Chapter II: Part 2

The Academic Mind of To-Day and To-Morrow.

“’Tis not a melancholy _utinam_ of my own, but the desires of
better heads, that there were a general synod――not to unite the
incompatible difference of religion, but,――for the benefit of
learning, to reduce it, as it lay at first, in a few and solid
authors; and to condemn to the fire those swarms and millions
of rhapsodies, begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker
judgements of scholars, and to maintain the trade and mystery
of typographers.”――_Sir Thomas Browne._

It will be observed that our survey of probable future developments in the lower branches of education is hopeful. These are good reasons for optimism: the trend of opinion which will mould the schools of the future is already clearly in evidence; our obvious defects to-day are defects of organisation, and these can be remedied by any capable administrator; the seeds of the growths we have foreseen have already been planted; and, finally, economic exigencies will provide the drive necessary to overcome the dilatoriness inseparable from public activity. But we must confess that we are much concerned about the universities. There are tendencies in university life to-day that give ample cause for misgiving,――the more so because they spring rather from vital weakness reflecting the intellectual vices of our age than from defective methods and organisation.

Not that our universities do not show very obvious defects in method and organisation. (We are considering now especially the new universities. Just as in our survey of secondary education we made no reference to the public schools, which have their own tradition, and which will remain outside a state-system, so we may now leave out of account Oxford and Cambridge, which have their own teaching-methods and which again are not likely to be amenable to state-interference. Moreover, the inevitable extension of higher education will be seen in the creation of more universities of the new type, as well as in the enlargement of those already in existence, and thus Oxford and Cambridge are likely to turn out an ever-diminishing proportion of the total number of graduates in this country). Criticism may well be levelled at the insufficient importance attached to social life in the modern universities. It is much too easy for young men and women to attend courses of lectures for three years or so and amass a certain quantity of information on given subjects without coming in contact with any intellectual influences outside the class room. This danger is, of course, inevitable when the students are not resident in a college. A remedy is being provided to some extent by the erection of hostels, and much more may be done in this direction; but there is still a difficulty arising from the fairly large proportion of students who live at home in the university-town. As part of the same problem must be mentioned the insufficient attention given to games. This is due not merely to the frequent absence of adequate playing-fields, which might be remedied, but to the fact that college lectures take place during the whole of the day and are so arranged that no considerable body of students is free for the whole of more than one afternoon a week. In other words, college work is organised solely with a view to academic requirements.

And then there is the teaching by means of lectures. As a method this was rendered obsolete as soon as books were rapidly and cheaply printed, and yet, whereas Oxford and Cambridge have long pursued a more excellent way, the new universities have strangely revived and perpetuated the mediaeval practice. A century-and-a-half ago Dr Johnson was emphatic about the futility of lectures. (“People have nowadays got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chymistry by lectures. You might teach making of shoes by lectures!”). It is delightful to imagine his remarks if he could walk through a modern college and see dozens of lecturers each droning from his rostrum,――in these days when library shelves and publishers’ store-rooms are stuffed with reliable text-books on every conceivable subject. Surely no system of teaching can have ever been devised with so little regard for ordinary efficiency. Batches of students are set to take imperfect notes of a probably imperfectly delivered lecture by a man who has either taken his material from books that they ought to read themselves, or is dictating what is really an original text-book, which obviously, in the interests of economy in time and labour, to say nothing of accuracy, ought to be printed. It is to be feared that under present arrangements a college lecturer fulfils the whole of the duties officially required of him if he thus turns himself into a gramophone for so many hours per week. If university-teaching meant no more than this, and if the lecture were its only channel, we should feel bound to urge that the present wasteful duplication of lectures in various university-centres should be avoided by enlisting the aid of wireless, and that standard lectures should be broadcast to students throughout the kingdom in their own homes.

The educational efficacy of the universities of this and other countries is being weakened, however, by a more insidious disease,――a disease of which the defective teaching-methods and the excessive absorption in purely academic pursuits are merely outward symptoms. The intellectual and moral malady of this present age has infected our seats of learning so that they appear to be abandoning the ideal of a liberal education and to be substituting the narrow aim of the acquisition of specialised knowledge. The modern university must be a centre of research: the danger is that it will neglect to be also a centre of education.

Research is the intellectual idol of our time. The fiery zeal for discovery which animates us resembles that which was abroad five centuries ago in Europe. Indeed, we of to-day are borne along by the second wave of the great tide of the Renaissance. The great awakening of the human spirit, due, in part, to the rediscovery of ancient literature and art, urged men to the passionate pursuit of truth and beauty. Research and creative activity went hand in hand. The inspiration which produced the great scholars, painters, and architects lasted for a season. Then the vital energy was dissipated: scholarship degenerated into gerund-grinding, literature into stylistic display, and art into lifeless imitation. But meanwhile the newly-liberated spirit of enquiry was turning from the past and seeking fresh objects of study in natural phenomena. Slowly and tentatively, at first, the human intellect explored the fringes of those vast fields of knowledge which had lain almost untouched since the time of the Greeks. Then, in the last century, the scattered sparks suddenly flamed into a great outburst of scientific discovery, and the western mind was amazed by the undreamed-of treasures spread before it. Here was a second Renaissance, the child of the first and informed with the same spirit of divine curiosity, but working in a new direction. The prime object of the nineteenth century investigator was to accumulate observed facts about the material universe, to find theories to interpret those facts, and perhaps ultimately to lay bare the innermost secrets of Nature. More and more wonders were discovered; and each new wonder pointed the road to fresh territories awaiting the pioneer. There must be formed a great army of explorers. The recruitment and the training of this army was naturally carried on in the universities. The aims and methods of science acquired enormous prestige. The spirit of research pervaded every department of academic activity.

In the reorganised universities of nineteenth-century Germany, the new spirit found its most complete expression. The professor was given a two-fold function: he was to teach, and also to advance his particular study or science. To-day teaching is often made subordinate to research. A characteristic product of the German academic system is the “seminar,” which is for the student of humanistic learning what the laboratory is to the scientist: in the seminar the student is given training in methods of original investigation. The course of study is highly specialised and leads to the degree of “doctor of philosophy,” for which he must present a dissertation contributing to the advance of knowledge. The close association of American students with Germany has led to the importation of German university methods and ideals into the United States. In England, too, there has been an ever-increasing tendency to approximate our standards to those of Germany. The Honours courses, at any rate at the new universities, become increasingly specialised, and more and more insistence is being laid on the necessity for original research as the crown of an academic career.

Thus the universities are living in an intellectual atmosphere manufactured by the scientists. The great craving is for knowledge,――knowledge of natural processes, and knowledge of man’s past history. This craving manifests itself at every turn. Apart from the labours of scientists, historians, and archaeologists in what Johnson calls the “academic bowers,” we read daily of search-parties (many of whom are organised by European or American universities) proceeding to the ends of the earth,――this one bringing to light the treasures of Egyptian royal tombs, another revealing a hitherto unknown civilisation of the ancient world, a third finding dinosaur’s eggs, a fourth studying the characteristics and the history of a savage tribe. A leading newspaper recently informed us proudly that no fewer than two hundred exploring parties are setting out this year on various quests――more than ever before in the history of the world. The interest in these efforts is not confined to the few. Accounts of marvellous discoveries and inventions bring romance to the millions in our industrial civilisation. The popular press knows the appeal of big headlines over an article giving a highly coloured account of the latest results of research; and the bookstalls are crowded with magazines devoted to the Wonders of Science and giving the City clerk and typist, hungry for knowledge, an Illustrated Outline of this, that, or the other field of information.

Whither is this enthusiasm for knowledge leading us? What benefits will accrue to the individual or to society when, with untold labour, we have learned a fraction more about the history of man or penetrated a few steps further into the illimitable arcana of nature? These are questions which those engaged in investigation and those whose delight is to hear some new thing alike hardly pause to ask. It is assumed that all knowledge of fact is valuable, and therefore is to be pursued for its own sake. To many this will seem a self-evident proposition. Such people may be reminded that curiosity about the material world has not always been a characteristic of the western nations. For many centuries man was not in the least interested to know whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth: he was content to take on trust the evidence of his senses. It is even a matter for debate whether the sum of human happiness has been increased by the knowledge that has come from Galileo’s labours. It is a perennial human weakness to pursue one aim to the unreasonable exclusion of others, to mistake the means for the end. The great humanists were so possessed by ideals which they found in the antique world that they sought to achieve them even at the expense of personal and social morality; their successors mistook the husk for the kernel and allowed pedantry to displace scholarship. We of this age are being diverted from other aims and allowing our intellectual life to be narrowed by an unreasoning zeal for research. We are influenced too much by the delusion that the making of “a contribution to knowledge” is the beginning of wisdom.

Will the universities rid themselves of the incubus of research, or at least relegate it to a separate department so that the main efforts of the professors and lecturers may be concentrated on other matters? On the answer to this question the future of the universities depends. It must be decided whether the primary business of the university teacher is to teach or to carry on the investigations in which he is privately interested; whether the business of the student is to become educated or to become a specialist; whether, in short, there is any necessary relationship between the two branches of university activity,――research and education. At present there is little indication of how these problems will be settled: as yet they are scarcely mentioned in academic circles in this country. Criticism of university methods and ideals is heard among people who have left professorial tutelage, and book-reviewers are occasionally entertaining at the expense of typical products of the academic mind; but for the most part the standards of the dons are taken for granted. The late Sir Walter Raleigh, it is true, did not conceal his antipathy to the “serious business of scholarship,” but his brother professors must have considered him a sad dog.

While English universities give no sign of interest in fundamental problems affecting their well-being, a ray of hope comes from America. In the recent annual report of Columbia University, the president, Dr Nicholas Murray Butler, speaking with all the authority of his distinguished position, faces critical issues with a frankness that is possible, perhaps, only in America. He is concerned about the dearth of great minds in spite of the spread of educational facilities, and he asks whether the universities have not destroyed the ideal of a liberal education, and with it the liberally educated man himself, through allowing the choice of less valuable subjects and laying too much stress on early specialisation. In spite of the efforts of two generations to make science an instrument of education, and in spite of the inherent excellence of the scientific method, he has grave doubts about the results. He finds the cause of his dissatisfaction in the methods and aims of the teachers of the sciences. “If these subjects are to be presented only for the purpose of training specialists, and if the methods to be followed are those that, while appropriate for investigation, have no relation whatever to interpretation, then it may well be that in another generation general interest in the natural and experimental sciences and general knowledge of their meaning and significance will have greatly declined.... The example of the ancient classics ought to suffice. They were killed largely by those who taught them.” On the subject of research Dr Butler is equally outspoken. “The word research,” he says, “has come to be something like the blessed word Mesopotamia. It is used to reduce everyone to silence, acquiescence, and approbation. The fact of the matter is that something between seventy-five per cent. and ninety per cent. of what is called research in the various universities and institutes of the land is not properly research at all, but simply the re-arrangement or re-classification of existing data or well-known phenomena.” He reminds his readers that “an original investigation may, and usually does, add a good deal to the knowledge of the individual investigator without adding anything to the knowledge of the human race.”

Dr Butler attacks the principles on which present-day science-teaching in the universities is carried out: such an indictment applies with equal, if not with greater force, to the teaching of the humanities, into which scientific methods have intruded themselves with disastrous results. It is natural that the historian of to-day should adopt the character of the scientific investigator; but surely something is wrong when university and other presses issue volume after volume of historical study of a kind which, judged by any of the wider canons, can have no conceivable value. Too often the specialists forget that the many intriguing little puzzles that they try to solve are intriguing little puzzles and nothing more. The researcher in the natural sciences can always plead that his discoveries, however insignificant at the moment, may take on great importance in connection with work in other fields. The researcher in history can hardly put forward the same plea. The scientific or pseudo-scientific spirit applied to history has tended to destroy the sense of values.

Literature at the universities is in even a worse plight. The scientific historical method applied in this field is steadily devitalising literary study. Criticism and enjoyment of the great masters have to give place to the study of tendencies and influences, of historical minutiae and bibliographical irrelevancies. The academic mind apparently fails to see any incongruity in the eagerness and seriousness with which learned societies recently discussed the precise circumstances of the death of Marlowe; nor is it shocked at the regularity with which university lecturers and others write letters to the “Times Literary Supplement,” taking leave to record some “new fact” about a relative of a tenth-rate poet whose name lives only in the bigger histories of literature. Immature graduates in the American schools of English are steadily working through all our writers who are sufficiently unimportant to have escaped attention hitherto and producing monographs on them “in part preparation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of ――――.” And as money is plentiful in the American universities the theses are duly printed. Similar so-called literary research is being carried on with unremitting energy in this country also; happily the results of most of it remain decently buried in the university archives. Dr Butler foresees a probable decline in the educational importance of scientific study through concentration on the unessentials and neglect of the essentials: for the same reason it is to be feared that the university departments of modern literature are already well on the road to decadence.

The outlook for university education is therefore not hopeful. It seems probable that the worship of the false gods of the academic world will take an unconscionable time in dying. Universities are conservative places: they hold themselves superior, and often rightly superior, to the rough and tumble of the world outside, and thus they are tardy in responding to the changing spirit of the age. Moreover, by their very system they are cramping the free intelligence and narrowing the vision of those who are to direct the universities of the future. Success in university life necessarily involves obedience to the tradition.

Thus it may be assumed that present tendencies will take a generation or two to reach their limit. With the improvement in the secondary schools through the better selection of pupils the standard of work there will be forced up to such a pitch that every student proceeding to the university will immediately specialise in a narrow field. Pass degrees will be abolished. The prestige of research-degrees will be such that most, if not all, graduates will proceed to them. In every university there will be a busy colony of researchers. In the departments of science in its various branches men and women will be labouring to discover new phenomena and to formulate fresh theories. Much of this work will fulfil the laudable purpose of improving man’s material lot. Much of it, on the other hand, will have the practical result of supplying an industrialised community with a surfeit of mechanical luxuries which the ordinary person will have neither the desire nor the time to use. The spirit of man may find some consolation in increased knowledge of such matters as the habits of atoms exposed to various sorts of experimental bombardments. In the departments of the modern languages and literatures the soil will have been so far exhausted that students will be reduced to collating and editing (with linguistic commentary) the dullest and most obscure mediaeval manuscripts. Or the American example will be followed of writing dissertations on recent or contemporary writers. We may expect doctoral theses with such titles as――“A Bibliographical Account of the Works of Arnold Bennett, together with a Hand-list of his Contributions to the Periodical Press”; or “The Sussex Farm-Labourer in English Fiction from 1900 to 1930.” In the realm of history, the evidence of the past will, in most directions, have been sifted and re-sifted; accounts of first-rate, second-rate, and even third-rate men and movements will have been multiplied _ad nauseam_ on the excuse that an additional insignificant fact or two has been added to information that was already accessible. Students will be driven to editing the dreariest records (if any still remain unpublished) elucidating matters of the least possible concern to the twentieth century. They will, no doubt, be sustained in their thankless tasks by the thought that they are doing the Spade-work: they are doing their share, however humble, towards providing a greater than themselves with the materials for a new survey of a period. We can only hope that their single-minded devotion may not be disturbed by the horrible thought that the mass of accumulated research on any given topic will eventually be so vast that no single human life will give sufficient time in which to read it, and that no single human mind will be equal to the task of synthesising it.

When the cult of research has thus reduced itself to absurdity the time will come when we shall perhaps turn to the conception of a university as a place where, by the study and discussion of problems of fundamental importance, the most intelligent young men and women are brought into contact with the best and most stimulating minds, where the balance is held true between intellect and emotion, between thought and action.

But that time is not yet.

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Transcriber’s Notes:

――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

――Punctuation, and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.