Part 8

Naturally enough, therefore, the organizers of the extension movement, despairing of finding among us competent unattached teachers, have turned at once to the colleges; but the colleges are a very unsafe support to lean upon. A professor in a university where the studies are elective has no more superfluous time than a busy lawyer, or doctor, or business man. Merely to keep up with the literature of a subject, to say nothing of that research and writing which should enlarge its limits, is an enormous task. Teaching too is no longer an affair of text-books and recitations. Leisurely days of routine ease belong to the past. A professor nowadays must prepare lectures incessantly; must perpetually revise them; must arrange examinations; direct the reading of his students; receive their theses; himself read a large part of their voluminous written work; personally oversee his advanced men; gather them about him in laboratory, seminary and conference; attend innumerable committee and faculty meetings; devise legislation for the further development of his college and department; correspond with schools and colleges where his students, after taking their higher degree, may suitably be placed; and if at the end of a hard-worked day he can find an hour's leisure, he must still keep his door open for students or fellow-officers to enter. So laborious have become the duties of a university teacher that few large staffs now go through a year without one or two of their members breaking down. With the growing complexity of work it often seems as if the proper business of college officers, study and teaching, must some day cease altogether, crowded out by the multifarious tasks with which they are only indirectly connected. It is useless to say that these things are not necessary. Whoever neglects them will cease to make his college, his subject and his influence grow. It is because professors now see that they cannot safely neglect them that the modern college differs fundamentally from its humdrum predecessor of a quarter of a century ago. Any movement which seeks to withdraw a professor's attention from these things, and induces him to put his soul elsewhere, inflicts on the community a serious damage. No amount of intellectual stimulus furnished to little companies here and there can atone for the loss that must fall on education when college teachers pledge themselves to do serious work in other places than in their own libraries and lecture rooms. To be an explorer and a guide in a department of human knowledge is an arduous profession. It admits no half-hearted service.

Of course if the work demanded elsewhere is not serious, the case is different. Rather with benefit than with damage a college teacher may on occasion recast the instruction that was intended for professionals and offer it to a popular audience. In this way a professor makes himself known and makes his college known. Many of the small colleges are now engaging in university extension as an inexpensive means of advertising themselves. But such lecturing is incidental, voluntary and perpetually liable to interruption. Beyond the immediate series of lectures it cannot be depended on. There is nothing institutional about it. The men who undertake it are owned elsewhere, and a second mortgage is not usually a very valuable piece of property. A movement which places its reliance on the casual teaching of overworked men is condemned from the start. University extension can never pass beyond the stage of amateurism and temporary expedient until, like its English namesake, it has a permanent staff of instructors exclusively devoted to its service.

Where, then, is such a staff to be obtained? In view of the conditions of education in this country already described, it is improbable that it can be obtained at all. But something may still be done,--something, however, of a more modest sort than enthusiasts at present have in mind. There issue from our great universities every year a number of men who have had two or three years' training beyond their bachelor's degree. Some of them have had a year or two of foreign study. They frequently wish to teach. Places do not immediately open to them. If the extension movement would set them to work, it might have all their time at a moderate salary for two or three years. Such men, it is true, would be inexperienced, and their connection with itinerant teaching could not be rendered lasting. As soon as one of them proved his power as a teacher, some college would call him; and he would seldom prefer the nomadic and fragmentary life to an established one. Plainly too under the charge of such men the grade of instruction could not be the highest; but it might be sound, inspiriting even, and it is in any case all that present circumstances render possible. We may mourn that those who are masters in their several provinces are already fully employed. We may wish there were a multitude of masters sitting about, ready for enlistment in a missionary undertaking. But there are no such masters. The facts are evident enough; and if the extension movement aims at a durable existence, it will respect these facts. The men it wants it cannot have without damaging them; and damaging them, it damages the higher education of which they are the guardians. Teachers of a lower grade are at hand, ready to be experimented with. The few experiments already tried have been fairly successful. Let the extension leaders give up all thought of doing here what has been done in England. The principal part of that work is performed for us by other means. The wisest guidance, accordingly, may not lead the movement to any long success. If, however, university extension will keep itself clearly detached from other educational agencies and make a quiet offer of humble yet serviceable instruction, there is a fair prospect that by somewhat slow degrees a permanent new power may be added to the appliances for rendering busy Americans intelligent.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Printed in 1892.

VI

SPECIALIZATION[2]

Ladies and gentlemen of the graduating class, this afternoon belongs to you. This morning we dedicated a chime of bells to the memory of Mrs. Palmer, and in those moving exercises you had but a slender share. Probably not half a dozen of you ever saw her who, once seen, was loved with romantic ardor. Undoubtedly many of you are different from what you would have been had she not lived, and lived here; for her influence so passed into the structure of this University that she will shape successive generations of you for a long time to come. But enough of her. Let us dismiss her from our thoughts. Too much praise we have already lavished on one who was ever simple and self-forgetting. She would chide our profusion. If we would think as she would wish us to think, let us turn rather to the common matters of the day, reflecting on those joys and perplexities which have attended you throughout these formative years. One especially among these perplexities, perhaps the greatest of all, I would invite you to consider now. Let me set it clearly before you.

This morning I sat down to breakfast with about a hundred of you who had entered on the attainment of the highest degree which this University offers. You were advanced specialists. You had each chosen some single line of endeavor. But even then I remembered that you were not the only specialists here. Before me this afternoon I see candidates in medicine, men and women who have taken for their specialty the warfare with pain and disease. They have said, "All that I can ever know, I will bring to bear on this urgent problem." Here also are the lawyers, impassioned for justice, for the quelling of human strife. That is their specialty. They too restrict themselves to a single point of view. Beside them sit the scientific men, who looking over the vast expanse of nature have accepted the task of tracing the physical aspects of this marvellous machine. Nor can I stop here. Throughout the undergraduate department, as we all know, run dominant interests. I should be ashamed of a young man who in his four years had not found some compulsive interest; for it is only when an interest compels that we can say that education has begun. So long as we are simply learning what is set before us, taking the routine mass of academic subjects, we may be faithful students, but we are not scholars. No, it is when with a free heart we give ourselves to a subject, bidding it take of us all it demands and feeling that we had rather attend to it than to anything else, because it expresses our personal desires--then it is that its quickening influence takes hold. But this is specialization. We might think of the University of Chicago then as a great specializing machine.

But why has each of you set himself this task of specialization? Because the world needs leaders, and you have chosen yourselves to be those leaders. Are you aware how exceptional is your condition? The last census shows that at present hardly one per cent of our population is in our colleges. You are of that one per cent, and you are here in order that you may enlighten the other ninety-nine per cent. If through ignorance you fail, you will cause others to fail and you had better never have come to this University. To some sort of leadership you have dedicated yourselves, and to this aim you should be true. But do not at times doubts cross your mind? Have you not occasionally asked yourselves whether you can attain such leadership and make the most of your lives by shutting yourselves up to a specialty? Multitudes of interesting things are calling; shall you turn away from them and follow a single line? It will be worth while to-day to consider these fundamental questions and inquire how far we are justified in specializing, what dangers there are in it, and in what degree those dangers may be avoided.

Let me say, then, at the start, that I regard specialization as absolutely essential to scholarship. There is no scholarship without it, for it is involved in the very process of knowing. When I look at this desk I am specializing; that is, I am detaching this piece of furniture from all else in the room. I am limiting myself, and I cannot see without it. I can gaze without specialization, but I cannot see without specialization. If I am to know anything by sight, that knowledge must come through the limitation of sight. I seize this object, cast away all others, and thus fix my attention. Or if I am carefully to observe, I even put my eye on a single point of the desk. There is no other way. Clear knowledge becomes possible only through precise observation. Now specialization is nothing but this necessary limitation of attention; and we, as specialists, are merely carrying out on a large scale what every human being must practise in some degree whenever he knows. We employ the process persistently, and for the sake of science are willing to hold ourselves steadily to a single line of observation. And we cannot do otherwise. The principles involved in the specialization of the senses run throughout all science. If we would know, we must hold the attention long on a given subject.

But there is an unfortunate side to specialization. It obliges us to discard other important interests. To discard merely unimportant ones is easy. But every evening when I sit down to devote myself to my ethics I am aware that there are persons starving in Boston who might be saved if I should drop my work and go to them. Yet I sit calmly there and say, "Let them starve; I am going to study ethics." I do not see how I could be a suitable professor of ethics unless I were willing thus to limit myself. That is the hard part, as I understand it, of specialization,--the cutting off of things that are worth while. I am sure you have already found it out. Many of you have come from places of narrow opportunity and here find a welcome abundance. Remembering how you have longed to obtain such privileges, you will be tempted to scatter yourselves over a wide field, gathering a little here and a little there. At the end of the year you will have nothing, if you do that. The only possibility of gain is to choose your field, devote serious time to it, count yourself a specialist, and propose to live like one. Goethe admirably announces the principle: "Wer grosses will muss sich beschraenken koennen." You must accept limitations if you will go on to power, for in limitation the very process of knowledge is rooted.

Furthermore, not only is specialization forced upon us by the nature of knowledge, but without it our own powers cannot receive appropriate discipline. It is difficult business to fashion a sound observer. Each province of science has its special modes of observation, its own modes of reasoning even. So long as we are unfamiliar with these and obliged to hold ourselves to them through conscious control, our work is poor. It is slow, inaccurate, and exhausting. Only when we have trained ourselves to such aptitudes that within a certain field our observations and reasonings are instinctive do we become swift, sure, and unfatigued in research. To train our powers then we must begin to specialize early and hold ourselves steadily within bounds. As one looks over the names of those who have accomplished much, one is surprised at the number who were early specialists. Take my own department: Berkeley writes his great work when he is twenty-five; Hume publishes his masterpiece at twenty-seven. Or again, Keats had brought his wonderful results to accomplishment and died at twenty-five; Shelley at thirty; Marlowe, the greatest loss English letters ever met, at twenty-seven. It is just the same in other fields: Alexander dies at thirty-six, Jesus at thirty-three. Yes, let us look nearer home: the most forcible leader American education has ever had became president of Harvard University at thirty-five; President Hyde of Bowdoin took his position at twenty-seven; my own wife, Alice Freeman, was president of Wellesley at twenty-six. These are early specialists; and because they specialized early they acquired an aptitude, a smoothness of work, a precision of insight, and width of power which could not have been theirs had they begun later. I would not deny that there have been geniuses who seemed to begin late: Kant was such; Locke was such. You will recall many within your own fields. But I think when you search the career of those who come to power in comparatively late years, you will find that there has usually been a train of covert specialization running through their lives. They may not have definitely named their field to themselves, or produced work within that field in early years, but everything had been converging toward that issue. I believe, therefore, you ought to respect your specialty, because only through it can your powers be brought to their highest accuracy and service.

One more justification of specialization I will briefly mention, that it is necessary for the organization of society. No motive is good for much until it is socialized. If specialization only developed our individual selves, we could hardly justify it; but it is the means of progress for society. The field of knowledge is vast; no man can master it, and its immensity was never so fully understood as to-day. The only way the whole province can be conquered and brought under subjection to human needs is by parting it out, one man being content to till his little corner while his neighbor is engaged on something widely different. We must part out the field of knowledge and specialize on our allotted work, in order that there may be entirety in science. If we seek to have entirety in ourselves, science will be fragmentary and feeble. That division of labor which has proved efficient everywhere else is no less needful in science.

But I suppose it is hardly necessary to justify specialization to this audience. Most of you have staked heavily on it, putting yourselves to serious inconvenience, many of you heavily mortgaging your future, in order to come here and devote yourselves to some single interest. I might confidently go through this room asking each of you what is your subject? And you would proudly reply, "My subject is this. My subject is this. My subject is this." I think you would feel ashamed if you had not thus specialized. I see no occasion, therefore, to elaborate what I have urged. As I understand it, the three roots of specialization are these: it is grounded in the very nature of the knowing process; it is grounded in the needs of ourselves as individuals, in order that we may attain our maximum efficiency; it is grounded in the needs of society, because only so can society reach that fulness of knowledge which its progress requires.

But, after all, the beliefs which are accepted as matters of course in this room are largely denounced outside it. We must acknowledge that our confidence in specialization encounters many doubts in the community. It may be well, then, to place ourselves where that community stands and ask the general public to tell us why it doubts us, what there is in our specialized attitude which it thinks defective, and what are the complaints which it is disposed to bring against us? I will try to take the position of devil's advocate and plead the cause of the objector to specialization.

Specialization, it is said, leads to ignorance; indeed it rather aims at ignorance than knowledge. When I attend to this desk, it is true I secure a bit of knowledge, but how small is that bit in comparison to all the things in this room which I might know about! It is but a fraction. Yet I have condemned all else in the room to ignorance, reserving only this one little object for knowledge. Now that is what we are all of us doing on a great scale; by specializing, by limiting our attention, we cut off what is not attended to. It is often assumed that attention is mainly a positive affair and occupied with what we are to know. But that is a very small portion of it; really its important part is the negative, the removal of what we do not wish to observe. We cut ourselves off from the great mass of knowledge which is offered. Is it not then true that every specialist has disciplined himself to be an ignoramus? He has drawn a fence around a little portion of the universe and said, "Within that fence I know something." "Yes," the public replies, "but you do not know anything outside." And is not the public right? When we step forward and claim to be learned men, is not the public justified in saying, "I know a great deal more than you do; I know a thousand things and you know only one. You say you know that one through and through, and of course I do not know my thousand things through and through. But it is not necessary. I perceive their relations; I can handle them; I can use them in practice; can you?" "Well, no," we are obliged to say, "we specialists are a little fumbling when we try to take hold of the world. We are not altogether skilful in action, just because we are such specialists." You students here have been devoting yourselves to some one point--I am afraid many of you are going to have sad experience of it--you have been learning to know something nobody else on earth does know, and then you go forth to seek a position. But the world may have no use for you; there are only two or three positions of that sort in the country, and those may happen to be filled. Just because you are such an elaborate scholar you cannot earn your daily bread. You have cut yourself off from everything but that one species of learning, and that does not happen to be wanted. Therefore you are not wanted. Such is the too frequent condition of the specialist. The thousand things he does not know; it is only the one thing he does know. And because he is so ignorant, he is helpless.

Turning then to our second justification of specialization, the case seems equally bad. I said that specialization was needed for the training of our powers. The training of them all? Not that, but the training of only certain ones among them. The others hang slack. In those regions of ourselves we count for little. We are men of weight only within the range of the powers we have trained; and what a large slice of us lies outside these! Accordingly the general public declares that there is no judgment so bad as the judgment of a specialist. Few practical situations exactly coincide with his specialty, and outside his specialty his judgment is worse than that of the novice. He has been training himself in reference to something precise; and the moment he ventures beyond it, the very exactitude of his discipline limits his worth. The man who has not been a specialist, who has dabbled in all things and has acquired a rough and ready common sense, that man's judgment is worth something in many different sections of life, but the judgment of the specialist is painfully poor beyond his usual range. You remember how, in the comic opera, the practice is satirized of appointing a person who has never been at sea to take charge of the navy of a great country. But that is the only sensible course to pursue. Put a specialist there, and the navy will be wretchedly organized, because the administration of the navy requires something more than the specialism of seamanship. It is necessary to coordinate seamanship with many other considerations, and the man trained in the specialty of seamanship is little likely to have that ability. Therefore ordinarily we use our experts best by putting them under the control of those who are not experts. Common sense has the last word. The coordinating power which has not been disciplined in single lines is what ultimately takes the direction of affairs. We need the specialist within his little field; shut him up there, and he is valuable enough; but don't let him escape. That seems to be the view of the public. They keep the specialist confined because they utterly distrust his judgment when he extends himself abroad.

And when we look at the third of our grounds for justification, social need, the public declares that the specialists are intolerably presumptuous. Knowing their own subject, they imagine they can dictate to anybody and do not understand how limited is their importance. Again and again it happens that because a man does know some one thing pretty well he sets himself up as a great man in general. My own province suffers in this respect more than most; for as soon as a man acquires considerable skill in chemistry or biology, he is apt to issue a pronunciamento on philosophy. But philosophy does not suffer alone. Everywhere the friends of the great specialist are telling him he has proved himself a mighty man, quite competent to sit in judgment on the universe; and he, forgetting that the universe and the particular subject he knows something about are two different things, really imagines that his ignorant opinions deserve consideration.