Then there was a further difficulty, particularly among the younger men, though not wholly among them. The expert's job, and hence inclusively the scholar's job, is relatively safe so far as the immediate risk of death is concerned, though not the risk of shortening life through overwork. One Columbia man, well over the draft age, told me frankly that he would gladly give up an important public office he held for the privilege of fighting with his hands, but he could not be tempted by an opportunity to fight with his head. Through this same impulse many and many a man attempted to conceal his special knowledge in order that he might fight in the line. The Army Committee on Classification of Personnel, which was in itself a beautiful example of scholarship in practical application, was able, however, in most instances to pluck out the expert from the line and set him, whether he was willing or not, at the task for which he was particularly adapted and particularly needed.
What, from the point of view of the non-scholar, can be said as to the general usefulness of the men and women (for the women did their share) who came forward or were brought forward to take this trial by fire on behalf of American scholarship? First of all, the scholar must be a real scholar; he must have the natural ability and the long and rigorous training necessary for accurate observation, and observation of the kind which, if I may be forgiven a most unscholarly metaphor, includes the ability to distinguish the blue chips from the white; his deductions must be relentless, and his inductions must be luminous. That is asking a good deal, and it would be enough if his dealings were to be with other scholars or with scholars in the making. The papers of a leisurely recluse can be dug out by others from the even more deliberately published proceedings of learned societies, even as the author has dug out those of his predecessors, and ultimately the practical application of his discoveries will be made. In national emergency, however, this process will not suffice. The scholar must descend from his tower; he must, if he is to serve effectively, learn to think to order and to do it rapidly, to deal with all sorts and conditions of men; he must bear with their amazing ignorances and profit by their equally amazing knowledge of things of which he is ignorant. He must know the art of team play. The war has brought out a new type of scholarship, or at any rate has developed it to such an extent that its implications are new, and that is the unselfish coöperation of experts to meet a given and usually an immediately pressing need. The development of the Liberty motor furnishes a good example of the results of such coöperative effort. It seems to me that the most important single lesson which our scholars can learn from the experience of the two past years is the importance of this team play in scholarship, and not only team play with other scholars, but team play with those who have the equally valuable and perhaps even rarer gift of getting things done, who perhaps deserve the title of scholars in the control of time and space. The scholars who made good were those who had had not only the training and temperament for research, but the training and temperament for working with other people. The scholarship of the man who from self-centeredness or from a mistaken absorption in his specialty lacked the art of dealing with his fellow men was likely to prove a sterile scholarship, and in most cases a useless scholarship in the day of national need.
One of the most dramatic things about the war was the speeding up of supply and transport under the strong hand of the man who had brought the Panama Canal to completion. General Goethals was no administrative theorist. He was willing to try anything and anybody once, but he was prompt in rejecting what did not promptly accomplish his purpose. An engineer of General Goethals' distinction can be regarded as a scholar in his particular field; but the point I want to make is that during his service as Quartermaster-General, when officers of the regular army and over-night majors, as they were called, presidents of manufacturing plants, bankers and lawyers, were passing in what seemed to be an almost unbroken procession through his office, he retained just two men in his inner circle from first to last, and both were academic persons. Herbert Hoover surrounded himself with scholars, entomologists, statisticians and public health men. He did not always use them for their specialties, but he evidently liked the type. The great welfare societies did the same, and the list of academic men whom they used makes an impressive total.
These instances are typical of a very general success among scholars in coöperating effectively and helpfully with eminently practical men. This may be because the scholar has been trained in a form of competition which the so-called practical man lacked. He is used to having his work wiped out by some discovery of a rival, and having to begin afresh. He is used to a checking of his work by his fellows which, if of a different nature, is no less relentless than the war-time check in the toll of human lives. The man of high reputation in business often failed because he had learned to measure success and his own competence only in terms of dividends, and in the new test he found his measuring-rod worse than useless.
Our scholars of the coöperative type not only pursued their researches, but they got their military associates into the habit of thinking in terms of scholarship. One of their most useful accomplishments, initiated by a Doctor of Philosophy of this University, was the organization of Thursday evening conferences for the discussion of the new scientific and technical problems facing the Army and Navy. This furnished a nucleus for the exchange of ideas between the different research groups, both here and abroad; for scholarship was mobilized and utilized in France, England, and Italy, as well as here, and our Allies laid their scientific discoveries before us with the greatest loyalty. At these conferences their reports were discussed and digested and applied, instead of being pigeon-holed at the War College, as I fear might have been otherwise the case. It was as a result of one of these conferences that a member of this Chapter, acting on a hint which came from a French report, was largely instrumental in developing a method of submarine detection through sound-waves of a particular type, which, though it came too late to be of service in the war, may serve in peace to relieve the greatest terror of the mariner, the danger of collision in darkness or fog with sister vessel or iceberg or derelict. A potent factor in breaking down the barriers and delays of departmental jealousies and bureaucratic tradition all along the line was the free-masonry of the company of scholars in Washington.
It must not be forgotten that our scholar in war worked under two powerful stimuli, neither of them operative under ordinary conditions. Although he was out of his accustomed setting, working with strange people and at strange tasks, nevertheless the realization of the national need and the joy of feeling an identification with the forces facing the adversary tended to produce that fine frenzy which enables a man to do better than he knows how. Then, for the first time in history, the scholar had unlimited funds. It is an interesting subject for speculation as to how he can ever go back to the limits of academic appropriations. It is to be feared that in many cases he will not, but will turn to industrial enterprises instead. If, however, there was an unlimited supply of funds, there was a corresponding deficiency in time, and the scholar who could not speed up to meet the new conditions had little chance to make his mark. The men who failed in war because they could not grasp the significance of the time factor may, however, still be eminently useful in peace. On the other hand, the training which some of our scholars received in meeting another war-time condition is likely to have an important influence upon the relation of scholarship to industry. Many a scholar found for the first time that to meet a given condition a beautiful laboratory solution may be no solution at all, that the answer, to be effective, must meet the peculiar condition of quantity production.
The merit of the Liberty engine, of which I have already spoken, lies not alone in the excellence of its design, admirable as that is, but in the fact that it is so constructed that we could produce fifteen hundred of them in a single week. Or, to take another example, in 1914 we made all together eighteen hundred field glasses in this country. Last winter, thanks to the coöperation of the scholars in the chemistry of glass and in the field of optics on the one hand, and of the experts in quantity production on the other, we were making thirty-five hundred pairs of field glasses each week. There are many other adaptations of scholarship to industry that are awaiting similar practical solutions. One of our most distinguished scholars in physics has said publicly that the day is past when one can defend any distinction between pure and applied science. One might as well try to distinguish between pure and applied virtue.
I said at the outset that I would venture later on an enlargement of the conception of the American scholar, in the light of what the past two years have made so clear. The scholar himself as well as those of us who are not scholars, needs, I think, to get a somewhat broader conception of the term; to develop it from its present popular connotation so that the attributes which come to one's mind will no longer be the static and selfish, but rather the dynamic and social. Emerson, in his essay on the American Scholar, seems to have some prophetic glimpse of this broader conception. He says, for example, that "action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential; that without it, he is not yet man; that the true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power"; and elsewhere, "that a great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think." The old idea of the scholar was the recluse, the individual; the new, it seems to me, should be one of a company of builders, each bringing to the common task, for the general welfare, his training and craft, his knowledge and ideas, to combine them with the gifts which his fellows are bringing.