 
current system of private ownership. It claims the attention of students as a 
feature of the latterday cultural growth, as an outcome of the pecuniary 
organization of modern society, and it is to be taken as a base-line in any 
inquiry into the policy that controls modern academic life and work - just as 
any inquiry into the circumstances and establishments of learning in the days of 
scholasticism must take account of the ecclesiastical rule of that time as one 
of the main controlling facts in the case. The fact is that businessmen hold the 
plenary discretion, and that business principles guide them in their management 
of the affairs of the higher learning; and such must continue to be the case so 
long as the community's workday material interests continue to be organized on a 
basis of business enterprise. All this does not promise well for the future of 
science and scholarship in the universities, but the current effects of this 
method of university control are sufficiently patent to all academic men, - and 
the whole situation should perhaps trouble the mind of no one who will be at 
pains to free himself from the (possibly transient) preconception that "the 
increase and diffusion of knowledge among men" is, in the end, more [79] to be 
desired than the acquisition and expenditure of riches by the astuter men in the 
community.
Many of those who fancy themselves conversant with the circumstances of American 
academic life would question the view set forth above, and they would 
particularly deny that business principles do or can pervade the corporate 
management of the universities in anything like the degree here implied. They 
would contend that while the boards of control are commonly gifted with all the 
disabilities described - that much being not open to dispute - yet these boards 
do not, on the whole, in practice, extend the exercise of their plenary 
discretion to the directive control of what are properly speaking academic 
matters; that they habitually confine their work of directorship to the 
pecuniary affairs of the corporation; and that in so far as they may at times 
interfere in the university's scholarly and scientific work, they do so in their 
capacity as men of culture, not as men of property or of enterprise. This latter 
would also be the view to which the men of property on the boards would 
themselves particularly incline. So it will be held by the spokesmen of content 
that virtually full discretion in all matters of academic policy is delegated to 
the academic head of the university, fortified by the advice and consent of the 
senior members of his faculty; by the free choice of the governing boards, in 
practice drawn out from under the control of these businessmen in question and 
placed in the hands of the scholars. And such, commonly, is at least ostensibly 
the case, in point of form; more particularly as regards those older 
establishments that are burdened with academic traditions running back beyond 
the date when their governing boards were taken over by [80] the businessmen, 
and more particularly in the recent past than in the immediate present or for 
the establishments of a more recent date.
This complaisant view overlooks the fact that much effective surveillance of the 
academic work is exercised through the board's control of the budget. The 
academic staff can do little else than what the specifications of the budget 
provide for; without the means with which the corporate income should supply 
them they are as helpless as might be expected.
Imbued with an alert sense of those tangible pecuniary values which they are by 
habit and temperament in a position to appreciate, a sagacious governing board 
may, for instance, determine to expend the greater proportion of the available 
income of the university in improving and decorating its real estate, and they 
may with businesslike thrift set aside an appreciable proportion of the 
remainder for a sinking fund to meet vaguely unforeseen contingencies, while the 
academic staff remains (notoriously) underpaid and so scantily filled as 
seriously to curtail their working capacity. Or the board may, again, as has 
also happened, take a thrifty resolution to "concede" only a fraction - say ten 
or fifteen per-cent - of the demands of the staff for books and similar working 
materials for current use; while setting aside a good share of the funds 
assigned for such use, to accumulate until at some future date such materials 
may be purchased at more reasonable prices than those now ruling. These 
illustrations are not supplied by fancy. There is, indeed, a visible reluctance 
on the part of these businesslike boards to expend the corporation's income for 
those intangible, immaterial uses for which the university is established. These 
uses leave no physical, tangible residue, in the way of durable goods, such as 
will justify the expenditure in terms of vendible [81] property acquired; 
therefore they are prima facie imbecile, and correspondingly distasteful, to men 
whose habitual occupation is with the acquisition of property. By force of the 
same businesslike bias the boards unavoidably incline to apportion the funds 
assigned for current expenses in such a way as to favour those "practical" or 
quasi-practical lines of instruction and academic propaganda that are presumed 
to heighten the business acumen of the students or to yield immediate returns in 
the way of a creditable publicity.

As to the delegation of powers to the academic head. There is always the 
reservation to be kept in mind, that the academic head is limited in his 
discretion by the specifications of the budget. The permissible deviations in 
that respect are commonly neither wide nor of a substantial character; though 
the instances of a university president exercising large powers are also not 
extremely rare. But in common practice, it is to be noted, the academic head is 
vested with somewhat autocratic powers, within the lines effectually laid down 
in the budget; he is in effect responsible to the governing board alone, and his 
responsibility in that direction chiefly touches his observance of the pecuniary 
specifications of the budget.
But it is more to the point to note that the academic head commonly holds office 
by choice of the governing board. Where the power of appointment lies freely in 
the discretion of such a board, the board will create an academic head in its 
own image. In point of notorious fact, the academic head of the university is 
selected chiefly on grounds of his business qualifications, taking that 
expression in a somewhat special sense. There is at present an increasingly 
broad and strenuous insistence on such qualifications in the men selected as 
heads of the univer-[82]sities; and the common sense of the community at large 
bears out the predilections of the businesslike board of control in this 
respect. The new incumbents are selected primarily with a view to give the 
direction of academic policy and administration more of a businesslike 
character. The choice may not always fall on a competent business man, but that 
is not due to its inclining too far to the side of scholarship. It is not an 
easy matter even for the most astute body of businessmen to select a candidate 
who shall measure up to their standard of businesslike efficiency in a field of 
activity that has substantially nothing in common with that business traffic in 
which their preconceptions of efficiency have been formed.
In many cases the alumni have much to say in the choice of a new academic head, 
whether by courtesy or by express provision; and the results under these 
circumstances are not substantially different. It follows as an inevitable 
consequence of the current state of popular sentiment that the successful 
businessmen among the alumni will have the deciding voice, in so far as the 
matter rests with the alumni; for the successful men of affairs assert 
themselves with easy confidence, and they are looked up to, in any community 
whose standards of esteem are business standards, so that their word carries 
weight beyond that of any other class or order of men. The community at large, 
or at least that portion of the community that habitually makes itself heard, 
speaks to the same effect and on the same ground, - viz., a sentimental 
conviction that pecuniary success is the final test of manhood. Business 
principles are the sacred articles of the secular creed, and business methods 
make up the ritual of the secular cult.
The one clear note of acclaim that goes up, from the [83] avowed adepts of 
culture and from those without the pale, when a new head has, as recently been 
called to one of the greater universities, is in commendation of his business 
capacity, "commercial sense," executive ability, financiering tact; and the 
effectual canvass of his qualifications does not commonly range much outside of 
these prime requisites. The modicum of scholarship and scholarly ideals and 
insight concessively deemed indispensable in such a case is somewhat of the 
nature of a perquisite, and is easily found. It is not required that the 
incumbent meet the prepossessions of the contingent of learned men in the 
community in this respect; the choice does not rest with that element, nor does 
its ratification, but rather at the other end of the scale, with that extreme 
wing of the laity that is taken up with "practical," that is to say pecuniary, 
affairs.
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. Scholarship is not barred, of course, 
though it is commonly the quasi-scholarship of the popular raconteur that comes 
in evidence in these premises; and the fact that these incumbents of executive 
office show so much of scholarly animus and attainments as they do is in great 
measure a fortuitous circumstance. It is, indeed, 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, even when all 
persons employed as instructors are counted as members of the staff. It may also 
be remarked by the way that when, as may happen, a scholar or scientist takes 
office as directive [84] head of a university, he is commonly lost to the 
republic of learning; he has in effect passed from the ranks of learning to 
those of business enterprise.
The upshot of it all should be that when and in so far as a businesslike 
governing board delegates powers to the university's academic head, it delegates 
these powers to one of their own kind, who is somewhat peremptorily expected to 
live up to the aspirations that animate the board. What such a man, so placed, 
will do with the powers and opportunities that so devolve on him is a difficult 
question that can be answered only in terms of the compulsion of the 
circumstances in which he is placed and of the moral wear and tear that comes of 
arbitrary powers exercised in a tangle of ambiguities.(7*)
NOTES:
1. An instance showing something of the measure and incidence of fiscal service 
rendered by such a businesslike board may be suggestive, even though it is 
scarcely to be taken as faithfully illustrating current practice, in that the 
particular board in question has exercised an uncommon measure of surveillance 
over its university's pecuniary concerns.
A university corporation endowed with a large estate (appraised at something 
over $30,000,000) has been governed by a board of the usual form, with plenary 
discretion, established on a basis of co-optation. In point of practical effect, 
the board, or rather that fraction of the board which takes an active interest 
in the university's affairs, has been made up of a group of local business men 
engaged in divers enterprises of the kind familiar to men of relatively large 
means, with somewhat extensive interests of the nature of banking and 
underwriting, where large extensions of credit and the temporary use of large 
funds are of substantial consequence. By terms of the corporate charter the 
board was required to render to the governor of the state a yearly report of all 
the pecuniary affairs of the university; but no penalty was attached to their 
eventual failure to render such report, though some legal remedy could doubtless 
have been had on due application by the parties in interest, as e.g., by the 
academic head of the university. No such report has been rendered, however, and 
no steps appear to have been taken to procure such a report, or any equivalent 
accounting. But on persistent urging from the side of his faculty, and after 
some courteous delay, the academic head pushed an inquiry into the corporation's 
finances so far as to bring out facts somewhat to the following effect: -
The board, or the group of local business men who constituted the habitual 
working majority of the board, appear to have kept a fairly close and active 
oversight of the corporate funds entrusted to them, and to have seen to their 
investment and disposal somewhat in detail - and, it has been suggested, 
somewhat to their own pecuniary advantage. With the result that the investments 
were found to yield a current income of some three per cent. (rather under than 
over), - in a state where investment on good security in the open market 
commonly yielded from six per cent to eight per cent. Of this income 
approximately one-[68]half (apparently some forty-five per cent) practically accrued 
to the possible current use of the university establishment. Just what disposal 
was made of the remainder is not altogether clear; though it is loosely presumed 
to have been kept in hand with an eventual view to the erection and repair of 
buildings. Something like one-half of what so made up the currently disposable 
income was further set aside in the character of a sinking fund, to accumulate 
for future use and to meet contingencies; so that what effectually accrued to 
the university establishment for current use to meet necessary academic 
expenditures would amount to something like one per cent (or less) on the total 
investment. But of this finally disposable fraction of the income, again, an 
appreciable sum was set aside as a special sinking fund to accumulate for the 
eventual use of the university library, - which, it may be remarked, was in the 
meantime seriously handicapped for want of funds with which to provide for 
current needs. So also the academic establishment at large was perforce managed 
on a basis of penurious economy, to the present inefficiency and the lasting 
damage of the university.
The figures and percentages given above are not claimed to be exact; it is known 
that a more accurate specification of details would result in a less favourable 
showing.
At the time when these matters were disclosed (to a small number of the uneasy 
persons interested) there was an ugly suggestion afloat touching the pecuniary 
integrity of the board's management, but this is doubtless to be dismissed as 
being merely a loose expression of ill-will; and the like is also doubtless to 
be said as regards the suggestion that there may have been an interested 
collusion between the academic head and the active members of the board. These 
were "all honourable men," of great repute in the community and well known as 
sagacious and successful men in their private business ventures.
2. Cf. The Instinct of Workmanship, ch. vii, pp. 343-352.
3. A subsidiary reason of some weight should not be overlooked in seeking the 
cause of this secularization of the boards, and of the peculiar colour which the 
secularization has given them. In any community where wealth and business 
enterprise are held in such high esteem, men of wealth and of affairs are not 
only deferred to, but their countenance is sought from one motive and another. 
At the same time election to one of these boards has come to have a high value 
as an honourable distinction. Such election or appointment therefore is often 
sought from motives of vanity, and it is at the same time a convenient means of 
conciliating the good will of the wealthy incumbent.
[70] It may be added that now and again the discretionary control of large funds 
which so falls to the members of the board may come to be pecuniarily profitable 
to them, so that the office may come to be attractive as a business proposition 
as well as in point of prestige. Instances of the kind are not wholly unknown, 
though presumably exceptional.
4. Cf., e.g., R. T. Crane. The Futility of All Kinds of Higher Schooling, 
especially part I, ch. iv.
5. Cf. R. T. Crane, as above, especially part I, ch. ii, iii, and vi. Cf. also 
H. P. Judson, The Higher Education as a Training for Business, where the case is 
argued in a typically commonplace and matter-of-fact spirit, but where "The 
Higher Education" is taken to mean the undergraduate curriculum simply; also "A 
Symposium on the value of humanistic, particularly classical, studies as a 
training for men of affairs," Proceedings of the Classical Conference at Ann 
Arbor, Michigan, April 3, 1909.
6. Cf. Bacon, Essays, "Of Cunning", and "Of Wisdom for a Man's Self."
7. Cf. ch. viii, especially pp. 242-269.

[85]
CHAPTER III
The Academic Administration and Policy
Men dilate on the high necessity of a businesslike organization and control of 
the university, its equipment, personnel and routine. What is had in mind in 
this insistence on an efficient system is that these corporations of learning 
shall set their affairs in order after the pattern of a well-conducted business 
concern. In this view the university is conceived as a business house dealing in 
merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of 
erudition, whose office it is to turn the means in hand to account in the 
largest feasible output. It is a corporation with large funds, and for men 
biased by their workday training in business affairs it comes as a matter of 
course to rate the university in terms of investment and turnover. Hence the 
insistence on business capacity in the executive heads of the universities, and 
hence also the extensive range of businesslike duties and powers that devolve on 
them.
Yet when all these sophistications of practical wisdom are duly allowed for, the 
fact remains that the university is, in usage, precedent, and common sense 
preconception, an establishment for the conservation and advancement of the 
higher learning, devoted to a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. As such, it 
consists of a body of scholars and scientists, each and several of whom 
necessarily goes to his work on his own initiative and pursues it in his own 
way. This work necessarily follows an orderly sequence [86] and procedure, and 
so takes on a systematic form, of an organic kind. But the system and order that 
so govern the work, and that come into view in its procedure and results, are 
the logical system and order of intellectual enterprise, not the mechanical or 
statistical systematization that goes into effect in the management of an 
industrial plant or the financiering of a business corporation.
Those items of human intelligence and initiative that go to make up the pursuit 
of knowledge, and that are embodied in systematic form in its conclusions, do 
not lend themselves to quantitative statement, and can not be made to appear on 
a balance-sheet. Neither can that intellectual initiative and proclivity that 
goes in as the indispensable motive force in the pursuit of learning be reduced 
to any known terms of subordination, obedience, or authoritative direction. No 
scholar or scientist can become an employé in respect of his scholarly or 
scientific work. Mechanical systematization and authoritative control can in 
these premises not reach beyond the material circumstances that condition the 
work in hand, nor can it in these external matters with good effect go farther 
than is necessary to supply the material ways and means requisite to the work, 
and to adapt them to the peculiar needs of any given line of inquiry or group of 
scholars. In order to their best efficiency, and indeed in the degree in which 
efficiency in this field of activity is to be attained at all, the executive 
officers of the university must stand in the relation of assistants serving the 
needs and catering to the idiosyncrasies of the body of scholars and scientists 
that make up the university;(1*) in the degree in which the converse relation is 
allowed to take effect, [87] the unavoidable consequence is wasteful defeat. A 
free hand is the first and abiding requisite of scholarly and scientific work.
Now, in accepting office as executive head of a university, the incumbent 
necessarily accepts all the conditions that attach to the administration of his 
office, whether by usage and common sense expectation, by express arrangement, 
or by patent understanding with the board to which he owes his elevation to this 
post of dignity and command. By usage and precedent it is incumbent on him to 
govern the academic personnel and equipment with an eye single to the pursuit of 
knowledge, and so to conduct its affairs as will most effectually compass that 
end. That is to say he must so administer his office as best to serve the 
scholarly needs of the academic staff, due regard being scrupulously had to the 
idiosyncrasies, and even to the vagaries, of the men whose work he is called on 
to further. But by patent understanding, if not by explicit stipulation, from 
the side of the governing board, fortified by the preconceptions of the laity at 
large to the same effect, he is held to such a conspicuously efficient 
employment of the means in hand as will gratify those who look for a voluminous 
turnover. To this end he must keep the academic administration and its activity 
constantly in the public eye, with such "pomp and circumstance" of untiring 
urgency and expedition as will carry the conviction abroad that the university 
under his management is a highly successful going concern, and he must be able 
to show by itemized accounts that the volume of output is such as to warrant the 
investment. So the equipment and personnel must be organized into a facile and 
orderly working force, held under the directive control of the captain of 
erudition at every point, and so articulated and standardized that its rate of 
speed and the [88] volume of its current output can be exhibited to full 
statistical effect as it runs.
The university is to make good both as a corporation of learning and as a 
business concern dealing in standardized erudition, and the executive head 
necessarily assumes the responsibility of making it count wholly and 
unreservedly in each of these divergent, if not incompatible lines.(2*) Humanly 
speaking, it follows by necessary consequence that he will first and always take 
care of those duties that are most jealously insisted on by the powers to whom 
he is accountable, and the due performance of which will at the same time yield 
some sufficiently tangible evidence of his efficiency. That other, more 
recondite side of the university's work that has substantially to do with the 
higher learning is not readily set out in the form of statistical exhibits, at 
the best, and can ordinarily come to appraisal and popular appreciation only in 
the long run. The need of a businesslike showing is instant and imperative, 
particularly in a business era of large turnover and quick returns, and to meet 
this need the uneventful scholastic life that counts toward the higher learning 
in the long run is of little use; so it can wait, and it readily becomes a habit 
with the busy executive to let it wait.
It should be kept in mind also that the incumbent of executive office is 
presumably a man of businesslike qualifications, rather than of scholarly 
insight, - the method of selecting the executive heads under the present régime 
makes that nearly a matter of course. As such he will in his own right more 
readily appreciate those results of his own management that show up with 
something of the glare of publicity, as contrasted with the slow-moving and 
often obscure working of inquiry that lies (commonly) some-[89]what beyond his 
intellectual horizon. So that with slight misgivings, if any, he takes to the 
methods of organization and control that have commended themselves in that 
current business enterprise to which it is his ambition to assimilate the 
corporation of learning.
These precedents of business practice that are to afford guidance to the captain 
of erudition are, of course, the precedents of competitive business. It is one 
of the unwritten, and commonly unspoken, commonplaces lying at the root of 
modern academic policy that the various universities are competitors for the 
traffic in merchantable instruction, in much the same fashion as rival 
establishments in the retail trade compete for custom. Indeed, the modern 
department store offers a felicitous analogy, that has already been found 
serviceable in illustration of the American university's position in this 
respect, by those who speak for the present régime as well as by its critics. 
The fact that the universities are assumed to be irreconcilable competitors, 
both in the popular apprehension and as evidenced by the manœuvres of their 
several directors, is too notorious to be denied by any but the interested 
parties. Now and again it is formally denied by one and another among the 
competing captains of erudition, but the reason for such denial is the need of 
it.(3*)
[90] Now, the duties of the executive head of a competitive business concern are 
of a strategic nature, the object of his management being to get the better of 
rival concerns and to engross the trade. To this end it is indispensable that he 
should be a "strong man" and should have a free hand, - though perhaps under the 
general and tolerant surveillance of his board of directors. Any wise board of 
directors, and in the degree in which they are endowed with the requisite 
wisdom, will be careful to give their general manager full discretion, and not 
to hamper him with too close an accounting of the details of his administration, 
so long as he shows gratifying results. He must be a strong man; that is to say, 
a capable man of affairs, tenacious and resourceful in turning the means at hand 
to account for this purpose, and easily content to let the end justify the 
means. He must be a man of scrupulous integrity, so far as may conduce to his 
success, but with a shrewd eye to the limits within which honesty is the best 
policy, for the purpose in hand. He must have full command of the means 
entrusted to him and full control of the force of employés and subordinates who 
are to work under his direction, and he must be able to rely on the instant and 
unwavering loyalty of his staff in any line of policy on which he may decide to 
enter. He must therefore have free power to appoint and dismiss, and to reward 
and punish, limited only by the formal ratification of his decisions by the 
board of directors who will be careful not to interfere or inquire unduly in 
these matters, - so long as their strong man shows results.
[91] The details and objective of his strategy need not be known to the members 
of the staff; indeed, all that does not concern them except in the most general 
way. They are his creatures, and are responsible only to him and only for the 
due performance of the tasks assigned them; and they need know only so much as 
will enable them to give ready and intelligent support to the moves made by 
their chief from day to day. The members of the staff are his employés, and 
their first duty is a loyal obedience; and for the competitive good of the 
concern they must utter no expression of criticism or unfavourable comment on 
the policy, actions or personal characteristics of their chief, so long as they 
are in his employ. They have eaten his bread, and it is for them to do his 
bidding.
Such is the object-lesson afforded by business practice as it bears on the 
duties incumbent on the academic head and on the powers of office delegated to 
him. It is needless to remark on what is a fact of common notoriety, that this 
rule drawn from the conduct of competitive business is commonly applied without 
substantial abatement in the conduct of academic affairs.(4*)
[92] Under this rule the academic staff becomes a body of graded subalterns, who 
share confidence of the chief in varying degrees, but who no decisive voice in 
the policy or the conduct of affairs of the concern in whose pay they are held. 
The faculty is conceived as a body of employés, hired to render certain 
services and turn out certain scheduled vendible results.
The chief may take advice; and, as is commonly the practice in analogous 
circumstances in commercial business, he will be likely to draw about him from 
among the faculty a conveniently small number of advisers who are in sympathy 
with his own ambitions, and who will in this way form an unofficial council, or 
cabinet, or "junta," to whom he can turn for informal, anonymous and 
irresponsible, advice and moral support at any juncture. He will also, in 
compliance with charter stipulations and parliamentary usage, have certain 
officially recognized advisers, - the various deans, advisory committees, 
Academic Council, University Senate, and the like, - with whom he shares 
responsibility, particularly for measures of doubtful popularity, and whose 
advice he formally takes coram publico; but he can not well share discretion 
with these, except on administrative matters of inconsequential detail. For 
reasons of practical efficiency, discretion must be undivided in any competitive 
enterprise. There is much fine-spun strategy to be taken care of under cover of 
night and cloud.

But the academic tradition, which still drags on the hands of the captains of 
erudition, has not left the ground prepared for such a clean-cut businesslike 
organization and such a campaign of competitive strategy. By tradi-[93]tion the 
faculty is the keeper of the academic interests of the university and makes up a 
body of loosely-bound noncompetitive co-partners, with no view to strategic team 
play and no collective ulterior ambition, least of all with a view to engrossing 
the trade. By tradition, and indeed commonly by explicit proviso, the conduct of 
the university's academic affairs vests formally in the president, with the 
advice and consent of the faculty, or of the general body of senior members of 
the faculty. In due observance of these traditions, and of the scholastic 
purposes notoriously underlying all university life, certain forms of 
disinterested zeal must be adhered to in all official pronouncements of the 
executive, as well as certain punctilios of conference and advisement between 
the directive head and the academic staff.
All of which makes the work of the executive head less easy and ingenuous than 
it might be. The substantial demands of his position as chief of a competitive 
business are somewhat widely out of touch with these forms of divided 
responsibility that must (formally) be observed in administering his duties, and 
equally out of touch with the formal professions of disinterested zeal for the 
cause of learning that he is by tradition required to make from time to time. 
All that may reasonably be counted on under these trying circumstances is that 
he should do the best he can, - to save the formalities and secure the 
substance. To compass these difficult incongruities, he will, as already 
remarked above, necessarily gather about him, within the general body of the 
academic personnel, a corps of trusted advisors and agents, whose qualifications 
for their peculiar work is an intelligent sympathy with their chief's ideals and 
methods and an unreserved subservience to his aims, - unless it should come to 
pass, as may happen in case its members are men of force and ingenuity, [94] 
that this unofficial cabinet should take over the direction of affairs and work 
out their own aims and purposes under cover of the chief's ostensibly autocratic 
rule.
Among these aids and advisers will be found at least a proportion of the higher 
administrative officials, and among the number it is fairly indispensable to 
include one or more adroit parliamentarians, competent to procure the necessary 
modicum of sanction for all arbitrary acts of the executive, from a distrustful 
faculty convened as a deliberative body. These men must be at least partially in 
the confidence of the executive head. From the circumstances of the case it also 
follows that they will commonly occupy an advanced academic rank, and so will 
take a high (putative) rank as scholars and scientists. High academic rank comes 
of necessity to these men who serve as coadjutors and vehicles of the executive 
policy, as does also the relatively high pay that goes with high rank; both are 
required as a reward of merit and an incitement to a zealous serviceability on 
the one hand, and to keep the administration in countenance on the other hand by 
giving the requisite dignity to its agents. They will be selected on the same 
general grounds of fitness as their chief, - administrative facility, 
plausibility, proficiency as public speakers and parliamentarians, ready 
versatility of convictions, and a staunch loyalty to their bread. Experience 
teaches that scholarly or scientific capacity does not enter in any appreciable 
measure among the qualifications so required for responsible academic office, 
beyond what may thriftily serve to mask the conventional decencies of the case.
It is, further, of the essence of this scheme of academic control that the 
captain of erudition should freely exercise the power of academic life and death 
over the members of his staff, to reward the good and faithful servant and [95] 
to abase the recalcitrant. Otherwise discipline would be a difficult matter, and 
the formally requisite "advice and consent" could be procured only tardily and 
grudgingly.

Admitting such reservations and abatement as may be due, it is to be said that 
the existing organization of academic control under business principles falls 
more or less nearly into the form outlined above. The perfected type, as 
sketched in the last paragraphs, has doubtless not been fully achieved in 
practice hitherto, unless it be in one or another of the newer establishments 
with large ambitions and endowment, and with few traditions to hamper the 
working out of the system. The incursion of business principles into the 
academic community is also of relatively recent date, and should not yet have 
had time to pervade the organization throughout and with full effect; so that 
the régime of competitive strategy should as yet be neither so far advanced nor 
so secure a matter of course as may fairly be expected in the near future. Yet 
the rate of advance along this line, and the measure of present achievement, are 
more considerable than even a very sanguine advocate of business principles 
could have dared to look for a couple of decades ago.
In so far as these matters are still in process of growth, rather than at their 
full fruition, it follows that any analysis of the effects of this régime must 
be in some degree speculative, and must at times deal with the drift of things 
as much as with accomplished fact. Yet such an inquiry must approach its subject 
as an episode of history, and must deal with the personal figures and the 
incidents of this growth objectively, as phenomena thrown up to view by the play 
of circumstances in the dispassionate give and take of institutional change. 
Such an impersonal attitude, it is perhaps needless to remark, is [96] not 
always easy to maintain in dealing with facts of so personal, and often of so 
animated, a character. Particularly will an observer who has seen these 
incidents from the middle and in the making find it difficult uniformly to 
preserve that aloof perspective that will serve the ends of an historical 
appreciation. The difficulty is increased and complicated by the necessity of 
employing terms, descriptions and incidents that have been habitually employed 
in current controversy, often with a marked animus. Men have taken sides on 
these matters, and so are engaged in controversy on the merits of the current 
régime and on the question of possible relief and remedy for what are considered 
to be its iniquities. Under the shadow of this controversy, it is nearly 
unavoidable that any expression or citation of fact that will bear a partisan 
construction will habitually be so construed. The vehicle necessarily employed 
must almost unavoidably infuse the analysis with an unintended colour of bias, 
to one side or the other of the presumed merits of the case. A degree of patient 
attention is therefore due at points where the facts cited, and the 
characterization of these facts and their bearing, would seem, on a superficial 
view, to bear construction as controversial matter.

In this episode of institutional growth, plainly, the executive head is the 
central figure. The light fails on him rather than on the forces that move him, 
and it comes as a matter of course to pass opinions on the resulting incidents 
and consequences, as the outcome of his free initiative rather than of the 
circumstances whose creature he is. No doubt, his initiative, if any, is a 
powerful factor in the case, but it is after all a factor of transmission and 
commutation rather than of genesis and self-direction; for he is chosen for the 
style and measure of initiative with [97] which he is endowed, and unless he 
shall be found to measure up to expectations in kind and degree in this matter 
he will go in the discard, and his personal ideals and initiative will count as 
little more than a transient obstruction. He will hold his place, and will count 
as a creative force in his world, in much the same degree in which he responds 
with ready flexibility to the impact of those forces of popular sentiment and 
class conviction that have called him to be their servant. Only so can he be a 
"strong man"; only in so far as, by fortunate bent or by its absence, he is 
enabled to move resistlessly with the parallelogram of forces.
The exigencies of a businesslike administration demand that there be no division 
of powers between the academic executive and the academic staff; but the 
exigencies of the higher learning require that the scholars and scientists must 
be left quite free to follow their own bent in conducting their own work. In the 
nature of things this work cannot be carried on effectually under coercive rule. 
Scientific inquiry can not be pursued under direction of a layman in the person 
of a superior officer. Also, learning is, in the nature of things, not a 
competitive business and can make no use of finesse, diplomatic equivocation and 
tactful regard for popular prejudices, such as are of the essence of the case in 
competitive business. It is, also, of no advantage to learning to engross the 
trade. Tradition and present necessity alike demand that the body of scholars 
and scientists who make up the university must be vested with full powers of 
self-direction, without ulterior consideration. A university can remain a 
corporation of learning, de facto, on no other basis.
As has already been remarked, business methods of course have their place in the 
corporation's fiscal affairs and in the office-work incident to the care of its 
material [98] equipment. As regards these items the university is a business 
concern, and no discussion of these topics would be in place here. These things 
concern the university only in its externals, and they do not properly fall 
within the scope of academic policy or academic administration. They come into 
consideration here only in so far as a lively regard for them may, as it 
sometimes does, divert the forces of the establishment from its ostensible 
purpose.
Under the rule imposed by those businesslike preconceptions that decide his 
selection for office, the first duty of the executive head is to see to the 
organization of an administrative machinery for the direction of the 
university's internal affairs, and the establishment of a facile and rigorous 
system of accountancy for the control and exhibition of the academic work. In 
the same measure in which such a system goes into effect the principles of 
competitive business will permeate the administration in all directions; in the 
personnel of the academic staff, in the control and intercourse of teachers and 
students, in the schedule of instruction, in the disposition of the material 
equipment, in the public exhibits and ceremonial of the university, as well as 
in its pecuniary concerns.
Within the range of academic interests proper, these business principles 
primarily affect the personnel and the routine of instruction. Here their 
application immediately results in an administrative system of bureaux or 
departments, a hierarchical gradation of the members of the staff, and a 
rigorous parcelment and standardization of the instruction offered. Some such 
system is indispensable to any effective control of the work from above, such as 
is aimed at in the appointment of a discretionary head of the university, - 
particularly in a large school; and the measure of control desired will decide 
the degree [99] of thoroughness with which this bureaucratic organization is to 
be carried through. The need of a well-devised bureaucratic system is greater 
the more centralized and coercive the control to which the academic work is to 
be subject; and the degree of control to be exercised will be greater the more 
urgent the felt need of a strict and large accountancy may be. All of which 
resolves itself into a question as to the purposes sought by the installation of 
such a system.
For the everyday work of the higher learning, as such, little of a hierarchical 
gradation, and less of bureaucratic subordination, is needful or serviceable; 
and very little of statistical uniformity, standard units of erudition, or 
detail accountancy, is at all feasible. This work is not of a mechanical 
character and does not lend itself, either in its methods or its results, to any 
mechanically standardized scheme of measurements or to a system of accounting 
per cent per time unit. This range of instruction consists substantially in the 
facilitation of scholarly and scientific habits of thought, and the imposition 
of any appreciable measure of such standardization and accounting must 
unavoidably weaken and vitiate the work of instruction, in just the degree in 
which the imposed system is effective.
It is not within the purpose of this inquiry to go into the bearing of all this 
on the collegiate (undergraduate) departments or on the professional and 
technical schools associated with the university proper in American practice. 
But something of a detailed discussion of the system and principles of control 
applied in these schools is necessary because of its incidental bearing on 
graduate work.
It is plain beyond need of specification that in the practical view of the 
public at large, and of the governing boards, the university is primarily an 
undergraduate [100] school, with graduate and professional departments added to 
it. And it is similarly plain that the captains of erudition chosen as executive 
heads share the same preconceptions, and go to their work with a view primarily 
to the needs of their undergraduate departments. The businesslike order and 
system introduced into the universities, therefore, are designed primarily to 
meet the needs and exploit the possibilities of the undergraduate school; but, 
by force of habit, by a desire of uniformity, by a desire to control and exhibit 
the personnel and their work, by heedless imitation, or what not, it invariably 
happens that the same scheme of order and system is extended to cover the 
graduate work also.
While it is the work of science and scholarship, roughly what is known in 
American usage as graduate work, that gives the university its rank as a seat of 
learning and keeps it in countenance as such with laymen and scholars, it is the 
undergraduate school, or college, that still continues to be the larger fact, 
and that still engages the greater and more immediate attention in university 
management. This is due in part to received American usage, in part to its more 
readily serving the ends of competitive ambition; and it is a fact in the 
current academic situation which must be counted in as a chronic discrepancy, 
not to be got clear of or to be appreciably mitigated so long as business 
principles continue to rule.
What counts toward the advancement of learning and the scholarly character of 
the university is the graduate work, but what gives statistically formidable 
results in the way of a numerous enrolment, many degrees conferred, public 
exhibitions, courses of instruction - in short what rolls up a large showing of 
turnover and output - is the perfunctory work of the undergraduate de-
[101]partment, as well as the array of vocational schools latterly subjoined as 
auxiliaries to this end. Hence the needs and possibilities of the undergraduate 
and vocational schools are primarily, perhaps rather solely, had in view in the 
bureaucratic organization of the courses of instruction, in the selection of the 
personnel, in the divisions of the school year, as well as in the various 
accessory attractions offered, such as the athletic equipment, facilities for 
fraternity and other club life, debates, exhibitions and festivities, and the 
customary routine of devotional amenities under official sanction.

The undergraduate or collegiate schools, that now bulk so large in point of 
numbers as well as in the attention devoted to their welfare in academic 
management, have undergone certain notable changes in other respects than size, 
since the period of that shifting from clerical control to a business 
administration that marks the beginning of the current régime. Concomitant with 
their growth in numbers they have taken over an increasing volume of other 
functions than such as bear directly on matters of learning. At the same time 
the increase in numbers has brought a change in the scholastic complexion of 
this enlarged student body, of such a nature that a very appreciable proportion 
of these students no longer seek residence at the universities with a view to 
the pursuit of knowledge, even ostensibly. By force of conventional propriety a 
"college course" - the due term of residence at some reputable university, with 
the collegiate degree certifying honourable discharge - has become a requisite 
of gentility. So considerable is the resulting genteel contingent among the 
students, and so desirable is their enrolment and the countenance of their 
presence, in the ap-[102]prehension of the university directorate, that the 
academic organization is in great part, and of strategic necessity, adapted 
primarily to their needs.
This contingent, and the general body of students in so far as this contingent 
from the leisure class has leavened the lump, are not so seriously interested in 
their studies that they can in any degree be counted on to seek knowledge on 
their own initiative. At the same time they have other interests that must be 
taken care of by the school, on pain of losing their custom and their good will, 
to the detriment of the university's standing in genteel circles and to the 
serious decline in enrolment which their withdrawal would occasion. Hence 
college sports come in for an ever increasing attention and take an increasingly 
prominent and voluminous place in the university's life; as do also other 
politely blameless ways and means of dissipation, such as fraternities, clubs, 
exhibitions, and the extensive range of extra-scholastic traffic known as 
"student activities."
At the same time the usual and average age of the college students has been 
slowly falling farther back into the period of adolescence; and the 
irregularities and uncertain temper of that uneasy period consequently are 
calling for more detailed surveillance and a more circumspect administration of 
college discipline. With a body of students whose everyday interest, as may be 
said without exaggeration, lies in the main elsewhere than in the pursuit of 
knowledge, and with an imperative tradition still standing over that requires 
the college to be (ostensibly at least) an establishment for the instruction of 
the youth, it becomes necessary to organize this instruction on a coercive plan, 
and hence to itemize the scholastic tasks of the inmates with great nicety of 
subdivision and with a meticulous regard to an exact equivalence as [103] 
between the various courses and items of instruction to which they are to be 
subjected. Likewise as regards the limits of permissible irregularities of 
conduct and excursions into the field of sports and social amenities.
To meet the necessities of this difficult control, and to meet them always 
without jeopardizing the interests of the school as a competitive concern, a 
close-cut mechanical standardization, uniformity, surveillance and accountancy 
are indispensable. As regards the schedule of instruction, bona fide students 
will require but little exacting surveillance in their work, and little in the 
way of an apparatus of control. But the collegiate school has to deal with a 
large body of students, many of whom have little abiding interest in their 
academic work, beyond the academic credits necessary to be accumulated for 
honourable discharge, - indeed their scholastic interest may fairly be said to 
centre in unearned credits.
For this reason, and also because of the difficulty of controlling a large 
volume of perfunctory labour, such as is involved in undergraduate instruction, 
the instruction offered must be reduced to standard units of time, grade and 
volume. Each unit of work required, or rather of credit allowed, in this 
mechanically drawn scheme of tasks must be the equivalent of all the other 
units; otherwise a comprehensive system of scholastic accountancy will not be 
practicable, and injustice and irritation will result both among the pupils and 
the schoolmasters. For the greater facility and accuracy in conducting this 
scholastic accountancy, as well as with a view to the greater impressiveness of 
the published schedule of courses offered, these mechanical units of academic 
bullion are increased in number and decreased in weight and volume; until the 
parcelment and mechanical balance of units reaches a point not easily credible 
to any outsider who might naively [104] consider the requirements of scholarship 
to be an imperative factor in academic administration. There is a well-
considered preference for semi-annual or quarterly periods of instruction, with 
a corresponding time limit on the courses offered; and the parcelment of credits 
is carried somewhat beyond the point which this segmentation of the school year 
would indicate. So also there prevails a system of grading the credits allowed 
for the performance of these units of task-work, by percentages (often carried 
out to decimals) or by some equivalent scheme of notation; and in the more 
solicitously perfected schemes of control of this task-work, the percentages so 
turned in will then be further digested and weighed by expert accountants, who 
revise and correct these returns by the help of statistically ascertained index 
numbers that express the mean average margin of error to be allowed for each 
individual student or instructor.
In point of formal protestation, the standards set up in this scholastic 
accountancy are high and rigorous; in application, the exactions of the credit 
system must not be enforced in so inflexible a spirit as to estrange that much-
desired contingent of genteel students whose need of an honourable discharge is 
greater than their love of knowledge. Neither must its demands on the student's 
time and energy be allowed seriously to interfere with those sports and "student 
activities" that make up the chief attraction of college life for a large 
proportion of the university's young men, and that are, in the apprehension of 
many, so essential a part in the training of the modern gentleman.
Such a system of accountancy acts to break the continuity and consistency of the 
work of instruction and to divert the interest of the students from the work in 
hand to the making of a passable record in terms of the acade-[105]mic "miner's 
inch." Typically, this miner's inch is measured in terms of standard text per 
time unit, and the immediate objective of teacher and student so becomes the 
compassing of a given volume of prescribed text, in print or lecture form, - 
leading up to the broad principle: "Nichts als was im Buche steht." Which puts a 
premium on mediocrity and perfunctory work, and brings academic life to revolve 
about the office of the Keeper of the Tape and Sealing Wax. Evidently this 
organization of departments, schedules of instruction, and scheme of scholastic 
accountancy, is a matter that calls for insight and sobriety on the part of the 
executive; and in point of fact there is much deliberation and solicitude spent 
on this behalf.
The installation of a rounded system of scholastic accountancy brings with it, 
if it does not presume, a painstaking distribution of the personnel and the 
courses of instruction into a series of bureaux or departments. Such an 
organization of the forces of the establishment facilitates the oversight and 
control of the work, at the same time that it allows the array of scheduled 
means, appliances and personnel at its disposal to be statistically displayed to 
better effect. Under existing circumstances of rivalry among these institutions 
of learning, there is need of much shrewd management to make all the available 
forces of the establishment count toward the competitive end; and in this 
composition it is the part of worldly wisdom to see that appearances may often 
be of graver consequence than achievement, - as is true in all competitive 
business that addresses its appeal to a large and scattered body of customers. 
The competition is for custom, and for such prestige as may procure custom, and 
these potential customers on whom it is desirable to produce an impression, 
especially as regards the undergraduate school, are commonly laymen who are 
expected to go [106] on current rumour and the outward appearance of things 
academic.
The exigencies of competitive business, particularly of such retail trade as 
seems chiefly to have contributed to the principles of businesslike management 
in the competing schools, throw the stress on appearances. In such business, the 
"good will" of the concern has come to be (ordinarily) its most valued and most 
valuable asset. The visible success of the concern, or rather the sentiments of 
confidence and dependence inspired in potential customers by this visible 
success, is capitalized as the chief and most substantial element of the 
concern's intangible assets. And the accumulation of such intangible assets, to 
be gained by convincing appearances and well-devised pronouncements, has become 
the chief object of persistent endeavour on the part of sagacious business men 
engaged in such lines of traffic. This, that the substance must not be allowed 
to stand in the way of the shadow, is one of the fundamental principles of 
management which the universities, under the guidance of business ideals, have 
taken over from the wisdom of the business community.
Accepting the point of view of the captains of erudition, and so looking on the 
universities as competitive business concerns, and speaking in terms applicable 
to business concerns generally, the assets of these seminaries of learning are 
in an exceptional degree intangible assets. There is, of course, the large item 
of the good-will or prestige of the university as a whole, considered as a going 
concern. But this collective body of "immaterial capital" that pertains to the 
university at large is made up in great part of the prestige of divers eminent 
persons included among its personnel and incorporated in the fabric of its 
bureaucratic departments, and not least the prestige of its executive head; in 
very much the same way as the like will [107] hold true, e.g., for any company 
of public amusement, itinerant or sedentary, such as a circus, a theatrical or 
operatic enterprise, which all compete for the acclamation and custom of those 
to whom these matters appeal.
For the purposes of such competition the effectual prestige of the university as 
a whole, as well as the detail prestige of its personnel, is largely the 
prestige which it has with the laity rather than with the scholarly classes. And 
it is safe to say that a somewhat more meretricious showing of magnitude and 
erudition will pass scrutiny, for the time being, with the laity than with the 
scholars. Which suggests the expediency for the university, as a going concern 
competing for the traffic, to take recourse to a somewhat more tawdry exhibition 
of quasi-scholarly feats, and a somewhat livelier parade of academic splendour 
and magnitude, than might otherwise be to the taste of such a body of scholars 
and scientists. As a business proposition, the meretricious quality inherent in 
any given line of publicity should not consign it to neglect, so long as it is 
found effectual for the end in view.
Competitive business concerns that find it needful to commend themselves to a 
large and credulous body of customers, as, e.g., newspapers or department 
stores, also find it expedient somewhat to overstate their facilities for 
meeting all needs, as also to overstate the measure of success which they 
actually enjoy. Indeed, much talent and ingenuity is spent in that behalf, as 
well as a very appreciable outlay of funds. So also as touches the case of the 
competitive seminaries of learning. And even apart from the exigencies of 
intercollegiate rivalry, taken simply as a question of sentiment it is 
gratifying to any university directorate to know and to make known that the 
stock of merchantable knowledge on hand is abundant and comprehensive, and that 
the registration and gradua-[108]tion lists make a brave numerical showing, 
particularly in case the directive head is duly imbued with a businesslike 
penchant for tests of accountancy and large figures. It follows directly that 
many and divers bureaux or departments are to be erected, which will then 
announce courses of instruction covering all accessible ramifications of the 
field of learning, including subjects which the corps of instructors may not in 
any particular degree be fit to undertake. A further and unavoidable consequence 
of this policy, therefore, is perfunctory work.
For establishments that are substantially of secondary school character, 
including colleges and undergraduate departments, such a result may not be of 
extremely serious consequence; since much of the instruction in these schools is 
of a perfunctory kind anyway. But since the university and the college are, in 
point of formal status and of administrative machinery, divisions of the same 
establishment and subject to the same executive control; and since, under 
competitive business principles, the collegiate division is held to be of 
greater importance, and requires the greater share of attention; it comes about 
that the college in great measure sets the pace for the whole, and that the 
undergraduate scheme of credits, detailed accountancy, and mechanical 
segmentation of the work, is carried over into the university work proper. Such 
a result follows more consistently and decisively, of course, in those 
establishments where the line of demarkation between undergraduate and graduate 
instruction is advisedly blurred or disregarded. It is not altogether unusual 
latterly, advisedly to efface the distinction between the undergraduate and the 
graduate division and endeavour to make a gradual transition from the one to the 
other.(5*) This is done in the less conspicuous fash-[109]ion of scheduling 
certain courses as Graduate and Senior, and allowing scholastic credits acquired 
in certain courses of the upper-class undergraduate curriculum to count toward 
the complement of graduate credits required of candidates for advanced degrees. 
More conspicuously and with fuller effect the same end is sought at other 
universities by classifying the two later years of the undergraduate curriculum 
as "Senior College"; with the avowed intention that these two concluding years 
of the usual four are scholastically to lie between the stricter undergraduate 
domain, now reduced to the freshman and sophomore years, on the one hand, and 
the graduate division as such on the other hand. This "Senior College" division 
so comes to be accounted in some sort a halfway graduate school; with the result 
that it is assimilated to the graduate work in the fashion of its accountancy 
and control; or rather, the essentially undergraduate methods that still 
continue to rule unabated in the machinery and management of this "senior 
college" are carried over by easy sophistication of expediency into the graduate 
work; which so takes on the usual, conventionally perfunctory, character that 
belongs by tradition and necessity to the undergraduate division; whereby in 
effect the instruction scheduled as "graduate" is, in so far, taken out of the 
domain of the higher learning and thrown back into the hands of the 
schoolmasters. The rest of the current undergraduate standards and discipline 
tends strongly to follow the lead so given and to work over by insensible 
precession into the graduate school; until in the consummate end the free 
pursuit of learning should no longer find a standing-place in the university 
except by subreption and [110] dissimulation; much after the fashion in which, 
in the days of ecclesiastical control and scholastic lore, the pursuit of 
disinterested knowledge was constrained to a shifty simulation of interest in 
theological speculations and a disingenuous formal conformity to the standards 
and methods that were approved for indoctrination in divinity.
Perfunctory work and mechanical accountancy may be sufficiently detrimental in 
the undergraduate curriculum, but it seems altogether and increasingly a matter 
of course in that section; but it is in the graduate division that it has its 
gravest consequences. Yet even in undergraduate work it remains true, as it does 
in all education in a degree, that the instruction can be carried on with best 
effect only on the ground of an absorbing interest on the part of the 
instructor; and he can do the work of a teacher as it should be done only so 
long as he continues to take an investigator's interest in the subject in which 
he is called on to teach. He must be actively engaged in an endeavour to extend 
the bounds of knowledge at the point where his work as teacher falls. He must be 
a specialist offering instruction in the specialty with which he is occupied; 
and the instruction offered can reach its best efficiency only in so far as it 
is incidental to an aggressive campaign of inquiry on the teacher's part.
But no one is a competent specialist in many lines; nor is any one competent to 
carry on an assorted parcel of special inquiries, cut to a standard unit of time 
and volume. One line, somewhat narrowly bounded as a specialty, measures the 
capacity of the common run of talented scientists and scholars for first-class 
work, whatever side-lines of subsidiary interest they may have in hand and may 
carry out with passably creditable results. The alternative is schoolmaster's 
task-work; or if the pretense of advanced learning must be kept up, the alter-
[111]native which not unusually goes into effect is amateurish pedantry, with 
the charlatan ever in the near background. By and large, if the number of 
distinct lines of instruction offered by a given departmental corps appreciably 
exceeds the number of men on the staff, some of these lines or courses will of 
necessity be carried in a perfunctory fashion and can only give mediocre 
results, at the best. What practically happens at the worst is better left under 
the cover of a decent reticence.
Even those preferred lines of instruction which in their own right engage the 
serious interest of the instructors can get nothing better than superficial 
attention if the time and energy of the instructors are dissipated over a 
scattering variety of courses. 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 number of distinct lines of instruction is relatively large, and if, as 
happens, they are distributed scatteringly among the members of the staff, with 
a relatively large assignment of hours to each man, so as to admit no assured 
and persistent concentration on any point, the run of instruction offered will 
necessarily be of this perfunctory character, and will therefore be of such 
amateurish and pedantic quality. Such an outcome is by no means unusual where 
regard is had primarily to covering a given inclusive range of subjects, rather 
than to the special aptitudes of the departmental corps; as indeed commonly 
happens, and as happens particularly where the school or the department in 
question is sufficiently imbued with a businesslike spirit of academic rivalry. 
It follows necessarily and in due measure on the introduction of the principles, 
methods, and tests of competitive business into the work of instruction.(6*)
[112] Under these principles of accountancy and hierarchical control, each of 
the several bureaux of erudition - commonly called departments - is a competitor 
with all its fellow bureaux in the (thrifty) apportionment of funds and 
equipment, - for the businesslike university management habitually harbours a 
larger number of departments than its disposable means will adequately provide 
for. So also each department competes with its fellow departments, as well as 
with similar departments in rival universities, for a clientèle in the way of 
student registrations. These two lines of competition are closely 
interdependent. An adverse statistical showing in the number of students, or in 
the range, variety and volume of courses of instruction offered by any given 
department, is rated by the businesslike general directorate as a shortcoming, 
and it is therefore likely to bring a reduction of allowances. At the same 
time, of course, such an adverse showing reflects discredit on the chief of 
bureau, while it also wounds his self-respect. The final test of competency in 
such a chief, under business principles, is the statistical test; in part 
because numerical tests have a seductive air of businesslike accountancy, and 
also because statistical exhibits have a ready use as advertising material to be 
employed in appeals to the potential donors and the unlearned patrons of the 
university, as well as to the public at large.
[113] So the chief of bureau, with the aid and concurrence of his loyal staff, 
will aim to offer as extensive and varied a range of instruction as the field 
assigned his department will admit. Out of this competitive aggrandizement of 
departments there may even arise a diplomatic contention between heads of 
departments, as to the precise frontiers between their respective domains; each 
being ambitious to magnify his office and acquire merit by including much of the 
field and many of the students under his own dominion.(7*) Such a conflict of 
jurisdiction is particularly apt to arise in case, as may happen, the number of 
scholastic departments exceeds the number of patently distinguishable provinces 
of knowledge; and competitive business principles constantly afford provocation 
to such a discrepancy, at the hands of an executive pushed by the need of a show 
of magnitude and large traffic. It follows, further, from these circumstances, 
that wherever contiguous academic departments are occupied with such closely 
related subject matter as would place them in a position to supplement one 
another's work, the negotiations involved in jealously guarding their respective 
frontiers may even take on an acrimonious tone, and may involve more or less of 
diplomatic mischief-making; so that, under this rule of competitive management, 
opportunities for mutual comfort and aid will not infrequently become occasion 
for mutual distrust and hindrance.
The broader the province and the more exuberant the [114] range of instruction 
appropriated to a given department and its corps of teachers, the more 
creditable will be the statistical showing, and the more meagre and threadbare 
are likely to be the scientific results. The corps of instructors will be the 
more consistently organized and controlled with a view to their dispensing 
accumulated knowledge, rather than to pursue further inquiry in the direction of 
their scholarly inclination or capacity; and frequently, indeed, to dispense a 
larger volume and a wider range of knowledge than they are in any intimate sense 
possessed of.
It is by no means that no regard is had to the special tastes, aptitudes, and 
attainments of the members of the staff, in so apportioning the work; these 
things are, commonly, given such consideration as the exigencies of academic 
competition will permit; but these exigencies decide that the criterion of 
special fitness becomes a secondary consideration. Wherever the businesslike 
demands of a rounded and extensive schedule of courses traverse the lines of 
special aptitude and training, the requirements of the schedule must rule the 
case; whereas, of course, the interests of science and scholarship, and of the 
best efficiency in the instruction given, would decide that no demands of the 
schedule be allowed to interfere with each man's doing the work which he can do 
best, and nothing else.
A schedule of instruction drawn on such lines of efficiency would avoid 
duplication of course, and would curtail the number of courses offered by any 
given department to such a modicum as the special fitness of the members of the 
staff would allow them to carry to the best effect. It would also proceed on the 
obvious assumption that co-ordinate departments in the several universities 
should supplement one another's work, - an assumption [115] obvious to the 
meanest academic common sense. But amicable working arrangements of this kind 
between departments of different universities, or between the several 
universities as a whole, are of course virtually barred out under the current 
policy of competitive duplication. It is out of the question, in the same manner 
and degree as the like co-operation between rival department stores is out of 
the question. Yet so urgently right and good is such a policy of mutual 
supplement and support, except as a business proposition, that some exchange of 
academic civilities paraded under its cloak is constantly offered to view in the 
manœuvres of the competing captains of erudition. The well-published and 
nugatory(8*) periodic conferences of presidents commonly have such an ostensible 
purpose.
Competitive enterprise, reinforced with a sentimental penchant for large 
figures, demands a full schedule of instruction. But to carry such a schedule 
and do the work well would require a larger staff of instructors in each 
department, and a larger allowance of funds and equipment, than business 
principles will countenance. There is always a dearth of funds, and there is 
always urgent use for more than can be had; for the enterprising directorate is 
always eager to expand and project the business of the concern into new 
provinces of school work, - secondary, primary, elementary, normal, 
professional, technical, manual-training, art schools, schools of music, 
elocution, book-keeping, housekeeping, and a further va-[116]riety that will 
more readily occur to those who have been occupied with devising ways and means 
of extending the competitive traffic of the university. Into these divers and 
sundry channels of sand the pressure of competitive expansion is continually 
pushing additional half-equipped, under-fed and over-worked ramifications of the 
academic body. And then, too, sane competitive business practice insists on 
economy of cost as well as a large output of goods. It is "bad business" to 
offer a better grade of goods than the market demands, particularly to customers 
who do not know the difference, or to turn out goods at a higher cost than other 
competing concerns. So business exigencies, those exigencies of economy to which 
the businesslike governing boards are very much alive, preclude any department 
confining itself to the work which it can do best, and at the same stroke they 
preclude the authorities from dealing with any department according to such a 
measure of liberality as would enable it to carry on the required volume of work 
in a competent manner.
In the businesslike view of the captains of erudition, taken from the standpoint 
of the counting-house, learning and university instruction are a species of 
skilled labour, to be hired at competitive wages and to turn out the largest 
merchantable output that can be obtained by shrewd bargaining with their 
employés; whereas, of course, in point of fact and of its place in the economic 
system, the pursuit of learning is a species of leisure, and the work of 
instruction is one of the modes of a life so spent in "the increase and 
diffusion of knowledge among men." It is to be classed as "leisure" only in such 
a sense of that term as may apply to other forms of activity that have no 
economic, and more particularly no pecuniary, end or equivalence. It is by no 
means hereby intended to imply that such pursuit of knowledge is an [117] 
aimless or indolent manner of life; nothing like dissipation has a legitimate 
place in it, nor is it "idle" in any other sense than that it is extra-economic, 
not without derogation to be classed as a gainful pursuit. Its aim is not the 
increase or utilization of the material means of life; nor can its spirit and 
employment be bought with a price. Any salary, perquisites, or similar 
emoluments assigned the scholars and scientists in the service of civilization, 
within the university or without, are (should be) in the nature of a stipend, 
designed to further the free use of their talent in the prosecution of this 
work, the value of which is not of a pecuniary kind. But 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 result is about such a degree of inefficiency, 
waste and stultification as might fairly be expected; whereof there are 
abundantly many examples, that humble the pride of the scholars and rejoice the 
heart of the captains of erudition.
The piece-wage plan never goes into effect in set form, or has not hitherto done 
so, - although there are schools of nominally university grade in which there is 
a recognized and avowed endeavour so to apportion the weekly hours of class-room 
exercises to the pay of the teachers as to bring the pay per class-hour per 
semester to a passably uniform level for the general body of the staff. That the 
piece-wage plan has so little avowed vogue in the academic wage scheme may at 
first sight seem strange; the body of academic employés are as defenceless and 
unorganized as any class of the wage-earning population, and it is among the 
unorganized and helpless that the piece-wage plan is commonly applied with the 
best effect; at the same time the system of scholastic [118] accountancy, worked 
out for other purposes and already applied both to instructors, to courses of 
instruction, and to divisions of the school year, has already reduced all the 
relevant items to such standard units and thorough equivalence as should make a 
system of piece-wages almost a matter of course. That it has not formally been 
put in practice appears to be due to tradition, and to that long-term common 
sense appreciation of the nature of learning that will always balk at rating 
this work as a frankly materialistic and pecuniary occupation. The academic 
personnel, e.g., are unable to rid themselves of a fastidious - perhaps 
squeamish - persuasion that they are engaged in this work not wholly for 
pecuniary returns; and the community at large are obscurely, but irretrievably 
and irresponsibly, in the same suspicious frame of mind on that head. The same 
unadvised and unformulated persuasion that academic salaries are after all not 
honestly to be rated as wages, is doubtless accountable for certain other 
features of academic management touching the pay-roll; notably the failure of 
the employés to organize anything like a trades-union, or to fall into line on 
any workable basis of solidarity on such an issue as a wage-bargain, as also the 
equivocal footing on which the matter of appointments and removals is still 
allowed to stand; hence also the unsettled ethics of the trade in this respect.
For divers reasons, but mainly reasons of competitive statistics, which resolve 
themselves, again, in the main into reasons of expedient publicity, it is 
desired that the enrolment should be very large and should always and 
unremittingly increase, - due regard being always had, of course, to the eminent 
desirability of drawing into the enrolment many students from the higher levels 
of gen-[119]tility and pecuniary merit. To this end it is well, as has already 
been remarked above, to announce a very full schedule of instruction and a free 
range of elective alternatives, and also to promote a complete and varied line 
of scholastic accessories, in the way of athletics, clubs, fraternities, 
"student activities," and similar devices of politely blameless dissipation.
These accessories of college life have been strongly on the increase since the 
business régime has come in. They are held to be indispensable, or unavoidable; 
not for scholarly work, of course, but chiefly to encourage the attendance of 
that decorative contingent who take more kindly to sports, invidious intrigue 
and social amenities than to scholarly pursuits. Notoriously, this contingent 
is, on the whole, a serious drawback to the cause of learning, but it adds 
appreciably, and adds a highly valued contribution, to the number enrolled; and 
it gives also a certain, highly appreciated, loud tone ("college spirit") to the 
student body; and so it is felt to benefit the corporation of learning by 
drawing public attention. Corporate means expended in provision for these 
academic accessories - "side shows," as certain ill-disposed critics have 
sometimes called them - are commonly felt to be well spent. Persons who are not 
intimately familiar with American college life have little appreciation of the 
grave solicitude given to these matters.
During some considerable number of years past, while the undergraduate enrolment 
at the universities has been increasing rapidly, the attitude of the authorities 
has progressively been undergoing a notable change touching these matters of 
extra-scholastic amenity. It is in great measure a continuation of changes that 
have visibly been going forward in the older universities of the country for 
[120] a longer period, and it is organically bound up with the general shifting 
of ground that marks the incursion of business principles.
While the authorities have turned their attention primarily to the undergraduate 
division and its numerical increase, they have at the same time, and largely 
with the same end in view, endeavoured to give it more of the character of a 
"gentleman's college", that is to say, an establishment for the cultivation of 
the graces of gentility and a suitable place of residence for young men of 
spendthrift habits. The improvement sought in these endeavours is not so much 
the increase and acceleration of scholarly pursuits, as a furthering of "social" 
proficiency. A "gentleman's college" is an establishment in which scholarship is 
advisedly made subordinate to genteel dissipation, to a grounding in those 
methods of conspicuous consumption that should engage the thought and energies 
of a well-to-do man of the world. Such an ideal, more or less overtly, appears 
to be gaining ground among the larger universities; and, needless to say, it is 
therefore also gaining, by force of precedent and imitation, among the younger 
schools engaged in more of a struggle to achieve a secure footing of 
respectability.
Its bearing on the higher learning is, of course, sufficiently plain; and its 
intimate connection with business principles at large should be equally plain. 
The scheme of reputability in the pecuniary culture comprises not only the 
imperative duty of acquiring something more than an equitable share of the 
community's wealth, but also the dutiful privilege of spending this acquired 
wealth, and the leisure that goes with it, in a reputably conspicuous way, 
according to the ritual of decorum in force for the time being. So that 
proficiency in the decorously conspicuous waste of time and means is no less 
essential in the end [121] than proficiency in the gainful conduct of business. 
The ways and means of reputably consuming time and substance, therefore, is by 
prescriptive necessity to be included in the training offered at any well-
appointed undergraduate establishment that aims in any comprehensive sense to do 
its whole duty by the well-to-do young men under its tutelage.(9*) It is, 
further and by compulsion of the same ideals, incumbent on such an establishment 
to afford these young men a precinct dedicate to cultured leisure, and 
conventionally sheltered from the importunities of the municipal police, where 
an adequate but guarded indulgence may be had for those extravagances of 
adolescence that count for so much in shaping the canons of genteel intercourse.
There is, of course, no intention here to find fault with this gentlemanly ideal 
of undergraduate indoctrination, or with the solicitude shown in this behalf by 
the captains of erudition, in endeavouring to afford time, place and 
circumstance for its due inculcation among college men. It is by no means here 
assumed that learning is substantially more to be desired than proficiency in 
genteel dissipation. It is only that the higher learning and the life of fashion 
and affairs are two widely distinct and divergent lines, both lying within the 
current scheme of civilization; and that it is the university's particular 
office in this scheme to conserve and extend the domain of knowledge. There need 
be no question that it is a work of great social merit and consequence to train 
[122] adepts in the ritual of decorum, and it is doubtless a creditable work for 
any school adapted to that purpose to equip men for a decorative place in polite 
society, and imbue them with a discriminating taste in the reputable waste of 
time and means. And all that may perhaps fall, not only legitimately, but 
meritoriously, within the province of the undergraduate school; at least it is 
not here intended to argue the contrary. At the same time a secure reputation 
for efficiency and adequate facilities along this line of aspirations on the 
part of any such school will serve a good business purpose in duly attracting 
students - or residents - from the better classes of society, and from those 
classes that aspire to be "better."
But this is essentially not university work. In the nature of the case it 
devolves on the college, the undergraduate school; and it can not be carried 
through with due singleness of purpose in an establishment bound by tradition to 
make much of that higher learning that is substantially alien to the spirit of 
this thing. If, then, as indications run, the large undergraduate schools are in 
due course to develop somewhat unreservedly into gentlemen's colleges, that is 
an additional reason why, in the interest of both parties, the divorce of the 
university from the collegiate division should be made absolute. Neither does 
the worldly spirit that pervades the gentlemen's college further the 
university's interest in scholarship, nor do the university's scholarly 
interests further the college work in gentility.
Well to the front among these undergraduate appurtenances of gentlemanship are 
the factional clubs known as Greek-letter fraternities. These touch the province 
of learning in the universities only incidentally and superficially, as they do 
not in practice enter the graduate division except by way of a thin aftermath of 
factional [123] animus, which may occasionally infect such of the staff as are 
gifted with a particularly puerile temperament. They are, in effect, competitive 
organizations for the elaboration of the puerile irregularities of adolescence, 
and as such they find little scope among the graduate students or among the 
adult personnel at large. But as part of the apparatus of the undergraduate 
division they require a strict surveillance to keep them within the (somewhat 
wide) limits of tolerance; and so their presence affects the necessary 
discipline of the school at large, entailing a more elaborate and rigorous 
surveillance and more meddling with personal habits than would otherwise be 
required, and entailing also some slight corporate expense.
Much the same is true for the other social clubs, not of an advisedly factional 
character, that are latterly being installed by authority under university 
patronage and guaranteed by the university funds; as, also, and in a more 
pronounced degree, for college athletics, except that the item of expense in 
connection with these things is much more serious and the resulting diversion of 
interest from all matters of learning is proportionally greater. Among these 
means of dissipating energy and attention, college athletics is perhaps still 
the most effective; and it is also the one most earnestly pushed by the 
businesslike authorities, at the same time that it is the most widely out of 
touch with all learning, whether it be the pursuit of knowledge or the 
perfunctory task-work of the collegiate division. So notorious, indeed, is the 
discrepancy between college athletics and scholarly work that few college 
authorities latterly venture to avow as cordial a support of this training in 
sportsmanship as they actually give. Yet so efficient a means of attracting a 
certain class of young men is this academic enterprise [124] in sports that, in 
practical effect, few schools fail to give it all the support that the limits of 
decorum will admit. There is probably no point at which specious practices and 
habitual prevarication are carried so far as here. Little need be said of the 
threadbare subterfuges by which (ostensibly surreptitious) pecuniary inducements 
are extended to students and prospective students who promise well as college 
athletes;(10*) or of the equally threadbare expedients by which these members of 
the gild of sportsmen are enabled to meet the formal requirements of scholarship 
imposed by shamefaced intercollegiate bargaining.(11*)
[125] But apart from such petty expedients, however abundant and commonplace, 
there is the more significant practice of retaining trainers and helpers at the 
university's expense and with academic countenance. There is the corps of 
workmen and assistants to take care of the grounds, buildings and apparatus, and 
there is the corps of trainers and coaches, masseurs and surgeons, masquerading 
under the caption of "physical culture," whose chief duty is to put the teams in 
form for the various contests. One may find a football or baseball coach 
retained officially as a member of the faculty and carried on the academic pay-
roll, in a university that practices a penurious economy in the equipment and 
current supply of materials and services necessary to the work of its scientific 
laboratories, and whose library is in a shameful state of neglect for want of 
adequate provision for current purchases and attendance. The qualifications of 
such a "professor" are those of a coach, while in point of scholarly capacity 
and attainments it would be a stretch of charity to say that he is of quite a 
neutral composition. Still, under the pressure of intercollegiate competition 
for the services of such expert lanistae, he may have to be vested with the 
highest academic rank and conceded the highest scholastic honours, with 
commensurate salary. Expediency may so decide, partly to cloak the shamefulness 
of the transaction, partly to meet the exacting demands of a coach whose 
professional services have a high [126] commercial rating in the sporting 
community, and who is presumed to be indispensable to the university's due 
success in intercollegiate athletics.
The manifest aim, and indeed the avowed purpose, of these many expedients of 
management and concessions to fashion and frailty is the continued numerical 
growth of the undergraduate school, - the increase of the enrolment and the 
obtaining of funds by use of which to achieve a further increase. To bring this 
assiduous endeavour into its proper light, it is to be added that most of these 
undergraduate departments are already too large for the best work of their kind. 
Since these undergraduate schools have grown large enough to afford a secure 
contrast as against the smaller colleges that are engaged in the same general 
field, it is coming to be plain to university men who have to do with the 
advanced instruction that, for the advanced work in science and scholarship, the 
training given by a college of moderate size commonly affords a better 
preparation than is had in the very large undergraduate schools of the great 
universities. This holds true, in a general way, in spite of the fact that the 
smaller schools are handicapped by an inadequate equipment, are working against 
the side-draft of a religious bias, with a corps of under-paid and over-worked 
teachers in great part selected on denominational grounds, and are under-rated 
by all concerned. The proposition, however, taken in a general way and allowing 
for exceptions, is too manifestly true to admit of much question; particularly 
in respect of preparation for the sciences proper, as contrasted with the 
professions.
The causes of this relative inefficiency that seems to attach unavoidably to the 
excessively large undergraduate establishments can not be gone into here; in 
part they are obvious, in part quite obscure. But in any case the [127] matter 
can not be gone into here, except so far as it has an immediate bearing on the 
advanced work of the university, through the inclusion of these collegiate 
schools in the university corporation and under the same government. As has 
already been remarked, by force of the competitive need of a large statistical 
showing and a wide sweep of popular prestige and notoriety, and by reason of 
other incentives of a nature more intimate to the person of the executive, it is 
in effect a matter of course that the undergraduate school and its growth 
becomes the chief object of solicitude and management with a businesslike 
executive; and that so its shaping of the foundations of the establishment as a 
whole acts irresistibly to fashion the rest of the university administration and 
instruction in the image of the undergraduate policy. Under the same compulsion 
it follows also that whatever elements in the advanced work of the university 
will not lend themselves to the scheme of accountancy, statistics, 
standardization and coercive control enforced in and through the undergraduate 
division, will tend to be lost by disuse and neglect, as being selectively unfit 
to survive under that system.
The advanced work falls under the same stress of competition in magnitude and 
visible success; and the same scheme of enforced statistical credits will 
gradually insinuate itself into the work for the advanced degrees; so that these 
as well as the lower degrees will come to be conferred on the piece-work plan. 
Throughout the American universities there is apparent such a movement in the 
direction of a closer and more mechanical specification of the terms on which 
the higher degrees are to be conferred, - a specification in terms of stipulated 
courses of class-room work and aggregate quantity of standard credits and length 
of residence. So that his [128] need of conformity to the standard credit 
requirements will therefore constrain the candidate for an advanced degree to 
make the substantial pursuit of knowledge subordinate to the present pursuit of 
credits, to be attended to, if at all, in the scant interstitial intervals 
allowed by a strictly drawn accountancy. The effect of it all on their animus, 
and on the effective prosecution of the higher learnings by the instructors, 
should be sufficiently plain; but in case of doubt any curious person may easily 
assure himself of it by looking over the current state of things as they run in 
any one of the universities that grant degrees.
Nothing but continued workday familiarity with this system of academic grading 
and credit, as it takes effect in the conduct and control of instruction, and as 
its further elaboration continues to employ the talents and deliberation of 
college men, can enable any observer to appreciate the extraordinary lengths to 
which this matter is carried in practice, and the pervasive way in which it 
resistlessly bends more and more of current instruction to its mechanical tests 
and progressively sterilizes all personal initiative and ambition that comes 
within its sweep. And nothing but the same continued contact with the relevant 
facts could persuade any outsider that all this skillfully devised death of the 
spirit is brought about by well-advised efforts of improvement on the part of 
men who are intimately conversant with the facts, and who are moved by a 
disinterested solicitude for the best academic good of the students under their 
charge. Yet such, unmistakably, are the facts of the case.
While the initial move in this sterilization of the academic intellect is 
necessarily taken by the statistically-minded superior officers of the 
corporation of learning, the detail of schedules and administrative routine in-
[129]volved is largely left in the discretion of the faculty. Indeed, it is work 
of this character that occupies nearly the whole of the attention of the faculty 
as a deliberative body, as well as of its many and various committees. In these 
matters of administrative routine and punctilio the faculty, collectively and 
severally, can exercise a degree of initiative and discretion. And these duties 
are taken as seriously as well may be, and the matters that so come within the 
faculty's discretion are handled in the most unambiguous spirit of responsible 
deliberation. Each added move of elaboration is taken only after the 
deliberative body has assured itself that it embodies a needed enhancement of 
the efficiency of the system of control. But each improvement and amplification 
also unavoidably brings the need of further specification and apparatus, desired 
to take care of further refinements of doubt and detail that arise out of the 
last previous extensions of the mechanism. The remedy sought in all such 
conjunctures is to bring in further specifications and definitions, with the 
effect of continually making two specifications grow where one grew before, each 
of which in its turn will necessarily have to be hedged about on both sides by 
like specifications, with like effect;(12*) with the consequence that the 
grading and credit system is subject to a ceaseless proliferation of ever more 
meticulous detail. The underlying difficulty appears to be not that the 
collective wisdom of the faculty is bent on its own stultification, as an 
unsympathetic outsider might hastily conclude, but that there is in all the 
deliberations of such a body a total disregard of common sense. It is, 
presumably, not that the constituent members are quite devoid of that quality, 
but rather that no point in their [130] elaboration of apparatus can feasibly be 
reached, beyond which a working majority can be brought conscientiously to agree 
that dependence may safely be placed on common sense rather than on further and 
more meticulous and rigorous specification.

It is at this point that the American system of fellowships falls into the 
scheme of university policy; and here again the effect of business principles 
and undergraduate machinery is to be seen at work. At its inception the purpose 
of these fellowships was to encourage the best talent among the students to 
pursue disinterested advanced study farther and with greater singleness of 
purpose and it is quite plain that at that stage of its growth the system was 
conceived to have no bearing on intercollegiate competition or the statistics of 
registration. This was something over thirty years ago. A fellowship was an 
honourable distinction; at the same time it was designed to afford such a 
stipend as would enable the incumbent to devote his undivided energies to 
scholastic work of a kind that would yield no pecuniary return. Ostensibly, such 
is still the sole purpose of the fellowships; the traditional decencies require 
(voluble and reiterated) professions to that effect. But in point of practical 
effect, and progressively, concomitant with the incursion of business principles 
into university policy, the exigencies of competitive academic enterprise have 
turned the fellowships to account in their own employ. So that, in effect, today 
the rival universities use the fellowships to bid against one another for 
fellows to come into residence, to swell the statistics of graduate registration 
and increase the number of candidates for advanced degrees. And the eligible 
students have learned so to regard the [131] matter, and are quite callously 
exploiting the system in that sense.
Not that the fellowships have altogether lost that character of a scholarly 
stipendiary with which they started out; but they have, under businesslike 
management, acquired a use not originally intended; and the new, competitive use 
of them is unequivocally their main use today. It would be hazardous to guess 
just how far the directorates of the rival universities consciously turn the 
fellowships to account in this enterprising way, or how far, on the other hand, 
they are able to let self-deception cover the policy of competitive bargaining 
in which they are engaged; but it would be difficult to believe that their right 
hand is altogether ignorant of what their left hand is doing. It would doubtless 
also be found that both the practice and the animus back of it differ 
appreciably from one school to another. But there is no element of hazard in the 
generalization that, by and large, such competitive use of the fellowships is 
today their chief use; and that such is the fact is quite openly avowed among 
the academic staff of some universities at least.
As a sequel and symptom of this use of the fellowship stipends in bargaining for 
an enlarged enrolment of advanced students, it has become a moot question in 
academic policy whether a larger number of fellowships with smaller stipends 
will give a more advantageous net statistical result than a smaller number of 
more adequate stipends. An administration that looks chiefly to the short-term 
returns - as is commonly the practice in latterday business enterprise - will 
sensibly incline to make the stipends small and numerous; while the converse 
will be true where regard is had primarily to the enrolment of carefully 
selected men who may reflect credit on the in-[132]stitution in the long run. 
Up-to-date business policy will apparently commend the former rather than the 
latter course; for business practice, in its later phases, is eminently guided 
by consideration of short-term gains. It is also true that the average stipend 
attached to the fellowships offered today is very appreciably lower than was the 
practice some two or three decades ago; at the same time that the cost of living 
- which these stipends were originally ddesigned to cover - has increased by 
something like one hundred per cent. As final evidence of the decay of scholarly 
purpose in the matter of fellowships, and as a climax of stultification, it is 
to be added that stipends originally established as an encouragement to 
disinterested scholarship are latterly being used to induce enrolment in the 
professional schools attached to the universities.(13*)

One further point of contact and contamination is necessary to be brought into 
this account of the undergraduate administration and its bearing on advanced 
work. The scholastic accessories spoken of above - clubs, fraternities, 
devotional organizations, class organizations, spectacles and social functions, 
athletics, and "student activities" generally - do not in any appreciable degree 
bear directly on the advanced work, in as much as they find no ready lodgement 
among the university students [133] proper. But they count, indirectly and 
effectually, toward lowering the scholarly ideals and keeping down the number of 
advanced students, chiefly by diverting the interest and energies of the 
undergraduate men from scholarly pursuits and throwing them into various lines 
of business and sportsmanship.
The subsidized clubs work, in these premises, to much the same effect as the 
fraternities; both are, in effect, designed to cultivate expensive habits of 
life. The same is true in a higher degree of athletic sports. The full round of 
sportsmanlike events, as well as the round schedule of social amenities for 
which the polite side of undergraduate life (partly subsidized) is designed to 
give a taste and training, are beyond the compass of men devoted to scholarship. 
In effect these things come in as alternatives to the pursuit of knowledge. 
These things call for a large expenditure of time and means, neither of which 
can be adequately met by the scientist or scholar. So that men who have been 
trained to the round of things that so go to make up the conventional scheme of 
undergraduate interests can not well look to a career in the higher learning as 
a possible outcome of their residence in college. On the other hand, young men 
habitually, and no doubt rightly, expect a business career to yield an income 
somewhat above the average of incomes in the community, and more particularly in 
excess of the commonplace incomes of academic men; such an income, indeed, as 
may afford the means to cover the conventional routine of such polite 
expenditures. So that, in the absence of an independent income, some sort of a 
business career that promises well in the pecuniary respect becomes the 
necessary recourse of the men to whom these amenities of expenditure have become 
habitual through their undergraduate training. With like effect the mental 
discipline [134] exercised by these sports and polite events greatly favours the 
growth of tactful equivocation and a guarded habit of mind, such as makes for 
worldly wisdom and success in business, but which is worse than useless in the 
scholar or scientist. And further and perhaps more decisively, an undergraduate 
who does his whole duty in the way of sports, fraternities, clubs, and reputable 
dissipation at large, commonly comes through his undergraduate course with a 
scanty and superficial preparation for scholarly or scientific pursuits, if any. 
So that even in case he should still chance to harbour a penchant for the 
pursuit of learning he will be unfit by lack of training.
NOTES:
1. Cf. George T. Ladd, "The Need of Administrative Changes in the American 
University," reprinted in University Control, by J. McKeen Cattell; especially 
pp. 352-353.
2. Cf. George T. Ladd, as above, pp. 351-352.
3. Apart from the executive's need of satisfying the prejudices of the laity in 
this matter, there is no ground for this competition between the universities, 
either in the pecuniary circumstances of the several establishments or in the 
work they are to take care of. So much is admitted on all hands. But the fact 
remains that no other one motive has as much to do with shaping academic policy 
as this same competition for traffic. The cause of it appears to be very little 
if anything else than that the habits of thought induced by experience in 
business are uncritically carried over into academic affairs.
Critics of the present régime are inclined to admit that the colleges of the 
land are in great part so placed as to be thrown into competition by force of 
circumstances, both as to the acqui-[90]sition of funds and as to the enrolment of 
students. The point may be conceded, though with doubt and reservation, as 
applies to the colleges; for the universities there is no visible ground of such 
rivalry, apart from unreflecting prejudice on the part of the laity, and an 
ambition for popular acclaim on the part of the university directorate.
4. An incumbent of executive office, recently appointed, in one of the greater 
universities was at pains a few years ago to speak his mind on this head, to the 
effect that the members of the academic staff are employés in the pay of the 
university and under the orders of its president, and as such they are bound to 
avoid all criticism of him and his administration so long as they continue on 
the pay-roll; and that if any member of the staff has any fault to find with the 
conduct of affairs he must first sever his connection with the university, 
before speaking his mind. These expressions were occasioned by the underhand 
dismissal of a scholar of high standing and long service, who had incurred the 
displeasure of the president then in charge, by overt criticism of the 
administration. As to its general features the case might well have been the one 
referred to by Professor Ladd (University Control, as above, p. 359), though the 
circumstances of the dismissal offer several details of a more discredit-[92]able 
character than Professor Ladd appears to have been aware of.
5. The strategic reason for this is the desire to retain for gradu-[109]ate 
registration any student who might otherwise prefer to look for graduate 
instruction elsewhere. The plan has not been found to work well, and it is still 
on trial.
6. At least one such businesslike chief of bureau has seriously [112] endeavoured 
so to standardize and control the work of his staff as to have all courses of 
lectures professed in the department reduced to symmetrical and permanent shape 
under the form of certified syllabi, which could then be taken over by any 
member of the staff, at the discretion of the chief, and driven home in the 
lecture room with the accredited pedagogical circumstance and apparatus. The 
scheme has found its way into academic anecdote, on the lighter side, as being a 
project to supply standard erudition in uniform packages, "guaranteed under the 
pure food law, fully sterilized, and sealed without solder or acids"; to which 
it is only necessary to "add hot air and serve."
7. So, e.g., it is known to have, on occasion, became a difficult question of 
inter-bureaucratic comity, whether commercial geography belongs of right to the 
department of geology or to that of economics; whether given courses in Hebrew 
are equitably to be assigned to the department of Semitics or to that of 
Religions; whether Church History is in fairness to be classed with profane 
History or with Divinity, etc., - questions which, except in point of 
departmental rivalry, have none but a meretricious significance.
8. Nugatory, that is, for the ostensible purpose of reducing inter-academic 
rivalry and duplication. However, there are other matters of joint interest to 
the gild of university executives, as, e.g., the inter-academic, or inter-
executive, blacklist, and similar recondite matters of presidential courtesy and 
prestige, necessary to be attended to though not necessary to be spread abroad.
9. The English pattern of boys' schools and gentlemanly university residence has 
doubtless afforded notable guidance to the "Educators" who have laboured for the 
greater gentility of American college life; at the same time that the grave 
authenticity of these English customs has at many a difficult passage sewed 
opportunely to take the edge off the gentlemen-educators' sense of shame.
10. Illustrative instances have little value as anecdotes and not much more as 
circumstantial evidence; their abundance and outrance are such as to have 
depreciated their value in both respects. Yet to any who may not know of this 
traffic by familiar contact one or two commonplace instances may perhaps not 
seem too much. So, a few years ago, in one of the greater of the new 
universities, a valued member of one of the athletic teams was retained at an 
allowance of $40 a month as book-keeper to the janitor of one of the boys' 
dormitories on the campus. At the same university and about the same time two 
other athletes were carried on university pay as assistants to the editor of the 
weekly bulletin announcing the programme of academic events for the week; though 
in this case, to the relief of the editor in question, only one of the two 
assistants reported at his office, and that only once, during the year of their 
incumbency. These, as already remarked, are commonplace occurrences. The more 
spectacular instances of shrewd management in these premises can not well be 
dealt with otherwise than by a canny silence; that being also the course 
approved by current practice.
11. A single instance may tolerantly be admitted here. Among the formal 
requirements that would admit students to a free pursuit of sportsmanship, at 
the same university as above mentioned, without imputation of professionalism, 
was specified the ability to read at sight such a passage in a given foreign 
language as would satisfy the instructor in charge that the candidate was 
competent in the language in question. The instructor [125] responsible in this case, 
a man of high academic rank and gifted with a sympathetic good-will toward the 
"boys," submitted in fulfilment of the test a copy of the Lord's Prayer in this 
foreign tongue, and passed the (several) candidates on finding them able 
passably to repeat the same in English. It would scarcely be fair to distinguish 
this episode by giving names and places, since equally ingenious expedients have 
been in use elsewhere.
12. "And then there came another locust and carried off another grain of wheat, 
and then there came another locust," etc., etc.
13. More than one instance might be cited where a student whose privately avowed 
and known aim was the study and practice of Law has deliberately been induced by 
the offer of a fellowship stipend to register, for the time being, as an 
academic graduate student and as candidate for the academic doctor's degree. In 
the instances that come to mind the students in question have since completed 
their law studies and entered practice, without further troubling about the 
academic degree for which they once were ostensible candidates.

[135] 
CHAPTER IV
Academic Prestige and the Material Equipment
In the course of the preceding chapter it has appeared that the introduction of 
business principles into university policy has had the immediate and ubiquitous 
effect of greatly heightening the directorate's solicitude for a due and 
creditable publicity, a convincing visible success, a tactful and effectual 
showing of efficiency reflected in an uninterrupted growth in size and other 
tangible quantitative features. This is good policy as seen from the point of 
view of competitive business enterprise. In competitive business it is of the 
gravest importance to keep up the concern's prestige, or "good will." A business 
concern so placed must be possessed of such prestige as will draw and hold a 
profitable traffic; otherwise the enterprise is in a precarious case. For the 
objective end and aim of business enterprise is profitable sales, or the 
equivalent of such sales if the concern is not occupied with what would strictly 
be called sales. The end sought is a net gain over costs; in effect, to buy 
cheap and sell dear. The qualities that count as of prime consequence in 
business enterprise, therefore, particularly in such business enterprise as has 
to do with many impressionable customers, are the salesmanlike virtues of 
effrontery and tact. These are high qualities in all business, because their due 
exercise is believed to bring a net return above the cost of the goods to the 
seller, and, indeed, above their value to the buyer. Unless the man in [136] 
competitive business is able, by force of these businesslike aptitudes, to get 
something more than he gives, it is felt that he has fallen short of the highest 
efficiency. So the efficient salesman, and similarly the efficiently managed 
business concern, are enabled to add to their marketable goods an immaterial 
increment of "prestige value," as some of the economists are calling it. A 
margin of prepossessions or illusions as to their superior, but intangible and 
inexpensive, utility attaches to a given line of goods because of the 
advertiser's or salesman's work, - work spent not so much on the goods as on the 
customer's sensibilities.
In case these illusions of superior worth are of an enduring character, they 
will add an increment of such intangible utility also to goods or other 
marketable items subsequently to be offered by the same concern; and they can be 
added up as a presumptive aggregate and capitalized as intangible assets of the 
business concern in question. Such a body of accumulated and marketable 
illusions constitute what is known as "good-will," in the stricter sense of the 
term. The illusions in question need, of course, not be delusions; they may be 
well or ill founded; for the purpose in hand that is an idle question.
The most familiar and convincing illustrations of such good will are probably 
those afforded by the sales of patent medicines, and similar proprietary 
articles of household consumption; but intangible values of a similar nature are 
involved in nearly all competitive business. They are the product of 
salesmanship, not of workmanship; and they are useful to the seller, not to the 
buyer. They are useful for purposes of competitive gain to the businessman, not 
for serviceability to the community at large, and their value to their possessor 
lies in the differential advantage which they give to one seller as against 
[137] another. They have, on the whole, no aggregate value or utility. From the 
point of view of the common good, work and expenditure so incurred for these 
competitive purposes are bootless waste.

Under compulsion of such precedents, drawn from the conduct of competitive 
business, publicity and "good-will" have come to take a foremost place in the 
solicitude of the academic directorate. Not that this notoriety and prestige, or 
the efforts that go to their cultivation, conduce in any appreciable degree to 
any ostensible purpose avowed, or avowable, by any university. These things, 
that is to say, rather hinder than help the cause of learning, in that they 
divert attention and effort from scholarly workmanship to statistics and 
salesmanship. All that is beyond cavil. The gain which so accrues to any 
university from such an accession of popular illusions is a differential gain in 
competition with rival seats of learning, not a gain to the republic of learning 
or to the academic community at large; and it is a gain in marketable illusions, 
not in serviceability for the ends of learning or for any other avowed or 
avowable end sought by the universities. But as competitors for the good-will of 
the unlettered patrons of learning the university directorates are constrained 
to keep this need of a reputable notoriety constantly in mind, however little it 
may all appeal to their own scholarly tastes.
It is in very large part, if not chiefly, as touches the acquirement of 
prestige, that the academic work and equipment are amenable to business 
principles, - not overlooking the pervasive system of standardization and 
accountancy that affects both the work and the equipment, and that serves other 
purposes as well as those of publicity; so that "business principles" in 
academic policy [138] comes to mean, chiefly, the principles of reputable 
publicity. It means this more frequently and more consistently than anything 
else, so far as regards the academic administration, as distinguished from the 
fiscal management of the corporation.
Of course, the standards, ideals, principles and procedure of business traffic 
enter into the scheme of university policy in other relations also, as has 
already appeared and as will be shown more at large presently; but after all due 
qualification is had, it remains true that this business of publicity 
necessarily, or at least commonly, accounts for a disproportionately large share 
of the business to be taken care of in conducting a university, as contrasted 
with such an enterprise, e.g., as a bank, a steel works, or a railway company, 
on a capital of about the same volume. This follows from the nature of the case. 
The common run of business concerns are occupied with industrial enterprise of 
some kind, and with transactions in credit, - with a running sequence of 
bargains from which the gains of the concern are to accrue, - and it is upon 
these gains that attention and effort centers, and to which the management of 
the concern constantly looks. Such concerns have to meet their competitors in 
buying, selling, and effecting contracts of all kinds, from which their gains 
are to come. A university, on the other hand, can look to no such gains in the 
work which is its sole ostensible interest and occupation; and the pecuniary 
transactions and arrangements which it enters into on the basis of its 
accumulated prestige are a relatively very trivial matter. There is, in short, 
no appreciable pecuniary gain to be looked for from any traffic resting on the 
acquired prestige, and therefore there is no relation of equivalence or 
discrepancy between any outlay incurred in this behalf and the volume of gainful 
[139] business to be transacted on the strength of it; with the result that the 
academic directorate applies itself to this pursuit without arrière pensée. So 
far as the acquired prestige is designed to serve a pecuniary end it can only be 
useful in the way of impressing potential donors, a highly speculative line of 
enterprise, offering a suggestive parallel to the drawings of a lottery.
Outlay for the purpose of publicity is not confined to the employment of field-
agents and the circulation of creditable gossip and reassuring printed matter. 
The greater share of it comes in as incidental to the installation of plant and 
equipment and the routine of academic life and ceremony. As regards the material 
equipment, the demands of a creditable appearance are pervading and rigorous; 
and their consequences in the way of elaborate and premeditated incidentals are, 
perhaps, here seen at their best. To the laity a "university" has come to mean, 
in the first place and indispensably, an aggregation of buildings and other 
improved real-estate. This material equipment strikes the lay attention directly 
and convincingly; while the pursuit of learning is a relatively obscure matter, 
the motions of which can not well be followed by the unlettered, even with the 
help of the newspapers and the circular literature that issues from the 
university's publicity bureau. The academic work is, after all, unseen, and it 
stays in the background. Current expenditure for the prosecution of this work, 
therefore, offers the enterprise in advertisement a less advantageous field for 
the convincing use of funds than the material equipment, especially the larger 
items, - laboratory and library buildings, assembly halls, curious museum 
exhibits, grounds for athletic contests, and the like. There is consequently a 
steady drift of provocation towards expenditure on conspicuous extensions of the 
[140] "plant," and a correlative constant temptation to parsimony in the more 
obscure matter of necessary supplies and service, and similar running-expenses 
without which the plant can not effectually be turned to account for its 
ostensible use; with the result, not infrequently, that the usefulness of an 
imposing plant is seriously impaired for want of what may be called "working 
capital."(1*)
[141] Indeed, instances might be cited where funds that were much needed to help 
out in meeting running expenses have been turned to use for conspicuous 
extensions of the plant in the way of buildings, in excess not only of what was 
needed for their alleged purpose but in excess of what could conveniently be 
made use of. More particularly is there a marked proclivity to extend the plant 
and the school organization into new fields of scholastic enterprise, often 
irrelevant or quite foreign to the province of the university as a seminary of 
learning; and to push these alien ramifications, to the neglect of the urgent 
needs of the academic work already in hand, in the way of equipment, 
maintenance, supplies, service and instruction.
The running-expenses are always the most urgent items of the budget, as seen 
from the standpoint of the academic work; and they are ordinarily the item that 
is most parsimoniously provided for. A scanty provision at this point 
unequivocally means a disproportionate curtailment of the usefulness of the 
equipment as well as of the personnel, - as, e.g., the extremely common and 
extremely [142] unfortunate practice of keeping the allowance for maintenance 
and service in the university libraries so low as seriously to impair their 
serviceability. But the exigencies of prestige will easily make it seem more to 
the point, in the eyes of a businesslike executive, to project a new extension 
of the plant; which will then be half-employed, on a scanty allowance, in work 
which lies on the outer fringe or beyond the university's legitimate 
province.(2*)
In so discriminating against the working capacity of the university, and in 
favour of its real-estate, this pursuit of reputable publicity further decides 
that the exterior of the buildings and the grounds should have the first and 
largest attention. It is true, the initial purpose of this material equipment, 
it is ostensibly believed, is to serve as housing and appliances for the work of 
inquiry and instruction. Such, of course, continues to be avowed its main 
purpose, in a perfunctorily ostensible way. This means a provision of libraries, 
laboratories, and lecture rooms. The last of these is the least exacting, and it 
is the one most commonly well supplied. It is also, on the whole, the more 
conspicuous in proportion to the outlay. [143] But all these are matters chiefly 
of interior arrangement, appliances and materials, and they are all of a 
relatively inconspicuous character. Except as detailed in printed statistics 
they do not ordinarily lend themselves with appreciable effect to the art of 
advertising. In meeting all these material requirements of the work in hand a 
very large expenditure of funds might advantageously be made - advantageously to 
the academic use which they are to serve - without much visible effect as seen 
in perspective from the outside. And so far as bears on this academic use, the 
exterior of the buildings is a matter of altogether minor consequence, as are 
also the decorative appointments of the interior.
In practice, under compulsion of the business principles of publicity, it will 
be found, however, that the exterior and the decorative appointments are the 
chief object of the designer's attention; the interior arrangement and working 
appointments will not infrequently become a matter of rude approximation to the 
requirements of the work, care being first taken that these arrangements shall 
not interfere with the decorative or spectacular intent of the outside. But even 
with the best-advised management of its publicity value, it is always 
appreciably more difficult to secure appropriations for the material equipment 
of a laboratory or library than for the shell of the edifice, and still more so 
for the maintenance of an adequate corps of caretakers and attendants.
As will be found true of other lines of this university enterprise in publicity, 
so also as to this presentation of a reputable exterior; it is designed to 
impress not the academic personnel, or the scholarly element at large, but the 
laity. The academic folk and scholars are commonly less susceptible to the 
appeal of curious facades and perplexing feats of architecture; and then, such 
an appeal [144] would have no particular motive in their case; it is not 
necessary to impress them. It is in the eyes of the unlettered, particularly the 
business community, that it is desirable for the university to present an 
imposing front; that being the feature of academic installation which they will 
readily appreciate. To carry instant conviction of a high academic worth to this 
large element of the populace, the university buildings should bulk large in the 
landscape, should be wastefully expensive, and should conform to the 
architectural mannerisms in present vogue. In a few years the style of 
architectural affectations will change, of course, as fashions necessarily 
change in any community whose tastes are governed by pecuniary standards; and 
any particular architectural contrivance will therefore presently lose much of 
its prestige value; but by the time it so is overtaken by obsolescence, the 
structures which embody the particular affectation in question will have made 
the appeal for which they were designed, and so will have served their purpose 
of publicity. And then, too, edifices created with a thrifty view to a large 
spectacular effect at a low cost are also liable to so rapid a physical decay as 
to be ready for removal and replacement before they have greatly outlived their 
usefulness in this respect.
In recent scholastic edifices one is not surprised to find lecture rooms 
acoustically ill designed, and with an annoying distribution of light, due to 
the requirements of exterior symmetry and the decorative distribution of 
windows; and the like holds true even in a higher degree for libraries and 
laboratories, since for these uses the demands in these respects are even more 
exacting. Nor is it unusual to find waste of space and weakness of structure, 
due, e.g., to a fictitious winding stair, thrown into the design to permit such 
a facade as will simulate [145] the defensive details of a mediaeval keep, to be 
surmounted with embrasured battlements and a (make-believe) loopholed turret. 
So, again, space will, on the same ground, be wasted in heavy-ceiled, ill-
lighted lobbies; which might once have served as a mustering place for a body of 
unruly men-at-arms, but which mean nothing more to the point today, and in these 
premises, than so many inconvenient flagstones to be crossed in coming and 
going.
These principles of spectacular publicity demand a nice adjustment of the 
conspicuous features of the plant to the current vagaries in decorative art and 
magnificence, that is to say, conformity to the sophistications current on that 
level of culture on which these unlettered men of substance live and move and 
have their being. As touches the case of the seats of learning, these current 
lay sophistications draw on several more or less diverse, and not altogether 
congruous, lines of conventionally approved manifestation of the ability to pay. 
Out of the past comes the conventional preconception that these scholastic 
edifices should show something of the revered traits of ecclesiastical and 
monastic real-estate; while out of the present comes an ingrained predilection 
for the more sprightly and exuberant effects of decoration and magnificence to 
which the modern concert-hall, the more expensive cafes and clubrooms, and the 
Pullman coaches have given a degree of authentication. Any one given to curious 
inquiry might find congenial employment in tracing out the manner and proportion 
in which these, and the like, strains of aesthetic indoctrination are blended in 
the edifices and grounds of a well-advised modern university.
It is not necessary here to offer many speculations on the enduring artistic 
merit of these costly stage proper-[146]ties of the seats of learning, since 
their permanent value in that respect is scarcely to be rated as a substantial 
motive in their construction. But there is, e.g., no obvious reason why, with 
the next change in the tide of mannerism, the disjointed grotesqueries of an 
eclectic and modified Gothic should not presently pass into the same category of 
apologetic neglect, with the architectural evils wrought by the mid-Victorian 
generation. But there is another side to this architecture of notoriety, that 
merits some slight further remark. It is consistently and unavoidably 
meretricious. Just at present the enjoined vogue is some form of bastard 
antique. The archaic forms which it ostensibly preserves are structurally out of 
date, ill adapted to the modern materials and the modern builder's use of 
materials. Modern building, on a large scale and designed for durable results, 
is framework building. The modern requirements of light, heating, ventilation 
and access require it to be such; and the materials used lend themselves to that 
manner of construction. The strains involved in modern structures are frame-work 
strains; whereas the forms which these edifices are required to simulate are 
masonry forms. The outward conformation and ostensible structure of the 
buildings, therefore, are commonly meaningless, except as an architectural 
prevarication. They have to be adapted, simulated, deranged, because in modern 
use they are impracticable in the shape, proportion and combination that of 
right belonged to them under the circumstances of materials and uses under which 
they were once worked out. So there results a meaningless juxtaposition of 
details, that prove nothing in detail and contradict one another in assemblage. 
All of which may suggest reflections on the fitness of housing the quest of 
truth in an edifice of false pretences.
[147] These architectural vagaries serve no useful end in academic life. As an 
object lesson they conduce, in their measure, to inculcate in the students a 
spirit of disingenuousness. But they spread abroad the prestige of the 
university as an ornate and spendthrift establishment; which is believed to 
bring increased enrolment of students and, what is even more to the point, to 
conciliate the good-will of the opulent patrons of learning. That these edifices 
are good for this purpose, and that this policy of architectural mise en scène 
is wise, appears from the greater readiness with which funds are procured for 
such ornate constructions than for any other academic use. It appears that the 
successful men of affairs to whom the appeal for funds is directed, find these 
wasteful, ornate and meretricious edifices a competent expression of their 
cultural hopes and ambitions.
NOTES:
1. A single illustrative instance may serve to show how the land lies in this 
respect, even though it may seem to the uninitiated to be an extreme if not an 
exaggerated case; while it may perhaps strike those familiar with these matters 
as a tedious commonplace. A few years ago, in one of the larger, younger and 
more enterprising universities, a commodious laboratory, well appointed and 
adequately decorated, was dedicated to one of the branches of biological 
science. To meet the needs of scientific work such a laboratory requires the 
services of a corps of experienced and intelligent assistants and caretakers, 
particularly where the establishment is equipped with modern appliances for 
heating, ventilation and the like, as was the case in this instance. In this 
laboratory the necessary warmth was supplied by what is sometimes called the 
method of indirect steam heat; that is to say, the provision for heat and for 
ventilation were combined in one set of appliances, by bringing the needed air 
from the open through an outdoor "intake," passing it over steam-heated coils 
(in the basement of the building), and so distributing the air necessary for 
ventilation, at the proper temperature, throughout the building by means of a 
suitable arrangement of air-shafts. Such was the design. But intelligent service 
comes high, and ignorant janitors are willing to undertake what may be asked of 
them. And sufficient warmth can be had in an inclement climate and through a 
long winter season only at an appreciable expense. So, with a view to economy, 
and without the knowledge of the scientific staff who made use of the 
laboratory, the expedient was hit upon by the academic executive, in 
consultation with a suitable janitor, that the outdoor intake be boarded up 
tightly, so that the air which passed over the heating coils and through the 
air-shafts to the laboratory rooms was thenceforth drawn not from the extremely 
cold atmosphere of outdoors but from the more temperate supply that filled the 
basement and had already had the benefit of circulating over the steam coils and 
through the ventilating shafts. By this means an obvious saving in fuel would be 
effected, corre-[141]sponding to the heat differential between the outdoor air, at 
some 0° to -20° and that already confined in the building, at some 60°. How long 
this fuel-saving expedient was in force can not well be ascertained, but it is 
known to have lasted at least for more than one season.
The members of the scientific staff meantime mysteriously but persistently fell 
sick after a few weeks of work in the laboratory, recurrently after each return 
from enforced vacations. Until, in the end, moved by persistent suspicions of 
sewer-gas - which, by the way, had in the meantime cost some futile 
inconvenience and expense occasioned by unnecessary overhauling of the plumbing 
- one of the staff pried into the janitoor's domain in the basement; where he 
found near the chamber of the steam coils a loosely closed man-hole leading into 
the sewers, from which apparently such air was drawn as would necessarily go to 
offset the current leakage from this closed system of ventilation.
2. This is a nearly universal infirmity of American university policy, but it is 
doubtless not to be set down solely to the account of the penchant for a large 
publicity on the part of the several academic executives. It is in all 
likelihood due as much to the equally ubiquitous inability of the governing 
boards to appreciate or to perceive what the current needs of the academic work 
are, or even what they are like. Men trained in the conduct of business 
enterprise, as the governing boards are, will have great difficulty in 
persuading themselves that expenditures which yield neither increased dividends 
nor such a durable physical product as can be invoiced and added to the 
capitalization, can be other than a frivolous waste of good money; so that what 
is withheld from current academic expenditure is felt to be saved, while that 
expenditure which leaves a tangible residue of (perhaps useless) real estate is, 
by force of ingrained habit, rated as new investment.
[148]
CHAPTER V
The Academic Personnel
As regards the personnel of the academic staff the control enforced by the 
principles of competitive business is more subtle, complex and far-reaching, and 
should merit more particular attention. The staff is the university, or it 
should so be if the university is to deserve the place assigned it in the scheme 
of civilization. Therefore the central and gravest question touching current 
academic policy is the question of its bearing on the personnel and the work 
which there is for them to do. In the apprehension of many critics the whole 
question of university control is comprised in the dealings of the executive 
with the staff.
Whether the power of appointment vests formally in one man or in a board, in 
American practice it commonly vests, in effect, in the academic executive. In 
practice, the power of removal, as well as that of advancement, rests in the 
same hands. The businesslike requirements of the case bring it to this outcome 
de facto, whatever formalities of procedure may intervene de jure.
It lies in the nature of the case that this appointing power will tend to create 
a faculty after its own kind. It will be quick to recognize efficiency within 
the lines of its own interests, and slower to see fitness in those lines that 
lie outside of its horizon, where it must necessarily act on outside 
solicitation and hearsay evidence.
The selective effect of such a bias, guided as one might [149] say, by a 
"consciousness of kind," may be seen in those establishments that have remained 
under clerical tutelage; where, notoriously, the first qualification looked to 
in an applicant for work as a teacher is his religious bias. But the bias of 
these governing boards and executives that are under clerical control has after 
all been able to effect only a partial, though far-reaching, conformity to 
clerical ideals of fitness in the faculties so selected; more especially in the 
larger and modernized schools of this class. In practice it is found necessary 
somewhat to wink at devotional shortcomings among their teachers; clerical, or 
pronouncedly devout, scientists that are passably competent in their science, 
are of very rare occurrence; and yet something presentable in the way of modern 
science is conventionally required by these schools, in order to live, and so to 
effect any part of their purpose. Half a loaf is better than no bread. None but 
the precarious class of schools made up of the lower grade and smaller of these 
colleges, such as are content to save their souls alive without exerting any 
effect on the current of civilization, are able to get along with faculties made 
up exclusively of God-fearing men.
Something of the same kind, and in somewhat the same degree, is true for the 
schools under the tutelage of businessmen. While the businesslike ideal may be a 
faculty wholly made up of men highly gifted with business sense, it is not 
practicable to assemble such a faculty which shall at the same time be plausibly 
competent in science and scholarship. Scientists and scholars given over to the 
pursuit of knowledge are conventionally indispensable to a university, and such 
are commonly not largely gifted with business sense, either by habit or by 
native gift. The two lines of interest - business and science - do not pull 
together; a competent scientist or scholar well en-[150]dowed with business 
sense is as rare as a devout scientist - almost as rare as a white blackbird. 
Yet the inclusion of men of scientific gifts and attainments among its faculty 
is indispensable to the university, if it is to avoid instant and palpable 
stultification.
So that the most that can practically be accomplished by a businesslike 
selection and surveillance of the academic personnel will be a compromise; 
whereby a goodly number of the faculty will be selected on grounds of 
businesslike fitness, more or less pronounced, while a working minority must 
continue to be made up of men without much business proficiency and without 
pronounced loyalty to commercial principles.
This fluctuating margin of limitation has apparently not yet been reached, 
perhaps not even in the most enterprising of our universities. Such should be 
the meaning of the fact that a continued commercialization of the academic staff 
appears still to be in progress, in the sense that businesslike fitness counts 
progressively for more in appointments and promotions. These businesslike 
qualifications do not comprise merely facility in the conduct of pecuniary 
affairs, even if such facility be conceived to include the special aptitudes and 
proficiency that go to the making of a successful advertiser. In academic 
circles as elsewhere businesslike fitness includes solvency as well as 
commercial genius. Both of these qualifications are useful in the competitive 
manœuvres in which the academic body is engaged. But while the two are 
apparently given increasing weight in the selection and grading of the academic 
personnel, the precedents and specifications for a standard rating of merit in 
this bearing have hitherto not been worked out to such a nicety as to allow much 
more than a more or less close approach to a consistent application of the 
principle in the average [151] case. And there lies always the infirmity in the 
background of the system that if the staff were selected consistently with an 
eye single to business capacity and business animus the university would 
presently be functa officio, and the captain of erudition would find his 
occupation gone.
A university is an endowed institution of culture; whether the endowment take 
the form of assigned income, as in the state establishments, or of funded 
wealth, as with most other universities. Such fraction of the income as is 
assigned to the salary roll, and which therefore comes in question here, is 
apportioned among the staff for work which has no determinate market value. It 
is not a matter of quid pro quo; since one member of the exchange, the stipend 
or salary, is measurable in pecuniary terms and the other is not. This work has 
no business value, in so far as it is work properly included among the duties of 
the academic men. Indeed, it is a fairly safe test; work that has a commercial 
value does not belong in the university. Such services of the academic staff as 
have a business value are those portions of their work that serve other ends 
than the higher learning; as, e.g., the prestige and pecuniary gain of the 
institution at large, the pecuniary advantage of a given clique or faction 
within the university, or the profit and renown of the directive head. Gains 
that accrue for services of this general character are not, properly speaking, 
salary or stipend payable toward "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among 
men," even if they are currently so designated, in the absence of suitable 
distinctions. Instances of such a diversion of corporate funds to private ends 
have in the past occurred in certain monastic and priestly orders, as well as in 
some modern political organizations. Organized malversation of this [152] 
character has latterly been called "graft." The long-term common sense of the 
community would presently disavow any corporation of learning overtly pursuing 
such a course, as being faithless to its trust, and the conservation of learning 
would so pass into other hands. Indeed, there are facts current which broadly 
suggest that the keeping of the higher learning is beginning to pass into other, 
and presumptively more disinterested, hands.
The permeation of academic policy by business principles is a matter of more or 
less, not of absolute, dominance. It appears to be a question of how wide a 
deviation from scholarly singleness of purpose the long-term common sense of the 
community will tolerate. The cult of the idle curiosity sticks too deep in the 
instinctive endowment of the race, and it has in modern civilization been too 
thoroughly ground into the shape of a quest of matter-of-fact knowledge, to 
allow this pursuit to be definitively set aside or to fall into abeyance. It is 
by too much an integral constituent of the habits of thought induced by the 
discipline of workday life. The faith in and aspiration after matter-of-fact 
knowledge is too profoundly ingrained in the modern community, and too consonant 
with its workday habit of mind, to admit of its supersession by any objective 
end alien to it, - at least for the present and until some stronger force than 
the technological discipline of modern life shall take over the primacy among 
the factors of civilization, and so give us a culture of a different character 
from that which has brought on this modern science and placed it at the centre 
of things human.
The popular approval of business principles and businesslike thrift is profound, 
disinterested, alert and insistent; but it does not, at least not yet, go the 
length of unreservedly placing a businesslike exploitation of office [153] above 
a faithful discharge of trust. The current popular animus may not, in this 
matter, approach that which animates the business community, specifically so-
called, but it is sufficiently "practical" to approve practical sagacity and 
gainful traffic wherever it is found; yet the furtherance of knowledge is after 
all an ideal which engages the modern community's affections in a still more 
profound way, and, in the long run, with a still more unqualified insistence. 
For good or ill, in the apprehension of the civilized peoples, matter-of-fact 
knowledge is an end to be sought; while gainful enterprise is, after all, a 
means to an end. There is, therefore, always this massive hedge of slow but 
indefeasible popular sentiment that stands in the way of making the seats of 
learning over into something definitively foreign to the purpose which they are 
popularly believed to serve.(1*)

Perhaps the most naive way in which a predilection for men of substantial 
business value expresses itself in university policy is the unobtrusive, and in 
part unformulated, preference shown for teachers with sound pecuniary 
connections, whether by inheritance or by marriage. With no such uniformity as 
to give evidence of an advised rule of precedence or a standardized schedule of 
correlation, but with sufficient consistency to merit, and indeed to claim, the 
thoughtful attention of the members of the craft, a scholar who is in a position 
to plead personal wealth or a wealthy connection has a perceptibly better chance 
of appointment on the academic staff, and on a more advantageous scale of 
remuneration, than men without pecuniary antecedents. Due preferment also 
appears to follow more as a matter of course where the [154] candidate has or 
acquires a tangible standing of this nature.
This preference for well-to-do scholars need by no means be an altogether blind 
or impulsive predilection for commercial solvency on the part of the appointing 
power; though such a predilection is no doubt ordinarily present and operative 
in a degree. But there is substantial ground for a wise discrimination in this 
respect. As a measure of expediency, particularly the expediency of publicity, 
it is desirable that the incumbents of the higher stations on the staff should 
be able to live on such a scale of conspicuous expensiveness as to make a 
favourable impression on those men of pecuniary refinement and expensive tastes 
with whom they are designed to come in contact. The university should be 
worthily represented in its personnel, particularly in such of its personnel as 
occupy a conspicuous place in the academic hierarchy; that is to say, it should 
be represented with becoming expensiveness in all its social contact with those 
classes from whose munificence large donations may flow into the corporate 
funds. Large gifts of this kind are creditable both to him that gives and him 
that takes, and it is the part of wise foresight so to arrange that those to 
whom it falls to represent the university, as potential beneficiary, at this 
juncture should do so with propitiously creditable circumstance. To meet and 
convince the opulent patrons of learning, as well as the parents and guardians 
of possible opulent students, it is, by and large, necessary to meet them on 
their own ground, and to bring into view such evidence of culture and 
intelligence as will readily be appreciated by them. To this end a large and 
well appointed domestic establishment is more fortunate than a smaller one; 
abundant, well-chosen and well-served viands, beverages and narcotics will also 
felicit-[155]ously touch the sensibilities of these men who are fortunate enough 
to have learned their virtue; the better, that is to say, on the whole, the more 
costly, achievements in dress and equipage will "carry farther" in these 
premises than a penurious economy. In short, it is well that those who may be 
called to stand spokesmen for the seat of learning in its contact with men and 
women of substantial means, should be accustomed to, and should be pecuniarily 
competent for, a scale of living somewhat above that which the ordinary 
remuneration for academic work will support. An independent income, therefore, 
is a meritorious quality in an official scholar.
The introduction of these delegates from the well-to-do among the academic 
personnel has a further, secondary effect that is worth noting. Their ability 
freely to meet any required pecuniary strain, coupled with that degree of social 
ambition that commonly comes with the ability to pay, will have a salutary 
effect in raising the standard of living among the rest of the staff, - salutary 
as seen from the point of view of the bureau of publicity. In the absence of 
outside resources, the livelihood of academic men is somewhat scant and 
precarious. This places them under an insidious temptation to a more 
parsimonious manner of life than the best (prestige) interests of the seat of 
learning would dictate. By undue saving out of their current wages they may 
easily give the academic establishment an untoward air of indigence, such as 
would be likely to depreciate its prestige in those well-to-do circles where 
such prestige might come to have a commercial value, in the way of donations, 
and it might at the same time deter possible customers of the same desirable 
class from sending their young men to the university as students.
The American university is not an eleemosynary insti-[156]tution; it does not 
plead indigence, except in that Pickwickian sense in which indigence may without 
shame be avowed in polite circles; nor does it put its trust in donations of 
that sparseness and modesty which the gifts of charity commonly have. Its 
recourse necessarily is that substantial and dignified class of gifts that are 
not given thriftily on compunction of charity, but out of the fulness of the 
purse. These dignified gifts commonly aim to promote the most reputable 
interests of humanity, rather than the sordid needs of creature comfort, at the 
same time that they serve to fortify the donor' s good name in good company. 
Donations to university funds have something of the character of an investment 
in good fame; they are made by gentlemen and gentlewomen, to gentlemen, and the 
transactions begin and end within the circle of pecuniary respectability. An 
impeccable respectability, authentic in the pecuniary respect, therefore, 
affords the only ground on which such a seminary of learning can reasonably 
claim the sympathetic attention of the only class whose attentions are seriously 
worth engaging in these premises; and respectability is inseparable from an 
expensive scale of living, in any community whose scheme of life is 
conventionally regulated by pecuniary standards.
It is accordingly expedient, for its collective good repute, that the members of 
the academic staff should conspicuously consume all their current income in 
current expenses of living. Hence also the moral obligation incumbent on all 
members of the staff - and their households - to take hands and help in an 
endless chain of conspicuously expensive social amenities, where their social 
proficiency and their ostensible ability to pay may effectually be placed on 
view. An effectual furtherance to this desirable end is the active presence 
among the [157] staff of an appreciable number who are ready to take the lead at 
a pace slightly above the competency of the common run of university men. Their 
presence insures that the general body will live up to their limit; for in this, 
as in other games of emulation, the pace-maker is invaluable.
Besides the incentive so given to polite expenditure by the presence of a highly 
solvent minority among the academic personnel, it has also been found expedient 
that the directorate take thought and institute something in the way of an 
authentic curriculum of academic festivities and exhibitions of social 
proficiency. A degree of expensive gentility is in this way propagated by 
authority, to be paid for in part out of the salaries of the faculty.
Something in this way of ceremonial functions and public pageants has long been 
included in the ordinary routine of the academic year among the higher American 
schools. It dates back to the time when they were boys' schools under the 
tutelage of the clergy, and it appears to have had a ritualistic origin, such as 
would comport with what is found expedient in the service of the church. By 
remoter derivation it should probably be found to rest on a very ancient and 
archaic faith in the sacramental or magical efficacy of ceremonial observances. 
But the present state of the case can by no means be set down to the account of 
aimless survival alone. Instead of being allowed in any degree to fall into 
abeyance by neglect, the range and magnitude of such observances have 
progressively grown appreciably greater since the principles of competitive 
business have come to rule the counsels of the universities. The growth, in the 
number of such observances, in their pecuniary magnitude, in their ritualistic 
circumstance, and in the importance attached to them, is greater in the 
immediate present than at any [158] period in the past; and it is, 
significantly, greater in those larger new establishments that have started out 
with few restraints of tradition. But the move so made by these younger, freer, 
more enterprising seats of learning falls closely in with that spirit of 
competitive enterprise that animates all alike though unequally. 1
That it does so, that this efflorescence of ritual and pageantry intimately 
belongs in the current trend of things academic, is shown by the visible 
proclivity of the older institutions to follow the lead given in this matter by 
the younger ones, so far as the younger ones have taken the lead. In the mere 
number of authorized events, as contrasted with the average of some twenty-five 
or thirty years back, the present average appears, on a somewhat deliberate 
review of the available data, to compare as three or four to one. For certain of 
the younger and more exuberant seats of learning today, as compared with what 
may be most nearly comparable in the academic situation of the eighties, the 
proportion is perhaps twice as large as the larger figure named above. Broadly 
speaking, no requirement of the academic routine should be allowed to stand in 
the way of an available occasion for a scholastic pageant.
These genteel solemnities, of course, have a cultural significance, probably of 
a high order, both as occasions of rehearsal in all matters of polite conformity 
and as a stimulus to greater refinement and proficiency in expenditure on seemly 
dress and equipage. They may also be believed to have some remote, but 
presumably salutary, bearing on the higher learning. This latter is an obscure 
point, on which it would be impossible at present to offer [159] anything better 
than abstruse speculative considerations; since the relation of these genteel 
exhibitions to scientific inquiry or instruction is of a peculiarly intangible 
nature. But it is none of these cultural bearings of any such round of polite 
solemnities and stately pageants that comes in question here. It is their 
expediency in point of businesslike enterprise, or perhaps rather their 
businesslike motive, on the one hand, and their effect upon the animus and 
efficiency of the academic personnel, on the other hand.
In so far as their motive should not (by unseemly imputation) be set down to 
mere boyish exuberance of make-believe, it must be sought among considerations 
germane to that business enterprise that rules academic policy. However 
attractive such a derivation might seem, this whole traffic in pageantry and 
ceremonial amenities can not be traced back to ecclesiastical ground, except in 
point of remote pedigree; it has grown greater since the businessmen took over 
academic policy out of the hands of the clergy. Nor can it be placed to the 
account of courtly, diplomatic, or military antecedents or guidance; these 
fields of activity, while they are good breeding ground for pomp and 
circumstance, do not overlap, or even seriously touch, the frontiers of the 
republic of learning. On the other hand, in seeking grounds or motives for it 
all, it is also not easy to find any close analogy in the field of business 
enterprise of the larger sort, that has to do with the conduct of industry. 
There is little of this manner of expensive public ceremonial and solemn 
festivities to be seen, e.g., among business concerns occupied with railroading 
or banking, in cotton-spinning, or sugar-refining, or in farming, shipping, 
coal, steel, or oil. In this field phenomena of this general class are of rare 
occurrence, sporadic at the best; and when [160] they occur they will commonly 
come in connection with competitive sales of products, services or securities, 
particularly the latter. Nearer business analogues will be found in retail 
merchandising, and in enterprises of popular amusement, such as concert halls, 
beer gardens, or itinerant shows. The street parades of the latter, e.g., show a 
seductive, though, it is believed, misleading analogy to the ceremonial pageants 
that round off the academic year.
Phenomena that come into view in the later and maturer growth of the retail 
trade, as seen, e.g., in the larger and more reputable department stores, are 
perhaps nearer the point. There are formal "openings" to inaugurate the special 
trade of each of the four seasons, desired to put the patrons of the house on a 
footing of good-humoured familiarity with the plant and its resources, with the 
customs of the house, the personnel and the stock of wares in hand, and before 
all to arrest the attention and enlist the interest of those classes that may be 
induced to buy. There are also occasional gatherings of a more ceremonial 
character, by special invitation of select customers to a promised exhibition of 
peculiarly rare and curious articles of trade. This will then be illuminated 
with shrewdly conceived harangues setting forth the alleged history, adventures 
and merits, past and future, of the particular branch of the trade, and of the 
particular house at whose expense the event is achieved. In addition to these 
seasonal and occasional set pieces of mercantile ceremony, there will also run 
along in the day's work an unremitting display of meritorious acts of 
commission and omission. Like their analogues in academic life these ceremonials 
of trade are expensive, edifying, enticing, and surrounded with a solicitous 
regard for publicity; and it [161] will be seen that they are, all and several, 
expedients of advertising.

To return to the academic personnel and their implication in these recurrent 
spectacles and amenities of university life. As was remarked above, apart from 
outside resources the livelihood that comes to a university man is, commonly, 
somewhat meagre. The tenure is uncertain and the salaries, at an average, are 
not large. Indeed, they are notably low in comparison with the high conventional 
standard of living which is by custom incumbent on university men. University 
men are conventionally required to live on a scale of expenditure comparable 
with that in vogue among the well-to-do businessmen, while their university 
incomes compare more nearly with the lower grades of clerks and salesmen. The 
rate of pay varies quite materially, as is well known. For the higher grades of 
the staff, whose scale of pay is likely to be publicly divulged, it is, perhaps, 
adequate to the average demands made on university incomes by polite usage; but 
the large majority of university men belong on the lower levels of grade and 
pay; and on these lower levels the pay is, perhaps, lower than any outsider 
appreciates.(3*)
[162] With men circumstanced as the common run of university men are, the 
temptation to parsimony is ever present, while on the other hand, as has already 
been noted, the prestige of the university - and of the academic head - demands 
of all its members a conspicuously expensive manner of living. Both of these 
needs may, of course, be met in some poor measure by saving in the obscurer 
items of domestic expense, such as food, clothing, heating, lighting, floor-
space, books, and the like; and making all available funds count toward the 
collective end of reputable publicity, by throwing the stress on such 
expenditures as come under the public eye, as dress and equipage, bric-a-brac, 
amusements, public entertainments, etc. It may seem that it should also be 
possible to cut down the [163] proportion of obscure expenditures for creature 
comforts by limiting the number of births in the family, or by foregoing 
marriage. But, by and large, there is reason to believe that this expedient has 
been exhausted. As men have latterly been at pains to show, the current average 
of children in academic households is not high; whereas the percentage of 
celibates is. There appears, indeed, to be little room for additional economy on 
this head, or in the matter of household thrift, beyond what is embodied in the 
family budgets already in force in academic circles.
So also, the tenure of office is somewhat precarious; more so than the documents 
would seem to indicate. This applies with greater force to the lower grades than 
to the higher. Latterly, under the rule of business principles, since the 
prestige value of a conspicuous consumption has come to a greater currency in 
academic policy, a member of the staff may render his tenure more secure, and 
may perhaps assure his due preferment, by a sedulous attention to the academic 
social amenities, and to the more conspicuous items of his expense account; and 
he will then do well in the same connection also to turn his best attention in 
the day's work to administrative duties and schoolmasterly discipline, rather 
than to the increase of knowledge. Whereas he may make his chance of preferment 
less assured, and may even jeopardize his tenure, by a conspicuously 
parsimonious manner of life, or by too pronounced an addiction to scientific or 
scholarly pursuits, to the neglect of those polite exhibitions of decorum that 
conduce to the maintenance of the university's prestige in the eyes of the 
(pecuniarily) cultured laity.
A variety of other untoward circumstances, of a similarly extra-scholastic 
bearing, may affect the fortunes of academic men to a like effect; as, e.g., 
unearned news-[164]paper notoriety that may be turned to account in ridicule; 
unconventional religious, or irreligious convictions - so far as they become 
known; an undesirable political affiliation; an impecunious marriage, or such 
domestic infelicities as might become subject of remark. None of these untoward 
circumstances need touch the serviceability of the incumbent for any of the 
avowed, or avowable, purposes of the seminary of learning; and where action has 
to be taken by the directorate on provocation of such circumstances it is 
commonly done with the (unofficial) admission that such action is taken not on 
the substantial merits of the case but on compulsion of appearances and the 
exigencies of advertising. That some such effect should be had follows from the 
nature of things, so far as business principles rule.
In the degree, then, in which these and the like motives of expediency are 
decisive, there results a husbanding of time, energy and means in the less 
conspicuous expenditures and duties, in order to a freer application to more 
conspicuous uses, and a meticulous cultivation of the bourgeois virtues. The 
workday duties of instruction, and more particularly of inquiry, are, in the 
nature of the case, less conspicuously in evidence than the duties of the 
drawing-room, the ceremonial procession, the formal dinner, or the grandstand on 
some red-letter day of intercollegiate athletics.(4*) For the purposes of a 
reputable noto-[165]riety the everyday work of the classroom and laboratory is 
also not so effective as lectures to popular audiences outside; especially, 
perhaps, addresses before an audience of devout and well-to-do women. Indeed, 
all this is well approved by experience. In many and devious ways, therefore, a 
university man may be able to serve the collective enterprise of his university 
to better effect than by an exclusive attention to the scholastic work on which 
alone he is ostensibly engaged.
Among the consequences that follow is a constant temptation for the members of 
the staff to take on work outside of that for which the salary is nominally 
paid. Such work takes the public eye; but a further incentive to go into this 
outside and non-academic work, as well as to take on supernumerary work within 
the academic schedule, lies in the fact that such outside or supernumerary work 
is specially paid, and so may help to eke out a sensibly scant livelihood. So 
far as touches the more scantily paid grades of university men, and so far as no 
alien considerations come in to trouble the working-out of business principles, 
the outcome may be schematized somewhat as follows. These men have, at the 
outset, gone into the university presumably from an inclination to scholarly or 
scientific pursuits; it is not probable that they have been led into this 
calling by the pecuniary inducements, which are slight as compared with the 
ruling rates of pay in the open market for other work that demands an equally 
arduous preparation and an equally close application. They have then been ap-
[166]portioned rather more work as instructors than they can take care of in the 
most efficient manner, at a rate of pay which is sensibly scant for the standard 
of (conspicuous) living conventionally imposed on them. They are, by authority, 
expected to expend time and means in such polite observances, spectacles and 
quasi-learned exhibitions as are presumed to enhance the prestige of the 
university. They are so induced to divert their time and energy to spreading 
abroad the university's good repute by creditable exhibitions of a quasi-
scholarly character, which have no substantial bearing on a university man's 
legitimate interests; as well as in seeking supplementary work outside of their 
mandatory schedule, from which to derive an adequate livelihood and to fill up 
the complement of politely wasteful expenditures expected of them. The academic 
instruction necessarily suffers by this diversion of forces to extra-scholastic 
objects; and the work of inquiry, which may have primarily engaged their 
interest and which is indispensable to their continued efficiency as teachers, 
is, in the common run of cases, crowded to one side and presently drops out of 
mind. Like other workmen, under pressure of competition the members of the 
academic staff will endeavour to keep up their necessary income by cheapening 
their product and increasing their marketable output. And by consequence of this 
pressure of bread-winning and genteel expenditure, these university men are so 
barred out from the serious pursuit of those scientific and scholarly inquiries 
which alone can, academically speaking, justify their retention on the 
university faculty, and for the sake of which, in great part at least, they have 
chosen this vocation. No infirmity more commonly besets university men than this 
going to seed in routine work and extra-scholastic duties. They have entered on 
the academic career to find time, place, [167] facilities and congenial 
environment for the pursuit of knowledge, and under pressure they presently 
settle down to a round of perfunctory labour by means of which to simulate the 
life of gentlemen.(5*)
Before leaving the topic it should further be remarked that the dissipation 
incident to these polite amenities, that so are incumbent on the academic 
personnel, apparently also has something of a deteriorative effect on their 
working capacity, whether for scholarly or for worldly uses. Prima facie 
evidence to this effect might be adduced, but it is not easy to say how far the 
evidence would bear closer scrutiny. There is an appreciable amount of 
dissipation, in its several sorts, carried forward in university circles in an 
inconspicuous manner, and not designed for publicity. How far this is induced by 
a loss of interest in scholarly work, due to the habitual diversion of the 
scholars' energies to other and more exacting duties, would be hard to say; as 
also how far it may be due to the lead given by men-of-the-world retained on the 
facul-[168]ties for other than scholarly reasons. At the same time there is the 
difficulty that many of those men who bear a large part in the ceremonial 
dissipation incident to the enterprise in publicity are retained, apparently, 
for their proficiency in this line as much as for their scholarly attainments, 
or at least so one might infer; and these men must be accepted with the defects 
of their qualities.
As bearing on this whole matter of pomp and circumstance, social amenities and 
ritual dissipation, quasi-learned demonstrations and meretricious publicity, in 
academic life, it is difficult beyond hope of a final answer to determine how 
much of it is due directly to the masterful initiative of the strong man who 
directs the enterprise, and how much is to be set down to an innate proclivity 
for all that sort of thing on the part of the academic personnel. A near view of 
these phenomena leaves the impression that there is, on the whole, less 
objection felt than expressed among the academic men with regard to this routine 
of demonstration; that the reluctance with which they pass under the ceremonial 
yoke is not altogether ingenuous; all of which would perhaps hold true even more 
decidedly as applied to the faculty households.(6*) But for all that, it also 
remains true that without the initiative and countenance of the executive head 
these [169] boyish movements of sentimental spectacularity on the part of the 
personnel would come to little, by comparison with what actually takes place. It 
is after all a matter for executive discretion, and, from whatever motives, this 
diversion of effort to extra-scholastic ends has the executive sanction;(7*) 
with the result that an intimate familiarity with current academic life is 
calculated to raise the question whether make-believe does not, after all, 
occupy a larger and more urgent place in the life of these thoughtful adult male 
citizens than in the life of their children.
NOTES:
1. It was a very wise and adroit politician who found out that "You can not fool 
all the people all the time."
2.La gloria di colui che tutto muove,
Per l'universo penétra e risplende
In una parte più e meno altr'ove.
3. In a certain large and enterprising university, e.g., the pay of the lowest, 
and numerous, rank regularly employed to do full work as teachers, is 
proportioned to that of the highest - much less numerous - rank about as one to 
twelve at the most, perhaps even as low as one to twenty. And it may not be out 
of place to enter the caution that the nominal rank of a given member of the 
staff is no secure index of his income, even where the salary "normally" 
attached to the given academic rank is known. Not unusually a "normal" scale of 
salaries is formally adopted by the governing board and spread upon their 
records, and such a scale will then be surreptitiously made public. But 
departures from the scale habitually occur, whereby the salaries [162] actually paid 
come to fall short of the "normal" perhaps as frequently as they conform to it.
There is no trades-union among university teachers, and no collective 
bargaining. There appears to be a feeling prevalent among them that their 
salaries are not of the nature of wages, and that there would be a species of 
moral obliquity implied in overtly so dealing with the matter. And in the 
individual bargaining by which the rate of pay is determined the directorate may 
easily be tempted to seek an economical way out, by offering a low rate of pay 
coupled with a higher academic rank. The plea is always ready to hand that the 
university is in want of the necessary funds and is constrained to economize 
where it can. So an advance in nominal rank is made to serve in place of an 
advance in salary, the former being the less costly commodity for the time 
being. Indeed, so frequent are such departures from the normal scale as to have 
given rise to the (no doubt ill-advised) suggestion that this may be one of the 
chief uses of the adopted schedule of normal salaries. So an employé of the 
university may not infrequently find himself constrained to accept, as part 
payment, an expensive increment of dignity attaching to a higher rank than his 
salary account would indicate. Such an outcome of individual bargaining is all 
the more likely in the academic community, since there is no settled code of 
professional ethics governing the conduct of business enterprise in academic 
management, as contrasted with the traffic of ordinary competitive business.
4. So, e.g., the well-known president of a well and favourably known university 
was at pains a few years ago to distinguish one of his faculty as being his 
"ideal of a university man"; the grounds of this invidious distinction being a 
lifelike imitation of a country gentleman and a fair degree of attention to 
committee work in connection with the academic administration; the incumbent had 
no distinguishing marks either as a teacher or as a scholar, and neither science 
nor letters will be found in his debt. It is perhaps needless to add that for 
reasons of invidious distinction, no names can be mentioned in this connection. 
[165] It should be added in illumination of the instance cited, that in the same 
university, by consistent selection and discipline of the personnel, it had come 
about that, in the apprehension of the staff as well as of the executive, the 
accepted test of efficiency was the work done on the administrative committees - 
rather than that of the class rooms or laboratories.
5. Within the past few years an academic executive of great note has been heard 
repeatedly to express himself in facetious doubt of this penchant for scholarly 
inquiry on the part of university men, whether as "reseárch" or as "résearch"; 
and there is doubtless ground for scepticism as to its permeating the academic 
body with that sting of ubiquity that is implied in many expressions on this 
head. And it should also be said, perhaps in extenuation of the expression cited 
above, that the president was addressing delegations of his own faculty, and 
presumably directing his remarks to their special benefit; and that while he 
professed (no doubt ingenuously) a profound zeal for the cause of science at 
large, it had come about, selectively, through a long course of sedulous 
attention on his own part to all other qualifications than the main fact, that 
his faculty at the time of speaking was in the main an aggregation of slack-
twisted schoolmasters and men about town. Such a characterization, however, does 
not carry any gravely invidious discrimination, nor will it presumably serve in 
any degree to identify the seat of learning to which it refers.
6. The share and value of the "faculty wives" in all this routine of resolute 
conviviality is a large topic, an intelligent and veracious account of which 
could only be a work of naive brutality:
"But the grim, grim Ladies, Oh, my brothers!
They are ladling bitterly.
They are ladling in the work-time of the others,
In the country of the free."
(Mrs. Elizabret Harte Browning, in The Cry of the Heathen Chinee.)
7. What takes place without executive sanction need trouble no one.
[170]
CHAPTER VI
The Portion of the Scientist
The principles of business enterprise touch the life and work of the academic 
staff at divers points and with various effect. Under their rule, and in so far 
as they rule, the remuneration shifts from the basis of a stipend designed to 
further the pursuit of knowledge, to that of a wage bargain, partaking of the 
nature of a piece-work scheme, designed to procure class-room instruction at the 
lowest practicable cost. A businesslike system of accountancy standardizes and 
measures this instruction by mechanically gauged units of duration and number, 
amplitude and frequency, and so discountenances work that rises above a staple 
grade of mediocrity. Usage and the urgent need of a reputable notoriety impose 
on university men an extraneous and excessively high standard of living 
expenses, which constrains them to take on supernumerary work in excess of what 
they can carry in an efficient manner. The need of university prestige enforces 
this high scale of expenses, and also pushes the members of the staff into a 
routine of polite dissipation, ceremonial display, exhibitions of quasi-
scholarly proficiency and propagandist intrigue.
If these business principles were quite free to work out their logical 
consequences, untroubled by any disturbing factors of an unbusinesslike nature, 
the outcome should be to put the pursuit of knowledge definitively in abeyance 
within the university, and to substitute for that [171] objective something for 
which the language hitherto lacks a designation.
For divers reasons of an unbusinesslike kind, such a consummate ("sweat-shop") 
scheme has never fully been achieved, particularly not in establishments that 
are, properly speaking, of anything like university grade. This perfect scheme 
of low-cost perfunctory instruction, high-cost stage properties and press-
agents, public song and dance, expensive banquets, speech-making and 
processions, is never fully rounded out. This amounts to admitting a partial 
defeat for the gild of businesslike "educators." While, as a matter of 
speculative predilection, they may not aim to leave the higher learning out of 
the university, the rule of competitive business principles consistently pushes 
their administration toward that end; which they are continually prevented from 
attaining, by the necessary conditions under which their competitive enterprise 
is carried on.
For better or worse, there are always and necessarily present among the academic 
corps a certain number of men whose sense of the genteel properties is too vague 
and meagre, whose grasp of the principles of official preferment is too weak and 
inconsequential, whose addiction to the pursuit of knowledge is too ingrained, 
to permit their conforming wholly to the competitive exigencies of the case. By 
force of the exigencies of competitive prestige there is, of course, a limit of 
tolerance that sets decent bounds both to the number of such supererogatory 
scholars harboured by the university, and the latitude allowed them in their 
intemperate pursuit of knowledge; but their presence in the academic body is, 
after all, neither an irrelevant accident nor a transient embarrassment. It is, 
in one sense of the expression, for the use of such men, and for the use which 
such men find for it, that the uni-[172]versity exists at all; in some such 
sense, indeed, as a government, a political machine, a railway corporation or a 
toll-road, may be said to exist for the use of the community from which they get 
their living. It is true in the sense that this ostensible use can not be left 
out of account in the long run. But even from day to day this scholarly purpose 
is never quite lost sight of. The habit of counting it in, as a matter of 
course, affects all concerned, in some degree; and complacent professions of 
faith to that effect cross one another from all quarters. It may frequently 
happen that the enterprising men in whom academic discretion centres will have 
no clear conception of what is implied in this scholarly purpose to which they 
give a perfunctory matter-of-course endorsement, and much of their professions 
on that head may be ad captandum; but that it need be a matter of course argues 
that it must be counted with.
Still, in the degree in which business principles rule the case the outcome will 
be of much the same complexion as it might be in the absence of any such 
prepossession, intelligent or otherwise, in favour of the higher learning on the 
part of the directorate; for competition has the same effect here as elsewhere, 
in that it permits none of the competitors to forego any expedient that has been 
found advantageous by any one of them. So that, whatever course might be 
dictated by the sentiments of the directorate, the course enjoined by the 
principles of competitive business sets toward the suppression or elimination of 
all such scholarly or scientific work from the university as does not contribute 
immediately to its prestige, - except so far as the conditions alluded to make 
such a course impracticable.
It is not an easy or a graceful matter for a businesslike executive to get rid 
of any undecorative or indecorous [173] scientist, whose only fault is an unduly 
pertinacious pursuit of the work for which alone the university claims to exist, 
whose failure consists in living up to the professions of the executive instead 
of professing to live up to them. Academic tradition gives a broad, though 
perhaps uncertain, sanction to the scientific spirit that moves this obscure 
element in the academic body. And then, their more happily gifted, more worldly-
wise colleagues have also a degree of respect for such a single-minded pursuit 
of knowledge, even while they may view these naive children of impulse with 
something of an amused compassion; for the general body of the academic staff is 
still made up largely of men who have started out with scholarly ideals, even 
though these ideals may have somewhat fallen away from them under the rub of 
expediency. At least in a genial, speculative sense of the phrase, scholarship 
still outranks official preferment in the esteem of the generality of academic 
men, particularly so long as the question does not become personal and touch 
their own preferment. In great part the academic corps still understands and 
appreciates the scholarly animus, and looks, on the whole, kindly and 
sympathetically - indeed, with a touch of envy - on those among them who are so 
driven to follow their own scientific bent, to the neglect of expedient 
gentility and publicity.
The like can, of course, not be so freely said of that body of businessmen in 
whom is vested the final control; yet this sentiment of genial approval that 
pervades the academic body finds some vague response even among these; and in 
any event it is always to be reckoned with and is not to be outraged, unless for 
a good and valuable consideration. It can not altogether be set aside, although, 
it is true, the conduct of certain executive heads, grown old in autocratic rule 
and self-complacency, may [174] at times appear to argue the contrary. So that, 
by and large, there results an unstable compromise between the requirements of 
scholarly fitness and those of competitive enterprise, with a doubtful and 
shifting issue. Just at present, under the firm hand of an enterprising and 
autocratic executive, the principles of competitive business are apparently 
gaining ground in the greater universities, where the volume of traffic helps to 
cloud the details of suppression, and the cult of learning is gradually falling 
into a more precarious position.
In a curious way, too, the full swing of business principles in academic life is 
hindered by the necessary ways and means through which these principles are 
worked out; so much so, indeed, as to throw a serious doubt on their ultimately 
achieving an undivided dominion. Taken as a business concern, the university is 
in a very singular position. The reason for its being, at all, is the 
educational aspiration that besets modern mankind. Its only ostensible reason 
for being, and so for its being governed and managed, competitively or 
otherwise, is the advancement of learning. And this advancement of learning is 
in no degree a business proposition; and yet it must, for the present at least, 
remain the sole ostensible purpose of the businesslike university. In the main, 
therefore, all the competitive endeavours and manœuvres of the captains of 
erudition in charge must be made under cover of an ostensible endeavour to 
further this non-competitive advancement of learning, at all costs. Since 
learning is not a competitive matter; since, indeed, competition in any guise or 
bearing in this field is detrimental to learning; the competitive manœuvres of 
the academic executive must be carried on surreptitiously, in a sense, cloaked 
[175] as a non-competitive campaign for the increase of knowledge without fear 
or favour.
All this places the executive in a very delicate position. On the one hand the 
principles of competitive business, embodied in a plenary board of control and 
in a critical scrutiny from the side of the business community at large, demand 
that all appointments, promotions, dismissals, ceremonials, pronouncements and 
expenditures, must be made with a constant view to their highest advertising 
effect; whereas the notions current as to what is fitting in a seminary of the 
higher learning, on the other hand, somewhat incongruously demand that all these 
deeds of commission and omission be done with an eye single to the increase of 
knowledge, regardless of appearances. And this double responsibility falls, of 
necessity, on the executive head of the university, under the present régime of 
centralized autocratic rule. Any ethical code that shall permit the executive 
head to accomplish what is expected of him in the way of a competitive 
enterprise under these circumstances, will necessarily be vague and shifty, not 
to and men who have tried to do say tenuous and shadowy; their whole duty in 
these premises are ready to admit that they have been called on to face many 
distasteful situations, where honesty would not approve itself as the best 
policy.(1*)

Whatever expedients of decorative real-estate, spectacular pageantry, 
bureaucratic magnificence, elusive statistics, vocational training, genteel 
solemnities and sweat-[176]shop instruction, may be imposed by the exigencies of 
a competitive business policy, the university is after all a seat of learning, 
devoted to the cult of the idle curiosity, - otherwise called the scientific 
spirit. And stultification, broad and final, waits on any university directorate 
that shall dare to avow any other end as its objective. So the appearance of an 
unwavering devotion to the pursuit of knowledge must be kept up. Hence the 
presence of scholars and scientists of accepted standing is indispensable to the 
university, as a means of keeping up its prestige. The need of them may be a 
need of their countenance rather than of their work, but they are indispensable, 
and they bring with them the defects of their qualities. When a man achieves 
such notoriety for scientific attainments as to give him a high value as an 
article of parade, the chances are that he is endowed with some share of the 
scientific animus, and he is likely to have fallen into the habit of rating the 
triumphs of science above those of the market place. Such a person will almost 
unavoidably affect the spirit of any academic corps into which he is intruded. 
He will also, in a measure, bend the forces of the establishment to a long-term 
efficiency in the pursuit of knowledge, rather than to the pursuit of a 
reputable notoriety from day to day. To the enterprising captain of erudition he 
is likely to prove costly and inconvenient, but he is unavoidable.
This will hold true in a general way, and with due exceptions, for men prominent 
in those material sciences that have to do with data of such a tangible 
character, and give their results in such terms of mechanical fact, as to permit 
a passably close appreciation of their worth by the laity. It applies only more 
loosely, with larger exceptions and a wider margin of error, in the humanities 
and the so-called moral and social sciences. In this latter [177] field a 
clamorous conformity to current prepossessions, particularly the conventional 
prepossessions of respectability, or an edifying and incisive rehearsal of 
commonplaces, will commonly pass in popular esteem for scholarly and scientific 
merit. A truculent quietism is often accepted as a mark of scientific maturity. 
The reason for this will appear presently. But so far as popular esteem is a 
truthful index of scientific achievement. the proposition holds, that scientists 
who have done great things have a business value to the captain of erudition as 
a means of advancing the university's prestige; and so far the indicated 
consequences follow. In some measure the scientific men so intruded into the 
academic body are in a position to give a direction to affairs within their 
field and within the framework of the general policy. They are able to claim 
rank and discretion, and their choice, or at least their assent, must be 
consulted in the selection of their subalterns, and in a degree also in the 
organization of the department's work. It is true, men whose talent, interest 
and experience run chiefly within the lines of scientific inquiry, are commonly 
neither skilled nor shrewd managers in that give and take of subtleties and 
ambiguities by which the internal machinery of the university is kept in line 
and running under a businesslike administration; but even so, their aims and 
prepossessions will in a measure affect the animus and shape the work of the 
academic body. All this applies particularly on the higher levels of research, 
as contrasted with the commonplace (undergraduate) work of instruction. But at 
this point, therefore, the principles of competitive publicity carry with them a 
partial neutralization of their own tendency.
This necessity of employing scientists of a commanding force and rank raises a 
point of some delicacy in the ad-[178]ministration of the competitive 
university. It is necessary to assign these men a relatively high rank in the 
academic hierarchy; both because they will accept no subordinate place and 
because the advertising value of their prestige will be curtailed by reducing 
them to an inconspicuous position. And with high rank is necessarily associated 
a relatively large discretion and a wide influence in academic affairs, at least 
on the face of things. Such men, so placed, are apt to be exacting in matters 
which they conceive to bear on the work in their own sciences, and their 
exactions may not be guided chiefly by the conspicuousness of the equipment 
which they require or of the results at which they aim. They are also not 
commonly adroit men of affairs, in the business sense of the term; not given to 
conciliatory compromises and an exhibition of complaisant statistics. The 
framing of shrewd lines of competitive strategy, and the bureaucratic punctilios 
of university administration, do not commonly engage their best interest, even 
if it does not stir them to an indecorous impatience.(2*)
Should such a man become unduly insistent in his advocacy of scholarship, so as 
seriously to traverse the statistical aspirations of the executive, or in any 
way to endanger the immediate popular prestige of the university, then it may 
become an open question whether his personal prestige has not been bought at too 
high a cost. As a business proposition, it may even become expedient to retire 
him. But his retirement may not be an easy matter to arrange. The businesslike 
grounds of it can not well be avowed, since it is involved in the scheme of 
academic decorum, as well as in the scheme of publicity, that motives of 
notoriety must not be avowed. Colour-[179]able grounds of another kind must be 
found, such as will divert the popular imagination from the point at issue. By a 
judicious course of vexation and equivocations, an obnoxious scientist may be 
manœuvred 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, or his racial, religious or political 
status. In America such an appeal to the baser sentiments will commonly cloud 
the issue sufficiently for the purpose in hand, even though it all has nothing 
to do with the man's fitness for university work. Such a step, however, is not 
to be taken unless the case is urgent; if there is danger of estranging the 
affections of potential donors, or if it involves anything like overt disloyalty 
to the executive head.
This is one of the points at which it is necessary to recall the fact that no 
settled code of business ethics has yet been worked out for the guidance of 
competitive university management; nor is it easy to see how such a code can be 
worked out, so long as the university remains ostensibly a seat of learning, 
unable to avow any other ground of action than a single-minded pursuit of 
knowledge. It has been alleged - indeed it is fast becoming a tradition - that 
the executives of the great competitive universities habitually allow some 
peculiar latitude as touches the canons of truth and fair dealing. If this 
describes the facts, it should not be counted against these discreet men who so 
have to tax their ingenuity, but against the situation in which they are placed, 
which makes it impracticable to observe a nice discrimination in matters of 
veracity. Statements of fact, under such conditions, will in great part be 
controlled by the end to be accomplished, rather than by antecedent 
circumstances; such statements are necessarily of a teleological order. [180] As 
in other competitive business, facts have in this connection only a strategic 
value; but the exigencies of strategy here are peculiarly exacting, and often 
rigorous.

Academic tradition and current common sense unite in imposing on the 
universities the employment of prominent scholars and scientists, in that men of 
note in this class have a high prestige value for purposes of publicity; and it 
was suggested above that a reservation of some breadth must be made on this 
head. Common notoriety is the due test of eminence which the competitive 
university must apply in the selection of its notables. But in the sciences that 
deal with the less tangible and measureable data, the so-called moral or social 
sciences, common notoriety is not even an approximately accurate index of 
scientific capacity or attainments; and still it is, of course, the standing of 
the incumbents in point of common notoriety that must chiefly be had in view in 
any strict valuation of them for purposes of academic prestige. They are needed 
for the advertising value which they bring, and for this purpose they are 
valuable somewhat in proportion to the rank awarded them by common report among 
that unlearned element, whose good opinion the competitive university must 
conciliate. But in the nature of the case, within the range of sciences named, 
the estimate of the unlearned is necessarily in the wrong.
With the exception of archaeological inquiries and the study of law, as commonly 
pursued, these moral or social sciences are occupied with inquiry into the 
nature of the conventions under which men live, the institutions of society - 
customs, usages, traditions, conventions, canons of conduct, standards of life, 
of taste, of morality and religion, law and order. No faithful inquiry into 
these matters can avoid an air of scepticism as to the stability or [181] 
finality of some one or other among the received articles of institutional 
furniture. An inquiry into the nature and causes, the working and the outcome, 
of this institutional apparatus, will disturb the habitual convictions and 
preconceptions on which they rest, even if the outcome of the inquiry should 
bear no colour of iconoclasm; unless, indeed, the inquirer were so fortunate as 
to start with an inalienable presumption that the received convictions on these 
matters need no inquiry and are eternally right and good; in which case he does 
best to rest content at his point of departure. Scepticism is the beginning of 
science. Herein lies the difference between homiletical exposition and 
scientific inquiry.
Now, on these matters of habit and convention, morality and religion, law and 
order - matters which intimately touch the community's accepted scheme of life - 
all men have convictions; sentimental convictions to which they adhere with an 
instinctive tenacity, and any disturbance of which they resent as a violation of 
fundamental truth. These institutions of society are made up of the habits of 
thought of the people who live under them. The consensus of the unlearned, or 
unscientific, as regards the scientific validity of inquiries which touch these 
matters means little else than the collective expressions of a jealous orthodoxy 
with respect to the articles of the current social creed. One who purports to be 
a scientist in this field can gain popular approval of his scientific capacity, 
particularly the businessmen's approval, only by accepting and confirming 
current convictions regarding those elements of the accepted scheme of life with 
which his science is occupied. Any inquiry which does not lead to corroboration 
of the opinions in vogue among the unlearned is condemned as being spurious and 
dangerously wrong-headed; whereas an unbiassed inquiry into these [182] things, 
of course, neither confirms nor disputes the scheme of things into which it 
inquires. And so, at the best, it falls into the same class with the fabled 
Alexandrine books that either agreed with the Koran or disagreed with it, and 
were therefore either idle or sacrilegious.
Within this field, vulgar sentiment will tolerate a sceptical or non-committal 
attitude toward vulgar convictions only as regards the decorative furnishings, 
not as regards the substance of the views arrived at. Some slight play of 
hazardous phrases about the fringe of the institutional fabric may be tolerated 
by the popular taste, as an element of spice, and as indicating a generous and 
unbiassed mind; but in such cases the conclusive test of scientific competency 
and leadership, in the popular apprehension, is a serene and magniloquent return 
to the orthodox commonplaces, after all such playful excursions. In fact, 
substantially nothing but homiletics and woolgathering will pass popular muster 
as science in this connection.
So it comes about that the men who are by common notoriety held to be the 
leaders in this field of learning, and who therefore are likely to be thrown up 
by official preferment, are such as enlarge on the commonplace and aphoristic 
wisdom of the laity. Not that the official sanction falls unfailingly on the 
paragons of mediocrity; there are many and illustrious exceptions, a fair 
proportion of whom would be illustrious even without the official sanction; and 
in this connection it is in place to recall that business principles have not 
hitherto held undivided and sovereign dominion in this province, and that there 
is even reason to believe that they are not yet coming fully into their own.
These putative leaders of science referred to are, in the common run of cases, 
not men with whom the science will [183] have to count; but by virtue of their 
eligibility as academic spokesmen of the science, they are men with whom their 
contemporaries in the science will have to count. As is shown by the experience 
of the past, they are likely to be well forgotten by the generation that follows 
them, but they are, perforce, equally well remembered by their contemporaries. 
It is not the long-term serviceability of these official scientists that counts 
toward their availability for academic leadership, but their popular prestige. 
They may not be such leaders as the science needs, but they are such exponents 
of opinion as are believed to commend themselves to the tastes of the well-to-do 
laity. A citation of instances would seem invidious, nor, presumably, is it 
called for. The anecdotal history of contemporary events is particularly full at 
this juncture; while to outsiders who are not in a position to appreciate either 
the urgency or the subtlety of the motives of academic expediency in this 
bearing, a recital of illustrative instances might seem either libellous or 
farcical. The exigencies of competitive academic enterprise, especially in its 
relation to the maintenance and increase of endowment, place the executive in a 
very delicate position in this matter and leave little room for squeamish 
deliberation.
At the risk of tedium, it is necessary to push the analysis of businesslike 
motives and their bearing a step farther at this point. It is not simply the 
vulgar, commonplace convictions of the populace that must receive consideration 
in this field of the moral and social sciences, - including such matters as 
religion, sociology, economics, and political science, so-called. What is 
especially to be conciliated by the official scientists is the current range of 
convictions on all these heads among those well-to-do classes from whom the 
institution hopes to draw contri-[184]butions to its endowment, on the one hand, 
and the more reputable part of its undergraduate clientèle, on the other hand. 
Which comes, broadly, to saying that a jealous eye must be had to the views and 
prepossessions prevalent among the respectable, conservative middle class; with 
a particular regard to that more select body of substantial citizens who have 
the disposal of accumulated wealth. This select and substantial element are on 
the whole more conservative, more old-fashioned in their views of what is right, 
good and true, and hold their views on more archaic grounds of conviction, than 
the generality of the vulgar. And within this conservative body, again, it is 
the elderly representatives of the old order that are chiefly to be considered, 
- since it is the honourable custom amonng men of large means not to give largely 
to institutions of learning until late in life.
It is to be accounted one of the meritorious customs of the greater businessmen 
that, one with another, they eventually convert a share of their takings to the 
installation of schools and similar establishments designed to serve and to 
conserve the amenities of civilized life. Usually it is in later life, or as an 
act of leave-taking, that this munificence is exercised. Usually, too, the great 
men who put forth this large munificence do not hamper their bounty with many 
restrictions on the character of the enlightenment which it is to serve. Indeed, 
there is in this respect a certain large modesty and continence customarily 
associated with the large donations. But like other men of force and 
thoughtfulness, the large and elderly businessmen have well-assured convictions 
and preferences; and as is the case with other men of the passing generation, so 
with the superannuated businessmen, their convictions and preferences fall out 
on the side of the old order rather than contrariwise. A wise academic [185] 
policy, conducted by an executive looking to the fiscal interests of the 
university, will aim not to alienate the affections of the large businessmen of 
a ripe age, by harbouring specialists whose inquires are likely to traverse 
these old-settled convictions in the social, economic, political, or religious 
domain. It is bad business policy to create unnecessary annoyance. So it comes 
about that the habitual munificence of the captains of industry who have reached 
their term will have grave consequences for that range of academic science that 
is occupied with matters on which they hold convictions.(3*)
There results a genial endeavour to keep step with the moribund captains of 
industry and the relics of the wealthy dead. Remotely by force of a worldly-wise 
appointing power, proximately by force of the good taste and sober sense of 
well-chosen incumbents, something of filial piety comes to pervade the academic 
handling of those institutional phenomena that touch the sentiments of the 
passing generation. Hence it comes that current academic work in the province of 
the social, political, and economic sciences, as well as in the sciences that 
touch the religious interest, has a larger reputation for assurance and dignity 
than for an incisive canvassing of the available material.
Critics of the latterday university policies have from time to time called 
attention to an apparent reluctance on the part of these academic scientists to 
encounter present-day facts hand-to-hand, or to trace out the causes to which 
[186] current conditions are due. Distempered critics have even alleged that the 
academic leaders in the social sciences are held under some constraint, as 
being, in some sort, in the pay of the well-to-do conservative element; that 
they are thereby incapacitated from following up any inquiry to its logical 
conclusion, in case the conclusion might appear to traverse the interest or the 
opinions of those on whom these leaders are in this way pecuniarily dependent.
Now, it may be conceded without violence to notorious facts, that these official 
leaders of science do commonly reach conclusions innocuous to the existing law 
and order, particularly with respect to religion, ownership, and the 
distribution of wealth. But this need imply no constraint, nor even any peculiar 
degree of tact, much less a moral obliquity. It may confidently be asserted, 
without fear of contradiction from their side, that the official leaders in this 
province of academic research and indoctrination are, commonly, in no way 
hindered from pushing their researches with full freedom and to the limit of 
their capacity; and that they are likewise free to give the fullest expression 
to any conclusions or convictions to which their inquiries may carry them. That 
they are able to do so is a fortunate circumstance, due to the fact that their 
intellectual horizon is bounded by the same limits of commonplace insight and 
preconceptions as are the prevailing opinions of the conservative middle class. 
That is to say, a large and aggressive mediocrity is the prime qualification for 
a leader of science in these lines, if his leadership is to gain academic 
authentication.
All this may seem too much like loose generality. With a view to such precision 
as the case admits, it may be remarked that this province of academic science as 
habitually pursued, is commonly occupied with questions [187] of what ought to 
be done, rather than with theories of the genesis and causation of the present-
day state of things, or with questions as to what the present-day drift of 
things may be, as determined by the causes at work. As it does in popular 
speculation, so also in this academic quasi-science, the interest centres on 
what ought to be done to improve conditions and to conserve those usages and 
conventions that have by habit been imbedded in the received scheme of use and 
wont, and so have come to be found good and right. It is of the essence of 
popular speculations on this range of topics that they are focussed on questions 
of use; that they are of a teleological order; that they look to the expediency 
of the observed facts and to their exploitation, rather than to a scientific 
explanation of them. This attitude, of course, is the attitude of expediency and 
homiletics, not of scientific inquiry.
A single illustrative instance of the prevalence of this animus in the academic 
social sciences may be in place. It is usual among economists, e.g., to make 
much of the proposition that economics is an "art" - the art of expedient 
management of the material means of life; and further that the justification of 
economic theory lies in its serviceability in this respect. Such a quasi-science 
necessarily takes the current situation for granted as a permanent state of 
things; to be corrected and brought back into its normal routine in case of 
aberration, and to be safeguarded with apologetic defence at points where it is 
not working to the satisfaction of all parties. It is a "science" of complaisant 
interpretations, apologies, and projected remedies.
The academic leaders in such a quasi-science should be gifted with the 
aspirations and limitations that so show up in its pursuit. Their fitness in 
respect of this conformity to the known middle-class animus and apprehension of 
[188] truth may, as it expediently should, be considered when their selection 
for academic office and rank is under advisement; but, provided the choice be a 
wise one, there need be no shadow of constraint during their incumbency. The 
incumbent should be endowed with a large capacity for work, particularly for 
"administrative" work, with a lively and enduring interest in the "practical" 
questions that fall within his academic jurisdiction, and with a shrewd sense of 
the fundamental rightness of the existing order of things, social, economic, 
political, and religious. So, by and large, it will be found that these 
accredited leaders of scientific inquiry are fortunate enough not narrowly to 
scrutinize, or to seek particular explanation of, those institutional facts 
which the conservative common sense of the elderly businessman accepts as good 
and final; and since their field of inquiry is precisely this range of 
institutional facts, the consequence is that their leadership in the science 
conduces more to the stability of opinions than to the advancement of knowledge.
The result is by no means that nothing is accomplished in this field of science 
under this leadership of forceful mediocrity, but only that, in so far as this 
leadership decides, the work done lies on this level of mediocrity. Indeed, the 
volume of work done is large and of substantial value, but it runs chiefly on 
compilation of details and on the scrutiny and interpretation of these details 
with a view to their conformity with the approved generalizations of the day 
before yesterday, - generalizations that had time to grow into aphoristic 
commonplaces at a date before the passing generation of businessmen attained 
their majority.
What has just been said of this academic leadership in the social sciences, of 
course, applies only with due qualification. It applies only in so far as the 
principles of com-[189]petitive enterprise control the selection of the 
personnel, and even then only with exceptions. There is no intention to 
depreciate the work of those many eminent scholars, of scientific animus and 
intellectual grasp, whose endeavours are given to this range of inquiry. Its 
application, indeed, is intended to reach no farther than may serve to cover the 
somewhat tactful and quietistic attitude of the moral sciences in the 
universities. As they are cultivated in the great seminaries of learning, these 
sciences are commonly of a somewhat more archaic complexion than the 
contemporary material sciences; they are less iconoclastic, have a greater 
regard for prescriptive authority and authenticity, are more given to rest their 
inquiry on grounds of expediency, as contrasted with grounds of cause and 
effect. They are content to conclude that such and such events are expedient or 
inexpedient, quite as often and as easily as that such are the causes or the 
genetic sequence of the phenomena under discussion. In short, under this 
official leadership these sciences will have an attitude toward their subject of 
inquiry resembling that taken by the material sciences something like a century 
ago.
To the credit of this academic leadership in the social sciences, then, it 
should be said that both the leaders and their disciples apply themselves with 
admirable spirit to these inquiries into the proper, expedient, and normal 
course of events; and that the conclusions arrived at also shed much salutary 
light on what is proper, expedient, and normal in these premises. Inquiries 
carried on in this spirit in the field of human institutions belong, of course, 
in the category of worldly wisdom rather than of science. "Practical" questions 
occupy these scientists in great part, and practical, or utilitarian, 
considerations guide the course of the inquiry and shape the system of 
generaliza-[190]tions in these sciences, to a much greater extent than in the 
material sciences with which they are here contrasted. An alert sense of the 
practical value of their inquiries and their teaching is one of the chief 
requisites for official recognition in the scientists who occupy themselves with 
these matters, and it is one of the chief characteristics of their work. So 
that, in so far as it all conforms to the principles of competitive business, 
the line of demarcation between worldly wisdom and theoretical validity becomes 
peculiarly indistinct in this province of science. And, it may be remarked by 
the way, the influence of this academic science, both in its discipline and in 
its tenets, appears to be wholly salutary; it conduces, on the whole, to a safe 
and sane, if not an enthusiastic, acceptance of things as they are, without 
undue curiosity as to why they are such.
What has here been said of the place and use of the scientist under the current 
régime of competitive enterprise describes what should follow from the 
unrestrained dominion of business principles in academic policy, rather than 
what has actually been accomplished in any concrete case; it presents an ideal 
situation rather than a relation of events, though without losing touch with 
current facts at any point. The run of the facts is, in effect, a compromise 
between the scholar's ideals and those of business, in such a way that the 
ideals of scholarship are yielding ground, in an uncertain and varying degree, 
before the pressure of businesslike exigencies.
NOTES:
1. Cf. also J. J. Chapman, paper on "Professional Ethics," in University 
Control, as above, for an estimate of the inefficiency of academic opinion as a 
corrective of the executive power on his head.
2. "The lambs play always, they know no better,
They are only one times one."
3. "He was a trusted and efficient employé of an institution made possible and 
maintained by men of great wealth, men who not only live on the interest of 
their money, but who expend millions in the endowment of colleges and 
universities in which enthusiastic young educators ... find lucrative and 
honourable employment." - Editorial on the dismissal of Dr. Nearing, in the 
Minneapolis Journal, August 11, 1915.

[191]
CHAPTER VII
Vocational Training
In this latterday academic enterprise, that looks so shrewdly to practical 
expediency, "vocational training" has, quite as a matter of course, become a 
conspicuous feature. The adjective is a new one, installed expressly to 
designate this line of endeavour, in the jargon of the educators; and it carries 
a note of euphemism. "Vocational training" is training for proficiency in some 
gainful occupation, and it has no connection with the higher learning, beyond 
that juxtaposition given it by the inclusion of vocational schools in the same 
corporation with the university; and its spokesmen in the university 
establishments accordingly take an apologetically aggressive attitude in 
advocating its claims. Educational enterprise of this kind has, somewhat 
incontinently, extended the scope of the corporation of learning by creating, 
"annexing," or "affiliating" many establishments that properly lie outside the 
academic field and deal with matters foreign to the academic interest, - fitting 
schools, high-schools, technological, manual and other training schools for 
mechanical, engineering and other industrial pursuits, professional schools of 
divers kinds, music schools, art schools, summer schools, schools of "domestic 
science," "domestic economy," "home economics", (in short, housekeeping), 
schools for the special training of secondary-school teachers, and even schools 
that are avowedly of primary grade; while a variety of "university extension" 
bureaux have [192] also been installed, to comfort and edify the unlearned with 
lyceum lectures, to dispense erudition by mail-order, and to maintain some 
putative contact with amateur scholars and dilettanti beyond the pale.
On its face, this enterprise in assorted education simulates the precedents 
given by the larger modern business coalitions, which frequently bring under one 
general business management a considerable number and variety of industrial 
plants. Doubtless a boyish imitation of such business enterprise has had its 
share in the propagation of these educational excursions. It all has an 
histrionic air, such as would suggest that its use, at least in good part, might 
be to serve as an outlet for the ambition and energies of an executive gifted 
with a penchant for large and difficult undertakings, and with scant insight 
into the needs and opportunities of a corporation of the higher learning, and 
who might therefore be carried off his scholastic footing by the glamour of the 
exploits of the trust-makers. No doubt, the histrionic proclivities of the 
executive, backed by a similar sensibility to dramatic effect on the part of 
their staff and of the governing boards, must be held accountable for much of 
this headlong propensity to do many other things half-way rather than do the 
work well that is already in hand. But this visible histrionic sensibility, and 
the glamour of great deeds, will by no means wholly account for current 
university enterprise along this line; not even when there is added the urgent 
competitive need of a show of magnitude, such as besets all the universities; 
nor do these several lines of motivation account for the particular direction so 
taken by these excursions in partes infidelium. At the same time, reasons of 
scholarship or science plainly have no part in the movement.
Apart from such executive weakness for spectacular [193] magnitude, and the 
competitive need of formidable statistics, the prime mover in the case is 
presumably the current unreflecting propensity to make much of all things that 
bear the signature of the "practical." These various projections of university 
enterprise uniformly make some plausible claim of that nature. Any extension of 
the corporation's activity can be more readily effected, is accepted more as an 
expedient matter of course, if it promises to have such a "practical" value. 
"Practical" in this connection means useful for private gain; it need imply 
nothing in the way of serviceability to the common good.
The same spirit shows itself also in a ceaseless revision of the schedule of 
instruction offered by the collegiate or undergraduate division as such, where 
it leads to a multiplication of courses desired to give or to lead up to 
vocational training. So that practical instruction, in the sense indicated, is 
continually thrown more into the foreground in the courses offered, as well as 
in the solicitude of the various administrative boards, bureaux and committees 
that have to do with the organization and management of the academic machinery.
As has already been remarked, these directive boards, committees, and chiefs of 
bureau are chosen, in great part, for their businesslike efficiency, because 
they are good office-men, with "executive ability"; and the animus of these 
academic businessmen, by so much, becomes the guiding spirit of the corporation 
of learning, and through their control it acts intimately and pervasively to 
order the scope and method of academic instruction. This permeation of the 
university's everyday activity by the principles of competitive business is less 
visible to outsiders than the various lines of extraneous enterprise already 
spoken of, but it touches the work within the uni-[194]versity proper even more 
radically and insistently; although, it is true, it affects the collegiate 
(undergraduate) instruction more immediately than what is fairly to be classed 
as university work. The consequences are plain. Business proficiency is put in 
the place of learning. It is said by advocates of this move that learning is 
hereby given a more practical bent; which is substantially a contradiction in 
terms. It is a case not of assimilation, but of displacement and substitution, 
garnished with circumlocution of a more or less ingenuous kind.

Historically, in point of derivation and early growth, this movement for 
vocational training is closely related to the American system of "electives" in 
college instruction, if it may not rather be said to be a direct outgrowth of 
that pedagogical expedient.(1*) It dates back approximately to the same period 
for its beginnings, and much [195] of the arguments adduced in its favour are 
substantially the same as have been found convincing for the system of 
electives. Under the elective system a considerable and increasing freedom has 
been allowed the student in the choice of what he will include in his 
curriculum; so that the colleges have in this way come to refer the choice of 
topics in good part to the guidance of the student's own interest. To meet the 
resulting range and diversity of demands, an increasing variety of courses has 
been offered, at the same time that a narrower specialization has also taken 
effect in much of the instruction offered. Among the other leadings of interest 
among students, and affecting their choice of electives, has also been the 
laudable practical interest that these young men take in their own prospective 
material success.(2*) So that this - academically speaking, extraneous - 
interest has come to mingle and take rank with the scholarly interests proper in 
shaping the schedule of instruction. A decisive voice in the ordering of the 
affairs of the higher learning has so been given to the novices, or rather to 
the untutored probationers of the undergraduate schools, whose entrance on a 
career of scholarship is yet a matter of speculative probability at the best.
Those who have spoken for an extensive range of electives have in a very 
appreciable measure made use of that expedient as a means of displacing what 
they have regarded as obsolete or dispensable items in the traditional college 
curriculum. In so advocating a wider range and freedom of choice, they have 
spoken for the new courses of instruction as being equally competent with the 
old in point of discipline and cultural value; and they have commonly not 
omitted to claim - somewhat in the [196] way of an obiter dictum, perhaps - that 
these newer and more vital topics, whose claims they advocate, have also the 
peculiar merit of conducing in a special degree to good citizenship and the 
material welfare of the community. Such a line of argument has found immediate 
response among those pragmatic spirits within whose horizon "value" is 
synonymous with "pecuniary value," and to whom good citizenship means 
proficiency in competitive business. So it has come about that, while the 
initial purpose of the elective system appears to have been the sharpening of 
the students' scholarly interests and the cultivation of a more liberal 
scholarship, it has by force of circumstances served to propagate a movement at 
cross purposes with all scholarly aspiration.
All this advocacy of the practical in education has fallen in with the 
aspirations of such young men as are eager to find gratuitous help toward a 
gainful career, as well as with the desires of parents who are anxious to see 
their sons equipped for material success; and not least has it appealed to the 
sensibilities of those substantial citizens who are already established in 
business and feel the need of a free supply of trained subordinates at 
reasonable wages. The last mentioned is the more substantial of these incentives 
to gratuitous vocational training, coming in, as it does, with the endorsement 
of the community's most respected and most influential men. Whether it is 
training in any of the various lines of engineering, in commerce, in journalism, 
or in the mechanic and manual trades, the output of trained men from these 
vocational schools goes, in the main, to supply trained employés for concerns 
already profitably established in such lines of business as find use for this 
class of men; and through the gratuitous, or half gratuitous, opportunities 
offered by these schools, this needed supply of [197] trained employés comes to 
the business concerns in question at a rate of wages lower than what they would 
have to pay in the absence of such gratuitous instruction.
Not that these substantial citizens, whose word counts for so much in 
commendation of practical education, need be greatly moved by selfish 
consideration of this increased ease in procuring skilled labour for use in 
their own pursuit of gain; but the increased and cheaper supply of such skilled 
workmen is "good for business," and, in the common sense estimation of these 
conservative businessmen, what is good for business is good, without 
reservation. What is good for business is felt to be serviceable for the common 
good; and no closer scrutiny is commonly given to that matter. While any closer 
scrutiny would doubtless throw serious doubt on this general proposition, such 
scrutiny can not but be distasteful to the successful businessmen; since it 
would unavoidably also throw a shadow of doubt on the meritoriousness of that 
business traffic in which they have achieved their success and to which they owe 
their preferential standing in the community.
In this high rating of things practical the captains of industry are also 
substantially at one with the current common-sense award of the vulgar, so that 
their advocacy of practical education carries the weight of a self-evident 
principle. It is true, in the long run and on sober reflection the award of 
civilized common sense runs to the effect that knowledge is more to be desired 
than things of price; but at the same time the superficial and transient workday 
sense of daily needs - the "snap judgment" of the vulgar - driven by the hard 
usage of competitive bread-winning, says that a gainful occupation is the first 
requisite of human life; and accepting it without much question as the first 
requisite, the vulgar allow it un-[198]critically to stand as the chief or sole 
and that is worth an effort. And in so doing they are not so far out of their 
bearings; for to the common man, under the competitive system, there is but a 
scant margin of energy or interest left over and disposable for other ends after 
the instant needs of bread-winning have been met.
Proficiency and single-mindedness in the pursuit of private gain is something 
that can readily be appreciated by all men who have had the usual training given 
by the modern system of competitive gain and competitive spending. Nothing is so 
instantly recognized as being of great urgency, always and everywhere, under 
this modern, pecuniary scheme of things. So that, without reflection and as a 
matter of course, the first and gravest question of any general bearing in any 
connection has come to be that classic of worldly wisdom: What profiteth it a 
man? and the answer is, just as uncritically, sought in terms of pecuniary gain. 
And the men to whom has been entrusted the custody of that cultural heritage of 
mankind that can not be bought with a price, make haste to play up to this snap 
judgment of the vulgar, and so keep them from calling to mind, on second 
thought, what it is that they, after all, value more highly than the means of 
competitive spending.
Concomitant with this growing insistence on vocational training in the schools, 
and with this restless endeavour of the academic authorities to gratify the 
demand, there has also come an increasing habitual inclination of the same 
uncritical character among academic men to value all academic work in terms of 
livelihood or of earning capacity.(3*) The question has been asked, more and 
more [199] urgently and openly, What is the use of all this knowledge?(4*) 
Pushed by this popular prejudice, and themselves also 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 devised 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 a means to private gain, nor that of an 
intermediate step in "the roundabout process of the production of goods."
As a motto for the scholars' craft, Scientia pecuniae ancillans is nowise more 
seemly than the Schoolmen's Philosophia theologiae ancillans.(5*) Yet such 
inroads have pecuniary habits of valuation made even within the precincts of the 
corporation of learning, that university men, [200] - and even the scholarly 
ones among them, - are no more than half ashamed of such a parcel of fatuity. 
And relatively few among university executives have not, within the past few 
years, taken occasion to plead the merits of academic training as a business 
proposition. The man of the world - that is to say, of the business world puts 
the question, What is the use of this learning? and the men who speak for 
learning, and even the scholars occupied with the "humanities," are at pains to 
find some colourable answer that shall satisfy the worldly-wise that this 
learning for which they speak is in some way useful for pecuniary gain.(6*)
If he were not himself infected with the pragmatism of the market-place, the 
scholar's answer would have to be. Get thee behind me!

Benjamin Franklin - high-bred pragmatist that he was - once put away such a 
question with the rejoinder: What is the use of a baby? To civilized men - with 
the equivocal exception of the warlike politicians - this latter question seems 
foolish, criminally foolish. But there once was a time, in the high days of 
barbarism, when thoughtful men were ready to canvass that question with as naive 
a gravity as this other question, of the use of learning, is canvassed by the 
substantial citizens of the present day. At the period covered by that chapter 
in ancient history, a child was, in a way, an article of equipment for the up-
keep of the family and its prestige, and [201] more remotely for the support of 
the sovereign and his prestige. So that a male child would be rated as 
indubitably worth while if he gave promise of growing into a robust and 
contentious man. If the infant were a girl, or if he gave no promise of becoming 
an effective disturber of the peace, the use or expediency of rearing the child 
would become a matter for deliberation; and not infrequently the finding of 
those old-time utilitarians was adverse, and the investment was cancelled. The 
habit of so deliberating on the pragmatic advisability of child-life has been 
lost, latterly; or at any rate such of the latterday utilitarians as may still 
entertain a question of this kind in any concrete case are ashamed to have it 
spoken of nakedly. Witness the lame but irrepressible sentimental protest 
against the Malthusian doctrine of population.
It is true, in out-of-the-way corners and on the lower levels - and on the 
higher levels of imperial politics where men have not learned to shrink from 
shameful devices, the question of children and of the birth-rate is still 
sometimes debated as a question of the presumptive use of offspring for some 
ulterior end. And there may still be found those who are touched by the 
reflection that a child born may become a valuable asset as a support for the 
parents' old age. Such a pecuniary rating of the parental relation, which values 
children as a speculative means of gain, may still be met with. But wherever 
modern civilization has made its way at all effectually, such a provident rating 
of offspring is not met with in good company. Latterday common sense does not 
countenance it.
Not that a question of expediency is no longer entertained, touching this matter 
of children, but it is no longer the patriarchal-barbarian question as to 
eventual gains that may be expected to accrue to the parent or the [202] family. 
Except in the view of those statesmen of the barbarian line who see the matter 
of birth-rate from the higher ground of dynastic politics, a child born is not 
rated as a means, but as an end. At least conventionally, it is no longer a 
question of pecuniary gain for the parent but of expediency for the child. No 
mother asks herself if her child will pay.
Civilized men shrink from anything like rating children as a contrivance for use 
in the "round-about process of the production of goods." And in much the same 
spirit, and in the last analysis on much the same grounds, although in a less 
secure and more loosely speculative fashion, men also look to the higher 
learning as the ripe fulfilment of material competency, rather than as a means 
to material success. In their thoughtful intervals, the most businesslike 
pragmatists will avow such an ideal. But in workday detail, when the question 
turns concretely on the advisability of the higher education, the workday habit 
of pecuniary traffic asserts itself, and the matter is then likely to be argued 
in pecuniary terms. The barbarian animus, habitual to the quest of gain, 
reverts, and the deliberation turns on the gainfulness of this education, which 
has in all sobriety been acknowledged the due end of culture and endeavour. So 
that, in working out the details, this end of living is made a means, and the 
means is made an end.
No doubt, what chiefly urges men to the pursuit of knowledge is their native 
bent of curiosity, - an impulsive proclivity to master the logic of facts; just 
as the chief incentive to the achievement of children has, no doubt, always been 
the parental bent. But very much as the boorish element in the present and 
recent generations will let the pecuniary use of children come in as a large 
subsidiary ground of decision, and as they have even avowed [203] this to be 
their chief concern in the matter; so, in a like spirit, men trained to the 
business system of competitive gain and competitive spending will not be content 
to find that they can afford the quest of that knowledge which their human 
propensity incites them to cultivate, but they must back this propensity with a 
shamefaced apology for education on the plea of its gainfulness.
What is here said of the businesslike spirit of the latterday "educators" is not 
to be taken as reflecting disparagingly on them or their endeavours. They 
respond to the call of the times as best they can. That they do so, and that the 
call of the times is of this character, is a fact of the current drift of 
things; which one may commend or deprecate according as one has the fortune to 
fall in with one or the other side of the case; that is to say according to 
one's habitual bent; but in any event it is to be taken as a fact of the 
latterday situation, and a factor of some force and permanence in the drift of 
things academic, for the present and the calculable future. It means a more or 
less effectual further diversion of interest and support from science and 
scholarship to the competitive acquisition of wealth, and therefore also to its 
competitive consumption. Through such a diversion of energy and attention in the 
schools, the pecuniary animus at large, and pecuniary standards of worth and 
value, stand to gain, more or less, at the cost of those other virtues that are, 
by the accepted tradition of modern Christendom, held to be of graver and more 
enduring import. It means an endeavour to substitute the pursuit of gain and 
expenditure in place of the pursuit of knowledge, as the focus of interest and 
the objective end in the modern intellectual life.

This incursion of pecuniary ideals in academic policy [204] is seen at its 
broadest and baldest in the Schools of Commerce, - "Commerce and Politics," 
"Business Training," "Commerce and Administration," "Commerce and Finance," or 
whatever may be the phrase selected to designate the supersession of learning by 
worldly wisdom. Facility in competitive business is to take the place of 
scholarship, as the goal of university training, because, it is alleged, the 
former is the more useful. The ruling interest of Christendom, in this view, is 
pecuniary gain. And training for commercial management stands to this ruling 
interest of the modern community in a relation analogous to that in which 
theology and homiletics stood to the ruling interest in those earlier times when 
the salvation of men's souls was the prime object of solicitude. Such a seminary 
of business has something of a sacerdotal dignity. It is the appointed keeper of 
the higher business animus.(7*)
Such a school, with its corps of instructors and its equipment, stands in the 
university on a tenure similar to that of the divinity school. Both schools are 
equally extraneous to that "intellectual enterprise" in behalf of which, 
ostensibly, the university is maintained. But while the divinity school belongs 
to the old order and is losing [205] its preferential hold on the corporation of 
learning, the school of commerce belongs to the new order and is gaining ground. 
The primacy among pragmatic interests has passed from religion to business, and 
the school of commerce is the exponent and expositor of this primacy. It is the 
perfect flower of the secularization of the universities. And as has already 
been remarked above, there is also a wide-sweeping movement afoot to bend the 
ordinary curriculum of the higher schools to the service of this cult of 
business principles, and so to make the ordinary instruction converge to the 
advancement of business enterprise, very much as it was once dutifully arranged 
that the higher instruction should be subservient to religious teaching and 
consonant with the demands of devout observances and creeds.
It is not that the College of Commerce stands alone as the exponent of worldly 
wisdom in the modern universities; nor is its position in this respect singular, 
except in the degree of its remoteness from all properly academic interests. 
Other training schools, as in engineering and in the other professions, belong 
under the same general category of practical aims, as contrasted with the aims 
of the higher learning. But the College of Commerce stands out pre-eminent among 
these various training schools in two respects: (a) While the great proportion 
of training for the other professions draws largely on the results of modern 
science for ways and means, and therefore includes or presumes a degree of 
familiarity with the work, aims and methods of the sciences, so that these 
schools have so much of a bond of community with the higher learning, the school 
of commerce on the other hand need scarcely take cognizance of the achievements 
of science, nor need it presume any degree of acquaintance on the [206] part of 
its students or adepts with the matter or logic of the sciences;(8*) (b) in 
varying degrees, the proficiency given by training in the other professional 
schools, and required for the efficient pursuit of the other professions, may be 
serviceable to the community at large; whereas the business proficiency 
inculcated by the schools of commerce has no such serviceability, being directed 
singly to a facile command of the ways and means of private gain.(9*) [207] The 
training that leads up to the several other professions, of course, varies 
greatly in respect of its draught on scientific information, as well as in the 
degree of its serviceability to the community; some of the professions, as, 
e.g., Law, approach very close to the character of business training, both in 
the unscientific and unscholarly nature of the required training and in their 
uselessness to the community; while others, as, e.g., Medicine and the various 
lines of engineering, differ widely from commercial training in both of these 
respects. With the main exception of Law (and, some would add, of Divinity?) the 
professional schools train men for work that is of [208] some substantial use to 
the community at large. This is particularly true of the technological schools. 
But while the technological schools may be occupied with work that is of 
substantial use, and while they may draw more or less extensively on the 
sciences for their materials and even for their methods, they can not, for all 
that, claim standing in the university on the ground of that disinterested 
intellectual enterprise which is the university's peculiar domain.
The professional knowledge and skill of physicians, surgeons, dentists, 
pharmacists, agriculturists, engineers of all kinds, perhaps even of 
journalists, is of some use to the community at large, at the same time that it 
may be profitable to the bearers of it. The community has a substantial interest 
in the adequate training of these men, although it is not that intellectual 
interest that attaches to science and scholarship. But such is not the case with 
the training designed to give proficiency in business. No gain comes to the 
community at large from increasing the business proficiency of any number of its 
young men. There are already much too many of these businessmen, much too astute 
and proficient in their calling, for the common good. A higher average business 
efficiency simply raises activity and avidity in business to a higher average 
pitch of skill and fervour, with very little other material result than a 
redistribution of ownership; since business is occupied with the competitive 
wealth, not with its production. It is only by a euphemistic metaphor that we 
are accustomed to speak of the businessmen as producers of goods. Gains due to 
such efficiency are differential gains only. They are a differential as against 
other businessmen on the one hand, and as against the rest of the community on 
the other hand. The work of the College of Commerce, accordingly, is a [209] 
peculiarly futile line of endeavour for any public institution, in that it 
serves neither the intellectual advancement nor the material welfare of the 
community.
The greater the number and the higher the proficiency of the community's 
businessmen, other things equal, the worse must the rest of the community come 
off in that game of skilled bargaining and shrewd management by which the 
businessmen get their gains. Gratuitous or partly gratuitous training for 
business will presumably increase the number of highly proficient businessmen. 
As the old-fashioned economists would express it, it will increase the number of 
"middlemen," of men who "live by their wits." At the same time it should 
presumably increase the average efficiency of this increased number. The outcome 
should be that the resulting body of businessmen will be able, between them, to 
secure a larger proportion of the aggregate wealth of the community; leaving the 
rest of the community poorer by that much, except for that (extremely doubtful) 
amount by which shrewd business management is likely to increase the material 
wealth-producing capacity of the community. Any such presumed increase of 
wealth-producing capacity is an incidental concomitant of business traffic, and 
in the nature of the case it can not equal the aggregate increased gain that 
goes to the businessmen. At the best the question as to the effect which such an 
aggregate increased business efficiency will have on the community's material 
welfare is a question of how large the net loss will be; that it will entail a 
net loss on the community at large is in fact not an open question.
A college of commerce is designed to serve an emulative purpose only - 
individual gain regardless of, or at the cost of, the community at large - and 
it is, therefore, peculiarly incompatible with the collective cultural pur-
[210]pose of the university. It belongs in the corporation of learning no more 
than a department of athletics.(10*) Both alike give training that is of no use 
to the community, except, perhaps, as a sentimental excitement. Neither business 
proficiency nor proficiency in athletic contests need be decried, of course. 
They have their value, to the businessmen and to the athletes, respectively, 
chiefly as a means of livelihood at the cost of the rest of the community, and 
it is to be presumed that they are worth while to those who go in for that sort 
of thing. Both alike are related to the legitimate ends of the university as a 
drain on its resources and an impairment of its scholarly animus. As related to 
the ostensible purposes of a university, therefore, the support and conduct of 
such schools at the expense of the universities is to be construed as a breach 
of trust.
What has just been said of the schools of commerce is, of course, true also of 
the other training schools com-[211]prised in this latterday university policy, 
in the degree in which these others aim at the like emulative and unscholarly 
results. It holds true of the law schools, e.g., typically and more largely than 
of the generality of professional and technical schools. Both in point of the 
purely competitive value of their training and of the unscientific character of 
their work, the law schools are in very much the same case as the schools of 
commerce; and, no doubt, the accepted inclusion of law schools in the university 
corporation has made the intrusion of the schools of commerce much easier than 
it otherwise would have been. The law school's inclusion in the university 
corporation has the countenance of ancient tradition, it comes down as an 
authentic usage from the mediaeval era of European education, and from the pre-
history of the American universities. But in point of substantial merit the law 
school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or 
dancing. This is particularly true of the American law schools, in which the 
Austinian conception of law is followed, and it is more particularly true the 
more consistently the "case method" is adhered to. These schools devote 
themselves with great singleness to the training of practitioners, as distinct 
from jurists; and their teachers stand in a relation to their students analogous 
to that in which the "coaches" stand to the athletes. What is had in view is the 
exigencies, expedients and strategy of successful practice; and not so much a 
grasp of even those quasi-scientific articles of metaphysics that lie at the 
root of the legal system. What is required and inculcated in the way of a 
knowledge of these elements of law is a familiarity with their strategic use.
The profession of the Law is, of course, an honourable profession, and it is 
doubtless believed by its apologists to be a useful profession, on the whole; 
but a body of law-[212]yers somewhat less numerous, and with a lower average 
proficiency in legal subtleties and expedients, would unquestionably be quite as 
serviceable to the community at large as a larger number of such men with a 
higher efficiency; at the same time they would be less costly, both as to 
initial cost and as to the expenses of maintenance that come of that excessive 
volume and retardation of litigation due to an extreme facility in legal 
technique on the part of the members of the bar.
It will also be found true that both the schools of law and those of commerce, 
and in a less degree the other vocational schools, serve the advantage of one 
class as against another. In the measure in which these schools accomplish what 
they aim at, they increase the advantage of such men as already have some 
advantage over the common run. The instruction is half-way gratuitous; that is 
the purpose of placing these schools on a foundation or maintaining them at the 
public expense. It is presumed to be worth more than its cost to the students. 
The fees and other incidental expenses do not nearly cover the cost of the 
schools; otherwise no foundation or support from the public funds would be 
required, and the universities would have no colourable excuse for going into 
this field. But even if the instruction and facilities offered by these schools 
are virtually gratuitous, yet the fees and incidental expenses, together with 
the expenditure of time and the cost of living required for a residence at the 
schools, make up so considerable an item of expense as effectually to exclude 
the majority of those young men who might otherwise be inclined to avail 
themselves of these advantages. In effect, none can afford the time and expense 
of this business training, whether in Commerce, Law, or the other professions, 
except those who are already possessed of something more [213] than the average 
wealth or average income; and none, presumably, take kindly to this training, in 
commerce or law, e.g., except those who already have something more than the 
average taste and aptitude for business traffic, or who have a promising 
"opening" of this character in sight. So that this training that is desired to 
serve the private advantage of commercial students is, for the greater part, 
extended to a select body of young men; only such applicants being eligible, in 
effect, as do not on any showing need this gratuity.
In proportion to the work which it undertakes, the College of Commerce is - or 
it would be if it lived up to its professions - the most expensive branch of the 
university corporation. In this connection the case of the law school offers a 
significant object-lesson of what to expect in the further growth of the schools 
of commerce. The law school is of older standing and maturer growth, at the same 
time that its aims and circumstances are of much the same general character as 
those that condition the schools of commerce; and it is therefore to be taken as 
indicating something of what must be looked for in the college of commerce if it 
is to do the work for which it is established. The indications, then, are (a) 
that the instruction in the field of commercial training may be expected 
gradually to fall into a more rigidly drawn curriculum, which will discard all 
irrelevant theoretical excursions and will diverge more and more widely from the 
ways of scientific inquiry, in proportion as experience and tactful organization 
bring the school to a maturer insight into its purposes and a more consistent 
adherence to its chief purpose of training expert men for the higher business 
practice; and (b) that the personnel of its staff must increasingly be drawn 
from among the successful businessmen, rather than from men of academic 
training.
[214] Among the immediate consequences of this latter feature, as shown in the 
example of the law schools, is a relatively high cost. The schedule of salaries 
in the law schools attached to the universities, e.g., runs appreciably higher 
than in the university proper; the reason being, of course, that men suitable 
efficiently to serve as instructors and directive officials in a school of law 
are almost necessarily men whose services in the practice of the law would 
command a high rate of pay. What is needed in the law school (as in the school 
of commerce) is men who are practically conversant with the ways and means of 
earning large fees, - that being the point of it all. Indeed, the scale of pay 
which their services will command in the open market is the chief and ordinary 
test of their fitness for the work of instruction. The salaries paid these men 
of affairs, who have so been diverted to the service of the schools, is commonly 
some multiple of the salary assigned to men of a comparable ability and 
attainments in the academic work proper. The academic rank assigned them is also 
necessarily, and for the like reason, commensurate with their higher scale of 
pay; all of which throws an undue preponderance of discretion and authority into 
the hands of these men of affairs, and so introduces a disproportionate bias in 
favour of unscientific and unscholarly aims and ideals in the university at 
large.
Judged by the example of the law schools, then, the college of commerce, if it 
is to live and thrive, may be counted on to divert a much larger body of funds 
from legitimate university uses, and to create more of a bias hostile to 
scholarly and scientific work in the academic body, than the mere numerical 
showing of its staff would suggest. It is fairly to be expected that capable men 
of affairs, drawn from the traffic of successful business for this service, will 
require even a higher rate of pay, at [215] the same time that they will be even 
more cordially out of sympathy with the ideals of scholarship, than the 
personnel of the law schools. Such will necessarily be the outcome, if these 
schools are at all effectually to serve the purpose for which they are created.
But for the present, as matters stand now, near the inception of this enterprise 
in training masters of gain, such an outcome has not been reached. Neither have 
the schools of commerce yet been placed on such a footing of expensiveness and 
authoritative discretion as the high sanction of the quest of gain would seem 
properly to assign them; nor are they, as at present organized and equipped, at 
all eminently fit to carry out the work entrusted to their care. Commonly, it is 
to be admitted, the men selected for the staff are men of some academic 
training, rather than men of affairs who have shown evidence of fitness to give 
counsel and instruction, by eminently gainful success in business. They are, 
indeed, commonly men of moderate rating in the academic community, and are 
vested with a moderate rank and authority; and the emoluments of these offices 
are also such as attach to positions of a middling grade in academic work, 
instead of being comparable with the gains that come to capable men engaged in 
the large business outside. Yet it is from among these higher grades of expert 
businessmen outside that the schools of commerce must draw their staff of 
instructors and their administrative officers if they are to accomplish the task 
proposed to them. A movement in this direction is already visibly setting in.
It is reasonably to be expected that one or the other result should follow: 
either the college of commerce must remain, somewhat as in practice it now is, 
something in the way of an academic division, with an academic [216] routine and 
standards, and with an unfulfilled ambition to serve the higher needs of 
business training; with a poorly paid staff of nondescript academic men, not 
peculiarly fitted to lead their students into the straight and narrow way of 
business success, nor yet eminently equipped for a theoretical inquiry into the 
phenomena of business traffic and their underlying causes so that the school 
will continue to stand, in effect, as a more or less pedantic and equivocal 
adjunct of a department of economics; or the schools must be endowed and 
organized with a larger and stricter regard to the needs of the higher business 
traffic; with a personnel composed of men of the highest business talent and 
attainments, tempted from such successful business traffic by the offer of 
salaries comparable with those paid the responsible officials of large 
corporations engaged in banking, railroading, and industrial enterprises, - and 
they must also be fitted out with an equipment of a corresponding magnitude and 
liberality.
Apart from a large and costly material equipment, such a college would also, 
under current conditions, have to be provided with a virtually unlimited fund 
for travelling expenses, to carry its staff and its students to the several 
typical seats and centres of business traffic and maintain them there for that 
requisite personal contact with affairs that alone can contribute to a practical 
comprehension of business strategy. In short, the schools would have to meet 
those requirements of training and information which men who today aim to 
prepare themselves for the larger business will commonly spend expensive years 
of apprenticeship to acquire. It is eminently true in business training, very 
much as it is in military strategy, that nothing will take the place of first-
hand observation and personal contact with the processes and procedure involved; 
and such first-hand contact is to be had only at the cost [217] of a more or 
less protracted stay where the various lines of business are carried on.
The creation and maintenance of such a College of Commerce, on such a scale as 
will make it anything more than a dubious make-believe, would manifestly appear 
to be beyond the powers of any existing university. So that the best that can be 
compassed in this way, or that has been achieved, by the means at the disposal 
of any university hitherto, is a cross between a secondary school for bank-
clerks and travelling salesmen and a subsidiary department of economics.
All this applies with gradually lessened force to the other vocational schools, 
occupied with training for occupations that are of more substantial use to the 
community and less widely out of touch with the higher learning. In the light of 
their professions on the one side and the degree of their fulfilment on the 
other, it would be hazardous to guess how far the university directorate in any 
given case is animated with a spontaneous zeal for the furtherance of these 
"practical" aims which the universities so pursue, and how far on the other hand 
it may be a matter of politic management, to bring content to those 
commercially-minded laymen whose good-will is rated as a valuable asset. These 
men of substance have a high appreciation of business efficiency - a species of 
self-respect, and therefore held as a point of honour - and are consequently 
inclined to rate all education in terms of earning-capacity. Failure to meet the 
presumed wishes of the businessmen in this matter, it is apprehended, would mean 
a loss of support in endowment and enrolment. And since endowment and enrolment, 
being the chief elements of visible success, are the two main ends of current 
academic policy, it is incumbent on the directorate to shape their policy 
accordingly.
[218] So the academic authorities face the choice between scholarly efficiency 
and vocational training, and hitherto the result has been equivocal. The 
directorate should presumably be in a position to appreciate the drift of their 
own action, in so diverting the university's work to ends at variance with its 
legitimate purpose; and the effect of such a policy should presumably be 
repugnant to their scholarly tastes, as well as to their sense of right and 
honest living. But the circumstances of their office and tenure leave them 
somewhat helpless, for all their presumed insight and their aversion to this 
malpractice; and these conditions of office require them, as it is commonly 
apprehended, to take active measures for the defeat of learning, - hitherto with 
an equivocal outcome. The schools of commerce, even more than the other 
vocational schools, have been managed somewhat parsimoniously, and the effectual 
results have habitually fallen far short of the clever promises held out in the 
prospectus. The professed purpose of these schools is the training of young men 
to a high proficiency in the larger and more responsible affairs of business, 
but for the present this purpose must apparently remain a speculative, and very 
temperately ingenuous, aspiration, rather than a practicable working programme.
NOTES:
1. "Our professors in the Harvard of the '50s were a set of rather eminent 
scholars and highly respectable men. They attended to their studies with 
commendable assiduity and drudged along in a dreary, humdrum sort of way in a 
stereotyped method of classroom instruction. ...
"And that was the Harvard system. It remains in essence the system still - the 
old, outgrown, pedagogic relation of the large class-recitation room. The only 
variation has been through Eliot's effort to replace it by the yet more 
pernicious system of premature specialization. This is a confusion of the 
college and university functions and constitutes a distinct menace to all true 
higher education. The function of the college is an all-around development, as a 
basis for university specializations. Eliot never grasped that fundamental fact, 
and so he undertook to turn Harvard college into a German university - 
specializing the student at 18. He instituted a system of one-sided contact in 
place of a system based on no contact at all. It is devoutly to be hoped that, 
some day, a glimmer of true light will effect an entrance into the professional 
educator's head. It certainly hadn't done so up to 1906." - Charles Francis 
Adams, An Autobiography.
2. The college student's interest in his studies has shifted from the footing of 
an avocation to that of a vocation.
3. So, e.g., in the later eighties, at the time when the confusion of sentiments 
in this matter of electives and practical academic instruction was reaching its 
height, one of the most largely en-[199]dowed of the late-founded universities set 
out avowedly to bend its forces singly to such instruction as would make for the 
material success of its students; and, moreover, to accomplish this end by an 
untrammelled system of electives, limited only by the general qualification that 
all instruction offered was to be of this pragmatic character. The establishment 
in question, it may be added, has in the course of years run a somewhat 
inglorious career, regard being had to its unexampled opportunities, and has in 
the event come to much the same footing of compromise between learning and 
vocational training, routine and electives, as its contemporaries that have 
approached their present ambiguous position from the contrary direction; except 
that, possibly, scholarship as such is still held in slightly lower esteem among 
the men of this faculty - selected on grounds of their practical bias - than 
among the generality of academic men.
4. "And why the sea is boiling hot,
And whether pigs have wings."
5. Cf. Adam Smith on the "idle curiosity." Moral Sentiments, 1st ed., p. 351 - , 
esp. 355.
6. So, a man eminent as a scholar and in the social sciences has said, not so 
long ago: "The first question I would ask is, has not this learning a large part 
to play in supplementing those practical powers, instincts and sympathies which 
can be developed only in action, only through experience? ... That broader 
training is just what is needed by the higher and more responsible ranks of 
business, both private and public. ... Success in large trading has always 
needed breadth of view."
7. Cf., e.g., Report of a Conference on Commercial Education and Business 
Progress: In connection with the dedication of the Commerce Building, at the 
University of Illinois, 1913. The somewhat raucous note of self-complacency that 
pervades this characteristic document should not be allowed to lessen its value 
as evidence of the spirit for which it speaks. Indeed, whatever it may show, of 
effrontery and disingenuousness, is rather to be taken as of the essence of the 
case. It might prove difficult to find an equally unabashed pronouncement of the 
like volume and consistency put forth under the like academic auspices; but it 
does by no means stand alone, and its perfections should not be counted against 
it.
8. This characterization applies without abatement to the schools of commerce as 
commonly designed at their foundation and set forth in their public 
announcements, and to their work in so far as they live up to their professions. 
At the same time it is to be noted that few of these schools successfully keep 
their work clear of all entanglement with theoretical discussions that have only 
a scientific bearing. And it is also quite feasible to organize a "school of 
commerce" on lines of scientific inquiry with the avowed purpose of dealing with 
business enterprise in its various ramifications as subject matter of 
theoretical investigation; but such is not the avowed aim of the established 
schools of this class, and such is not the actual character of the work carried 
on in these schools, except by inadvertence.
9. It is doubtless within the mark to say that the training given by the 
American schools of commerce is detrimental to the community's material 
interests. In America, even in a more pronounced degree than elsewhere, business 
management centres on financiering and salesmanship; and American commercial 
schools, even in a more pronounced degree than those of other countries, centre 
their attention on proficiency in these matters, because these are the matters 
which the common sense of the American business community knows how to value, 
and on which it insists as indispensable qualifications in its young men. The 
besetting infirmity of the American business community, as witness the many and 
circumstantial disclosures of the "efficiency engineers," and of others who have 
had occasion to speak of the matter, is a notable indifference to the economical 
and mechanically efficient use, exploitation and conservation of equipment and 
resources, coupled with an equally notable want of insight into the 
technological needs and possibilities of the industries which they control. The 
typical American businessman watches the industrial process from ambush, with a 
view to the seizure of any item of value that may be left at loose ends. 
Business strategy is a [207] strategy of "watchful waiting," at the centre of a web; 
very alert and adroit, but remarkably incompetent in the way of anything that 
can properly be called "industrial enterprise."
The concatenation of circumstances that has brought American business enterprise 
to this inglorious posture, and has virtually engrossed the direction of 
business affairs in the hands of men endowed with the spiritual and intellectual 
traits suitable to such prehensile enterprise, can not be gone into here. The 
fact, however, is patent. It should suffice to call to mind the large fact, as 
notorious as it is discreditable, that the American business community has, with 
unexampled freedom, had at its disposal the largest and best body of resources 
that has yet become available to modern industry, in men, materials and 
geographical situation, and that with these means they have achieved something 
doubtfully second-rate, as compared with the industrial achievements of other 
countries less fortunately placed in all material respects.
What the schools of commerce now offer is further specialization along the same 
line of proficiency, to give increased facility in financiering and 
salesmanship. This specialization on commerce is like other specialization in 
that it draws off attention and interest from other lines than those in which 
the specialization falls; thereby widening the candidate's field of ignorance 
while it intensifies his effectiveness within his specialty. The effect, as 
touches the community's interest in the matter, should be an enhancement of the 
candidate's proficiency in all the futile ways and means of salesmanship and 
"conspiracy in restraint of trade." together with a heightened incapacity and 
ignorance bearing on such work as is of material use.
10. Latterly, it appears, the training given by the athletic establishments 
attached to the universities is also coming to have a value as vocational 
training; in that the men so trained and vouched for by these establishments are 
finding lucrative employment as instructors, coaches, masseurs, etc., engaged in 
similar athletic traffic in various schools, public or private. So also, and for 
the same reason, they are found eligible as "muscular Christian" secretaries in 
charge of chapters of the Y. M. C. A. and the like quasi-devout clubs and gilds. 
Indeed in all but the name, the athletic establishments are taking on the 
character of "schools" or "divisions" included under the collective academic 
administration, very much after the fashion of a "School of Education" or a 
"School of Journalism"; and they are in effect "graduating" students in 
Athletics, with due, though hitherto unofficial, certification of proficiency. 
So also, latterly, one meets with proposals, made in good faith, among official 
academic men to allow due "academic credit" for training in athletics and let it 
count toward graduation. By indirection and subreption, of course, much of the 
training given in athletics already does so count.

[219]
CHAPTER VIII
Summary and Trial Balance
As in earlier passages, so here in speaking of profit and loss, the point of 
view taken is neither that of material advantage, whether of the individuals 
concerned or of the community at large, nor that of expediency for the common 
good in respect of prosperity or of morals; nor is the appraisal here ventured 
upon to be taken as an expression of praise or dispraise at large, touching this 
incursion of business principles into the affairs of learning.
By and large, the intrusion of businesslike ideals, aims and methods into this 
field, with all the consequences that follow, may be commendable or the reverse. 
All that is matter for attention and advisement at the hands of such as aim to 
alter, improve, amend or conserve the run of institutional phenomena that goes 
to make up the current situation. The present inquiry bears on the higher 
learning as it comes into this current situation, and on the effect of this 
recourse to business principles upon the pursuit of learning.
Not that this learning is therefore to be taken as necessarily of higher and 
more substantial value than that traffic in competitive gain and competitive 
spending upon which business principles converge, and in which they find their 
consummate expression, - even though it is broadly to be recognized and taken 
account of that such is the deliberate appraisal awarded by the common sense 
[220] of civilized mankind. The profit and loss here spoken for is not profit 
and loss, to mankind or to any given community, in respect of that inclusive 
complex of interests that makes up the balanced total of good and ill; it is 
profit and loss for the cause of learning, simply; and there is here no 
aspiration to pass on ulterior questions. As required by the exigencies of such 
an argument, it is therefore assumed, pro forma, that profit and loss for the 
pursuit of learning is profit and loss without reservation; very much as a 
corporation accountant will audit income and outlay within the affairs of the 
corporation, whereas, qua accountant, he will perforce have nothing to say as to 
the ulterior expediency of the corporation and its affairs in any other bearing.

I.
Business principles take effect in academic affairs most simply, obviously and 
avowably in the way of a businesslike administration of the scholastic routine; 
where they lead immediately to a bureaucratic organization and a system of 
scholastic accountancy. In one form or another, some such administrative 
machinery is a necessity in any large school that is to be managed on a 
centralized plan; as the American schools commonly are, and as, more 
particularly, they aim to be. This necessity is all the more urgent in a school 
that takes over the discipline of a large body of pupils that have not reached 
years of discretion, as is also commonly the case with those American schools 
that claim rank as universities; and the necessity is all the more evident to 
men whose ideal of efficiency is the centralized control exercised through a 
system of accountancy in the modern large business concerns. The larger American 
schools are primarily undergraduate es-[221]tablishments, - with negligible 
exceptions; and under these current American conditions, of excessive numbers, 
such a centralized and bureaucratic administration appears to be indispensable 
for the adequate control of immature and reluctant students; at the same time, 
such an organization conduces to an excessive size. The immediate and visible 
effect of such a large and centralized administrative machinery is, on the 
whole, detrimental to scholarship, even in the undergraduate work; though it 
need not be so in all respects and unequivocally, so far as regards that routine 
training that is embodied in the undergraduate curriculum. But it is at least a 
necessary evil in any school that is of so considerable a size as to preclude 
substantially all close or cordial personal relations between the teachers and 
each of these immature pupils under their charge, as, again, is commonly the 
case with these American undergraduate establishments. Such a system of 
authoritative control, standardization, gradation, accountancy, classification, 
credits and penalties, will necessarily be drawn on stricter lines the more the 
school takes on the character of a house of correction or a penal settlement; in 
which the irresponsible inmates are to be held to a round of distasteful tasks 
and restrained from (conventionally) excessive irregularities of conduct. At the 
same time this recourse to such coercive control and standardization of tasks 
has unavoidably given the schools something of the character of a penal 
settlement.
As intimated above, the ideal of efficiency by force of which a large-scale 
centralized organization commends itself in these premises is that pattern of 
shrewd management whereby a large business concern makes money. The underlying 
business-like presumption accordingly appears to be that learning is a 
merchantable commodity, to be produced on a piece-rate plan, rated, bought and 
sold [222] by standard units, measured, counted and reduced to staple 
equivalence by impersonal, mechanical tests. In all its bearings the work is 
hereby reduced to a mechanistic, statistical consistency, with numerical 
standards and units; which conduces to perfunctory and mediocre work throughout, 
and acts to deter both students and teachers from a free pursuit of knowledge, 
as contrasted with the pursuit of academic credits. So far as this mechanistic 
system goes freely into effect it leads to a substitution of salesmanlike 
proficiency - a balancing of bargains in staple credits - in the place of 
scientific capacity and addiction to study.
The salesmanlike abilities and the men of affairs that so are drawn into the 
academic personnel are, presumably, somewhat under grade in their kind; since 
the pecuniary inducement offered by the schools is rather low as compared with 
the remuneration for office work of a similar character in the common run of 
business occupations, and since businesslike employés of this kind may fairly 
be presumed to go unreservedly to the highest bidder. Yet these more unscholarly 
members of the staff will necessarily be assigned the more responsible and 
discretionary positions in the academic organization; since under such a scheme 
of standardization, accountancy and control, the school becomes primarily a 
bureaucratic organization, and the first and unremitting duties of the staff are 
those of official management and accountancy. The further qualifications 
requisite in the members of the academic staff will be such as make for 
vendibility, - volubility, tactful effrontery, conspicuous conformity to the 
popular taste in all matters of opinion, usage and conventions.
The need of such a businesslike organization asserts itself in somewhat the same 
degree in which the academic policy is guided by considerations of magnitude and 
sta-[223]tistical renown; and this in turn is somewhat closely correlated with 
the extent of discretionary power exercised by the captain of erudition placed 
in control. At the same time, by provocation of the facilities which it offers 
for making an impressive demonstration, such bureaucratic organization will lead 
the university management to bend its energies with somewhat more singleness to 
the parade of magnitude and statistical gains. It also, and in the same 
connection, provokes to a persistent and detailed surveillance and direction of 
the work and manner of life of the academic staff, and so it acts to shut off 
initiative of any kind in the work done.(1*)
Intimately bound up with this bureaucratic officialism [224] and accountancy, 
and working consistently to a similar outcome, is the predilection for 
"practical efficiency" that is to say, for pecuniary success - prevalent in the 
American community.(2*) This predilection is a matter of settled habit, due, no 
doubt, to the fact that preoccupation with business interests characterizes this 
community in an exceptional degree, and that pecuniary habits of thought 
consequently rule popular thinking in a peculiarly uncritical and prescriptive 
fashion. This pecuniary animus falls in with and reinforces the movement for 
academic accountancy, and combines with it to further a so-called "practical" 
bias in all the work of the schools.

It appears, then, that the intrusion of business principles in the universities 
goes to weaken and retard the pursuit of learning, and therefore to defeat the 
ends for which a university is maintained. This result follows, primarily, from 
the substitution of impersonal, mechanical relations, standards and tests, in 
the place of personal conference, guidance and association between teachers and 
students; as also from the imposition of a mechanically standardized routine 
upon the members of the staff, whereby any disinterested preoccupation with 
scholarly or scientific inquiry is thrown into the background and falls into 
abey-[225]ance. Few if any who are competent to speak in these premises will 
question that such has been the outcome. To offset against this work of 
mutilation and retardation there are certain gains in expedition, and in the 
volume of traffic that can be carried by any given equipment and corps of 
employés. Particularly will there be a gain in the statistical showing, both as 
regards the volume of instruction offered, and probably also as regards the 
enrolment; since accountancy creates statistics and its absence does not.
Such increased enrolment as may be due to businesslike management and methods is 
an increase of undergraduate enrolment. The net effect as regards the graduate 
enrolment - apart from any vocational instruction that may euphemistically be 
scheduled as "graduate" - is in all probability rather a decrease than an 
increase. Through indoctrination with utilitarian (pecuniary) ideals of earning 
and spending, as well as by engendering spendthrift and sportsmanlike habits, 
such a businesslike management diverts the undergraduate students from going in 
for the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, and so from entering on what is 
properly university work; as witness the relatively slight proportion of 
graduate students outside of the professional schools - who come up from the 
excessively large undergraduate departments of the more expansive universities, 
as contrasted with the number of those who come into university work from the 
smaller and less businesslike colleges.
The ulterior consequences that follow from such businesslike standardization and 
bureaucratic efficiency are evident in the current state of the public schools; 
especially as seen in the larger towns, where the principles of business 
management have had time and scope to work out in a fair degree of consistency. 
The resulting [226] abomination of desolation is sufficiently notorious. And 
there appears to be no reason why a similarly stale routine of futility should 
not overtake the universities, and give similarly foolish results, as fast as 
the system of standardization, accountancy and piece-work goes consistently into 
effect, - except only for the continued enforced employment of a modicum of 
impracticable scholars and scientists on the academic staff, whose 
unbusinesslike scholarly proclivities and inability to keep the miner's-inch of 
scholastic credit always in mind, must in some measure always defeat the perfect 
working of standardization and accountancy.
As might be expected, this régime of graduated sterility has already made fair 
headway in the undergraduate work, especially in the larger undergraduate 
schools; and this in spite of any efforts on the part of the administration to 
hedge against such an outcome by recourse to an intricate system of electives 
and a wide diversification of the standard units of erudition so offered.
In the graduate work the like effect is only less visible, because the measures 
leading to it have come into bearing more recently, and hitherto less 
unreservedly. But the like results should follow here also, just so fast and so 
far as the same range of business principles come to be worked into the texture 
of the university organization in the same efficacious manner as they have 
already taken effect in the public schools. And, pushed on as it is by the 
progressive substitution of men imbued with the tastes and habits of practical 
affairs, in the place of unpractical scholarly ideals, the movement toward a 
perfunctory routine of mediocrity should logically be expected to go forward at 
a progressively accelerated rate. The visible drift of things in this respect in 
the academic pursuit of the social sciences, so-called, is an argument [227] as 
to what may be hoped for in the domain of academic science at large. It is only 
that the executive is actuated by a sharper solicitude to keep the academic 
establishment blameless of anything like innovation or iconoclasm at this point; 
which reinforces the drift toward a mechanistic routine and a curtailment of 
inquiry in this field; it is not that these sciences that deal with the 
phenomena of human life lend themselves more readily to mechanical description 
and enumeration than the material sciences do, nor is their subject matter 
intrinsically more inert or less provocative of questions.

II.
Throughout the above summary review, as also through the foregoing inquiry, the 
argument continually returns to or turns about two main interests, - notoriety 
and the academic executive. These two might be called the two foci about which 
swings the orbit of the university world. These conjugate foci lie on a 
reasonably short axis; indeed, they tend to coincide; so that the orbit comes 
near the perfection of a circle; having virtually but a single centre, which may 
perhaps indifferently be spoken of as the university's president or as its 
renown, according as one may incline to conceive these matters in terms of 
tangible fact or of intangible.
The system of standardization and accountancy has this renown or prestige as its 
chief ulterior purpose, - the prestige of the university or of its president, 
which largely comes to the same net result. Particularly will this be true in so 
far as this organization is designed to serve competitive ends; which are, in 
academic affairs, chiefly the ends of notoriety, prestige, advertising in all 
its branches and bearings. It is through increased credi-[228]table notoriety 
that the universities seek their competitive ends, and it is on such increase of 
notoriety, accordingly, that the competitive endeavours of a businesslike 
management are chiefly spent. It is in and through such accession of renown, 
therefore, that the chief and most tangible gains due to the injection of 
competitive business principles in the academic policy should appear.
Of course, this renown, as such, has no substantial value to the corporation of 
learning; nor, indeed, to any one but the university executive by whose 
management it is achieved. Taken simply in its first incidence, as prestige or 
notoriety, it conduces in no degree to the pursuit of knowledge; but in its 
ulterior consequences, it appears currently to be believed, at least ostensibly, 
that such notoriety must greatly enhance the powers of the corporation of 
learning. These ulterior consequences are (believed to be), a growth in the 
material resources and the volume of traffic.
Such good effects as may follow from a sedulous attention to creditable 
publicity, therefore, are the chief gains to be set off against the mischief 
incident to "scientific management" in academic affairs. Hence any line of 
inquiry into the business management of the universities continually leads back 
to the cares of publicity, with what might to an outsider seem undue insistence. 
The reason is that the businesslike management and arrangements in question are 
habitually - and primarily required either to serve the ends of this competitive 
campaign of publicity or to conform to its schedule of expediency. The felt need 
of notoriety and prestige has a main share in shaping the work and bearing of 
the university at every point. Whatever will not serve this end of prestige has 
no secure footing in current university policy. The margin of tolerance on this 
head is [229] quite narrow; and it is apparently growing incontinently narrower.
So far as any university administration can, with the requisite dignity, permit 
itself to avow a pursuit of notoriety, the gain that is avowedly sought by its 
means is an increase of funds, - more or less ingenuously spoken of as an 
increase of equipment. An increased enrolment of students will be no less 
eagerly sought after, but the received canons of academic decency require this 
object to be kept even more discreetly masked than the quest of funds.
The duties of publicity are large and arduous, and the expenditures incurred in 
this behalf are similarly considerable. So that it is not unusual to find a 
Publicity Bureau - often apologetically masquerading under a less tell-tale name 
- incorporated in the university organizzation to further this enterprise in 
reputable notoriety. Not only must a creditable publicity be provided for, as 
one of the running cares of the administration, but every feature of academic 
life, and of the life of all members of the academic staff, must unremittingly 
(though of course unavowedly) be held under surveillance at every turn, with a 
view to furthering whatever may yield a reputable notoriety, and to correcting 
or eliminating whatever may be conceived to have a doubtful or untoward bearing 
in this respect.
This surveillance of appearances, and of the means of propagating appearances, 
is perhaps the most exacting detail of duty incumbent on an enterprising 
executive. Without such a painstaking cultivation of a reputable notoriety, it 
is believed, a due share of funds could not be procured by any university for 
the prosecution of its work as a seminary of the higher learning. Its more alert 
and unabashed rivals, it is presumed, would in that [230] case be able to divert 
the flow of loose funds to their own use, and would so outstrip their dilatory 
competitor in the race for size and popular acclaim, and therefore, it is sought 
to be believed, in scientific and scholarly application.
In the absence of all reflection - not an uncommon frame of mind in this 
connection - one might be tempted to think that all this academic enterprise of 
notoriety and conciliation should add something appreciable to the aggregate of 
funds placed at the disposal of the universities; and that each of these 
competitive advertising concerns should so gain something appreciable, without 
thereby cutting into the supply of funds available for the rest. But such is 
probably not the outcome, to any appreciable extent; assuredly not apart from 
the case of the state universities that are dependent on the favour of local 
politicians, and perhaps apart from gifts for conspicuous buildings.
With whatever (slight) reservation may be due, publicity in university 
management is of substantially the same nature and effect as advertising in 
other competitive business; and with such reservation as may be called for in 
the case of other advertising, it is an engine of competition, and has no 
aggregate effect. As is true of competitive gains in business at large, so also 
these differential gains of the several university corporations can not be added 
together to make an aggregate. They are differential gains in the main, of the 
same nature as the gains achieved in any other game of skill and effrontery. The 
gross aggregate funds contributed to university uses from all sources would in 
all probability be nearly as large in the absence of such competitive notoriety 
and conformity. Indeed, it should seem likely that such donors as are gifted 
with sufficient sense of the value of science [231] and scholarship to find it 
worth while to sink any part of their capital in that behalf would be somewhat 
deterred by the spectacle of competitive waste and futile clamour presented by 
this academic enterprise; so that the outcome might as well be a diminution of 
the gross aggregate of donations and allowances. But such an argument doubtless 
runs on very precarious grounds; it is by no means evident that these munificent 
patrons of learning habitually distinguish between scholarship and publicity. 
But in any case it is quite safe to presume that to the cause of learning at 
large, and therefore to the community in respect of its interest in the 
advancement of learning, no appreciable net gain accrues from this competitive 
publicity of the seats of learning.
In some slight, or doubtful, degree this competitive publicity, including 
academic pageants, genteel solemnities, and the like, may conceivably augment 
the gross aggregate means placed at the disposal of the universities, by 
persuasively keeping the well-meaning men of wealth constantly in mind of the 
university's need of additional funds, as well as of the fact that such gifts 
will not be allowed to escape due public notice. But the aggregate increase of 
funds due to these endeavours is doubtless not large enough to offset the 
aggregate expenditure on notoriety. Taken as a whole, and counting in all the 
wide-ranging expenditure entailed by this enterprise in notoriety and the 
maintenance of academic prestige, university publicity doubtless costs 
appreciably more than it brings. So far as it succeeds in its purpose, its chief 
effect is to divert the flow of funds from one to another of the rival 
establishments. In the aggregate this expedient for procuring means for the 
advancement of learning doubtless results in an appreciable net loss.
The net loss, indeed, is always much more considerable [232] than would be 
indicated by any statistical showing; for this academic enterprise involves an 
extensive and almost wholly wasteful duplication of equipment, personnel and 
output of instruction, as between the rival seats of learning, at the same time 
that it also involves an excessively parsimonious provision for actual 
scholastic work, as contrasted with publicity; so also it involves the 
overloading of each rival corps of instructors with a heterogeneous schedule of 
courses, beyond what would conduce to their best efficiency as teachers. This 
competitive parcelment, duplication and surreptitious thrift, due to a 
businesslike rivalry between the several schools, is perhaps the gravest 
drawback to the American university situation.
It should be added that no aggregate gain for scholarship comes of diverting any 
given student from one school to another duplicate establishment by specious 
offers of a differential advantage; particularly when, as frequently happens, 
the differential inducement takes the form of the extra-scholastic amenities 
spoken of in an earlier chapter, or the greater alleged prestige of one school 
as against another, or, as also happens, a surreptitiously greater facility for 
achieving a given academic degree.
In all its multifarious ways and means, university advertising carried beyond 
the modicum that would serve a due "publicity of accounts" as regards the work 
to be done, accomplishes no useful aggregate result. And, as is true of 
advertising in other competitive business, current university publicity is not 
an effective means of spreading reliable information; nor is it designed for 
that end. Here as elsewhere, to meet the requirements of competitive enterprise, 
advertising must somewhat exceed the point of maximum veracity.
[234] In no field of human endeavour is competitive notoriety and a painstaking 
conformity to extraneous standards of living and of conduct so gratuitous a 
burden, since learning is in no degree a competitive enterprise; and all 
mandatory observance of the conventions - pecuniary or other - is necessarily a 
drag on the pursuit of knowledge. In ordinary competitive business, as, e.g., 
merchandising, advertisement is a means of competitive selling, and is justified 
by the increased profits that come to the successful advertiser from the 
increased traffic; and on the like grounds a painstaking conformity to 
conventional usage, in appearances and expenditure, is there wisely cultivated 
with the same end in view. In the affairs of science and scholarship, simply as 
such and apart from the personal ambitions of the university's executive, there 
is nothing that corresponds to this increased traffic or these competitive 
profits,(3*) - nor will the discretionary officials avow that such increased 
traffic is the purpose of academic publicity. Indeed, an increased enrolment of 
students yields no increased net income, nor is the corporation of learning 
engaged (avowedly, at least) in an enterprise that looks to a net income. At the 
same time, such increased enrolment as comes of this competitive salesmanship 
among the universities is made up almost wholly of wasters, accessions from the 
genteel and sporting classes, who seek the university as a means of [234] 
respectability and dissipation, and who serve the advancement of the higher 
learning only as fire, flood and pestilence serve the needs of the husbandman.
Competitive publicity, therefore, and its maid-servant conventional observance, 
would appear in all this order of things to have no serious motive, or at least 
none that can freely be avowed; as witness the unwillingness of any university 
administration formally to avow that it seeks publicity or expends the corporate 
funds in competitive advertising. So that on its face this whole academic 
traffic in publicity and genteel conventionalities appears to be little else 
than a boyish imitation of the ways and means employed, with shrewd purpose, in 
business enterprise that has no analog with the pursuit of knowledge. But the 
aggregate yearly expenditure of the universities on this competitive academic 
publicity runs well up into the millions, and it involves also an extensive 
diversion of the energies of the general body of academic men to these purposes 
of creditable notoriety; and such an expenditure of means and activities is not 
lightly to be dismissed as an unadvised play of businesslike fancy on the part 
of the university authorities.
Unquestionably, an unreflecting imitation of methods that have been found good 
in retail merchandising counts for something in the case, perhaps for much; for 
the academic executives under whose surveillance this singularly futile traffic 
is carried on are commonly men of commonplace intelligence and aspiration, bound 
by the commonplace habits of workday intercourse in a business community. The 
histrionic afflatus is also by no means wanting in current university 
management, and when coupled with commonplace ideals in the dramatic art its 
outcome will necessarily be a tawdry, spectacular pageantry and a straining 
after showy magnitude. There is [235] also the lower motive of unreflecting 
clannishness on the part of the several university establishments. This counts 
for something, perhaps for more than one could gracefully admit. It stands out 
perhaps most baldly in the sentimental rivalry - somewhat factitious, it is true 
- shown at intercollegiate games and simmilar occasions of invidious comparison 
between the different schools. It is, of course, gratifying to the clannish 
conceit of any college man to be able to hold up convincing statistical exhibits 
showing the greater glory of "his own" university, whether in athletics, 
enrolment, alumni, material equipment, or schedules of instruction; whether he 
be an official, student, alumnus, or member of the academic staff; and all this 
array and circumstance will appeal to him the more unreservedly in proportion as 
he is gifted with a more vulgar sportsmanlike bent and is unmoved by any 
dispassionate interest in matters of science or scholarship; and in proportion, 
also, as his habitual outlook is that of the commonplace man of affairs. In the 
uncritical eyes of the commonplace men of affairs, whose experience in business 
has trained them into a quasi-tropismatic approval of notoriety as a means of 
advertising, these puerile demonstrations will, of course, have a high value 
simply in their own right. Sentimental chauvinism of this kind is a good and 
efficient motive to emulative enterprise, as far as it goes, but even when 
backed with the directorate's proclivity to businesslike make-believe, it can, 
after all, scarcely be made to cover the whole voluminous traffic that must on 
any consistent view go in under the head of competitive publicity.
[236]
III.
The abiding incentives to this traffic in publicity and genteel observance must 
be sought elsewhere than in the boyish emotions of rivalry and clanish elation 
that animates the academic staff, or even in the histrionic interest which the 
members of the staff or the directorate may have in the prestige of their own 
establishment. The staff, indeed, are not in any sensible degree accountable for 
this pursuit of prestige, since they have but little discretion in these 
matters; in substance, the government of a competitive university is necessarily 
of an autocratic character, whatever plausible forms of collective action and 
advisement it may be found expedient to observe. The seat of discretion is in 
the directorate; though many details of administration may be left to the 
deliberations of the staff, so long as these details do not impinge on the 
directorate's scheme of policy. The impulse and initiative to this enterprise in 
publicity, as well as the surveillance and guidance in the matter, radiates from 
this centre, and it is here, presumably, that the incentives to such enterprise 
are immediately felt. The immediate discretion in the conduct of these matters 
rests in the hands of the directive academic head, with the aid and advice of 
his circle of personal counsellors, and with the backing of the governing board.
The incentives that decide the policy of publicity and guide its execution must 
accordingly be such as will appeal directly to the sensibilities of the academic 
head and of the members of the governing board; and this applies not only as 
regards the traffic in publicity by print and public spectacles, but also as 
regards the diversion of the corporation of learning to utilitarian ends, and as 
regards the traffic in conventional observances and conformity to [237] popular 
opinion. What these incentives may be, that so appeal to the authorities in 
discretion, and that move them to divert the universities from the pursuit of 
knowledge, is not altogether easy to say; more particularly it is not easy to 
find an explanation that shall take account of the facts and yet reflect no 
discredit on the intelligence or the good faith of these discretionary 
authorities.
The motives that actuate the members of the governing boards are perhaps less 
obscure than those which determine the conduct of the academic executive. The 
governing boards are, in effect, made up of businessmen, who do not habitually 
look beyond the "practical" interest of commercial gain and the commonplaces of 
commercial routine and political bravado. It is (should be) otherwise with the 
academic management, who are, by tradition, presumed to be animated with 
scholarly ideals, and whose avowed ulterior motive is in all cases the single-
minded furtherance of the cause of learning.
On its face it should not seem probable that motives of personal gain, in the 
form of pecuniary or other material interest, would have a serious part in the 
matter. In all probability there is in no case a sensible pecuniary gain to the 
university as such from its expenditures on publicity, and there is still less 
question of gain in any other than the pecuniary respect. There is also commonly 
no very substantial pecuniary gain to be derived from this business either by 
the academic head or by the members of the board, - an exceptional instance to 
the contrary will not vitiate this general proposition. It all brings no 
appreciable pecuniary return to them, particularly so far as it is concerned 
with the pursuit of prestige; and apart from exceptional, and therefore 
negligible, cases it admits of no appreciable conversion of funds to private 
use. At the same time it seems almost an affront to entertain [238] the notion 
that these impassively purposeful men of affairs are greatly moved by personal 
motives of vanity, vaingloriously seeking renown for efficiently carrying on a 
traffic in publicity that has no other end than renown for efficiently carrying 
it on. And yet it will be found extremely difficult to take account of the facts 
and at the same time avoid such an odiously personal interpretation of them.
Such, indeed, would have to be the inference drawn by any one who might 
ingenuously take the available facts at their face value, - not counting as 
facts the dutiful protestations of the authorities to the contrary. But it 
should be kept in mind that a transparent ingenuousness is not characteristic of 
business phenomena, within the university or without. A degree of deviation, or 
"diplomacy," may be forced on the academic management by the circumstances of 
their office, particularly by the one-eyed business sense of their governing 
boards. Indeed, admissions to such an effect are not altogether wanting.
Rated as they are, in the popular apprehension, as gentlemen and scholars, and 
themselves presumably accepting this rating as substantially correct, no feature 
of the scheme of management imposed on the academic executive by business 
principles should (presumably) be so repugnant to their sensibilities and their 
scholarly judgment as this covert but unremitting pursuit of an innocuous 
notoriety, coupled as it necessarily is with a systematic misdirection of the 
academic forces to unscholarly ends; but prudential reasons will decide that 
this must be their chief endeavour if they are to hold their own as a 
competitive university. Should the academic head allow his sense of scholarly 
fitness and expediency to hamper this business of reputable notoriety, it is, 
perhaps with reason, feared that such remissness [239] would presently lead to 
his retirement from office; at least something of that kind seems a fair 
inference from the run of the facts. His place would then be supplied by an 
incumbent duly qualified on this score of one-eyed business sagacity, and one 
who would know how to keep his scholarly impulses in hand. It is at least 
conceivable that the apprehension of some such contingency may underlie current 
university management at some points, and it may there fore in some instances 
have given the administration of academic affairs an air of light-headed 
futility, when it should rather be credited with a sagaciously disingenuous 
yielding to circumstance.
The run of the facts as outlined above, and the line of inference just indicated 
as following from them, reflect no great credit on the manly qualities of the 
incumbents of executive office; but the alternative, as also noted above, is 
scarcely preferable even in that respect, while it would be even less flattering 
to their intellectual powers. Yet there appears to be no avoiding the dilemma so 
presented. Of disinterested grounds for the common run of academic policy there 
seem to be only these two lines to choose between: - either a short-sighted and 
headlong conformity to the vulgar prejudice that does not look beyond 
"practical" training and competitive expansion, coupled with a boyish craving 
for popular display; or a strategic compromise with the elders of the 
Philistines, a futile doing of evil in the hope that some good may come of it.
This latter line of apology is admissible only in those cases where the 
university corporation is in an exceptionally precarious position in respect of 
its endowment, where it is in great need and has much to hope for in the way of 
pecuniary gain through stooping to conventional prejudices, that are of no 
scholastic value, but that are [240] conceived to bind its potential benefactors 
in a web of fatally fragile bigotry; or, again, where the executive is in 
sensible danger of being superseded by an administration imbued with 
(conceivably) yet lower and feebler scholarly ideals.
Now, it happens that there are notable instances of universities where such a 
policy of obsequiously reputable notoriety and aimless utilitarian management is 
pursued under such circumstances of settled endowment and secure tenure as to 
preclude all hazard of supersession on the part of the executive and all chance 
of material gain from any accession of popular renown or stagnant 
respectability. There is a small class of American university corporations that 
are so placed, by the peculiar circumstances of their endowment, as to be above 
the apprehension of need, so long as they are content to live anywhere nearly 
within the domain of learning; at the same time that they have nothing to lose 
through alienating the affections of the vulgar, and nothing to gain by 
deferring to the sentimental infirmities of elderly well-to-do persons. This 
class is not a numerous one; not large enough to set the pace for the rest; but 
evidently also not numerous enough to go on their own recognizances, and adopt a 
line of policy suited to their own circumstances and not bound to the fashion 
set by the rest. Some of the well known establishments of this class have 
already been alluded to in another connection.
Statistical display, spectacular stage properties, vainglorious make-believe and 
obsequious concessions to worldly wisdom, should seem to have no place in the 
counsels of these schools; which should therefore hopefully be counted on to 
pursue the quest of knowledge with that single mind which they profess. Yet such 
is eminently, not to say pre-eminently, not the case. Their [241] policy in 
these matters commonly differs in no sensible degree from that pursued by the 
needier establishments that are engaged in a desperate race of obsequiousness, 
for funds to be procured by favour of well-to-do donors, or through the support 
of worldly-wise clergymen and politicians. Indeed, some of the most pathetic 
clamour for popular renown, as well as instances of the most profligate stooping 
to vulgar prejudice, are to be credited to establishments of this, potentially 
independent, class. The management, apparently, are too well imbued with the 
commonplace preconceptions of worldly wisdom afloat among the laity, to admit of 
their taking any action on their own deliberate initiative or effectually taking 
thought of that pursuit of learning that has been entrusted to their care. So, 
perhaps through some puzzle-headed sense of decorum, they have come to engage in 
this bootless conventional race for funds which they have no slightest thought 
of obtaining, and for an increased enrolment which they advisedly do not desire.
In the light of these instances, one is constrained to believe that the academic 
executive who has so been thrown up as putative director of the pursuit of 
learning must go in for this annexation of vocational schools, for amateurish 
"summer sessions," for the appointment of schoolmasters instead of scholars on 
the academic staff, for the safe-keeping and propagation of genteel 
conventionalities at the cost of scholarship, for devout and polite ceremonial, 
- one is constrained to believe that succh a university executive goes in for 
this policy of tawdry routine because he lacks ordinary intelligence or because 
he lacks ordinary courage. His discretion is overborne either by his own store 
of unreflecting prejudice, or by fear of losing personal prestige among 
the ignorant, even though he has no substantial ground, per-[242]sonal or official, 
for so yielding to current prejudice. Such appears to be the state of the case 
in these instances, where the exigencies of university politics afford no 
occasion for strategic compromise with the worldly-wise; which pointedly 
suggests that the like threadbare motives of unreflecting imitation and boyish 
make-believe may also have unduly much to do with academic policy, even in that 
common run of cases that might otherwise have best been explained as an effect 
of shrewd strategy, designed to make terms with the mischievous stupidity of an 
underbred laity.

But any discussion of motives necessarily has an invidious air, and so can not 
but be distasteful. Yet, since this executive policy can be explained or 
understood only as the outcome of those motives that appeal decisively to the 
discretionary officials, it is necessary to pursue the inquiry a degree farther 
at this point, even at the cost of such slight odium as may not be avoided, and 
at the risk of a certain appearance of dispraise. It is perhaps needless to say 
that this question of motivation is not gone into here except as it may serve to 
exhibit the run of the facts. The run of the facts is not intelligible except in 
the light of their meaning as possible motives to the pursuit of that policy of 
which they are the outcome.
On the above considerations, it follows that the executive heads of these 
competitive universities are a picked body of men, endowed with a particular 
bent, such as will dispose them to be guided by the run of motives indicated. 
This will imply that they are, either by training or by native gift, men of a 
somewhat peculiar frame of mind, - peculiarly open to the appeal of parade and 
ephemeral celebrity, and peculiarly facile in the choice of means by which to 
achieve these gaudy distinctions; [243] peculiarly solicitous of appearances, 
and peculiarly heedless of the substance of their performance. It is not that 
this characterization would imply exceptionally great gifts, or otherwise 
notable traits of character; they are little else than an accentuation of the 
more commonplace frailties of commonplace men. As a side light on this spiritual 
complexion of the typical academic executive, it may be worth noting that much 
the same characterization will apply without abatement to the class of 
professional politicians, particularly to that large and long-lived class of 
minor politicians who make a living by keeping well in the public eye and 
avoiding blame.(4*)
There is, indeed more than a superficial or accidental resemblance between the 
typical academic executive and [244] the professional politician of the familiar 
and more vacant sort, both as regards the qualifications requisite for entering 
on this career and as regards the conditions of tenure. Among the genial make-
believe that goes to dignify the executive office is a dutiful protest, indeed, 
a somewhat clamorous protest, of conspicuous self-effacement on the part of the 
incumbent, to the effect that the responsibilities of office have come upon him 
unsought, if not unawares; which is related to the facts in much the same manner 
and degree as the like holds true for the manœuvres of those wise politicians 
that "heed the call of duty" and so find themselves "in the hands of their 
friends." In point of fact, here as in political office-seeking, the most active 
factor that goes to decide the selection of the eventual incumbents of office is 
a tenacious and aggressive self-selection. With due, but by no means large, 
allowance for exceptions, the incumbents are chosen from among a self-selected 
body of candidates, each of whom has, in the common run of cases, been 
resolutely in pursuit of such an office for some appreciable time, and has spent 
much time and endeavour on fitting himself for its duties. Commonly it is only 
after the aspirant has achieved a settled reputation for eligibility and a 
predilection for the office that he will finally secure an appointment. The 
number of aspirants, and of eligibles, considerably exceeds the number of such 
executive offices, very much as is true for the parallel case of aspirants for 
political office.
As to the qualifications, in point of character and attainments, that so go to 
make eligibility for the executive office, it is necessary to recall what has 
been said in an earlier chapter(5*) on the characteristics of those boards of 
control with whom rests the choice in these matters [245] of appointment. These 
boards are made up of well-to-do businessmen, with a penchant for popular 
notability; and the qualifications necessary to be put in evidence by aspirants 
for executive office are such as will convince such a board of their 
serviceability. Among the indispensable general qualifications, therefore, will 
be a "businesslike" facility in the management of affairs, an engaging address 
and fluent command of language before a popular audience, and what is called 
"optimism," - a serene and voluble loyalty to the current conventionalities and 
a conspicuously profound conviction that all things are working out for good, 
except for such untoward details as do not visibly conduce to the vested 
advantage of the well-to-do businessmen under the established law and order. To 
secure an appointment to executive office it is not only necessary to be 
possessed of these qualifications, and contrive to put them in evidence; the 
aspirant must ordinarily also, to use a colloquialism, be willing and able to 
"work his passage" by adroit negotiation and detail engagements on points of 
policy, appointments and administration.
The greater proportion of such aspirants for executive office work their 
apprenticeship and manage their campaign of office-seeking while engaged in some 
university employment. To this end the most likely line of university employment 
is such as will comprise a large share of administrative duties, as, e.g., the 
deanships that are latterly receiving much attention in this behalf; while of 
the work of instruction the preference should be given to such undergraduate 
class-work as will bring the aspirant in wide contact with the less scholarly 
element of the student body, and with those "student activities" that come 
favourably under public observation; and more particularly should one go in for 
the quasi-scholarly pur-[246]suits of "university extension"; which will bring 
the candidate into favourable notice among the quasi-literate leisure class; at 
the same time this employment conduces greatly to assurance and a flow of 
popular speech.
It is by no means here intended to convey the assumption that appointments to 
executive office are currently made exclusively from among aspiring candidates 
answering the description outlined above, or that the administrative deanships 
that currently abound in the universities are uniformly looked on by their 
incumbents as in some sort a hopeful novitiate to the presidential dignity. The 
exceptions under both of these general propositions would be too numerous to be 
set aside as negligible, although scarcely numerous enough or consequential 
enough entirely to vitiate these propositions as a competent formulation of the 
typical line of approach to the coveted office. The larger and more substantial 
exception would, of course, be taken to the generalization as touching the use 
of the deanships in preparation for the presidency.
The course of training and publicity afforded by the deanships and extension 
lectures appears to be the most promising, although it is not the only line of 
approach. So, e.g., as has been remarked in an earlier passage, the exigencies 
of academic administration will ordinarily lead to the formation of an 
unofficially organized corps of counsellors and agents or lieutenants, who serve 
as aids to the executive head. While these aids, factors, and gentlemen-in-
waiting are vested with no official status proclaiming their relation to the 
executive office or their share in its administration, it goes without saying 
that their vicarious discretion and their special prerogatives of access and 
advisement with the executive head do not commonly remain hidden from their 
colleagues on [247] the academic staff, or from interested persons outside the 
university corporation; nor, indeed, does it appear that they commonly desire to 
remain unknown.
In the same connection, as has also been remarked above, and as is sufficiently 
notorious, among the large and imperative duties of executive office is public 
discourse. This is required, both as a measure of publicity at large and as a 
means of divulging the ostensible aims, advantages and peculiar merits of the 
given university and its chief. The volume of such public discourse, as well as 
the incident attendance at many public and ceremonial functions, is very 
considerable; so much so that in the case of any university of reasonable size 
and spirit the traffic in these premises is likely to exceed the powers of any 
one man, even where, as is not infrequently the case, the "executive" head is 
presently led to make this business of stately parade and promulgation his chief 
employment. In effect, much of this traffic will necessarily be delegated to 
such representatives of the chief as may be trusted duly to observe its spirit 
and intention; and the indicated bearers of these vicarious dignities and 
responsibilities will necessarily be the personal aids and counsellors of the 
chief; which throws them, again, into public notice in a most propitious 
fashion.
So also, by force of the same exigencies of parade and discourse, the chief 
executive is frequently called away from home on a more or less extended 
itinerary; and the burden of dignity attached to the thief office is such as to 
require that its ostensible duties be delegated to some competent lieutenant 
during these extensive absences of the chief; and here, again, this temporary 
discretion and dignity will most wisely and fittingly be delegated to some 
member of the corps of personal aids who stands in peculiarly close relations of 
sympathy and usefulness to [248] the chief. It has happened more than once that 
such an habitual "acting head" has come in for the succession to the executive 
office.
It comes, therefore, to something like a general rule, that the discipline which 
makes the typical captain of erudition, as he is seen in the administration of 
executive office, will have set in before his induction into office, not 
infrequently at an appreciable interval before that event, and involving a 
consequent, more or less protracted, term of novitiate, probation and 
preliminary seasoning; and the aspirants so subjected to this discipline of 
initiation are at the same time picked men, drawn into the running chiefly by 
force of a facile conformity and a self-selective predisposition for this 
official dignity.
The resulting captain of erudition then falls under a certain exacting 
discipline exercised by the situation in which the exigencies of office place 
him. These exigencies are of divers origin, and are systematically at variance 
among themselves. So that the dominant note of his official life necessarily 
becomes that of ambiguity. By tradition, - indeed, by that tradition to which 
the presidential office owes its existence, and except by force of which there 
would apparently be no call to institute such an office at all, - by tradition 
the president of the university is the senior member of the faculty, its 
confidential spokesman in official and corporate concerns, and the "moderator" 
of its town meeting like deliberative assemblies. As chairman of its meetings he 
is, by tradition, presumed to exercise no peculiar control, beyond such guidance 
as the superior experience of the senior member may be presumed to afford his 
colleagues. As spokesman for the faculty he is, by tradition, presumed to be a 
scholar of such erudition, breadth and maturity as may fairly command something 
of filial respect and [249] affection from his associates in the corporation of 
learning; and it is by virtue of these qualities of scholarly wisdom, which give 
him his place as senior member of a corporation of scholars, that he is, by 
tradition, competent to serve as their spokesman and to occupy the chair in 
their deliberative assembly.
Such is the tradition of the American College President, - and, in so far, of 
the university president, - as it comes down from that earlier phase of academic 
history from which the office derives its ostensible character, and to which it 
owes its hold on life under the circumstances of the later growth of the 
schools. And it will be noted that this office is distinctly American; it has no 
counterpart elsewhere, and there appears to be no felt need of such an office in 
other countries, where no similar tradition of a college president has created a 
presumptive need of a similar official in the universities, - the reason being 
evidently that these universities in other lands have not, in the typical case, 
grown out of an underlying college.
In the sentimental apprehension of the laity out of doors, and in a degree even 
in the unreflecting esteem of men within the academic precincts, the 
presidential office still carries something of this traditionally preconceived 
scholarly character; and it is this still surviving traditional preconception, 
which confuses induction into the office with scholarly fitness for its 
dignities, that still makes the office of the academic executive available for 
those purposes of expansive publicity and businesslike management that it has 
been made to serve. Except for this uncritical esteem of the office and its 
incumbency, so surviving out of an inglorious past, no great prestige could 
attach to that traffic in spectacular solemnities, edifying discourse and 
misdirected business control, that makes up the substantial duties of the office 
as now conducted. [250] It is therefore of the utmost moment to keep up, or 
rather to magnify, that appearance of scholarly competence and of intimate 
solidarity with the corporation of learning that gives the presidential office 
this prestige value. But since it is only for purposes external, not to say 
extraneous, to the corporation of learning that this prestige value is seriously 
worth while, it is also only toward the outside that the make-believe of 
presidential erudition and scholarly ideals need seriously be kept up. For the 
common run of the incumbents today to pose before their faculties as in any 
eminent degree conversant with the run of contemporary science or scholarship, 
or as rising to the average even of their own faculties in this respect, would 
be as bootless as it is uncalled for. But the faculties, as is well enough 
understood, need of course entertain no respect for their executive head as a 
citizen of the republic of learning, so long as they at all adequately 
appreciate his discretionary power of use and abuse, as touches them and their 
fortunes and all the ways, means and opportunities of academic work. By 
tradition, and in the genial legendary lore that colours the proceedings of the 
faculty-meeting, he is still the senior member of an assemblage of scholarly 
gentlemen; but in point of executive fact he is their employer, who does 
business with and by them on a commercial footing. To the faculty, the 
presidential office is a business proposition, and its incumbent is chiefly an 
object of circumspection, to whom they owe a "hired-man's loyalty."
It is toward the outside, in the face of the laity out of doors, that the high 
fence - "the eight-fold fence" - of scholarly pretension 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, volumi-[251]nous, 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.
It is only by keeping up these manifestations toward the outside, and making 
them good in the esteem of the unlearned, that the presidential office can be 
made to serve the ends of the board of control and the ambitions of the 
incumbent; and this large apparatus and traffic of make-believe, therefore, is 
the first and most unremitting object of executive solicitude. It is the "place 
whereon to stand" while moving the academic universe. The uses to be made of the 
standing-place so achieved have already been set out in some detail in earlier 
chapters. They centre about three main considerations: Visible magnitude, 
bureaucratic organization, and vocational training.

As already noted in earlier passages, the boards of control are bodies of 
businessmen in whose apprehension the methods successfully employed in 
competitive business are suitable for all purposes of administration; from which 
follows that the academic head who is to serve as their general manager is 
vested, in effect, with such discretionary powers as currently devolve on the 
discretionary officials of business corporations; from which follows, among 
other things, that the members of the faculty come to take rank as employés of 
the concern, hired by and responsible to the academic head.
The first executive duty of the incumbent of office, [252] therefore, is to keep 
his faculty under control, so as to be able unhampered to carry out the policy 
of magnitude and secularization with a view to which the governing board has 
invested him with his powers. This work of putting the faculty in its place has 
by this time been carried out with sufficient effect, so that its "advice and 
consent" may in all cases be taken as a matter of course; and should a remnant 
of initiative and scholarly aspiration show itself in any given concrete case in 
such a way as to traverse the lines of policy pursued by the executive, he can 
readily correct the difficulty by exercise of a virtually plenary power of 
appointment, preferment and removal, backed as this power is by a nearly 
indefeasible black-list. So well is the academic black-list understood, indeed, 
and so sensitive and trustworthy is the fearsome loyalty of the common run among 
academic men, that very few among them will venture openly to say a good word 
for any one of their colleagues who may have fallen under the displeasure of 
some incumbent of executive office. This work of intimidation and subornation 
may fairly be said to have acquired the force of an institution, and to need no 
current surveillance or effort.(6*)
The subservience of the faculty, or of a working majority, may safely be counted 
on. But the forms of advisement and responsibility are still necessary to be 
observed; the president is still, by tradition, the senior member of the 
faculty, and its confidential spokesman. From which follows a certain, at least 
pro forma, disingenuousness in the executive's coercive control of academic 
policy, whereby the ostensible discretion and responsibility [253] comes to rest 
on the faculty, while the control remains with the executive. But, after all, 
this particular run of ambiguity and evasions has reached such settled forms and 
is so well understood that it no longer implies an appreciable strain on the 
executive's veracity or on his diplomatic skill. It belongs under the category 
of legal fiction, rather than that of effectual prevarication.
So also as regards the businesslike, or bureaucratic, organization and control 
of the administrative machinery, and its utilization for vocational ends and 
statistical showing. All that has been worked out in its general features, and 
calls, in any concrete case, for nothing much beyond an adaptation of general 
practices to the detail requirements of the special case. It devolves, properly, 
on the clerical force, and especially on those chiefs of clerical bureau called 
"deans," together with the many committees-for-the-sifting-of-sawdust into which 
the faculty of a well-administered university is organized. These committees 
being, in effect if not in intention, designed chiefly to keep the faculty 
talking while the bureaucratic machine goes on its way under the guidance of the 
executive and his personal counsellors and lieutenants. These matters, then, are 
also well understood, standardized, and accepted, and no longer require a 
vigilant personal surveillance from the side of the executive.
As is well and seemly for any head of a great concern, these matters of routine 
and current circumlocution are presently delegated to the oversight of trusted 
subalterns, in a manner analogous to the delegation of the somewhat parallel 
duties of the caretakers of the material equipment. Both of these hierarchical 
corps of subordinates are in a somewhat similar case, in that their duties are 
of a mechanically standardized nature, and in that it is incumbent on both alike 
to deal in a dispassionate, not to [254] say impersonal, way each with the 
particular segment of apparatus and process entrusted to his care; as is right 
and good for any official entrusted with given details of bureaucratic routine.
The exacting duties that remain personally incumbent on the academic executive, 
and claiming his ordinary and continued attention, therefore, are those of his 
own official prestige on the one hand, and the selection, preferment, rejection 
and proscription of members of the academic staff. These two lines of executive 
duty are closely correlated; not only in that the staff is necessarily to be 
selected with a view to their furthering the prestige of their chief and his 
university, but also in that the executive's experience in the course of this 
enterprise in publicity goes far to shape his ideals of scholarly endeavour and 
to establish his standards of expediency and efficiency in the affairs of 
learning.
By usage, guided, no doubt, by a shrewd sense of expediency in the choice of 
means, it has, in the typical case, come to be the settled policy of these 
incumbents of executive office to seek the competitively requisite measure of 
public prestige chiefly by way of public oratory. Now and again his academic 
rank, backed by the slow-dying tradition that his office should be filled by a 
man of scholarly capacity, will bring the incumbent before some scientific body 
or other; where he commonly avoids offence. But, as has been remarked above, it 
is the laity that is to be impressed and kept propitiously in mind of the 
executive and his establishment, and it is therefore the laity that is to be 
conciliated with presidential addresses; it is also to the laity that the 
typical academic executive is competent to speak without stultification. Hence 
the many edifying addresses before popular audiences, at commencements, 
inaugurations, dedications, [255] club meetings, church festivals, and the like. 
So that an executive who aspires to do his whole duty in these premises will 
become in some sort an itinerant dispensary of salutary verbiage; and university 
presidents have so come to be conventionally indispensable for the effusion of 
graceful speech at all gatherings of the well-to-do for convivial deliberation 
on the state of mankind at large.(7*)
Throughout this elocutionary enterprise there runs the rigorous prescription 
that the speaker must avoid offence, that his utterances must be of a salutary 
order, since the purpose of it all is such conciliation of goodwill as will 
procure at least the passive good offices of those who are reached by the 
presidential run of language. But, by and large, it is only platitudes and racy 
anecdotes that may be counted on to estrange none of the audiences before which 
it is worth while for the captains of erudition to make their plea for sanity 
and renown. Hence [256] the peculiarly, not to say exuberantly, inane character 
of this branch of oratory, coupled with an indefatigable optimism and good-
nature. This outcome is due neither to a lack of application nor of reflection 
on the part of the speakers; it is, indeed, a finished product of the 
homiletical art and makes up something of a class of its own among the artistic 
achievements of the race. At the same time it is a means to an end.(8*)

However, the clay sticks to the sculptor's thumb, as the meal-dust powders the 
miller's hair and the cobbler carries sensible traces of the pitch that goes 
into his day's work, and as the able-bodied seaman "walks with a rolling gait." 
So also the university executive, who by pressure of competitive enterprise 
comes to be all things to all audiences, will come also to take on the colour of 
his own philandropic pronouncements; to believe, more or less conveniently, in 
his own blameless utterances. They necessarily commit him to a pro forma 
observance of their tenor; they may, of course, be desired as perfunctory 
conciliation, simply, but in carrying conviction [257] to the audience the 
speaker's eloquence unavoidably bends his own convictions in some degree. And 
not only does the temper of the audience sympathetically affect that of the 
speaker, as does also his familiar contact with the same range of persons, such 
as goes with and takes a chief place in this itinerant edification; but there is 
also the opportunity which all this wide-ranging itinerary of public addresses 
affords for feeling out the state of popular sentiment, as to what ends the 
university is expected to serve and how it is expected best to serve them. 
Particularly do the solemn amenities of social intercourse associated with this 
promulgation of lay sermons lend themselves felicitously to such a purpose; and 
this contact with the public and its spokesmen doubtless exercises a powerful 
control over the policies pursued by these academic executives, in that it 
affords them the readiest, and at the same time the most habitual, indication as 
to what line of policy and what details of conduct will meet with popular 
approval, and what will not.
Since, then, it is necessarily the endeavour of the competitive executives to 
meet the desires of their public as best they can, consistently with the demands 
of magnitude and éclat imposed by their position as chiefs of these competitive 
concerns, it becomes a question of some moment what the character of this select 
public opinion may be, to which their peregrinations expose them; and how far 
and with what limitations the public opinion that so habitually impinges on 
their sensibilities and shapes their canons of procedure may be taken as 
reflecting the sentiments of the public at large, or of any given class of the 
population.
The public that so contributes to the habitual bent of the academic executives 
is necessarily a select fraction of the laity, of course, - self-selected by 
virtue of mem-[258]bership in the various clubs, churches and other like 
organizations under whose auspices the edification and amenities in question are 
commonly brought into bearing, or by virtue of voluntary attendance at these 
occasions of quasi-culture and gentility. It is somewhat exclusive fragment of 
the public, pecuniarily of a middling grade, as is indeed also its case in other 
than the pecuniary respect. Apart from the (very consequential) convivial 
gatherings where businessmen will now and again come together and lend a genial 
ear to these executive spokesmen of philandropism, it will be found that at the 
audiences, and at their attendant solemnities of hospitality, the assembly is 
made up of very much the same elements as make up the effective constituency of 
the moderately well-to-do churches.(9*) Neither the small minority of the wholly 
idle rich, nor the great majority who work with their hands, are present in 
appreciable force; particularly not the latter, who are busy elsewhere; nor do 
the learned class come in evidence in this connection, - except, of course, the 
"scholars by appointment," within whose official competency lie precisely such 
occasions of public evidence.
Doubtless, the largest, tone-giving and effective, constituent in this self-
selected public on whose temper the university president typically leans, and 
from whose bent his canons of circumspection are drawn, is the class of 
moderately well-to-do and serious-minded women who have outlived the 
distractions of maternity, and so have come to turn their parental solicitude to 
the common good, conceived as a sterilization of the proprieties. The 
controlling ideals of efficiency and expediency in the af-[259]fairs of the 
higher learning accordingly, in so far as they are not a precipitate of 
competitive business principles simply, will be chiefly of this derivation. Not 
that the captains of erudition need intimately harbour precisely those notions 
of scholarship which this constituency would enjoin upon them, and for which 
they dutifully speak in their conciliatory sermons before these audiences; but 
just as happens in all competitive retail business that has to deal with a large 
and critical constituency, so here, - the captains find themselves constrained 
in their management of the affairs of learning to walk blamelessly in the sight 
of this quasi-public spirited wing of the laity that has by force of 
circumstances come to constitute the public, as seen in the perspective of the 
itinerant philandropist.
The executive and all his works and words must avoid blame from any source from 
which criticism might conceivably affect the traffic with which he is occupied, 
such is the first of those politic principles that govern the conduct of 
competitive business. The university must accordingly be managed with a first 
view to a creditable rating in those extraneous respects, touching which that 
select laity that make up the executive's effective public are competent to hold 
convictions. The resulting canons of management will be chiefly of the nature of 
tabus, since blame is best avoided by a code of avoidance. and since the forum 
in which these tabus are audited is a forum in which the matronly negations of 
piety, propriety and genteel usage take precedence of work, whether scholarly or 
otherwise, a misdirected cowardice not infrequently comes to rule the counsels 
of the captains of erudition, - misdirected not only in the more obvious sense 
that its guidance is disserviceable to the higher learning, but also (what is 
more to the immediate [260] point) in the sense that it discredits the executive 
and his tactics in the esteem of that workday public that does not habitually 
give tongue over the cups at five-o'clock.(10*)
It is perhaps unnecessary, as it would assuredly be ungraceful, to pursue this 
quasi-personal inquiry into the circumstances that so determine that habitual 
attitude of the executive. The difficulties of such an ambiguous position should 
be sufficiently evident, and the character of the demands which this position 
makes on the incumbent should be similarly evident, so far as regards 
conduciveness to clean and honest living within the premises of this executive 
office. It may, however, not be out of place to call to mind one or two 
significant, and perhaps extenuating, traits among those conventions that go to 
make up the situation. Unlike what occurs in the conduct of ordinary business 
and in the professions, there has hitherto been worked out no code of 
professional ethics for the guidance of men employed in this vocation, - with 
the sole exception of that mandatory inter-[261]presidential courtesy that binds 
all members of the craft to a strict enforcement of the academic black-list, - 
all of which leaves an exceptionally broad field for casuistry. So that, unlike 
what happens in the business community at large, no standardization has here 
determined the limits of legitimate prevarication; nor can such a 
standardization and limit be worked out so long as the executive is required, in 
effect, to function as the discretionary employer of his academic staff and hold 
them to account as agents for whom he is responsible, at the same time that he 
must, in appearance, be their confidential spokesman and their colleague in the 
corporation of learning. And it is impossible to forego either of these 
requirements, since the discretionary power of use and abuse is indispensable to 
the businesslike conduct of the enterprise, while the appearance of scholarly 
co-partnery with the staff is indispensable to that prestige on which rests the 
continued exercise of this power. And so also it has similarly proved 
unavoidable (perhaps as an issue of human infirmity) that the executive be 
guided in effect by a meretricious subservience to extra-scholastic conventions, 
all the while that he must profess an unbiassed pursuit of "the increase and 
diffusion of knowledge among men."

IV.
With all due endeavour to avoid the appearance of a study in total depravity, 
the foregoing analysis has come, after all, to converge on the growth and 
derivation of those peculiar ambiguities and obliquities that give character to 
the typical academic executive. Not that all academic executives, without 
exception, are (in the historical present) to be found fully abreast of that 
mature [262] phase of the type that would so be reflected by the exigencies of 
their office as outlined above. Nor need it be believed or argued that no man 
may enter on these duties of office but such as are specially fitted, by native 
gift and previous training, for just such an enterprise in meretricious 
notoriety as these official duties enjoin. The exceptions to such a rule are not 
altogether rare, and the incumbent may well have entered on the duties of office 
with preconceptions and aims somewhat at variance with what its discipline 
inculcates. But, it should be called to mind, the training that makes a typical 
executive comes with the most felicitous and indefeasible effect not in the 
predisposing discipline of candidature but in the workday conduct of office. And 
so consistent and unremitting is this drift of the duties of office, overt and 
covert, that, humanly speaking, any one who submits to its discipline through an 
appreciable period of years must unavoidably come to conform to type. Men of 
unmanageably refractory temperament, such as can not by habituation be indued 
with the requisite deviation and self-sufficiency, will of necessity presently 
be thrown out, as being incompetent for this vocation. Instances of such 
rejection after trial will come to mind, but such instances are, after all, not 
so frequent or so striking as to throw doubt on the general rule. The discipline 
of executive office will commonly shape the incumbent to its uses. It should 
seem beyond reason to expect that a decade of exposure to the exigencies of this 
high office will leave the incumbent still amenable to the dictates of 
commonplace tolerance and common honesty.
As intimated above, men with ingrained scholarly ideals and a consistent aim to 
serve the ends of learning will still occasionally be drawn into the executive 
office by force of circumstances - particularly by force of the [263] slow-dying 
preconception that the preferences of the academic staff should count for 
something in the choice of their senior member; and this will happen in spite of 
the ubiquitous candidature of aspirants who have prepared themselves for this 
enterprise by sedulous training in all the arts of popularity and by a well 
organized backing of influential "friends." The like happened more frequently a 
quarter of a century ago, at the time when the current situation was taking 
shape under the incipient incursion of business principles into university 
policy. But it does not appear that those incumbents who so enter on these 
duties, will fare notably otherwise in the end than do the others whose previous 
training has already bent them to the typical policy of deviation, from the 
outset.
An illustrative instance or two may well be to the point. And the same 
illustrations will perhaps also serve to enforce the view that anything like an 
effectual university - a seminary of the higher learning, as distinct from an 
assemblage of vocational schools - is not a practicable proposition in America 
under current conditions. Such seems to be the conclusion vouched for by the two 
most notable attempts of the kind during the past quarter-century. The two 
instances in question should appear to afford clear experimental evidence to 
that effect, though it is always possible to allege that personal or local 
conditions may so far have affected these experimental instances as still to 
leave the case in doubt.
In these two instances, in the Middle West and in the Far West, the matter has 
been tried out under conditions as favourable to the cause of learning as the 
American community may hope to offer, barring only the possible inhibition due 
to an untoward local colour of sentiment. Each of these two great establishments 
has been favoured [264] with an endowment of such magnitude as would be adequate 
to the foundation of an effectual university, sufficient to the single-minded 
pursuit of the higher learning, with all the "modern appliances" requisite to 
scientific and scholarly work, if only their resources had been husbanded with a 
single mind to that end; and in either case the terms of the endowment have been 
sufficiently tolerant to admit such pursuit of knowledge without arrière pensée. 
The directive hands, too, under whose discretionary control each of these 
establishments entered on its adventures and attained its distinctive character, 
were men who, at one point or another in their administration of academic 
policy, entertained a sincerely conceived scholarly ambition to create a 
substantial university, an institution of learning.(11*) And, in a general way, 
the two attempts have equally failed of their avowed initial purpose.
In the persons of their discretionary heads, the two enterprises were from the 
outset animated with widely divergent ideals and aspirations in matters of 
scholar-[265]ship, and with singularly dissimilar and distinctive traits of 
character, resembling one another in little else than a sincere devotion to the 
cause of scholarship and an unhampered discretion in their autocratic management 
of affairs; but it is an illuminating comment on the force of circumstances 
governing these matters, that these two establishments have gone down to 
substantially the same kind and degree of defeat, - a defeat not extreme but 
typical, both in kind and degree. In the one case, the more notorious, the 
initial aim (well known to persons intimately in touch with the relevant facts 
at the time) was the pursuit of scholarship, somewhat blatant perhaps, but none 
the less sincere and thoughtful; in the companion-piece it was in a like degree 
the pursuit of scientific knowledge and serviceability, though, it is true, 
unschooled and puzzle-headed to a degree. In both enterprises alike the 
discretionary heads so placed in control had been selected by individual 
businessmen of the untutored sort, and were vested with plenary powers. Under 
pressure of circumstances, in both cases alike, the policy of forceful 
initiative and innovation, with which both alike entered on the enterprise, 
presently yielded to the ubiquitous craving for statistical magnitude and the 
consequent felt need of conciliatory publicity; until presently the ulterior 
object of both was lost in the shadow of these immediate and urgent manœuvres 
of expediency, and it became the rule of policy to stick at nothing but 
appearances.
So that both establishments have come substantially to surrender the university 
ideal, through loss of effectual initiative and courage, and so have found 
themselves running substantially the same course of insidious compromise with 
"vocational" aims, undergraduate methods, and the counsels of the Philistines. 
The life-history of each, while differing widely in detail of ways and [266] 
methods, is after all made up, for the greater part, of futile extensions, 
expansions, annexations, ramifications, affiliations and pronunciamentos, in 
matters that are no more germane to the cause of learning than is the state of 
the weather. In the one case, the chase after a sufficient notoriety took the 
direction of a ravenous megalomania, the busiest concern of which presently came 
to be how most conspicuously to prolong a shout into polysyllables; and the 
further fact that this clamorous raid on the sensibilities of the gallery was 
presently, on a change of executive personnel, succeeded by a genial surrender 
to time and tide, an aimless gum-shod pusillanimity, has apparently changed the 
drift of things in no very appreciable degree.(12*)
In the companion-piece, the enterprise has been brought to the like manner and 
degree of stultification under the simple guidance of an hysterically meticulous 
deference to all else than the main facts. In both cases alike the executive 
solicitude has come to converge on a self-centred and irresponsible government 
of intolerance, differing chiefly in the degree of its efficiency. Of [267] 
course, through all this drift of stultification there has always remained - 
decus et solamen - something of an amiably inefficient and optimistic solicitude 
for the advancement of learning at large, in some unspecified manner and 
bearing, some time, but not to interfere with the business in hand.
It is not that either of these two great schools is to be rated as useless for 
whatever each is good for, but only that that pursuit of learning on which both 
set out in the beginning has fallen into abeyance, by force of circumstances as 
they impinge on the sensibilities of a discretionary executive. As vocational 
schools and as establishments for the diffusion of salutary advice on the state 
of mankind at large, both are doubtless all that might be desired; particularly 
in respect of their statistical showing. It is only that the affairs of the 
higher learning have come definitively to take a subsidiary, or putative, place. 
In these establishments; and to all appearance irretrievably so, because both 
are now committed to so large and exacting a volume of obligations and 
liabilities, legal and customary, extraneous and alien to their legitimate 
interest, that there is no longer a reasonable chance of their coming to 
anything of serious import in the way of the higher learning, even, conceivably, 
under the most enlightened management in the calculable future. In their 
bootless chase after a blameless publicity, both have sunk their endowment in 
conspicuous real estate, vocational, technical and accessory schools, and the 
like academic side-issues, to such an extent as to leave them without means to 
pursue their legitimate end in any adequate manner, even if they should harbour 
an effectual inclination to pursue it.(13*)
[268] These remarks on the typical traits of the academic executive have 
unavoidably taken the colour of personalities. That such is the case should by 
no means be taken as intentionally reflecting anything like dispraise on those 
persons who have this (unavoidable) work of stultification in hand. Rather, it 
is dispassionately to be gathered from the run of the facts as set out above 
that those persons on whom these exigencies impinge will, by force of 
habituation, necessarily come to take the bent which these current conditions 
enforce, and without which this work could not well be done; all on the 
supposition - and it is by no means an extravagant assumption - that these 
persons so exposed to these agencies of spiritual disintegration are by native 
gift endowed with the commonplace traits of human nature, no more and no less. 
It is the duties of the office, not a run of infirmities peculiar to the 
incumbents of office, that make [269] the outcome. Very much like that of the 
medicine-man, the office is one which will not abide a tolerant and ingenuous 
incumbent.(14*)
[270]
V.
In all the above argument and exposition, touching the executive office and its 
administrative duties, the point of the discussion is, of course, not the 
personal characteristics of the typical executive, nor even the spiritual 
fortunes of the persons exposed to the wear and tear of executive office; 
although these matters might well engage the attention of any one given to 
moralizing. The point is, of course, that precarious situation in which the 
university, considered as a corporation of the higher learning, is placed under 
these current conditions, and the manner in which these current conditions give 
rise to this situation. Seen from the point of view of the higher learning, and 
disregarding considerations extraneous to that interest, it is evident that this 
run of events, and the conditions which determine them, are wholly untoward, not 
to say disastrous.
Now, this inquiry is nowise concerned to reform, deflect or remedy this current 
drift of things academic away from the ancient holding ground of the higher 
learning; partly because such an enterprise in reform and rehabilitation lies 
beyond its competence; and partly, again, because in all this current move to 
displace the higher learning there may conceivably be other ends involved, which 
may be worth while in some other bearing that is alien to the higher learning 
but of graver consequence for the fortunes of the race, - urgent needs which can 
only be served by so diverting effort and attention from this pursuit. Yet, 
partly out of a reasonable defer-[271]ence to the current prejudice that any 
mere negative criticism and citation of grievances is nothing better than an 
unworthy experiment in irritation; and more particularly as a means to a more 
adequate appreciation of the rigorous difficulties inherent in this current 
state and drift of things; it may not be out of place to offer some 
consideration of remedial measures that have been attempted or projected, or 
that may be conceived to promise a way out.
As is well known, divers and various remedial measures have been advocated by 
critics of current university affairs, from time to time; and it is equally 
evident on reflection that these proposed remedial measures are with fair 
uniformity directed to the treatment of symptoms, - to relieve agitation and 
induce insensibility. However, there is at least one line of aggressively 
remedial action that is being tried, though not avowedly as a measure to bring 
the universities into line with their legitimate duties, but rather with a view 
to relieving them of this work which they are no longer fit to take care of. It 
is a move designed to shift the seat of the higher learning out of the precincts 
of the schools. And the desperate case of the universities, considered as 
seminaries of science and scholarship, is perhaps more forcibly brought in 
evidence by what is in this way taking place in the affairs of learning outside 
the schools than by their visible failure to take care of their own work. This 
evidence goes to say that the difficulties of the academic situation are 
insurmountable; any rehabilitation of the universities is not contemplated in 
this latterday movement. And it is so coming to be recognized, in effect though 
tacitly, that for all their professions of a single-minded addiction to the 
pursuit of learning, the academic establishments, old and new, are no longer 
[272] competent to take the direction of affairs in this domain.
So it is that, with a sanguine hope born of academic defeat, there have latterly 
been founded certain large establishments, of the nature of retreats or shelters 
for the prosecution of scientific and scholarly inquiry in some sort of academic 
quarantine, detached from all academic affiliation and renouncing all share in 
the work of instruction. In point of form the movement is not altogether new. 
Foundations of a similar aim have been had before. But the magnitude and 
comprehensive aims of the new establishments are such as to take them out of the 
category of auxiliaries and throw them into the lead. They are assuming to take 
over the advance in science and scholarship, which has by tradition belonged 
under the tutelage of the academic community. This move looks like a desperate 
surrender of the university ideal. The reason for it appears to be the proven 
inability of the schools, under competitive management, to take care of the 
pursuit of knowledge.
Seen from the point of view of the higher learning, this new departure, as well 
as the apparent need of it, is to be rated as untoward; and it reflects gravely 
enough on the untoward condition into which the rule of business principles is 
leading the American schools. Such establishments of research are capable, in 
any competent manner, of serving only one of the two joint purposes necessary to 
be served by any effective seminary of the higher learning; nor can they at all 
adequately serve this one purpose to the best advantage when so disjoined from 
its indispensable correlate. By and large, these new establishments are good for 
research only, not for instruction; or at the best they can serve this latter 
purpose only as a more or less Surreptitious or supererogatory side interest. 
Should they, under pressure of instant [273] need, turn their forces to 
instruction as well as to inquiry, they would incontinently find themselves 
drifting into the same equivocal position as the universities, and the dry-rot 
of business principles and competitive gentility would presently consume their 
tissues after the same fashion.
It is, to all appearance, impracticable and inadvisable to let these 
institutions of research take over any appreciable share of that work of 
scientific and scholarly instruction that is slipping out of the palsied hands 
of the universities, so as to include some consistent application to teaching 
within the scope of their everyday work. And this cuts out of their complement 
of ways and means one of the chief aids to an effectual pursuit of scientific 
inquiry. Only in the most exceptional, not to say erratic, cases will good, 
consistent, sane and alert scientific work be carried forward through a course 
of years by any scientist without students, without loss or blunting of that 
intellectual initiative that makes the creative scientist. The work that can be 
done well in the absence of that stimulus and safe-guarding that comes of the 
give and take between teacher and student is commonly such only as can without 
deterioration be reduced to a mechanically systematized task-work, - that is to 
say, such as can, without loss or gain, be carried on under the auspices of a 
businesslike academic government.
This, imperatively unavoidable, absence of provision for systematic instruction 
in these new-found establishments of research means also that they and the work 
which they have in hand are not self-perpetuating, whether individually and in 
detail or taken in the large; since their work breeds no generation of 
successors to the current body of scientists on which they draw. As the matter 
stands now, they depend for their personnel [274] on the past output of scholars 
and scientists from the schools, and so they pick up and turn to account what 
there is ready to hand in that way - not infrequently men for whom the 
universities find little use, as being refractory material not altogether 
suitable for the academic purposes of notoriety. When this academic source 
fails, as it presently must, with the increasingly efficient application of 
business principles in the universities, there should seem to be small recourse 
for establishments of this class except to run into the sands of intellectual 
quietism where the universities have gone before.
In this connection it will be interesting to note, by way of parenthesis, that 
even now a large proportion of the names that appear among the staff of these 
institutions of research are not American, and that even the American-born among 
them are frequently not American-bred in respect of their scientific training. 
For this work, recourse is necessarily had to the output of men trained 
elsewhere than in the vocational and athletic establishments of the American 
universities, or to that tapering file of academic men who are still imbued with 
traditions so alien to the current scheme of conventions as to leave them not 
amenable to the dictates of business principles. Meantime, that which is eating 
the heart out of the American seminaries of the higher learning should in due 
course also work out the like sterilization in the universities of Europe, as 
fast and as far as these other countries also come fully into line with the same 
pecuniary ideals that are making the outcome in America. And evidence is not 
wholly wanting that the like proclivity to pragmatic and popular traffic is 
already making the way of the academic scientist or scholar difficult and dis-
[275]tasteful in the greater schools of the Old World. America is by no means in 
a unique position in this matter, except only in respect of the eminent degree 
in which this community is pervaded by business principles, and its consequent 
faith in businesslike methods, and its intolerance of any other than pecuniary 
standards of value. It is only that this country is in the lead; the other 
peoples of Christendom are following the same lead as fast as their incumbrance 
of archaic usages and traditions will admit; and the generality of their higher 
schools are already beginning to show the effects of the same businesslike 
aspirations, decoratively coloured with feudalistic archaisms of patriotic 
buncombe.

As will be seen from the above explication of details and circumstances, such 
practicable measures as have hitherto been offered as a corrective to this 
sterilization of the universities by business principles, amount to a surrender 
of these institutions to the enemies of learning, and a proposal to replace them 
with an imperfect substitute. That it should so be necessary to relinquish the 
universities, as a means to the pursuit of knowledge, and to replace them with a 
second-best, is due, as has also appeared from the above analysis, to the course 
of policy (necessarily) pursued by the executive officers placed in control of 
academic affairs; and the character of the policy so pursued follows unavoidably 
from the dependence of the executive on a businesslike governing board, backed 
by a businesslike popular clamour, on the one hand, and from his being 
(necessarily) vested, in effect, with arbitrary power of use and abuse within 
the academic community, on the other hand. It follows, therefore, also that no 
remedy or corrective can be con-[276]trived that will have anything more than a 
transient palliative effect, so long as these conditions that create the 
difficulty are allowed to remain in force.
All of which points unambiguously to the only line of remedial measures that can 
be worth serious consideration; and at the same time it carries the broad 
implication that in the present state of popular sentiment, touching these 
matters of control and administration, any effort that looks to reinstate the 
universities as effectual seminaries of learning will necessarily be nugatory; 
inasmuch as the popular sentiment runs plainly to the effect that magnitude, 
arbitrary control, and businesslike administration is the only sane rule to be 
followed in any human enterprise. So that, while the measures called for are 
simple, obvious, and effectual, they are also sure to be impracticable, and for 
none but extraneous reasons.
While it still remains true that the long-term common sense judgment of 
civilized mankind places knowledge above business traffic, as an end to be 
sought, yet workday habituation under the stress of competitive business has 
induced a frame of mind that will tolerate no other method of procedure, and no 
rule of life that does not approve itself as a faithful travesty of competitive 
enterprise. And since the quest of learning can not be carried on by the methods 
or with the apparatus and incidents of competitive business, it follows that the 
only remedial measures that hold any promise of rehabilitation for the higher 
learning in the universities can not be attempted in the present state of public 
sentiment.
All that is required is the abolition of the academic executive and of the 
governing board. Anything short of this heroic remedy is bound to fail, because 
the evils sought to be remedied are inherent in these organs, and intrinsic to 
their functioning.
[277] Even granting the possibility of making such a move, in the face of 
popular prejudice, it will doubtless seem suicidal, on first thought, to take so 
radical a departure; in that it would be held to cripple the whole academic 
organization and subvert the scheme of things academic, for good and all: - 
which, by the way, is precisely what would have to be aimed at, since it is the 
present scheme and organization that unavoidably work the mischief, and since, 
also (as touches the interest of the higher learning), they work nothing but 
mischief.
It should be plain, on reflection, to any one familiar with academic matters 
that neither of these official bodies serves any useful purpose in the 
university, in so far as bears in any way on the pursuit of knowledge. They may 
conceivably both be useful for some other purpose, foreign or alien to the quest 
of learning; but within the lines of the university's legitimate interest both 
are wholly detrimental, and very wastefully so. They are needless, except to 
take care of needs and emergencies to which their own presence gratuitously 
gives rise. In so far as these needs and difficulties that require executive 
surveillance are not simply and flagrantly factitious, - as, e.g., the onerous 
duties of publicity - they are altogether such needs as arise out of an 
excessive size and a gratuitously complex administrative organization; both of 
which characteristics of the American university are created by the governing 
boards and their executive officers, for no better purpose than a vainglorious 
self-complacency, and with no better justification than an uncritical 
prepossession to the effect that large size, complex organization, and 
authoritative control necessarily make for efficiency; whereas, in point of 
fact, in the affairs of learning these things unavoidably make for defeat.
[278] Objection to any such measure of abolition is not to be grounded in their 
impracticability or their inefficiency, - supposing only that they could be 
carried out in the face of the prejudices of the ignorant and of the selfishly 
interested parties; the obstacles to any such move lie simply in the popular 
prejudice which puts implicit faith in large, complicated, and formidable 
organizations, and in that appetite for popular prestige that animates the class 
of persons from which the boards and executives are drawn.
This unreasoning faith in large and difficult combinations has been induced in 
the modern community by its experience with the large-scale organization of the 
mechanical industries, and still more particularly by the convincing pecuniary 
efficiency of large capital, authoritative control, and devious methods, in 
modern business enterprise; and of this popular prejudice the boards of control 
and their executive officers have at least their full share, - indeed they owe 
their place and power in great part to their being animated with something more 
than an equitable share of this popular prepossession. It is undeniable, indeed 
it is a matter of course, that so long as the university continues to be made 
up, as is now customary, of an aggregation of divers and sundry schools, 
colleges, divisions, etc., each and several of which are engaged in a more or 
less overt rivalry, due to their being so aggregated into a meaningless 
coalition, - so long will something formidable in the way of a centralized and 
arbitrary government be indispensable to the conduct of the university's 
affairs; but it is likewise patent that none of the several constituent schools, 
colleges, etc., are any the better off, in respect of their work, for being so 
aggregated in such an arbitrary collective organization. The duties of the 
executive - aside from [279] the calls of publicity and self-aggrandizement - 
are in the main administrative duties that have to do with the interstitial 
adjustments of the composite establishment. These resolve themselves into a co-
ordinated standardization of the several constituent schools and divisions, on a 
mechanically specified routine and scale, which commonly does violence to the 
efficient working of all these diverse and incommensurable elements; with no 
gain at any point, excepting a gain in the facility of control - control for 
control's sake, at the best. Much of the official apparatus and routine office-
work is taken up with this futile control. Beyond this, and requisite to the due 
working of this control and standardization, there is the control of the 
personnel and the checking-up of their task work; together with the disciplining 
of such as do not sufficiently conform to the resulting schedule of uniformity 
and mediocrity.
These duties are, all and several, created by the imposition of a central 
control, and in the absence of such control the need of them would not arise. 
They are essentially extraneous to the work on which each and several of the 
constituent schools are engaged, and their only substantial effect on that work 
is to force it into certain extraneous formalities of routine and accountancy, 
such as to divert and retard the work in hand. So also the control exercised 
more at large by the governing board; except in so far as it is the mere 
mischief-making interference of ignorant outsiders, it is likewise directed to 
the keeping of a balance between units that need no balancing as against one 
another; except for the need which so is gratuitously induced by drawing these 
units into an incongruous coalition under the control of such a board; whose 
duties of office in this way arise wholly out of the creation of their office.
[280] The great and conspicuous effect of abolishing the academic executive and 
the governing board would be, of course, that the university organization as now 
known would incontinently fall to pieces. The several constituent schools would 
fall apart, since nothing holds them together except the strong hand of the 
present central government. This would, of course, seem a monstrous and painful 
outrage to all those persons who are infatuated with a veneration of big thing; 
to whom a "great" - that is to say voluminous - university is an object of pride 
and loyal affection. This class of persons is a very large one, and they are 
commonly not given to rejection on the merits of their preconceived ideals of 
"greatness." So that the dissolution of this "trust"-like university coalition 
would bitterly hurt their feelings. So intolerable would the shock to this 
popular sentiment presumably be, indeed, that no project of the kind can have 
any reasonable chance of a hearing.
Apart from such loss of "prestige value" in the eyes of those whose pride 
centres on magnitude, the move in question would involve no substantial loss. 
The chief direct and tangible effect would be a considerable saving in "overhead 
charges," in that the greater part of the present volume of administrative work 
would fall away. The greater part - say, three-fourths - of the present officers 
of administration, with their clerical staff, would be lost; under the present 
system these are chiefly occupied with the correlation and control of matters 
that need correlation and control only with a view to centralized management.
The aggregate of forces engaged and the aggregate volume of work done in the 
schools would suffer no sensible diminution. Indeed, the contemplated change 
should bring a very appreciably heightened efficiency of [281] all the working 
units that are now tied up in the university coalition. Each of these units 
would be free to follow its own devices, within the lines imposed by the work in 
hand, since none of them would then be required to walk in lock-step with 
several others with which it had no more vital articulation than the lock-step 
in question.
Articulation and co-ordination is good and requisite where and so far as it is 
intrinsic to the work in hand; but it all comes to nothing better than 
systematized lag, leak and friction, so soon as it is articulation and 
coordination in other terms and for other ends than the performance of the work 
in hand. It is also true, the coalition of these several school units into a 
pseudo-aggregate under a centralized control gives a deceptive appearance of a 
massive engine working to some common end; but, again, mass movement comes to 
nothing better than inhibition and misdirection when it involves a coalition of 
working units whose work is necessarily to be done in severalty.
Left to themselves the several schools would have to take care each of its own 
affairs and guide its endeavours by the exigencies of its own powers and 
purposes, with such regard to inter-collegiate comity and courtesy as would be 
required by the substantial relations then subsisting between them, by virtue of 
their common employment in academic work.

In what has just been said, it is not forgotten that the burden of their own 
affairs would be thrown back on the initiative and collective discretion of the 
several faculties, so soon as the several schools had once escaped from the 
trust-like coalition in which they are now held. As has abundantly appeared in 
latterday practice, these faculties have in such matters proved themselves 
notable [282] chiefly for futile disputation; which does not give much promise 
of competent self-direction on their part, in case they were given a free hand. 
It is to be recalled, however, that this latterday experience of confirmed 
incompetence has been gathered under the overshadowing presence of a 
surreptitiously and irresponsibly autocratic executive, vested with power of use 
and abuse, and served by a corps of adroit parliamentarians and lobbyists, ever 
at hand to divert the faculty's action from any measure that might promise to 
have a substantial effect. By force of circumstances, chief of which is the 
executive office, the faculties have become deliberative bodies charged with 
power to talk. Their serious attention has been taken up with schemes for 
weighing imponderables and correlating incommensurables, with such a degree of 
verisimilitude as would keep the statistics and accountancy of the collective 
administration in countenance, and still leave some play in the joints of the 
system for the personal relation of teacher and disciple. It is a nice problem 
in self-deception, chiefly notable for an endless proliferation.
At the same time it is well known - too well known to command particular 
attention - that in current practice, and of necessity, the actual effective 
organization of each of these constituent school units devolves on the working 
staff, in so far as regards the effectual work to be done. even to the selection 
of its working members and the apportionment of the work. It is all done "by 
authority" of course, and must all be arranged discreetly, with an ulterior view 
to its sanction by the executive and its due articulation with the scheme of 
publicity at large; but in all these matters the executive habitually comes into 
bearing only as a (powerful) extraneous and alien interference, - almost wholly 
inhibitory, in effect, even [283] though with a show of initiative and creative 
guidance. And this inhibitory surveillance is exercised chiefly on grounds of 
conciliatory notoriety towards the outside, rather than on grounds that touch 
the efficiency of the staff for the work in hand. Such efficiency is commonly 
not barred, it is believed, so long as it does not hinder the executive's quest 
of the greater glory. There is, in effect, an inhibitory veto power touching the 
work and its ways and means.
But even when taken at its best, and when relieved of the inhibition and 
deflection worked by the executive, such an academic body can doubtless be 
counted on to manage its collective affairs somewhat clumsily and incompetently. 
There can be no hope of trenchant policy and efficient control at their hands; 
and, it should be added, there need be no great fear of such an outcome. The 
result should, in so far, be nearly clear gain, as against the current highly 
efficient management by an executive. Relatively little administration or 
control would be needed in the resulting small-scale units; except in so far as 
they might carry over into the new régime an appreciable burden of extra-
scholastic traffic in the way of athletics, fraternities, student activities, 
and the like; and except so far as regards those schools that might still 
continue to be "gentlemen's colleges," devoted to the cultivation of the 
irregularities of adolescence and to their transfusion with a conventional 
elegance; these latter, being of the nature of penal settlements, would 
necessarily require government by a firm hand. That work of intimately personal 
contact and guidance, in a community of intellectual enterprise, that makes up 
the substance of efficient teaching, would, it might fairly be hoped, not be 
seriously hindered by the ill-coordinated efforts of such an academic assembly, 
even if its members [284] had carried over a good share of the mechanistic frame 
of mind induced by their experience under the régime of standardization and 
accountancy.
Indeed, there might even be ground to hope that, on the dissolution of the 
trust, the underlying academic units would return to that ancient footing of 
small-scale parcelment and personal communion between teacher and student that 
once made the American college, with all its handicap of poverty, chauvinism and 
denominational bias, one of the most effective agencies of scholarship in 
Christendom.
The hope - or delusion - would be that the staff in each of the resulting 
disconnected units might be left to conduct its own affairs, and that they would 
prove incapable of much concerted action or detailed control. It should be plain 
that no other and extraneous power, such as the executive or the governing 
boards, is as competent - or, indeed, competent in any degree - to take care of 
these matters, as are the staff who have the work to do. All this is evident to 
any one who is at all conversant with the run of academic affairs as currently 
conducted on the grand scale; inasmuch as it is altogether a matter of course 
and of common notoriety within the precincts, that this is precisely what these 
constituent schools and units now have to do, each and several; with the sole 
qualification that they now have to take care of these matters under the 
inhibitory surveillance of the executive and his extraneous interests, and under 
the exactions of a super-imposed scheme of mechanical standardization and 
accountancy that accounts for nothing but its superimposition. At the same time 
the working force of the staff is hampered with a load of dead timber imported 
into its body to administer a rou-[285]tine of control and accountancy exacted 
by the executive's need of a creditable publicity (15*)
This highly conjectural tracing of consequences to follow from this hypothetical 
dissolution of the trust, may as well be pursued into a point or two of detail, 
as touches those units of the university coalition that have an immediate 
interest in point of scholarship, - the Collegiate ("Arts") division and the 
Graduate School. The former being left to its own devices and, it might be 
hoped, being purified of executive megalomania, it should seem probable that 
something of a reversion would take effect, in the direction of that simpler 
scheme of scholarship that prevailed in the days before the coming of electives. 
It was in the introduction of electives, and presently of alternatives and 
highly flexible curricula, that the move first set in which carried the American 
college off its footing as a school of probation and introduction to the 
scholarly life, and has left it a job-lot of ostensibly conclusive short-cuts 
into the trades and [286] professions. It need not follow that the ancient 
curriculum would be re-established, but it should seem reasonable that a move 
would take effect in the direction of something like a modern equivalent. The 
Graduate School, on the other hand, having lost the drag of the collegiate 
division and the vocational schools, should come into action as a shelter where 
the surviving remnant of scholars and scientists might pursue their several 
lines of adventure, in teaching and in inquiry, without disturbance to or from 
the worldly-wise who clamour for the greater glory.

Now, all this speculation as to what might happen has, of course, little else 
than a speculative value. It is not intended, seriously and as a practical 
measure, to propose the abolition of the president's office, or of the governing 
board; nor is it intended to intimate that the captain of erudition can be 
dispensed with in fact. He is too dear to the commercialized popular 
imagination, and he fits too convincingly into the businessmen's preconceived 
scheme of things, to permit any such sanguine hope of surcease from skilled 
malpractice and malversation. All that is here intended to be said is nothing 
more than the obiter dictum that, as seen from the point of view of the higher 
learning, the academic executive and all his works are anathema, and should be 
discontinued by the simple expedient of wiping him off the slate; and that the 
governing board, in so far as it presumes to exercise any other than vacantly 
perfunctory duties, has the same value and should with advantage be lost in the 
same shuffle.
NOTES:
1. "He has stifled all manly independence and individuality wherever it has 
exhibited itself at college. All noble idealism, and all the graces of poetry 
and art have been shrivelled by his brutal and triumphant power. He has made 
mechanical efficiency and administrative routine the goal of the university's 
endeavour. The nobler ends of academic life will never be served so long as this 
spokesman of materialism remains in power."
History will relate that one of the eminent captains, through an incumbency of 
more than a quarter of a century, in a university of eminent wealth and volume, 
has followed a settled policy of defeating any overt move looking to scientific 
or scholarly inquiry on the part of any member of his faculty. Should a man of 
scholarly proclivities by any chance sift through the censorship exercised in 
virtue of the executive's appointing power, as might happen, since the captain 
was himself not qualified to pass a grounded opinion on any man's qualifications 
in that respect; and should he then give evidence of continuing to spend time 
and thought on matters of that nature, his burden of administrative and class-
room tasks would presently be increased sufficiently to subdue his wayward bent; 
or, in an incorrigible case, the offender against the rule of academic sterility 
would eventually be retired by severance of his connection with this seat of 
learning.
In some sinister sense the case reflects credit on the American academic 
community at large, in that, by the close of this quarter-century of preventive 
regimen, the resulting academic staff had become a byword of nugatory intrigue 
and vacant pedantry.
2. So far has this predilection made its way in the counsels of the "educators" 
that much of the current discussion of desideranda in academic policy reads like 
controversial argument on "efficiency engineering," - an "efficiency engineer" 
is an accountant competent to advise business concerns how best to increase 
their saleable output per unit of cost. And there has, indeed, been at least one 
tour of inspection of American universities by such an "efficiency engineer," 
undertaken in the service of an establishment founded with a view to academic 
welfare and governed by a board of university presidents. The report submitted 
by the inquiry in question duly conforms to the customary lines of "scientific 
management."
3. "Education is the one kind of human enterprise that can not be brought under 
the action of the economic law of supply and demand. It can not be conducted on 
'business principles.' There is no 'demand' for education in the economic sense. 
... Society is the only interest that can be said to demand it, and society must 
supply its own demand. Those who found educational institutions or promote 
educational enterprise put themselves in the place of society and assume to 
speak and act for society, not for any economic interest." - Lester F. Ward, 
Pure Sociology, p. 575.
4. Indeed, the resemblance is visible. As among professional politicians, so 
also as regards incumbents and aspirants for academic office, it is not at all 
unusual, nor does it cause surprise, to find such persons visibly affected with 
those characteristic pathological marks that come of what is conventionally 
called "high living" - late hours, unseasonable vigils, surfeit of victuals and 
drink, the fatigue of sedentary ennui. A flabby habit of body, hypertrophy of 
the abdomen, varicose veins, particularly of the facial tissues, a blear eye and 
a colouration suggestive of bile and apoplexy, - when this unwholesome bulk is 
duly wrapped in a conventionally decorous costume it is accepted rather as a 
mark of weight and responsibility, and so serves to distinguish the pillars of 
urbane society. Nor should it be imagined that these grave men of affairs and 
discretion are in any peculiar degree prone to excesses of the table or to 
nerve-shattering bouts of dissipation. The exigencies of publicity, however, 
are, by current use and wont, such as to enjoin not indulgence in such 
excursions of sensual perversity, so much as a gentlemanly conformity to a large 
routine of conspicuous convivialities. "Indulgence" in ostensibly gluttonous 
bouts of this kind - banquets, dinners, etc. - is not so much a matter of taste 
as of astute publicity, designed to keep the celebrants in repute among a laity 
whose simplest and most assured award of esteem proceeds on evidence of wasteful 
ability to pay. But the pathological consequences, physical and otherwise, are 
of much the same nature in either case.
5. See pp. 68-73, 79-81, above.
6. As bearing on this "hired-man's loyalty" of the academic staff and the means 
of maintaining it, see, e.g., a paper by George Cram Cook in the Forum for 
October, 1913, on "The Third American Sex," especially pp. 450-455.
7. Unfortunately, the language wants a competent designation for public-minded 
personages of this class; which comprises something appreciably more than the 
homiletical university executives alluded to above, and their understudies, 
while it is also not strictly inclusive of all these executives. There is indeed 
a fairly obvious contingent comes in from among those minor politicians and 
clergymen who crave the benefit of an inoffensive notoriety, and who are at the 
same time solicitous to keep their fellow-men in mind of the unforgotten 
commonplaces. One will necessarily have misgivings about putting forward a new 
technical term for adoption into a vocabulary that is already top-heavy with 
technical innovations. "Philandropist" has been suggested. It is not a large 
innovation, and it has the merit of being obviously self-explanatory. At the 
same time its phonetic resemblance to an older term, already well accepted in 
the language, should recommend it to the members of the craft whom it is 
designed to signalize, and with whom phonetic considerations are habitually 
allowed weight. The purists will doubtless find "philandropist" a barbarism; but 
that is an infirmity that has attached to many technical designations at their 
inception, without permanently hindering their acceptance and serviceability; it 
is also not wholly unfitting that the term chosen should be of such a character.
8. "The time has come, the walrus said,
To talk of many things."
Within the last few years one of the more illustrious and fluent of the captains 
of erudition hit upon the expedient of having a trusted locum tenens appointed 
to take over the functions of the home office for a term of years, while the 
captain himself "takes the road" - on an appreciably augmented salary - to speak 
his mind eloquently on many topics. The device can, however, scarcely yet be 
said to have passed the experimental phase. This illustrious exponent of 
philandropism commands an extraordinary range of homily and is a raconteur of 
quite exceptional merit; and a device that commends itself in this special case, 
therefore, may or may not prove a feasible plan in general and ordinary usage. 
But in any case it indicates a felt need of some measure of relief, such as will 
enable the run of presidential speech to gain a little something in amplitude 
and frequency.
9. So, e.g., a certain notably self-possessed and energetic captain of erudition 
has been in the habit of repeating ("on the spur of the moment") a homily on one 
of the staple Christian virtues.
10. These resulting canons of blameless anility will react on the character of 
the academic personnel in a two-fold way: negatively and by indirection they 
work out in an (uncertain but effectual) selective elimination of such persons 
as are worth while in point of scholarship and initiative; while positively and 
by direct incitement it results that the tribe of Lo Basswood has been elected 
to fill the staff with vacancy.
At the same time the case is not unknown, nor is it altogether a chance 
occurrence, where such an executive with plenary powers, driven to uncommonly 
fatuous lengths by this calculus of expedient notoriety, and intent on putting a 
needed patch on the seat of his honour, has endeavoured to save some remnant of 
good-will among his academic acquaintance by protesting, in strict and 
confidential privacy, that his course of action taken in conformity with these 
canons was taken for the sake of popular effect, and not because he did not know 
better. apparently having by familiar use come to the persuasion that a knave is 
more to be esteemed than a fool, and overlooking the great ease with which he 
has been able to combine the two characters.
11. In all fairness it should be noted, as a caution against hasty conclusions, 
that in both of these cases this initial scholarly intention has been questioned 
- or denied - by men well informed as too the later state of things in either of 
the two universities in question. And it may as well be admitted without much 
reservation that the later state of things has carried no broad hint of an 
initial phase in the life-history of these schools, in which ideals of 
scholarship were given first consideration. Yet it is to be taken as unequivocal 
fact that such was the case, in both instances; this is known as an assured 
matter of memory by men competent to speak from familiar acquaintance with the 
relevant facts at the time. In both cases, it is only in the outcome, only after 
the pressure of circumstances has had time to act, that a rounded meretricious 
policy has taken effect. What has misled hasty and late-come observers in this 
matter is the relatively very brief - inconspicuously brief - time interval 
during which it was found practicable to let the academic policy be guided 
primarily by scholarly ideals.
12. As a commentary on the force of circumstances and the academic value of the 
executive office, it is worth noting that, in the case cited, an administration 
guided by a forceful, ingenious and intrepid personality, initially imbued with 
scholarly ideals of a sort, has run a course of scarcely interrupted academic 
decay; while the succeeding reign of astute vacuity and quietism as touches all 
matters of scholarship and science has, on the whole, and to date, left the 
university in an increasingly hopeful posture as a seminary of the higher 
learning. All of which would appear to suggest a parallel with the classic 
instance of King Stork and King Log. Indeed, at the period of the succession 
alluded to, the case of these fabled majesties was specifically called to mind 
by one and another of the academic staff. It would appear that the academic 
staff will take care of its ostensible work with better effect the less 
effectually its members are interfered with and suborned by an enterprising 
captain of erudition.
13. There is a word to add, as to the measure of success achieved by these 
enterprises along their chosen lines of endeavour. Both [268] of the establishments 
spoken of are schools of some value in many directions, and both have also 
achieved a large reputation among the laity. Indeed, the captains under whose 
management the two schools have perforce carried on their work, are commonly 
held in considerable esteem as having achieved great things. There is no desire 
here to understate the case; but it should be worth noting, as bearing on the 
use and academic value of the presidential office, that the disposal of very 
large means - means of unexampled magnitude - has gone to this achievement. A 
consideration of these results, whether in point of scholarship or of notoriety, 
as compared with the means which the captains have disposed of, will leave one 
in doubt. It should seem doubtful if the results could have been less excellent 
or less striking, given the free disposal of an endowment of 20 or 30 millions, 
and upward, even under the undistinguished and uneventful management of 
commonplace honesty and academic traditions without the guidance of a "strong 
man." It is, indeed, not easy to believe that less could have been achieved 
without the captain's help. There is also evidence to hand that the loss of the 
"strong man" has entailed no sensible loss either in the efficiency or in the 
good repute of the academic establishment; rather the reverse.
14. Within the precincts, it is not unusual to meet with a harsher and more 
personal note of appraisal of what are rated as the frailties of the executive. 
There are many expressions to be met with, touching this matter, of a colloquial 
turn. These will commonly have something of an underbred air, as may happen in 
unguarded colloquial speech; but if it be kept in mind that their personal 
incidence is duly to be read out of them, their tenor may yet be instructive, 
and their scant elegance may be over-looked for once, in view of that certain 
candour that is scarcely to be had without a colloquial turn. They should serve 
better than many elaborate phrases to throw into relief the kind and measure of 
esteem accorded these mature incumbents of executive office by the men who 
assist behind the scenes. So, in bold but intelligible metaphor, one hears, "He 
is a large person full of small potatoes," "The only white thing about him is 
his liver," "Half-a-peck of pusillanimity," "A four-flusher." Something after 
this kind is this aphoristic wisdom current in the academic community, in so far 
as it runs safely above the level of scurrility. In point of taste, it would be 
out of the question to follow the same strain of discourteous expressions into 
that larger volume of more outspoken appraisal that lies below that level; and 
even what has so been sparingly cited in illustration can, of course, not claim 
a sympathetic hearing as being in any way a graceful presentment of the sense 
intended to be conveyed in these figures of speech. Yet the apology may be 
accepted, that it conveys this sense intelligibly even if not elegantly.
Indeed, a person widely conversant with current opinion and its expression among 
the personnel of the staff, as touches the character and academic value of a 
capable and businesslike executive, might unguardedly come to the persuasion 
that the typical academic head, under these latterday conditions, will be a 
feebleminded rogue. Such is, doubtless, far from being the actual valuation 
underlying these many artless expressions that one meets with. And doubtless, 
the most that could be said would be that, in point of orientation, the typical 
executive, qua executive, tends to fall in with the lines so indicated; that the 
exigencies of the executive office are of a kind that would converge upon such 
an issue "in the long run" and "in the absence of disturbing causes"; not that 
the effectual run of circumstances [270] will at all commonly permit a consummation 
of that kind and degree.
"Indeed ... we may say ... as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries. 'Doubtless God 
could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.'"
15. It will be objected, and with much reason, that these underlying "school 
units" that go to make up the composite American university habitually see no 
great evil in so being absorbed into the trust. They lend themselves readily, if 
not eagerly, to schemes of coalition; they are in fact prone to draw in under 
the aegis of the university corporation by "annexation," "affiliation." 
"absorption," etc. Any one who cares to take stock of that matter and is in a 
position to know what is going on can easily assure himself that the reasons 
which decide in such a case are not advisedly accepted reasons intrinsic to the 
needs of efficiency for the work in hand, but rather reasons of competitive 
expediency, of competitive advantage and of prestige; except in so far as it may 
all be - as perhaps it commonly is - mere unreflecting conformity to the current 
fashion. In this connection it is to be remarked, however, that even if the 
current usage has no intrinsic advantage, as against another way of doing, 
failure to conform with the current way of doing will always entail a disadvantage.
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