Wanted: More Talk

AMERICAN professors do not talk enough. I know that this may sound incredible to undergraduates, and even to some who are not undergraduates. There are people who feel that professors are, by their very nature, incapable of rational talk, because they know nothing about life. I do not hope to convince either of these groups. I would fain speak to others. There are in our country a vast number of professors. There are even more who hope to be professors. Their departments range from Cereal Husbandry to Tagalog and Bisaya. For these professors, and especially for the males of the species, for their wives, their sisters and their cousins and their aunts, even for their mothers, I have a word. I repeat it. Professors do not talk enough.

I have just come from teaching in an English university. During all the time I spent there, my English colleagues constantly amazed me by their apparent leisureliness. Always there seemed time to talk. At eleven in the morning, there was invariably a large group gathered for coffee and talk. At four o’clock, or somewhere between then and six, the spirit moved all and sundry to seek the college café again. This time we had tea with our cigarettes, and again we had plenty of talk. Once in a while we ate dinner together, and had more talk. More often we dined with our families, and came back for after-dinner coffee. This was known as ‘coffee,’ but, unlike the morning coffee, it included a little more. As I remember those ‘coffees,’ I want to gloat like the boys in Stalky and Co., not only because the coffee included wine, whiskey and soda, and all the ‘makings,’ but because it also included talk.

For this talk was talk that amounted to something. I have had some wonderful talks in America; but into one winter in England there was crowded a long series of never-to-be-forgotten evenings. One night a distinguished American scholar, who had lectured before the college in the afternoon, was entertained. In our company there was a man who had been an English administrator in India and in Africa; a young American who had served with the marines in San Domingo; a Scotsman with an uncanny knowledge of unexpected things, who enlightened us on the Icelandic sagas; another Scotsman, who once lived in China and who is an authority on modern psychology; and others, each knowing his own subject well enough to see its bearing on the subjects we talked of. We spent most of our time talking of the treatment by Europeans of the primitive races; and then, somehow, we slipped over to the psychology of the primitive races themselves. Of course information was exchanged, but not a man was dull or pedantic. There was anecdote, repartee, wit, and sociability. We wont our several ways with new life in us. I know that I lectured on Catullus much better next day because of this mental stimulant. My time was far more profitably spent in a whole evening of talk, than it would have been in reading Robinson Ellis or even Elmer Truesdale Merrill.

I was in one of the ‘Provincial’ universities. At Oxford and Cambridge, the staff of each college usually dines together in Hall, and after dinner goes to the Combination Room for coffee and talk. The power to take part in the talk that goes on is almost an essential qualification for a fellow of a college. I heard of one man, a brilliant scholar, who was seriously thinking of resigning his fellowship because he felt that he had no gift for conversation. His colleagues won’t let him resign, but it is significant that he should consider it on grounds like these. As a result of this constant clashing of wits, these men can talk and write entertainingly. They have learned in the Combination Room to be simple, free from pedantry, and never polysyllabic. A surprising number, even of their technical books, are readable. I have often been told that, in the narrow fields they choose, our American scholars are more accurate. But, let me whisper it here in the intimacy of our own family, that we Americans are not always accurate. We make many slips. I think, on the whole, we make full as many as our English colleagues, and there are comparatively few among us who can convey misinformation so delightfully. It would help us here on this side of the water to have our brains mutually picked and our polysyllabicisms hooted. We need more talk.

I am aware that the way to get things done in America is to form an organization, with committees, an office, and a paid secretary. Too often, it is true, we think that the work is done when we have organized to do it; and it has happened that, concentrating on our organization, we have forgotten our original aim altogether. But, in spite of the danger, I am tempted to start an organization to make professors talk. The meetings might have to be held in Montreal, or in Cuba, for reasons that should be obvious; but, if we could only keep our aim in sight and remember that we were organized to talk, it would pay. We really are polysyllabic. Some of us are afraid that, if we write intelligibly, we may be regarded as popular, and popularity is damnation.

We have another fault, worse, if possible, then polysyllabicism. We are narrow. We fear the man who can write, or even talk, intelligently on more than one theme. We are like the German scholar my English friends told me of. He came one winter to an English university which has grown up about an ancient cathedral. In the chapter library there is a collection of priceless old manuscripts, and he came to collate one of them, I think a manuscript of Piers Plowman. The members of the Faculty thought they should in some way recognize his presence, so they gave a dinner in his honor. After dinner in one of the college halls, they adjourned to the Combination Room for the usual talk. The German visitor would not be drawn. They tried him on all sorts of questions without result. Finally, he explained that Piers Plowman was his special field and he did not wish to talk except on his own subject. The saddest part of the story is that, so far as they could judge, he gloried in his shame. We are not quite as bad as he, but too often we have little interest outside our own field, and no knowledge whatever. We should know more of our own field if we knew something of others. We might learn much by occasionally picking a colleague’s brains.

But perhaps we should not have an organization. If we had, then our female colleagues would come in. I believe in women’s rights. I believe that before the sex there still lie heights which they shall some day reach. Some of them, while mere males still do sleep, are toiling upward in the night. Some of them are experts at picking brains, and would be useful at a picking bee. Many of them are good fellows, and would not object to their male associates ‘solemnizing Nicotina’s rites’ while in deep discussions they spend ambrosial nights. But somehow the women are few who can fit into a group where men are in the majority and not bring with them some slight restraint. I urge, therefore, that in the case of professors, coeducation be abandoned, and that parallel courses be given to small groups of each sex.

And here I turn to the wives of professors, to their sisters and their cousins and their aunts. Women, spare your man. Let him loose for a time, more often than you do, from his smug domestic comfort, even from the training of his children, momentous as this is, and make him a boy again, just for a night. Let him go and talk and smoke and drink non-alcoholic beverages. Your country calls you to this high duty; for American scholarship will never achieve its high destiny until American professors talk more.