What every man and every organization of men in America want is to grow big. If you ask why they want to grow big they are puzzled, because it has never before happened to them to hear anybody question the moral axiom that bigness is greatness. An office building which is twelve stories high is twice as admirable as one which is six stories high; a city which has a million inhabitants is twice as important as one which has only half a million. It matters not that the additional population may be festering in wretched slums; whatever they may be, grafters and grabbers, drunkards and morons, a greater number of them is a thing to be boosted for and boasted about. The city grows big in body, but in soul it remains small.
And the same thing happens to the college. Every little college wants to be bigger than its neighbor, and looks forward to being the biggest in the state, and to that end employs the noisy arts of the real estate promoter and the circus agent. An article published in “School and Society,” April 22, 1922, tells about the activities of “field secretaries” and “field agents” now employed by colleges. “According to the president of one of Ohio’s state universities, only four or five of the forty colleges in the state are able to dispense with the services of one or more of these functionaries. Their use is apparently growing in favor. The dean of one of Ohio’s strongest colleges confessed regretfully that the authorities in his institution are about to yield to the pressure being exerted within the institution to appoint a man to ‘sell the college’ to prospective students.” Crossing the prairies I stepped from my train to get a breath of fresh air on a station platform, and found myself confronted by an enormous sign, hailing me in the breezy Western fashion: “Hello, this is Manhattan, Kansas, a Good Town, home of the famous Kansas State Agricultural College, 1400 acres, 50 buildings, 433 faculty, 3500 students. Free auto camping grounds.”
The professor, needless to say, is expected to be a “good sport,” and contribute his proper share to the “uplift” of his institution. Anything notable that he does is seized upon and exploited by the college press agent; and sometimes the efforts of publicity hounds to deal with unfamiliar sciences and arts produce comical results. Professor Jacques Loeb began to experiment in the artificial fertilization of the eggs of sea-urchins, and this was marvelous material for stories, it went all over the world. Hardly any of it was right, but that made no difference—not even in academic circles; Professor Loeb’s star ascended, and so did his salary. He was invited to the University of California to continue his researches, and there he found the successful sons prepared to use him as they do the Mission bells and the Bohemian Club “jinks.” They put a “booster button” on him, and got out picture post-cards of his laboratory, and a real estate firm started an advertising campaign to sell lots in his neighborhood. But when they found that Loeb resented this kind of exploitation, they lost interest in artificial parthenogenesis, and discovered that the professor was a godless materialist and a poor hand at teaching freshmen.
The average faculty member of course never scales the heights of fame, never sees his portrait on picture post cards. The college grows big in body and stays small in soul; while the professor is apt to stay small in both body and soul. His salary does not permit a generous diet, and his work is confining and tedious. He teaches three or four classes a day, and corrects compositions and test-papers, and keeps records and makes out reports, and obeys his superiors and keeps himself within the limits of his little specialty. He leads a narrow life, withdrawn from realities. He goes to lunch at the Faculty Club and talks “shop” with his colleagues, men who live equally empty lives and are equally out of touch with great events. There is gossip and intrigue and wire-pulling; a professor at the University of Chicago heard his colleagues talk for an hour about the fact that someone had got an increase in salary of two or three hundred dollars. A professor at Johns Hopkins compared his colleagues to the lotus eaters: “Peaceful, endowed and dull.”
As I write, Professor Frank C. Hankins, one of the rebels at Clark University, hands in his resignation and formulates his criticism of the teaching in our higher institutions:
The teacher of social science may treat his subject matter in a purely formal manner, as is done in most high school courses in civics, where attention is given to the powers and duties of Congress, the number of justices in the Supreme court, etc. This is a pity; but the high school teacher and, unfortunately, a large number of college teachers of the social sciences must reckon with the “man in the street,” who would feel that “sacred” things were being defiled if civics courses discussed the origin and development of institutions, the relation of patriotism to war, or the relative merits of individualism and collectivism in social life. It is a real tragedy in the life of a teacher if he must squeeze all the juice out of his subject matter and give his pupils the dry pulp, in order to hold his job.
And to the same effect testifies Ludwig Lewisohn, out of many years experience at Wisconsin and Ohio State. I jotted down his phrases in my notes:
It is like teaching from a cook-book. There are certain receipts which you follow. You try to explain the scientific spirit, but you find that in college the word “science” means cut and dried experiments without meaning. You teach the principles of a subject, but you never apply them. You explain the “Novum Organum,” for example, but you don’t apply Bacon’s method to the current formulas of capitalist imperialism. You explain the relativity of morals according to Locke, but you never test present-day marriage and divorce, property rights and the duty of obedience to the state.
And again, a professor now at Wisconsin: “You teach the facts, but you do not interpret them; and especially you do not deal with remedies. You teach details, not vision. You accumulate ‘learning,’ in the narrow sense of that word; raking in the dust-heaps of the past, and producing carefully documented treatises about absurdities.” I have given a list of such topics in the chapter on Harvard; I ran into others here and there—Professor E. A. Ross mentioned two theses which won degrees while he was at Berlin—“The Linden Tree in German Literature,” and “The Hay Supply in the Army of Frederick the Great.” Or, if Germany is too far away, perhaps you would be interested in a Columbia thesis, composed by a man who is now a professor at Princeton: “Metaphors Concerned with Nature in the Prose of Aelfric”; or a Columbia thesis, by a professor who is now at Charleston: “The Dialect Contamination in the Old English Gospels.” Said Nietzsche[Nietzsche]: “You beat them, and they give out dust like meal-sacks. But who could guess that their dust came from corn, and the golden wonder of the summer fields?”
Colleges are growing like those prehistoric monsters, the size of a freight-car, with brains that would fit inside a walnut-shell. And as they grow, there is more and more “administration,” more and more red tape and routine; the professor is turned into a bookkeeper and a filing clerk. Writing in “Science,” President Maclaurin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology drew a picture of the adventures of Isaac Newton in a modern American university: