Hardly less significant, however, for a study of the social obligations resting upon our universities is the graduate school. In the West local patriotism demands that every state shall have its state-university, and no institution is a complete university without a graduate school. That several states should combine to form one graduate school of really good quality has, to my knowledge, never been suggested. Meanwhile, to measure the urgency of the need for graduate schools, it will be sufficient to contemplate the kind of men who are awarded fellowships in the graduate schools already well established, in the East or in the West. A dispassionate observer might readily conclude that the capacity of the country for graduate work had been satisfied for a century to come. And he would be the more confirmed in his opinion if he should reflect upon the cost of graduate instruction, the small number of students who attend the graduate courses, and the few who are not subsidized to attend. In his book on University Control Professor Cattell has called attention to the fact that our graduate schools procure most of their students only by paying them, and to the more significant fact that, with all the inducements offered by scholarships and fellowships, the material is of not more than mediocre quality. Even at Harvard it has been noted that the graduate students were as a class inferior in personal genius and intellectual endowment to the best class of undergraduates. Nor does it seem worth while to increase the stipend. Some years ago one of our college presidents, an artist in inflation, conceived the idea of splitting his fellowships into two; with a scarcely observable change of quality, he obtained two graduate students for the price of one. From all this one would be led to conclude that what is now needed is, not more graduate schools, but a working outfit of really eligible students for those already established.
Since the college faculty is recruited from the graduate school, this means that there is a corresponding lack of eligible material for college professorships. Professor Cattell suggests that the lack of good material for the graduate fellowships is due to the unsatisfactory conditions which, in America, surround the profession of scholar and teacher. Doubtless this is true, but the deeper fact seems to be that cultural conditions in the United States have not yet developed a sufficient number of men with a taste for academic work to fill the places created by a policy of hasty expansion. The result is that a fair number of those composing our college faculties—fully half, one might say, viewing them as a whole,—are men who have no special sense of professional dignity or of professional responsibility; and some of those who write "Professor" before, or "A.B., Ph.D." after their names are all but illiterate. An unselected group of college professors leaves no impression of special culture. Their ordinary conversation conveys no impression of superior insight in matters of politics, or of art, or of social reform—very probably the subject of conversation is football and the prospects of the team. In any community a group of college professors is likely to represent, not a higher level of culture, but simply a fairly assorted average, a vertical section, so to speak, of the culture of the community. Under normal conditions many of those who now compose our college faculties would probably be teaching in the elementary schools, while others, especially those, now highly esteemed by the administration, who prefer the stir and bustle of traveling and speech-making to the humdrum of study and teaching, would be carrying a case of samples or selling life-insurance. One of the striking things about our college professors is their frequent distaste for quiet occupations. Hence, while it is true that the conditions prevailing in the profession react upon the graduate schools, the reverse is also true. One reason that operates against better salaries for college professors is that so many are now worth no more than they get, while for men of a better quality there is no immediately promising source of supply.
On the other hand, it is obvious that a policy of indiscriminate expansion is committed to the employment of Chinese cheap labor in teaching. To this necessity we owe the elaborate academic hierarchy extending through the grades of fellow, assistant, instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, full professor, to the culminating dignity of "professor and head of the department;" to this we owe the employment of women in the coëducational colleges (who rarely get beyond the grade of instructor); and to this we owe the fact that, even in the oldest and richest of our universities, a great part of the instruction is given by instructors at about a thousand dollars a year. Yet all the while a course by a thousand-dollar instructor yields the same amount of credit towards the degree as a course by a full professor. From the administration's standpoint, however, it is foolish to pay four or five thousand dollars for one man when you can get two or three for that sum; and especially when your public is of a kind that only a small portion of it will know the difference.
Peculiarly favorable to this policy has been the importation from Germany of the wissenschaftliche Methode and, in particular, of the scientific method of creating a Doctor of Philosophy, based upon the curious Teutonic conception of a "contribution to knowledge." One such contribution is sufficient for a Doctor of Philosophy; the number of them is the measure of a scientific reputation. What is positively needed to constitute a contribution to knowledge, is not altogether clear. It seems quite certain, however, that a contribution to knowledge need not be a contribution to ideas. And a census of the contributions printed by the journals devoted to special departments of knowledge suggests that little more is needed than an industrious description of some region of unexplored fact. It matters little that the fact is insignificant, or that the analysis (if there be analysis) throws no new light upon the principles of science or upon the motives of history or of literature—a fact is still a fact; and a "negative result" in response to an improbable hypothesis is still a "contribution." It is evident that the "scientific method," whatever be its first intention, need not in practice imply the operation of intelligence. And this may help to explain why the "results of science" are occasionally indistinguishable from those of manual labor, and how a man may rank as a scientific authority whose general intelligence would not clearly distinguish him from an ordinary carpenter or bricklayer. All of this, indeed, is implied in the logic of "method." As the purpose of a machine is to be foolproof, so is it the purpose of scientific method to make scientific discovery independent of personal endowment or genius. In the wholesale creation of academic establishments the method plays a particularly important part, since it furnishes a supply of accredited reputations at a relatively moderate cost.
The scientific method represents the introduction of "democracy" into the fields of science and scholarship. And thus it enables us to explain the paradox, otherwise mystifying, that college professors are the first to teach the student to attach a superior importance to men of affairs; to value a practical experience of things above a clear understanding of them; the intuitions of the plain man, or of the child of nature, above the decisions of reflective judgment; and that they are the first to warn him against allowing plain common sense to be disturbed by the exercise of reason. All of this would be rather perplexing if one were unfamiliar with the democratic theory that a contribution to knowledge implies no exercise of intelligence, and that intellectual discipline works no change in the quality of the man.
When, however, it becomes a question of democracy for the faculty—or, in other words, of a form of academic administration appropriate to the idea of a learned profession—the democrats of this type are apt to be either silent or contemptuous. One of the reasons why academic administration is imperialistic in democratic America, while it is democratic in imperialistic Germany, is that American scholars have no illusions regarding the dignity of their profession. On the other hand, a commercial, or, if you please, scientific, theory of academic organization leads quite naturally to the conception of the college-president as a captain of industry—while a study of the acts of college professors in their corporate capacity as a faculty might easily lead one to believe that most of them are capable only of doing what they are told. But all this is but one manifestation of a deeper reason. For a true basis of comparison, we must turn, not to the German university, but to the German army, and then back again to the citizen soldiery of the United States. On a peace footing, if academic progress be the end in question, there appears to be no reason why a body of academic teachers, presumably men of culture and of experience in academic affairs, should not be able to govern an educational institution both efficiently and progressively under the presiding direction of one of their number responsible to themselves. Nor may we see why any scholar should be disinclined to interrupt his studies for a term to assume the office. But for an aggressive campaign against the state-treasury, or the pockets of the wealthy, or a raid upon the constituency of a rival institution, such a form of organization would be as little fitted as our National Guard for an invasion of Canada. A campaign of conquest calls for the autocratic powers of a captain of industry.
In institutions of established reputation, the tradition of culture is usually strong enough to demand that the president be a scholar and a man of distinction—though he need not be a conspicuous illustration of the theory that familiarity with the arts emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros. A glance, however, at what is expected of the president in the great majority of colleges and universities will convince one that it is easier for the rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for the president to live up to the ideal of a scholar and a gentleman. It will also help to account for the number of strange and even grotesque characters which have figured in the office. Every one has known college presidents whose personality would suggest the politician, the promoter, the theatrical manager, or the quack-doctor—anything rather than the head of an institution of learning. When a professor is elevated to the presidency, he ceases to be a teacher, and becomes an "educator" (with a long o). The duties of the office leave no time, as a rule, either for teaching or for study—for which, doubtless, those who have been "training" for the office are often grateful. The result is that the educational manager is usually far removed from the realities of education. And, indeed, the last thing of which our college presidents are expected to have any personal knowledge is the courses that are given in their institution and the ideas of the instructor who is giving them. What is chiefly demanded of them is "executive ability," especially that kind of which the chief ingredient is a histrionic capacity for attracting attention.
Thus the duties of the office are only remotely academic. On the side of internal administration, the first duty of the president is to swell the volume of "life" by a paternal encouragement, mingled at times with insistence, of all the organizations representing "student interests"—those athletic, first of all, but then the countless other societies, religious, social, dramatic, musical, terpsichorean, journalistic, forensic, or what not, which give a tone of "vitality" to our academic life (or, as you may choose to put it, make a howling wilderness of the academic halls); and among which the literary society of the older days is the least considered. If college life is to yield material for publicity nothing should be left to the student's spontaneity; on the other hand, the modern college student is apt to blame the administration if he is backward in making friends or fails to make a place for himself among his fellows. On the side of external administration, the duties of the president may be summed up in the two words, money and publicity. To procure the first of these, he is expected to make himself acceptable to men of wealth; or, in the state-university, to the politicians. Those who idealize the independence of the state-university are apt to forget that it has its own seamy side. At the same time, to strengthen his appeal, the college president is expected to create a larger clientele among the public, and, for all these purposes, to organize the alumni into a compact fighting force. This means that he must be half the time traveling and making speeches. The demands upon him for talk alone are usually far in excess of any normal capacity for thinking; and it would be an extraordinary man who, under all these conditions, should preserve a high sincerity or a deeply thoughtful attitude towards life.
All of this is the outcome of an expensive "democracy," based, we are told, upon broad conceptions of social responsibility. How far the elevation of society is involved in this democratic program I have tried to make clear. In any case there would seem to be a need for a few institutions of learning with the courage to be aristocratic. An aristocratic college (or university, as the case may be) would necessarily limit the scope of its work, in range of courses and number of students, to what it could do well upon the income at its command. Several of our academic endowments might seem to be already sufficient for maintaining a uniformly high standard of very fair scope. An aristocratic institution of learning would then be represented by an aristocratic faculty, composed of men whose life and teaching rest upon the conviction that exercise of intellect and cultivation of taste produce a finer type of man. With the possible exception of a few of the younger men, an aristocratic faculty would be made up of men worthy of the rank and salary of a full professor. In the aristocratic college or university the competition for students would be replaced by the competition of applicants for entrance; and an institution which preserved its independence by thus deliberately determining the scope of its work would have the choice of the best. Admission to college would then become what it might conceivably be expected to be, an aristocratic privilege. Of course, an aristocratic institution of learning could not hope to make a constant noise in the world. It should none the less be an inspiring and pervasive influence in the direction of a higher tone of thought and morals for all of society.