第103章 CHAPTER IV(8)

The hope -- or delusion -- would be that the staff in each of the resulting disconnected units might be left to conduct its own affairs, and that they would prove incapable of much concerted action or detailed control. It should be plain that no other and extraneous power, such as the executive or the governing boards, is as competent -- or, indeed, competent in any degree -- to take care of these matters, as are the staff who have the work to do.

All this is evident to any one who is at all conversant with the run of academic affairs as currently conducted on the grand scale; inasmuch as it is altogether a matter of course and of common notoriety within the precincts, that this is precisely what these constituent schools and units now have to do, each and several; with the sole qualification that they now have to take care of these matters under the inhibitory surveillance of the executive and his extraneous interests, and under the exactions of a super-imposed scheme of mechanical standardization and accountancy that accounts for nothing but its superimposition. At the same time the working force of the staff is hampered with a load of dead timber imported into its body to administer a routine of control and accountancy exacted by the executive's need of a creditable publicity (15*)This highly conjectural tracing of consequences to follow from this hypothetical dissolution of the trust, may as well be pursued into a point or two of detail, as touches those units of the university coalition that have an immediate interest in point of scholarship, -- the Collegiate ("Arts") division and the Graduate School. The former being left to its own devices and, it might be hoped, being purified of executive megalomania, it should seem probable that something of a reversion would take effect, in the direction of that simpler scheme of scholarship that prevailed in the days before the coming of electives. It was in the introduction of electives, and presently of alternatives and highly flexible curricula, that the move first set in which carried the American college off its footing as a school of probation and introduction to the scholarly life, and has left it a job-lot of ostensibly conclusive short-cuts into the trades and professions. It need not follow that the ancient curriculum would be re-established, but it should seem reasonable that a move would take effect in the direction of something like a modern equivalent. The Graduate School, on the other hand, having lost the drag of the collegiate division and the vocational schools, should come into action as a shelter where the surviving remnant of scholars and scientists might pursue their several lines of adventure, in teaching and in inquiry, without disturbance to or from the worldly-wise who clamour for the greater glory.

Now, all this speculation as to what might happen has, of course, little else than a speculative value. It is not intended, seriously and as a practical measure, to propose the abolition of the president's office, or of the governing board; nor is it intended to intimate that the captain of erudition can be dispensed with in fact. He is too dear to the commercialized popular imagination, and he fits too convincingly into the businessmen's preconceived scheme of things, to permit any such sanguine hope of surcease from skilled malpractice and malversation. All that is here intended to he said is nothing more than the obiter dictum that, as seen from the point of view of the higher learning, the academic executive and all his works are anathema, and should be discontinued by the simple expedient of wiping him off the slate; and that the governing board, in so far as it presumes to exercise any other than vacantly perfunctory duties, has the same value and should with advantage be lost in the same shuffle.

NOTES:

1. "He has stifled all manly independence and individuality wherever it has exhibited itself at college. All noble idealism, and all the graces of poetry and art have been shrivelled by his brutal and triumphant power. He has made mechanical efficiency and administrative routine the goal of the university's endeavour. The nobler ends of academic life will never be served so long as this spokesman of materialism remains in power."History will relate that one of the eminent captains, through an incumbency of more than a quarter of a century, in a university of eminent wealth and volume, has followed a settled policy of defeating any overt move looking to scientific or scholarly inquiry on the part of any member of his faculty.

Should a man of scholarly proclivities by any chance sift through the censorship exercised in virtue of the executive's appointing power, as might happen, since the captain was himself not qualified to pass a grounded opinion on any man's qualifications in that respect; and should he then give evidence of continuing to spend time and thought on matters of that nature, his burden of administrative and class-room tasks would presently be increased sufficiently to subdue his wayward bent; or, in an incorrigible case, the offender against the rule of academic sterility would eventually be retired by severance of his connection with this seat of learning.

In some sinister sense the case reflects credit on the American academic community at large, in that, by the close of this quarter-century of preventive regimen, the resulting academic staff had become a byword of nugatory intrigue and vacant pedantry.