Will the universities rid themselves of the incubus of research, or at least relegate it to a separate department so that the main efforts of the professors and lecturers may be concentrated on other matters? On the answer to this question the future of the universities depends. It must be decided whether the primary business of the university teacher is to teach or to carry on the investigations in which he is privately interested; whether the business of the student is to become educated or to become a specialist; whether, in short, there is any necessary relationship between the two branches of university activity,—research and education. At present there is little indication of how these problems will be settled: as yet they are scarcely mentioned in academic circles in this country. Criticism of university methods and ideals is heard among people who have left professorial tutelage, and book-reviewers are occasionally entertaining at the expense of typical products of the academic mind; but for the most part the standards of the dons are taken for granted. The late Sir Walter Raleigh, it is true, did not conceal his antipathy to the “serious business of scholarship,” but his brother professors must have considered him a sad dog.
While English universities give no sign of interest in fundamental problems affecting their well-being, a ray of hope comes from America. In the recent annual report of Columbia University, the president, Dr Nicholas Murray Butler, speaking with all the authority of his distinguished position, faces critical issues with a frankness that is possible, perhaps, only in America. He is concerned about the dearth of great minds in spite of the spread of educational facilities, and he asks whether the universities have not destroyed the ideal of a liberal education, and with it the liberally educated man himself, through allowing the choice of less valuable subjects and laying too much stress on early specialisation. In spite of the efforts of two generations to make science an instrument of education, and in spite of the inherent excellence of the scientific method, he has grave doubts about the results. He finds the cause of his dissatisfaction in the methods and aims of the teachers of the sciences. “If these subjects are to be presented only for the purpose of training specialists, and if the methods to be followed are those that, while appropriate for investigation, have no relation whatever to interpretation, then it may well be that in another generation general interest in the natural and experimental sciences and general knowledge of their meaning and significance will have greatly declined.... The example of the ancient classics ought to suffice. They were killed largely by those who taught them.” On the subject of research Dr Butler is equally outspoken. “The word research,” he says, “has come to be something like the blessed word Mesopotamia. It is used to reduce everyone to silence, acquiescence, and approbation. The fact of the matter is that something between seventy-five per cent. and ninety per cent. of what is called research in the various universities and institutes of the land is not properly research at all, but simply the re-arrangement or re-classification of existing data or well-known phenomena.” He reminds his readers that “an original investigation may, and usually does, add a good deal to the knowledge of the individual investigator without adding anything to the knowledge of the human race.”
Dr Butler attacks the principles on which present-day science-teaching in the universities is carried out: such an indictment applies with equal, if not with greater force, to the teaching of the humanities, into which scientific methods have intruded themselves with disastrous results. It is natural that the historian of to-day should adopt the character of the scientific investigator; but surely something is wrong when university and other presses issue volume after volume of historical study of a kind which, judged by any of the wider canons, can have no conceivable value. Too often the specialists forget that the many intriguing little puzzles that they try to solve are intriguing little puzzles and nothing more. The researcher in the natural sciences can always plead that his discoveries, however insignificant at the moment, may take on great importance in connection with work in other fields. The researcher in history can hardly put forward the same plea. The scientific or pseudo-scientific spirit applied to history has tended to destroy the sense of values.
Literature at the universities is in even a worse plight. The scientific historical method applied in this field is steadily devitalising literary study. Criticism and enjoyment of the great masters have to give place to the study of tendencies and influences, of historical minutiae and bibliographical irrelevancies. The academic mind apparently fails to see any incongruity in the eagerness and seriousness with which learned societies recently discussed the precise circumstances of the death of Marlowe; nor is it shocked at the regularity with which university lecturers and others write letters to the “Times Literary Supplement,” taking leave to record some “new fact” about a relative of a tenth-rate poet whose name lives only in the bigger histories of literature. Immature graduates in the American schools of English are steadily working through all our writers who are sufficiently unimportant to have escaped attention hitherto and producing monographs on them “in part preparation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of ——.” And as money is plentiful in the American universities the theses are duly printed. Similar so-called literary research is being carried on with unremitting energy in this country also; happily the results of most of it remain decently buried in the university archives. Dr Butler foresees a probable decline in the educational importance of scientific study through concentration on the unessentials and neglect of the essentials: for the same reason it is to be feared that the university departments of modern literature are already well on the road to decadence.
The outlook for university education is therefore not hopeful. It seems probable that the worship of the false gods of the academic world will take an unconscionable time in dying. Universities are conservative places: they hold themselves superior, and often rightly superior, to the rough and tumble of the world outside, and thus they are tardy in responding to the changing spirit of the age. Moreover, by their very system they are cramping the free intelligence and narrowing the vision of those who are to direct the universities of the future. Success in university life necessarily involves obedience to the tradition.
Thus it may be assumed that present tendencies will take a generation or two to reach their limit. With the improvement in the secondary schools through the better selection of pupils the standard of work there will be forced up to such a pitch that every student proceeding to the university will immediately specialise in a narrow field. Pass degrees will be abolished. The prestige of research-degrees will be such that most, if not all, graduates will proceed to them. In every university there will be a busy colony of researchers. In the departments of science in its various branches men and women will be labouring to discover new phenomena and to formulate fresh theories. Much of this work will fulfil the laudable purpose of improving man’s material lot. Much of it, on the other hand, will have the practical result of supplying an industrialised community with a surfeit of mechanical luxuries which the ordinary person will have neither the desire nor the time to use. The spirit of man may find some consolation in increased knowledge of such matters as the habits of atoms exposed to various sorts of experimental bombardments. In the departments of the modern languages and literatures the soil will have been so far exhausted that students will be reduced to collating and editing (with linguistic commentary) the dullest and most obscure mediaeval manuscripts. Or the American example will be followed of writing dissertations on recent or contemporary writers. We may expect doctoral theses with such titles as—“A Bibliographical Account of the Works of Arnold Bennett, together with a Hand-list of his Contributions to the Periodical Press”; or “The Sussex Farm-Labourer in English Fiction from 1900 to 1930.” In the realm of history, the evidence of the past will, in most directions, have been sifted and re-sifted; accounts of first-rate, second-rate, and even third-rate men and movements will have been multiplied ad nauseam on the excuse that an additional insignificant fact or two has been added to information that was already accessible. Students will be driven to editing the dreariest records (if any still remain unpublished) elucidating matters of the least possible concern to the twentieth century. They will, no doubt, be sustained in their thankless tasks by the thought that they are doing the Spade-work: they are doing their share, however humble, towards providing a greater than themselves with the materials for a new survey of a period. We can only hope that their single-minded devotion may not be disturbed by the horrible thought that the mass of accumulated research on any given topic will eventually be so vast that no single human life will give sufficient time in which to read it, and that no single human mind will be equal to the task of synthesising it.
When the cult of research has thus reduced itself to absurdity the time will come when we shall perhaps turn to the conception of a university as a place where, by the study and discussion of problems of fundamental importance, the most intelligent young men and women are brought into contact with the best and most stimulating minds, where the balance is held true between intellect and emotion, between thought and action.
But that time is not yet.