THE WAR AS A PRACTICAL TEST OF AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP[2]
It is a difficult task to attempt to define the American scholar of to-day. If any of you doubt it, let him try it as I have tried. Scholarship, like many another broad term, has no sharply marked edges. It is hard to define anything that lacks definiteness; and, after all, the task is relatively profitless, because we all of us recognize what is at the center of the concept. I think we all recognize that the scholar is an expert in some particular field or fields; but he is more than the expert as such, in that he knows enough of other matters to see his particular specialty in its relation to things in general. He must, to this degree at least, be a philosopher. This very general conception of scholarship is fairly constant, but the fields which the conception includes are broadening day by day and almost hour by hour. We cannot to-day limit scholarship to the polite branches which were all that it embodied when this Society was founded or even when this Chapter was established. The scholar of the old-fashioned type must now accept as his fellow the man who has helped to flatten the trajectory of the 16-inch shell, or to control the birth rate of the cootie. Later on I shall suggest one other element which, in the light of the test which American scholarship has undergone in the past two years, it seems to me should now be included in our idea of the typical American scholar.
We Americans are proud of being called a nation of inventors; and most of us have made, or almost made, private discoveries of an inventional nature which, for some reason, have never come to fruition. The scientific boards in Washington during the war received more than sixty thousand suggestions in some mechanical field; and I am told by those who ought to know that of all these not more than five of those coming from untrained minds were of any practical value. Even from the trained minds there came, I am told, no fundamental discovery in science as a direct result of the war conditions. Suggestions of improvements in detail and valuable suggestions there were in plenty, new applications of known principles, but application of a fundamentally new idea, no. That is only to say what we already know, that discovery is not made to order. In each case the idea had already been born in the mind of some intellectual pioneer and worked out by him, and some man who had the idea in the front of his mind was at hand to apply it to the new condition. And that means, I think, that if we met the test, we met it with our scholars.
When the test came, certain fields of scholarship naturally afforded a better chance for immediate service than others. The chemist, for example, had a better chance a thousand-fold than the archæologist. It is extraordinary, however, how many of the gifts which burned bright on the national altar came from men with some out-of-the-way specialty. Take archæology itself, if you will. The best trench helmet developed during the war was designed by the expert in armor from our own academic fellowship. I am told that a very important element in the length of time which it took to control the submarine menace was the fact that when war broke out the science of oceanography was almost wholly in the hands of the Germans. When the world's supply of cocoanut husks was taken up for gas masks and we still needed charcoal, we had to turn for additional sources to the tropical botanist, who might have been expected to remain reasonably undisturbed. It remained for a scholar in perhaps the purest branch of pure science, astronomy, to recognize the well known fact that it is the shape of the tail of any and every moving object, motor car or boat or what you will, and not the shape of the head, which is the factor of chief importance in design, and to apply this recognition to artillery problems. The re-designing of our artillery shells under the direction of this astronomer added miles to their range. Another astronomer applied his experience in studying the movement of comets to solving certain problems of long-range artillery fire where the projectile in its flight rises into the circumambient ether.
In proving the case for the American scholar, as I think we can prove it, we should not be beguiled into the pleasant task of recording the deeds of scholars and gentlemen when the deeds were those of the gallant gentleman rather than of the scholar per se. We have one here in our own academic family whose lieutenant's bars I should be as proud to wear as the stars of any of our generals. Nor need we, I think, cite the instances where the rigorous training of the scholar clearly laid the foundation for great accomplishment in some general field of administration. The man whom we can thank perhaps more than any other for the brilliant conduct of our war finance was seventeen years ago editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review. We may well turn with pride, but we don't need him to prove our point, to the scholar of this university, formerly president of this Chapter, who, from his own talents and experience and his alert sense of scholarship in others, has earned the place which he now holds as educational director of the largest university in the world, the A.E.F. University at Beaune.
Our case rests, as I say, upon the direct applications of scholarship, and not only upon their quality, but on their range. A single division of the National Research Council, in its report for 1918, showed work of national significance by the scholars in physics, mathematics, and allied fields toward the solution of no fewer than sixty-eight different problems, every one of which needed for its solution men with training and knowledge and vision. At the outset, who among us had the slightest conception of the complexity of the adaptations to warfare of what was known to modern scholarship? We knew that the war was mounting into the air, but who had any realization of the adjustments which this involved? Fifteen fundamental problems based on pure physics promptly arose with reference to instruments for airplane operation. For example, at night and in the clouds, the aviator must have before his eyes a dial which will indicate the slightest deviation from his course. Seven problems had to do with airplane photography. As the art of camouflage advanced, for instance, color filters had to be devised for its detection from above. Seven additional problems had to do with factors of construction and maintenance, as fuel efficiency. Nine others affected ballooning; and the balloon, as the war developed, came to be of greater and greater importance. Eleven studies were in signalling: one, for example, a device for secret daylight signalling, with a range of five miles or more. And please remember that all these were the task of one branch of one organization within the field of pure science. By common consent, the dullest branch of physics was held to be acoustics, but since 1914 the whole question of sound-ranging has been in the hands of experts in acoustics. A device developed by American physicists gave our men nineteen seconds in which to take cover from cannon fired four miles away. The most brilliant work in this field was that of a former student of the Columbia School of Mines.
If I were to pick out one field in which the scholarly attitude has been most brilliantly rewarded, it is that of medicine. If our army surgeons and sanitarians had been confined to the practical family doctors, who cannot be bothered with all this new-fangled stuff, our men would have died like flies from disease, as they did in the Spanish-American War. It was the laboratory man, the theorist, the highbrow if you like, who made our health record a matter of national pride and congratulation. It was the knowledge of a scholar, coupled with his instinctive understanding of the human heart—neither could have accomplished the purpose alone—which sent hundreds of shell-shocks, as they came to be called (people used to call the condition by an uglier, if not a shorter, term) back into the lines with self-respect and nerve renewed.