The College and the Philanthropist

Suggesting a Plan for the Hastening of America's Intellectual Golden Age

DAVID GRAY

SOME wise man, I forget who, observed that his idea of a university was Mark Hopkins sitting on one end of a log and a young man sitting on the other. But this frugal conception of academic equipment was formulated two generations ago. Today Dr. Butler asks for sixty millions to carry on at Columbia, Dr. Angell of Yale for twenty-five, and Dr. Lowell of Harvard for all that he can get. Every college in America wants money— and more money.

Obviously here are two opposed views of education. The Mark Hopkins idea was to educate by personal contact, to make knowledge a living force by virtue of the inspiration of the teacher. Mark Hopkins believed in Latin, Greek and mathematics but it was immaterial what he taught. Any subject was the text for his own interpretation of life. Primarily he transmitted the wisdom and virtue of Mark Hopkins and the student became something wiser and more virtuous than he was before.

The new idea of the university is that of the department store offering standardized courses of information in everything from algebra to zoology, a producing plant turning out thousands of standardized graduates. One cannot conceive of Dr. Butler transmitting personally his wisdom and virtue to ten thousand students at Columbia. It is physically impossible. What he needs to solve his problem is organization, equipment, certified teachers and unlimited funds.

But there is a disquieting suspicion abroad that something is wrong with these great college plants. With so much education being dispensed annually, if indeed it be education, ought we not as a nation to be notably more cultivated, more wise and virtuous, more civilized than we were twenty years ago? Motors and motor roads have multiplied, golf courses, automats, hotels with "room and bath", but I have heard no competent observer rapturously noting any conspicuous ripening of America's aesthetic and spiritual fruits.

A VAST amount of information is undoubtedly dispensed by our universities, but information and education arc two different things. The truly educated man may have no practical information whatever but the best thought of the best minds has somehow become a part of him. He is sensitive to the beauty and distinction of the work of the great artists, poets, musicians. He is familiar with noble standards of conduct, with high manners and with the things by which the spirit of man may live. He knows "The Beautiful and the Good". He has taste. He belongs to the little band of civilized men in whose hands arc the destinies of humanity. The well-informed man may know everything in the World Almanac yet be a boor, a vulgarian, an uncivilized yahoo.

It is a fact so obvious as to have escaped general notice that the old education which taught culture and civilization rather than information depended primarily on the Mark Hopkins idea of teaching, and it would seem that the abandonment of this idea of teaching is largely responsible for the neglect of the old ideals of education. It is also probable that the growing dissatisfaction with the DepartmentStore University is due to the same cause for, more than any other lack, the contemporary output of graduates shows the lack of contact with distinguished and inspiring personalities.

For a number of years I have been asking middle-aged graduates what they really got out of college that endured. With a surprising unanimity they reply that college to them has come to mean old professor Smith or Jones. They have forgotten the information he imparted to them, but he opened some window that gave them a glimpse of the stars; he helped them to the true meaning and higher possibilities of life. Now, if the most that remains to a graduate of thirty years' standing is the flavour of an inspiring personality, what will be left, thirty years hence, to the graduates of universities in which there is no place for personalities with flavour?

BUT there is no profit in pessimism. This situation may still be net. The practical American genius, once awakened to the gravity of the case, will do something earnest if not intelligent. Very possibly we shall have "Back to Personality" movements, "drives" for the Mark Hopkins idea. At Columbia a generous slice of Dr. Butler's sixty millions will be devoted to the wholesale purchase of inspiring teachers. Unfortunately, however, these arc not a commodity that one may order F. O. B. Parnassus. They arc shy and fugitive. But, if our universities should provide something analogous to a wild-life bird refuge they might wander in, just as golden orioles sometimes appear in city parks.

This suggestion is not fantastic nor even original. All Souls' College at Oxford is just such an institution. It is not a college at all, as we understand the term. There arc no undergraduates. It is an exclusive club of intellectual swells, picked graduates of other colleges who live, at the expense of the foundation, in a kind of divine idleness. They have no duties to speak of. They may read books or write them or they may think or they may do nothing at all. They ripen there in the sunshine of pure and unapplied learning; their souls grow their wings; their intellects grow vigorous, their personalities acquire flavour. At the appointed time those who have the call to teach descend from their citadel and take up their work in Oxford or in the outer world.

An All Souls' in every American university, a nucleus of young men of promise incubating notable things, emanating criteria of taste, might conceivably change the course of American civilization for the better. At the least it would provide a nursery for inspiring personalities and a defense against intellectual standardization.

It would be very unfair to charge our educators with deliberate betrayal of the traditional education of liberal culture and the humanities. They have been victims of extraordinary circumstances. The old education which produced western civilization was devised for scholars. Until comparatively recent times no one went to the university who was not interested in pure learning. The scholar was a specialized type like the painter or musician.

With the increase of wealth, young men began to go to college to have a good time, to make desirable associations, to play football, to "make" clubs, and to sniff the atmosphere of culture. In the Nineties this tendency gathered unprecedented momentum in America. The number of non-scholars became so formidable that something had to be done for them. The late Dr. Eliot led the way with the introduction of the elective system. He proposed to prepare non-scholars for jobs. It was, in fact, a higher vocational training but he did not call it that. It was still known as college education.

In 1889 there was an enrollment, in American colleges and universities, of 45,000 males and 20,000 females. By 1923 the number had swelled to 467,000 males and 268,000 females. While the population had less than doubled, college attendance had increased eleven and one third times. But specialized evolutionary types—like the scholar and the musician— do not increase overnight out of ratio to population. Today, relative to population there arc probably no more true scholars than there were in Dr. Eliot's college days. As a consequence our universities have become, more than ninetenths, schools for higher vocational training and, less than one-tenth, institutions of learning. Incidentally the teaching methods essential to the old education have been superseded by the methods improvised to meet the vast demand for vocational training.

HELPING to fit young men for jobs with vocational training is, of course, a good thing. The danger lies in the resulting confusion of ends in which the distinction between the old traditional education and the new has been lost sight of. Before much can be done to rehabilitate liberal culture this distinction must be recognized and the universities re-organized with reference to it. In any such re-organization the "pure learning" group obviously would be segregated, reinvested with the old authority of the humanities and supplied again with the academic atmosphere of inspired personality. The All Souls' idea certainly would be helpful to this end and a study of the All Souls' College plan should preface the foundation of a similar American college.

When Henry Chichele, then Archbishop of Canterbury, endowed All Souls' College, Oxford, in 1437, he founded what may be called a Higher College, limited to forty men, twenty-four artists and sixteen jurists, literaJly to pray for "all souls" that had died during the year, but actually to promote learning and the study of philosophy, theology and law. At that time it was a lay monastic order and the members were forbidden marriage, holidays, any considerable property or any post preventing study. Throughout the course of its development through the centuries, the College remained restricted to a limited number of Fellows; accepted only graduates from other Colleges; added to its curriculum the study of the humanities and extended an increased freedom to the members. The College became an exclusive and laxly disciplined school for only the most brilliant of the gentlemen-scholars, a sort of Superior Seminar. It was said of the members that they were "well born, well-dressed, and moderately learned".

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The cumulative achievements of graduates of All Souls' in the five centuries since its founding bulk so impressively as to incline one to suspect that some miraculous formula of education has been accidentally discovered there. Great names dot the rolls of the College; innumerable books of every sort, grave and gay, have been written by All Souls' men; men in the high places of the government, the church, the law, and the arts make up the greater part of the graduates of the College. Among the "worthies of All Souls' " may be counted Sir Christopher Wren in architecture, the great Blackstone in jurisprudence, William Byrd in music; Jeremy Bentham in philosophy; Jeremy Taylor in theology; the Marquis of Salisbury in statesmanship; Thomas Sydenham in medicine, often called the English Hippocrates.

Have we, in America, gone too far in grey and unrelieved standardization, to be able at least to imagine such a group: a company of free companions, interested in the good things of the mind, brilliant, learned, wise and virtuous? Can we not go farther and breathe a prayer that a concrete beginning may one day be made? We would institute our first American "All Souls' " at some already established university, setting up a college within a college, in which the outward and visible forms of cultivated living would be so provided that a group of distinguished minds might live in a continual state of grace. Libraries, a greensward, trees, rooms for fore-gathering, a good cook, a cellarer. Though a true culture can grow without these, they would still contribute toward the easeful and urbane background in which scholars of many tastes could live agreeably together.

It is predictable that within twenty years there will arise, on the American scene, a philanthropist with sound and far-seeing sense. He will found the one oasis of intellectual cast in the limitless desert of standardized and vulgarized education for the democracy.