Part 36

A sure key to the interpretation of "social obligation" will be found in inter-collegiate athletics. I am speaking here, not of athletic sports as such, nor necessarily of athletic contests between colleges, but of inter-collegiate contests as a matter of public exhibition--"a Roman holiday"--and commercial enterprise. Only a finely drawn distinction saves the college athlete from being classed as a professional. It is true that (as a rule) he does not pay for his living out of the gate-receipts. But the gate-receipts pay for his sport, and the sport covers a good deal of expensive traveling and sojourning at expensive hotels, not to speak of the services of a professional coach, now commonly appointed by the college administration at a salary often higher than that of a full professor. And when we remember that the gate-receipts total many thousands--$50,000 from a single game is not uncommon--and further that such sums are needed to maintain the sport at its present (shall we not say "professional"?) perfection, it is hard to see that amateur sport is not a business enterprise of serious dimensions. The difficulty becomes greater if we define a man's profession to be that which consumes most of his time and attention. This applies especially to football. The very purpose of the training is to provide that during the season no member of the team shall waste his time or strength on any other purpose. The schedule for practice would be sufficient to demonstrate this point, apart from the testimony of numerous football men, among them men of fair ability and conscientious students. During the season they can do little more than attend their classes and trust to the mercy of the instructor. This mercy they are pretty sure to receive, first, because they have, as a rule, carefully avoided electing the courses of the unmerciful, secondly, because even a rather independent instructor will often prefer to give a football man the grade needed to keep him on the team rather than face a storm of execration from students and colleagues, not to speak of a long argument in the president's office. Such arguments are not uncommon; and a college professor who attaches any importance to the reports published of the high average of scholarship maintained by athletes must be lacking in a sense of humor.

Older apologists for inter-collegiate athletics were accustomed to talk about _mens sana in corpore sano_. But every one knows now that inter-collegiate athletics are as little related to sound health as inter-collegiate debates to sound logic. Nor does it suffice to point to the need of a safety-valve for the spirits of youth. This argument may pass for some of the Eastern colleges, but the Western student is apt to be a sober and steady, if somewhat unimaginative youth, who looks at college mostly from a business standpoint; and it is fair to say that inter-collegiate sports would have amounted to little in the West if they had not been carefully fostered by the college administration. This is so far true that a youth who happens to be husky and strong can hardly hope to escape the football team except under the imputation of "disloyalty;" and more than one who had hoped to give his time to other things has yielded to the importunities, not so much of his fellow-students as of the faculty sports and those connected with the administration. In the college community generally, and in the speeches made by the faculty before gatherings of students, the highest tribute is reserved for the athletic heroes. Those who win college honors, or who make Phi Beta Kappa or Sigma Xi, are rarely heard of. The present theory seems to be--and again, the theory, not so much of the students as of the faculty and administration--that the student who wins honors work only for himself, while he who helps win a game does something for the college.

A generation ago the management of athletics was in the hands of the students, and the faculty was content to confine itself to the task of keeping the games within proper limits. But the amount of money involved became too great for undergraduate business methods and, in some cases, for undergraduate honesty. Hence, in one college after another, the administration assumed the direction of athletics in the interest of good management and at the same time, it was claimed, of preserving their amateur character. This claim has been very strangely justified. The result has been rather that in the hands of the administration athletics became an instrument of competition, and for the first time a serious and important business; and in the prosecution of the business along professional lines, the administration has been shown to be, not more scrupulous than the undergraduates, but only more resourceful. Impecunious athletes could now be provided for by scholarships or by places in the library, the college office, or the college book-store. Why, pray, should a student be debarred from the privilege of "working his way through" because he happens to be an athlete? Or why, for this reason, should a president be deprived of the benevolent satisfaction of helping a deserving student out of his own pocket? Or why should a similar privilege be withheld from "loyal" alumni or from disinterested persons who happen to have money on the game? Cases of this kind are matters of common report in academic circles; and when players are disqualified for professionalism by the inter-collegiate conference, the circumstances point not seldom to complicity on the part of the academic authorities. Among men of the world who are gentlemen, it is thought to be one of the primitive moralities to be a good sport--to play the game on the square and to treat your opponent as a gentleman. Neither of these points seems to be quite intelligible to many of our academic sports. One college president might be named whose speeches at football "rallies" are said to suggest an expedition against savages.

A private citizen who should set up a billiard table in his house, and then earn the cost of it by giving exhibition games for admission fees, would be promptly put down as a professional sport. I have suggested to a number of colleagues that college athletics will never be a gentleman's sport until the gate-receipts are abolished, the professional coach dismissed, and the scope of athletics is limited to what can be supported by private subscription, preferably confined to students. One can readily see how this would improve the _morale_ of athletics. There would be some loss of proficiency, but in matters of sport no gentleman can afford to be too proficient. The usual reply has been, however, "Oh, that would never do." Now of course it would never do. But there is just one reason why, namely, that athletics are today regarded as the most important measure and criterion of academic prestige. They are indeed an abominable nuisance. They absorb the attention of the administration, take up the time of faculty meetings or of governing committees, send traveling about the country students who ought to be at work, and give to the members of the team a public importance which their personality fails to justify. But every institution feels itself bound to make a good showing for fear that a barbarian public, and the rich barbarians among the alumni, will judge that it is lacking in vitality. The fear is doubtless exaggerated, but such is the _rationale_ of inter-collegiate athletics.

Further light upon the "social obligations" of our colleges and universities will be afforded by a study of the departments of education, or teachers' colleges, which have been established in most of the larger institutions, and which now often receive a greater share of the attention of the administration than any other part of the institution. It is unnecessary to ask whether the history or philosophy of education are important subjects of study. The fact remains that the history of education is about as necessary a preliminary to the practice of teaching, as the history of medicine to the practice of medicine, while any genuine philosophy of education implies a broad basis of ripe culture. Nor may we question the need of a higher standard of general culture for the teachers in the secondary schools. All of this is irrelevant to the department of education. The very last thing named there is the need of broad culture and sound knowledge. On the contrary, the idea is commonly conveyed that a too thorough knowledge of the subject will be bad for the teacher. As I write, there comes to me the published report of a speech by the dean of one of the teachers' colleges, who says that "it is harder for a Phi Beta Kappa to learn to teach than for medium students." Of course the moral is clear: no student who intends to teach, and who hopes to receive an appointment, can afford to waste his time in making a record for excellence of scholarship and breadth of culture, such as would recommend him to Phi Beta Kappa, especially since any deficiencies in these directions can be more than made good by a "professional training" in child-psychology, the science of method, and the social aims of education.

The result of this appeal is to bring to the university a large class of students whose personal ambition does not extend beyond the desire for a comfortable job, and who regard the university, not as an _alma mater_, but simply as an emporium from which they may procure a professional outfit; and at the same time to instal in the faculty a set of men whose prevailing point of view is that of the _entrepreneur_. In all of our universities, from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, the department of education, with its courses, students, and instructors, is an object of ridicule and malediction on the part of most of the faculty. Even the less fastidious are disposed to resent the presence in the university of a department whose intellectual and cultural status is hardly superior to that of a normal school. There would seem to be only one reason for the importance attached to the department by the administration, namely, the large and steady constituency which it is able to command through the questionable logic of its vocational appeal. For the purpose of enlarging the "plant," nothing better has been yet devised than the plan of offering "professional training" for teachers.

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.