The Professor's Dilemma

HE who reads the newspapers with an eye that looks beyond headlines can hardly have failed to notice a curious phenomenon of recent weeks. It was inevitable, of course, that the universal acclaim which greeted President Roosevelt at the dramatic moment of his inauguration should diminish in volume with the passage of time, and that conservative journals should at last draw away from him to assume their role of spokesmen for the opposition. Nothing in this calls for comment. Amusing, however, is the oblique way they have chosen to go about it. For some reason — perhaps it was the continued popularity of the President — the first volleys of editorial criticism have been aimed, not at Mr. Roosevelt, but at the three professors whom he took from Columbia University and placed in the innermost circle of his advisers.

Toward the end of April the New York Herald Tribune published a critical analysis of the inflationary amendments to the Farm Bill, running it under a heading which must have seemed to many a reader more utterly devastating than any of the specific objections listed below. In bold black type it read, ‘When Professors Take Charge.’ Other opposition journals took the cue, and a week later the Herald Tribune returned to the assault with a second editorial. ‘The plain truth is,’ it ran, ‘as the country is now regretfully realizing, that the President himself was rushed off his feet by his college professors. These gentlemen spend their lives in mental acrobatics, planning this and plotting that. Many of them have written books, all of them have spent hours in lectures, telling the world how it should go. None of them has ever sunk his teeth in one actual problem of government.’

We need not concern ourselves with the debatable points of inflation or with the niceties of political strategy. We may even sidestep the issue — if issue it is — concerning the native abilities of the three key men upon whom Mr. Roosevelt leans. He evidently trusts them; the opposition press quite as evidently does not. The rest of us do not yet know them well enough to have an opinion; let us frankly admit it and pass on to consider some of the overtones of this attack on them.

Here we see a telling use of that familiar device — the label. Mr. Moley, Assistant Secretary of State, Mr. Tugwell, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, and Mr. Berle, of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, are held up to ridicule, not as statesmen, which is what they now are, but simply and baldly as professors. True, they exchanged their mortar boards for plug hats the moment they accepted public office, but what of that? Once a professor, always a professor. So run the unwritten lines of the argument, and no further word is needed to point the obvious moral: ‘Let no such man be trusted.’

Now it was the original sin of Adam, and it has been a universal weakness in men ever since, to want to pin neat tags on things. It saves time, and it saves thought. It does more — it makes thought unnecessary, for it gives us the comforting illusion that we know what a thing is if we know its name. The device has many practical uses. The trick is to pick a label (‘reflation’ and ‘dictator’ are familiar current examples) and then to praise or condemn the thing to which it is applied, not because of what it is, but because of the connotations of the word.

The connotations of the label ‘professor’ are peculiarly interesting. When the term is used disparagingly, it suggests an absent-minded old gentleman whose head is lost in clouds of abstract thought and who possesses not a grain of practical sense — one, in short, who takes refuge in an ivory tower as a means of escape from the dust and heat of the market place. Everyone has known a teacher or two of whom these words are a literal description, but they are rare exceptions. Strangely enough, however, something of this taint clings to the cap and gown no matter who wears it. In general it is true that the members of our university faculties do not cut much of a figure outside their academic circle; the world at large does not take them seriously. Why should this be so? Certainly it is not so in England, France, and Germany.

It may well be that our habit of laughing at the professor as a futile chap reveals more about ourselves than about him. One may suspect, indeed, that it betrays a highly significant trait of the American mind — a tendency to discount the value of thought while placing a premium upon action. Like many another of our distinctive characteristics, this one stems directly from the frontier. So long as we were a pioneer people, the pressing demands of daily life conspired to favor the man who could do things, and to discourage as an idle and luxurious fellow the man who spent his time in contemplation. Respect for education was, to be sure, an integral part of the New England tradition, but when that tradition was carried westward with the frontier it tended more and more to become isolated in the little red schoolhouse on the hill. The important day’s work was to fight Indians and clear the wilderness; book learning was a thing apart, and was turned over bag and baggage to the communal hired man — the pedagogue.

Something of this primitive isolation from robust life has colored our attitude toward education and its administrators ever since. Though the frontier was closed long ago, the mental habits peculiar to it linger on. We still reserve our admiration for the doer rather than the thinker, as the cult of the business man during the past decade bears witness. Instinctively we are still more than a little suspicious of learning. Professors are supposed to know more than the common run of men, and since we cannot expect to understand them, we laugh at them and cry them down. They may even be dangerous, teaching subversive doctrines and unsettling the morals of the young. If we don’t dare clap them in jail as public nuisances, — a procedure which the sovereign State of Tennessee attempted under its anti-evolution law, — we can at least keep them segregated within their ivy-covered cloisters.

Under these circumstances the professor’s dilemma is a delicate one. If he plays safe and remains within his academic groves, other men will point a finger of scorn at him and quote Bernard Shaw: ‘Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach.’ And if, itching to carry his thought into action, he dares to break loose and take part in practical affairs, he will be discredited as a wild-eyed visionary who has spent his life in ‘mental acrobatics.’

SCRUTATOR