Mr. Carnegie's Service to the Teacher

Omnem spem delectationis nostrœ, quam cum in otium venerimus habere volumus, in tua humanitate positam habemus. — CICERO, Letters to Atticus.

IN the early days of the month of August Mr. Carnegie passed away. It is too soon to attempt to appraise his great service to humanity or his contributions to industry and science; but in the institution of a retiring fund for college teachers he performed a service of peculiar kindness and thoughtfulness, the quality of which may well be recalled in the days when the sense of his presence has not yet left us.

Mr. Carnegie had a respect for the teacher, and an interest in the teacher’s service to the world, which was unusual and, in some respects, extraordinary. Most men whose memories go out in kindness to the college teacher recall some old teacher of their own who has been a help or an inspiration in their own lives. Mr. Carnegie had no such memory. So meagre had been his opportunities for formal education, so short the time that he spent in school, that he had no enduring recollection of any teacher who visualized for him the service of all teachers. His effort to be of service to the college teacher was part of a general desire to strengthen those forces in the social order that make for progress, for finer and simpler living, for nobler ideals. In a very real sense, he idealized the profession of the teacher. He deplored the meagre remuneration that came to men in the teaching profession, and desired, in the foundation of a pension system for college teachers, to strengthen one of the great forces in the world making for better conditions; and he sought to show at the same time his personal regard for the men of the teaching profession. It seemed to him that he could do nothing better to accomplish these two purposes than to establish some agency that would increase the rewards of the teacher’s life, and that would remove some of the uncertainties which confront the man whose income is small and whose obligations are large.

His original notion was to carry out this intention by a fund intended to increase the salary of college teachers. It was very evident, however, that even a small increase of salary for the great body of college teachers in America meant a sum far beyond even Mr. Carnegie’s fortune. In the end, he decided to make his contribution in the form of a pension, to be paid to the old and faithful teacher who had reached the end of active service.

As originally proposed, the income of this fund would have been apportioned to those teachers who applied and who seemed to the trustees of the fund the most deserving. This plan was given up because it was finally decided that pensions assigned by this process, however grateful they might be to the recipients, would not permanently strengthen the profession of the teacher, and that it was wiser to confer pensions upon a smaller number of teachers according to definite rules.

In the fifteen years that have elapsed since the inauguration of the plan, the whole conception, both of Mr. Carnegie and of his trustees, as to the function of the college pension has undergone a transformation. An exhaustive study and examination of the whole field convinced him and his trustees that a free pension could not be a solution of the teachers’ problem in a democratic community; that a system must be set up which should be contractual, which should rest upon the coöperation of the teacher and of his college, and which should give, at the same time, the greatest freedom of movement for the teacher from one college to another. It is one of the great satisfactions of Mr. Carnegie’s trustees that he lived to take part in the working out of this plan, and that every step by which the original pension system has been transformed into a contractual and contributory plan was taken only with his approval, and after his sound judgment had coincided in the wisdom of the change.

The transformation through which the Carnegie Foundation has gone is, after all, only an illustration of the process by which men come in the long run to the sound and firm ground which experience and patient seeking alone can discover. Mr. Carnegie’s desire was to be of service to the great body of college teachers. The service that he has rendered is measured only in small part by the seventy or more millions of dollars of his money that will be spent in paying the pensions of college teachers in the first fifty years of the history of the Carnegie Foundation. The essential service that he has rendered lies in the fact that, through the agency which he set up, under the necessity which it faced to deal with the actual problems of the teachers’ profession, in the endeavor to conform with sound principles, — social, educational, financial, — the problem of the teachers’ pension has finally been solved by the only solution which is just, feasible, and permanent. The beneficiary of Mr. Carnegie’s contribution to the teachers’ profession is not only the man who will receive a fullpaid pension provided through his generosity: the true beneficiaries are they who, in generations to come, will have the privilege of taking part in a system instituted through his generosity, but sustained and in the end controlled by them. Younger men who come to avail themselves in succeeding years of these opportunities will also say, quite as truly as the men of this generation, in the words of Cicero, ‘All my hopes of enjoying myself when I retire rest on your kindness.’

It is impossible to convey to those who did not know Mr. Carnegie personally a fair conception of the regard which he had for the profession of the teacher, or of the kindness and goodwill which he sought to express to them. Scattered through the country are many old teachers, and many widows of such teachers, who to-day enjoy annuities granted out of Mr. Carnegie’s personal fortune, but who, for one reason and another, were not eligible for pensions under the rules established by the trustees of the Carnegie Foundation. The number of these will never be known, but it is so large as to form a distinct tribute to Mr. Carnegie’s deep regard for the men who teach. To these his death will bring a feeling of real personal loss. Very few of them ever saw him. All they know about him is that he sympathized sincerely with the difficulties of the teacher’s life; that he had so high a regard for the part which the teacher plays in the progress of mankind that he reached out a friendly hand to those whom he had never seen, but whom he honored as members of a high and noble profession.