Harvard's Plight

Will Someone Kindly Arouse Her From Her State of Coma?

JOHN JAY CHAPMAN

FOUND my old friend, Meredith Wilde, in a condition of some excitement. He was in his comfortable, old-fashioned bed-room whose windows look out upon Beacon Street, and he had evidently been overtaken by some violent emotion while in the process of dressing himself. He held a copy of Horace's Odes in one hand and a razor in the other. His face was covered with lather, and on the floor lay a copy of the Boston Evening Transcript.

"They've done it!" he cried. "In one generation from now there won't be one educated gentleman in Massachusetts!"

"Well," said I, assuming a cynical tone which I did not feel, "there's only one there now." But my shot could not turn the buffalo; he paid no attention to it, but went on.

"Twenty years hence that book (pointing to the Horace) will be as unmeaning as a Hebrew Bible. It has educated every generation for two thousand years, and now Harvard College throws it on the dust heap."

"IS Harvard worse than the rest of them?" I asked, touched in spite of myself to find that the old cynic harbored so much feeling towards the Institution he so constantly abused.

"No, no, no, no, not worse; but more unfortunate, more desperately typical, more tragic. The age of ignorance has turned all our colleges into factories; but at Harvard the thing was done with a system, with a perfection, with a root-and-branch frightfulness that makes of the place a devastated region where the subsoil is exposed and nothing will grow for a century. It was done with a genius for destruction, slowly, deliberately, and with icy precision.

"Of course, all our colleges had to be remodeled during the last half century, and of course the bankers had to do it because the bankers put up the money. The bankers were unlearned men, and the colleges thus became a mirror of the age,—a commercial age. Few men saw that the future of learning in America was being committed to our business man. These new managements took charge of the intellectual interest of society. They decided on policies, they conferred honorary degrees, they exercised the functions of sages. They became the custodians of our light.

Through their influence, the older scholars and literateurs of our Universities were soon replaced by younger men who stood for applied science and industry. All this was perhaps inevitable. But at Harvard there was a peculiar campaign against cultivation and a deliberate surrender to business. The long reign of President Eliot transferred the University from Cambridge to State Street. For the last thirty years the College has been run by Lee Higginson and Company."

I have always found that the way to soothe an excited person was to let him talk. Wilde was becoming calmer. He began to shave his lathered face and spoke at intervals, more and more slowly:

"T^ LIOT thought, and Lee Higginson Ali thought, that there was such a thing as a University quite apart from the existence of its great scholars or notable learned men, notable characters and writers. Such persons interfered wih Eliot's theory of a college and were apt to be obstructionists. They were accordingly weeded out, or allowed to die out. The type was discouraged. The idea of the type was discouraged. The opportunities at Harvard for any student to see an intellectual person have been growing more and more meagre since 1875; although, of course, there have generally been a few lovers of learning prowling about Cambridge in obscurity and neglect, feeling that they belonged to a discouraged type. The consequence is that the students who have been going to Harvard during the last thirty or forty years have been almost cut off from that sort of spiritual contact in youth which keeps learning alive throughout the ages. The Harvard graduate of forty hardly knows that such contact once existed. Ask the next Harvard man you meet, 'What is the matter with Harvard?' He will reply: 'Nothing. Harvard is all right.' This man doesn't know what a University is; he doesn't know what cultivation and learning are. He has never seen an educated man. The damage was done thirty years ago, but its fruits,—dead sea apples,—now appear."

Wilde was now smiling, and continued to melt till he became whimsical and wistful. I had never before seen him in this helpless, benevolent mood. The more hopeless all the conditions appeared to him, the more gentle he became. It crossed my mind that this must be his swan-song.

"Whom do you blame?" I asked.

"Well, I have thought a great deal about that. If we are to concede,—if we are to concede that there is such a thing as blame in the universe, the blame must rest on the intellectuals of Massachusetts during the eighties, and especially on the great men still to be found in Harvard at that time,—on Professors James, Royce and Palmer."

I DREW a long breath, but said nothing, knowing that if Wilde lost his quietude he would become epigrammatic, clever and extravagant. He went on:

"William James was a highly gifted, highly educated man. He was brought up abroad, knew languages, French literature, German philosophy; knew something of the world, and was a saint. But he wouldn't oppose Eliot. If William James, Josiah Royce and George Herbert Palmer had gone to Eliot and to Henry Higginson thirty years ago and had said, 'We insist that your corporation of seven shall always contain one or two men of purely intellectual interests and aspirations,' the whole history of Massachusetts would have been affected. But James and Royce and Palmer were dedicated to philosophy and to things much larger than Harvard. They couldn't see that it was their business to fix the kitchen stove."

"How do you know they couldn't?" I asked.

"I used to tell them so. In them there occurred a break, a schism between the contemplative and the active life of our country. They were given to understand by the Management that the great and complicated externals of the College,—its funds, buildings, schoolarrangements,—must be left in the hands of real estate and bond experts, and the philosophers accepted the decision. I don't say they were always happy, but they, these great philosophers, accepted an analysis of their own function which was offered to them by crude, practical men. They could not see that it was their duty to wade in and impose their ideals on others through a struggle. They were thinkers and they trusted to thought. But, you know, there are truths as deep as the truths of contemplation which only fighters know. No matter how great or how good you are, there is a force that only comes to you through fight. This side of truth was unknown to James, Royce and Palmer."

THERE was a long panse; for I didn't more than half comprehend his idea, and I preferred to let him drift onward rather than pin him down to something which, very likely, he could not explain. But I spoke in spite of myself, and perhaps a little impetuously:

Continued on page 84

Continued from page 30

"But it seems to me that President Eliot himself appointed these men. They were all of his own selection, were they not? He couldn't have been the demon you make him out."

"Oh, I'm not talking of demons, but of the Spirit of the Age. They were not subservient, they were innocent. They were under the spell of the epoch, which cried with a loud voice, 'Business first!'

"Why, I don't care," he continued. "Why should I care if the meaning has passed out of Harvard? We are always striving to thrust the meaning back into institutions from which it has slipped. Massachusetts had a meaning once. Perhaps the evaporation of that is what ails Harvard. Why worry over a last year's beehive? But I do worry. Universities are among the permanencies of the world; they are going to continue, and they force their problems upon us because they and their problems are more permanent than we ourselves are. Some sort of bees are going to build in that hive. That is what stares us in the face. The close corporation of seven which owns the trademark of the beehive and controls its funds has continued and perpetuated itself, never taking in anything that was not its own by-product, till it is a cocoon; and whether there is life in it or not, who can tell? All we see is a very inaccessible, somnolent chrysalis. From the point of view of reason one thing that might be tried with profit would be to awaken the alumni into awakening the Corporation.

"AND here comes the nemesis of all that carefully fostered propaganda of alumni associations in American colleges. Your alumnus thinks he is helping education by shouting for his college,—whatever college it happens to be. This is his hymn to the Muses. Your alumnus has been stupefied into a belief which rests on,—what? On nothing; on the need of funds,—on blind, foolish partizanship. Your alumnus is the enemy of education. He is a boyman, an arrested creature. Not content with neglecting the student while in college, the college authorities have actually proceeded to brutalize him after he left college, by organizing him into a sort of claque.

"THESE Harvard boy-men must be appealed to and induced to persuade the cocoon to open its orifice and elect one or two purely intellectual persons upon the sacred Board of the Corporation of Harvard. Seems hopeless, doesn't it?—when you consider that to the arrested alumnial mind this Corporation is the Shrine of Delphi. These faithful shouters have for years taken off their shoes at the South Station and uncovered their heads as they passed State Street. And now we ask them to open their eyes, and see, in the corporation, a sarcophagus and in the Fellows a collection of mummies who cannot be reached by the voice of intellect, though the shades of Plato and Bacon should arise and bellow at them with a megaphone.

"BUT what I hope is this:—that somehow the newer and bolder spirit of the whole country will begin to break into the Harvard Church from the outside. The man in the street will say, 'Hi there!' The heir of the ages,—some fellow who perhaps hasn't been to college at all, but who is a cultivated, active-minded man,—will lend a hand, bring an axe, assert his rights in Harvard University and help ventilate the entire subject. History shows that new life does sometimes creep into old institutions. It keeps oozing in somehow; and I should regard the preliminary charivari by which the alumni are to be waked up as being really useful in a much larger sense. It will be the means of intellectual agitation. All our other colleges are plagued with much the same problems as Harvard; and a Harvard awakening would be salutary. The Yale man has as much at stake in the condition of Harvard—and the Harvard man in that of Yale—as each has in his own college. The first instinctive gropings toward education will teach them this. A movement by Harvard men to arouse Harvard from her lethargy will be a blow at that college patriotism which is one of the worst influences in American life. College patriotism, as it now exists among us, makes a university degree into the symbol of a fetish, the symbol of some particular kind of rag doll."

AS Wilde finished he gazed oddly about the room. Then, picking up his Horace, he looked into it slowly and mechanically, as if to see what time it was.

"See what a dismal portent my thumb falls on!" said he. "I hope it's not true.

'Ne vera virtus, cum semel excidit Curat reponi deterioribus"

"You couldn't translate that for me, I suppose," I said, coyly, passing the book toward him.

"Latin is very hard to put into accurate English," he said, "but I'll give you the Hebrew equivalent of the verse: —'If the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?"'