What is Wrong with Our Colleges?

A Plan to Lessen the Chief Evils of Present-Day University Education

WALTER PRICHARD EATON

WE ARE in a What's-The-Matter age. From questioning nothing, a generation or more ago, we have now taken to questioning everything. It would be a very distressing age for the elderly gentlemen one used to see sitting in the windows of the Union League Club, reading the Evening Post, in the davs when one walked up the Avenue for pleasure and met one's friends. Let us hope these poor old gentlemen are gone beyond the reach of Time and Change.

Naturally colleges and college education have not escaped the universal critical scrutiny, the more so as serious educators were never satisfied with them, even when their graduates were most self-satisfied. At the present time, certainly, there seems to be hardly a college administrator in the country who is sure where his college is going, or where he wants it to go, or is satisfied with the present status of his institution; while in more than one college and universitv large sections of the alumni body are at odds with the policies of the president.

Debate is rife everywhere.

PRESIDENT LOWELL is pushing Haryard one way, and many alumni are protesting that it should be pushed back. President Angel 1 of Yale is accused of converting the bull-dog into a bookworm, or something equally terrible. President Meiklejohn put a bomb under Amherst, and, having been himself ejected bv the explosion, came to earth with a scheme for a brand new kind of college. Just before his death, Dr. Burton, president of Michigan, had evolved a plan whereby genuinely talented juniors and seniors could be treated as responsible adults and relieved of the petty tyranny of "cuts" and examinations, being left free to work as they saw fit along a chosen line. Other colleges are working toward a similar scheme. The sudden rush of youth college-ward, following the war, which has overtaxed the capacity of nearly all higher institutions, has automatically resulted in a jacking up of scholastic standards to meet the limited housing situation, much to the distress of manv a famous athlete of the 90's, who supposed his son "had a pull"—and whose son supposed so, too. Yale's football captain and finest freshman athlete went by the board last winter. Naturally, to the old Yale grad this amounts to an educational revolution mayhap Bolshevism.

As evenalumnus is only too painfully aware, one result of the educational unrest and uncertainty is a never ending series of "drives." It seems to me that I have been paying money to mv dear old school and my dear old college, year in and year out now, lor more than a decade. The State universities tap the public treasury, of course, and get all they can through taxes.

What is the need for all this money? In part only is it to pay better salaries to Professors, salaries of whom God knows, were always too low and, in most colleges, still are. In much larger part it is to meet the vastly increased cost of administration, brought about bv the increase in the number of departments, of new laboratories, of this, that and the other experiment. The budget at Columbia is something like £6,000,000 a year now and you can study anything there, from biology to motion picture writing; from journalism to ethics. There is a vast extension department, employing hundreds and hundreds of instructors and lecturers, which provides harmless evening entertainment for residents of Morningside Heights, at a small fee, and teaches elevator bovs bv mail how to write short stories. Even when a great new building or department is built and endowed by one rich man, it inevitable increases the budget burden, it makes more students, more work, more complications, and pushes the institution still farther along the path of effort to supply vocational training in vast variety; to assist students in making a living instead of assisting them to live.

The result of all these drives at the purses of the alumni is going to be a reaction—if it hasn't already come; just as the general public is beginning to resent the incessant drives tor "charity," so that one now runs a mile at the approach of a girl scout or a debutante rattling a pasteboard box with a slit in the cover.

ONE form which this reaction among alumni is taking is a new and radical consideration of the type of boys admitted to college, a transvaluation of human as well as educational values. No student pays, as tuition, anything like the cost to the college of his education; not, probably, more than one quarter at most. What it amounts to, then, is that you and 1, out of our possibly meagre incomes, are practically held up by the drive committees, and our own pride, to help pay for the education—so called—of everybody who goes to Harvard or Yale or Princeton, or the rest. How man}of these youths are worth this sacrifice on our part ' What are they getting out of college that justifies them in asking us to pay for it? What percentage of them, in plain language, are entitled to be educated at what amounts to the public expense?

Twenty-five vears ago I never heard such questions asked. But in the last two or three years I have heard them asked over and over again. Not long ago a famous graduate of Harvard declared, in a meeting of fellow alumni, that "two things will forever prevent Harvard from being a true university and chief among them, is the presence at Cambridge, in such large numbers, of the genus undergraduate." (The speaker was, by the way, a college professor.) A Yale alumnus the other day asked me, point blank, "What proportion of vour class was really entitled to a thousanddollar-a-vear education for two-hundred a year? "

"Fifty per-cent, maybe," I answered.

"Not that many in my class, by half,"saidhc.

And what did we mean by "entitled to an education? "

We meant, we finally decided, that only such youths should go to, or remain in, a college as go there with a real desire to learn, to develop their minds and who show, after getting there, genuine intellectual curiosity and the capacity to do some sort of serious mental work. Then we began to run through long lists of men we had known in college, or boys we now knew who were going to college —and the result was something appalling! Try it yourself. A very considerable percentage of all the men vou knew in collegeany college —were there because it was the proper place to be. It was their family, or social, tradition to go to college. They had no intellectual curiosity, no love of learning, no creative mental capacity. They just got in, and after they were in they selected the snap courses, and just got by. And, of course, the lowest of God's creatures is the man who is content sometimes even proud—just to get by. College entrance examinations are no effective bar to these men, because anvbodv above the grade of a moron, if enough teachers stand over him to make him work, or if his father can afford enough tutors, can pass them. Neither are examinations of much use in college, unless conducted with great severitv, and even then they might weed out almost as many of the fit as the unfit, for original minds—the minds best worth educating—are infrequently the Phi Beta Kappa minds and may be poor at rigid examinations.

If you went to a big preparatory school, or if vou have had anything to do with such a school, you will be still further aware, if you've ever thought about the matter at all, that the majority of the boys there have to be driven. There is no inherent response in them to knowledge, to things essentially of the mind, and they look upon study as a necessary evil which they must face in order to enjoy four vears of pleasant country club life at college. Graduates of public high schools invariably have a higher scholastic rating in eastern colleges than "prep" school graduates, simply because almost all preparatory school graduates go to college, but only those public school boys go who really have an honest ambition to learn, and very often are obliged to make sacrifices in order to do so.

IF YOU talk to an average college graduate of the last thirty years (or sixty, for that matter), you will find him certainly no more mentally alert, no more interested in ideas, in things of the mind, in change and progress, that the non-college man who has got his education for himself. In fact, you generally find him much the more conservative of the two, much less inclined to admit that education never really stops till we die. If he is an artist, indeed, he is generally a bit second rate and academic, without the free flair ol the true creative mind. Eugene O'Neill showed a deep instinct when he ran away from Princeton in his freshman year, and went to sea as a common sailor! For how should a college train an artist, when it is half or three-quarters full of carefree young gentlemen with no more use for art or ideas than they have for the measles, and when most colleges tic all students down to a routine of examinations, and when some colleges, at least—like Harvard of the new regime—are wounded their deepest dignity In the very thought that a creative artist genius of the stage) is in its midst, and kick him out as quickly as possible:

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There is, of course, an ever increasing and legitimate demand, this industrial century, for higher technical education. But this creates no real problem beyond that of staff and equipment, because such education is scientific and almost automatically weeds out the unfit. But there is also an ever increasing demand for higher education which shall be vocational without being genuinelv technical. The absurd courses in scenario and short story writing, (even, I fear, too many of the "schools of journalism,") are examples of effort to meet this demand. However, not a few of our oldest colleges even, have felt the pressure, since the war, in the oldfashioned academic curriculum. The so-called "Jewish problem" in these colleges is a result of the desire of a long submerged people to get a higher education, not for learning's sake, but because it gets, or seems to get, them on and up in the world. It is in this sense, vocational. With the old-time young gentleman of the football field and the social clubs pressing in on one hand, and the new-time voting man who uses a college as a stepping stone to advancement, social and financial, pressing in on the other, there sometimes doesn't seem to be much room for the mere scholar, or the mere lover of ideas and the arts, who looks upon college as a place where he may dwell with similar congenial souls and learn to put his talents to their best use for the furtherance of human knowledge and the ultimate progress of the race.

Vet, I submit, he is the only one of the three who has any real right to ask you and me to pay for his education. Anyhow, he's the only one I'm interested in, or to whom I can give my mite without a groan of protest.

I am not in the least allured by the prospect of helping some charming graduate of Groton (most of them are charming) to get through college* so lie may capitalize his football fame in a Wall Street bond house. Nor am I in the least allured, I fear, bv the prospect of helping Isadore K'>pinski's boy through Harvard, so that he can get a job as sub-master in a public school instead of helping papa in the cigar business. But I would be willing and glad to help to the limit of my financial abilitv anv boy, whether Cabot or Kopinski, to go through college if he were genuinely interested in learning for its own sake, or if he showed some undoubted ability not only to assimilate learning, but to handle it creativelv so that he gave promise of adding* something, however slight, to the world's precious stock of humanistic knowledge, or philosophy or art. He is the boy for whom a liberal college should exist. I he rest are dead weight, or worse.

Now, of course, at any such idea as this the public will say: "How ar: you going to tell this bov from the others: " "Hasn't anybody a right to a college education: Why give it only to this exceptional type?" "Don't you know that a lot of men, even the dumb-bells, get something worth while out of college, even if it's just by being there?" "Don't you believe that the friendships and associations, file spirit and loyalty, of college life make better citizens?" And so forth. Ask your own. I've heard them all.

I'll say at once that a State university, supported by the public funds, is in honor bound to take any boy or girl in that state who can pass a reasonable examination, and keep this boy and girl as long as he or she can maintain a C grade. They are, as a result, vast, unwieldy institutions striving hard to find some way to satisfy their educational consciences, for they know well how little they affect much of their human material. But no such compulsion rests on private institutions, and, outside of their strictly technical departments they are or should be free to choose whether they will be country clubs and semivocational schools, or whether they will be a body of intellectuallv alert young men gathered together to seek for the truth in an atmosphere of dispassionate learning and passionate curiosity. The bugaboo of the "dear old college days" and the friendships, and the loyalties created, and the "training of character" for "citizenship" (i.e. for conservatism and mob thinking) is one of the chief obstacles of course, to choosing this latter aim.

Harvard, our richest university, now has an endowment, in addition to the value of its physical plant, of close to $70,000,000. Columbia has almost as much. Yet they are incessantly seeking more, in order to maintain their multifarious activities and house and train their ever increasing thousands of students. It all sounds tremendously impressive on paper, and the vast physical plants, crowded ever more thicklv together to the exclusion of light and green grass and peace and quiet, thrills the typical graduate, with his American ideal of bigness, till he fairly glows with pride—and goes down into his pocket again.

Yet some of us cannot help wondering if the gain is as great as it seems, if a more rigorous selection of students instead of a physical expansion would not be the better wav to meet the problem. The colleges will of course retort that they are constantlv jacking up their standards; and it is quite true that probably most of us who were graduated twenty-five wars ago would find it impossible to make the grade in Harvard or Tale today. Twentieth century youth, however, has jacked up its capacity, and finds no great difficulty. Indeed, the college boys of today not only do more work in their classrooms but do more outside at the same time, than their fathers did. Which, perhaps, merely proves that their fathers'didn't do nearly enough! So it seems fairly apparent that a mere increased severity of examination marks is ineffective in holding down the number of college students and p re venting the university from being in a perpetual anil breathless rush of endowment drives and building operations.

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The effort of several universities, women's as well as men's, to select chosen pupils at the end of the sophomore year, and thereafter permit them perhaps under tutorial guidance to do individual and possibly creative work, is, I think, a happy omen. Why not carry it farther, and drop from college at the end of the sophomore year everybody who has not shown the character and mental capacity to do such work? Why not make the colleges training schools of leadership, in reality instead of in name only? Any college teacher will tell you— I've been one and I know—that half at least of his human material is hopelessly mediocre, unereative, and, in any high sense, impenetrable. It may make enthusiastic alumni of the dear old university, but it will never make intellectual leaders. In college, it stands definitely in the way of a coherent atmosphere of creative scholarship and achievement. Why not drop it altogether? Why, after all, is any private institution obligated to try to educate it, in return for one quarter of the actual cost? Why should mediocrity demand charity?

If, however, this recommendation is too drastic and would hurt too much the pride of fathers of the class of '99, here is another one. Let all boys who have not, by the end of their sophomore year, shown the character and mental capacity to be trusted with individual specialization, thereafter pay as tuition the entire sum which their education costs the college. That is to say, a boy who had proved his capacity to do real scholarly work in Greek or French, or who had shown creative ability in drama or music, criticism or chemistry, would continue to pay, let us say, £200 a year. But the boy who "just got by," who was plainly the "college man" type, who could make the usual grade hut could not, or would not, tackle the cliffs and peaks of learning, would thereafter pay $1000 a year—or his father would. If, out of a class of 500, half the hoys were of this latter type (as at present they certainly would be), there would be an increased income to the college of $200,000 with another $200,000 from the senior class on the same basis. This is the interest on $8,000,000, and might conceivably give the harrassed alumni a brief respite from endowment drives.

Not that I expect for an instant that this plan will anywhere he tried! Our colleges are, after all, but reflections of the nation. We are still, as a nation, laboring under the dreadful ideal of Bigness. We will have to get over that before our colleges can substitute for it an ideal of quality, of creative perfection. Our colleges are, indeed, democratic. That is the chief trouble with them. For democracy, in the intellectual world, is another way of spelling mediocrity.