The War on the College
FOR the past ninety years the four-year American college has been repeatedly under attack. President Henry P. Tappan of the University of Michigan initiated these onslaughts in 1852 when he proposed that the college be abandoned and that the German system of higher education be substituted. For about thirty years the warfare has been quiescent. Now it has been stirred up again by the January 22, 1942, announcement of the University of Chicago that, beginning with students entering this summer, it will grant its bachelor’s degree two years earlier, to wit, at the end of the sophomore year.
The Chicago change is not an emergency measure adopted for the duration of the war. It is meant to be permanent. Said President Robert Maynard Hutchins in announcing the new Chicago plan: ‘ The reforms adopted by the University are no ill-considered program of acceleration to meet a war emergency. . . . We have taken a comprehensive view of education as a whole in making these plans.’
Including President Tappan’s campaign, eleven attempts have been made to kill off the four-year college or to change its structure. They have all failed. But because both educators and the public are now preoccupied with defeating the Axis, this twelfth Putsch may succeed. Lest a decision be reached by default without a discussion of the issues involved, this article is written: (1) to review the attacks upon the college since Tappan’s day; (2) to describe the educational philosophy of the attackers; (3) to analyze that philosophy; and (4) to suggest the desirable outcome of the conflict.
I
President Tappan sought to eliminate the college for three reasons: first, because he believed that the establishment of universities constituted the greatest educational need of the nation; second, because he judged the German system to be the most desirable plan for the United States to follow; and third, because German education did not include anything comparable to the American college. Following these premises, he and those educators who have agreed with him have persistently sought to undermine if not to liquidate our traditional college.
A century ago the United States obviously and urgently needed universities. The country supported about one hundred and twenty colleges, but not a single university. Changing rapidly from an agricultural and maritime to an industrial society, the nation needed institutions to train chemists, economists, engineers, geologists, physicists, and dozens of other varieties of specialists and professional men. The old-time American college could not offer the advanced instruction necessary, and therefore universities were properly and insistently demanded. For a number of reasons England and France offered no desirable models, and thus Tappan and other educators turned to Germany, whose universities had developed curriculums devoted to extensive specialization in all intellectual and professional fields.
Since German universities were becoming, as Huxley later phrased it, ‘the most intensely cultivated and the most intellectual corporations the world has ever seen,’ Tappan proclaimed German education to be ‘the most perfect educational system in the world.’ He therefore set about reorganizing American education after the German pattern, which, he wrote, ‘we are constrained to admire, to approve, and to copy.’
But the German system differed from the American in two very significant respects. In the first place, in contrast to the American democratic system, the Germans supported a class system of education. In the second place, German education reduced by two or three years the time available for broad, general education and therefore provided no institution comparable to the traditional American college.
The class system of German education segregated children at the age of six. For the common people Germany provided only a Volksschule, offering eight years of elementary education. Ninety per cent of all German children attended the Volksschule and finished their formal education at about fourteen years of age. The other ten per cent attended the Vorschule, which provided the only gateway to secondary education and to advanced instruction in the technical schools and universities.
The democratic convictions of America would tolerate no such dual system of education. As early as 1779 Jefferson presented a bill to the Virginia legislature calling for the establishment of a single educational road democratically open to the children of all citizens and running from elementary to higher education. The bill failed, but Jefferson’s leadership brought about the passage of the Ordinance of 1787, which became the charter of American democratic education. All the states in the Northwest. Territory wrote provisions into their basic laws for a unitary plan of education, and after several bitter struggles the less democratic East and South followed the example of the Middle West and West. Thus class education disappeared from the United States, and young Americans assisted by public funds and private philanthropy are now able, in the democratic tradition, to pursue their education with very substantial equality of opportunity.
The second difference between German and American education has proved considerably more important and more troublesome. It has in fact been the cause of the war on the colleges. The German system terminated the period of general or liberal education when a student finished the Gymnasium, or high school, at nineteen or twenty years of age. The student then entered a university or technical school and began his specialized education. After the establishment of American universities, however, the traditional four-year college continued in operation, interposed between the high school and the university. Differently expressed, Germany provided three levels of education: elementary, secondary, and advanced; the United States provided four levels: elementary, secondary, collegial, and advanced.
How to reorganize or to dispose of the college, so that American education could be made as comparable as possible to German education, constituted the persistent question in the minds of the men who through the years have been in the Tappan tradition or who have been in sympathy with it. They answered the question with one or another of three major plans of action: (1) by attempting to reduce the four-year college course to three years; (2) by forcing university specialization down into the college; and (3) by seeking to kill off the college entirely, assigning its two lower years to the high schools or junior colleges and its two upper years to the graduate or professional schools.
During the present war, college instruction is being accelerated so that, by using the summer months, the four-year course may be covered in three years or a little less. But such acceleration is in no way related to the effort to reduce the college course permanently to three years. The campaign toward this objective has been undertaken five times and has each time failed.
These five unsuccessful attempts were made (1) at Johns Hopkins from its establishment in 1876 to 1907; (2) at Yale Sheffield Scientific School from its opening in 1847 to 1920; (3) at Clark University from 1902 to 1920; (4) at Cornell for a few years beginning in 1885; (5) at Harvard, where President Eliot started in 1883 to reduce the undergraduate course to three years and kept fighting for his plan until his retirement in 1909. His biographer describes his failure in these words: ‘It was the only reform which he had undertaken and which he had not succeeded in carrying through.’
The second effort to undermine the college has proved much more successful. Liberal-arts college educators were able to save the four-year college, but they were not able to prevent university specialization from being pushed down into the college course. Instead they compromised and set up what is generally called the major system, under which students concentrate most of their work during the junior and senior years in a single academic subject or a group of related subjects.
Since about 1910 this system of concentration within the undergraduate curriculum has been adopted by almost all American colleges. It provides both for those students who want to specialize narrowly, while still living in the environment of liberal education, and also for those students who seek to continue their broad education through four years of college work. The compromise thus furnished by the major or concentration system has proved to be reasonably successful and has at once protected the life of the college and, in many respects, improved its work.
The compromise has not, however, proved satisfactory to the extreme group of idolizers of the German system. They have therefore persisted in their attempts to bring about the adoption of the third plan: the complete abandonment of the college. ‘To admire, to approve, and to copy’ the German system means to them that the traditional American college must be discarded, and periodically they have made strong efforts toward that end.
To date, six major attempts to conquer the college by partitioning it have all failed: (1) at Michigan under Tappan from 1852 to 1861; (2) at Minnesota from 1871 to 1884; (3) at Cornell in 1890 and 1891; (4) at Columbia in 1902; (5) at Stanford sporadically, beginning in 1907; and (6) by a committee of the National Council of Education which in 1913 presented a long report, therein continuously citing education ‘as in Germany’ and concluding that ‘there is no longer any excuse for the American college as a mere four-year addition to the earlier periods of education.’
II
This rapid review of the difference between the educational systems in Germany and in the United States, and of the attempts to reorganize American higher education because of the spectacular success of German universities, is of course greatly simplified. It serves, however, to put Mr. Hutchins’s sophomoredegree plan in perspective and to provide a background for an analysis of the educational philosophy which Tappan, Hutchins, and other admirers of German education have held and hold.
In his book The Higher Learning in America, published in 1936, Mr. Hutchins succinctly states this educational philosophy: ‘If education is rightly understood,’ he wrote, ‘it will be understood as the cultivation of the intellect. The cultivation of the intellect is the same good for all men in all societies. It is, moreover, the good for which all other goods are only means. Material prosperity, peace and civil order, justice and the moral virtues are means to the cultivation of the intellect.’ Intellectual cultivation, he asserts, is the chief reason for living; every other human activity is but a means toward this end; therefore education must put all its emphasis upon intellectual training.
This doctrine applies not only to specialized education in the university but also to the general education that precedes specialization. ‘The object of general education . . . must be the training of the mind for intellectual activity.’ General education, moreover, has nothing to do with extra-intellectual objectives such as development of character: ‘The objective of general education will not be the formation of character since little can be done about character at that age level.’
Mr. Hutchins gives even greater emphasis to this intellectualistic doctrine on the level of specialized, or university, education. ‘A university’s unique function is the advancement of knowledge,’ he writes; ‘therefore it should confine itself to advancing knowledge and to the education of those interested in becoming scholars or professional men, or in the cultivation of the intellect.’
This is exactly in the tradition of the German universities. When Fichte, Stein, and Humboldt reorganized German life after the disastrous defeat of the Prussian armies at Jena in 1806, they elevated the doctrine of intellectualism to supremacy in German education. Fichte laid down this policy in his famous ‘Addresses to the German People’ which he gave in Berlin every Sunday night for an entire winter to large audiences of leading Germans. He said in essence that the soil of Prussia was poor, her armies beaten and dispersed, her economy ruined, her spirit crushed, but that Germans could rise rapidly not only to self-respect but also to the domination of Europe and of the world by making education their controlling passion.
In 1899 William James, who had spent several years studying in German universities, described the results of the policy which the German people accepted from Fichte: —
In Germany the explicitly avowed aim of the higher education is to turn the student into an instrument for advancing scientific discovery. The German universities are proud of the number of young specialists whom they turn out every year, — not necessarily men of any original force of intellect, but men so trained to research that when their professor gives them an historical or philological thesis to prepare, or a bit of laboratory work to do, with a general indication as to the best method, they can go off by themselves and use apparatus and consult sources in such a way as to grind out in the requisite number of months some little pepper-corn of new truth.
Valuing above all else ‘the cultivation of the intellect’ so that men and women may engage in life’s supreme enterprise of ‘advancing knowledge,’ Mr. Hutchins would reduce the opportunities available for general education. ‘General education,’ he observed in his January 22 announcement, ‘can easily be completed by the end of the sophomore year.’ In support of this ex cathedra utterance he has offered no evidence except the example of Germany and of other European countries which have been largely influenced by German educational thinking.
If Mr. Hutchins’s sophomore-degree plan is successful at Chicago and is adopted throughout the country, general education would be turned over to the secondary schools — to elongated high schools and to junior colleges which would absorb the first two years of the traditional college and thereby become four-year institutions. Thus American general education, following the German pattern, would be finished by the time students reach nineteen or twenty years of age, at which point they would either end their formal education or go on to universities to become ‘scholars or professional men.’
The educational theory of the attackers of the four-year college boils down, therefore, to this: (1) the purpose of education is intellectual training; (2) general education, intellectualistic in emphasis, should follow the German pattern and be completed at a point comparable to the end of the sophomore year of the four-year college. If these two premises are accepted by educators and the public, American education will be completely reorganized, and the major structural change will be the disappearance of the traditional college. The validity of each premise must therefore be subjected to analysis.
III
The first premise — that the purpose of education is intellectual training — has never been accepted by the American college. Instead, through all its history, the college has been dedicated to social and moral as well as intellectual ends. It has attempted to make men as well as minds. It has directed its energies to emancipating its students, in Woodrow Wilson’s words, ‘from narrowness of sympathy, of perception, of motive, of purpose, and of hope.’ It has clung tenaciously to its place in American culture, to quote President Walter A. Jessup of the Carnegie Corporation, as ‘life’s one institution most wholeheartedly devoted to the development of the individual as a unit in society.’ It has worked from the conviction that, in education as in living, intelligence is not enough.
Intelligence is not enough because students come to college not only for the training of their minds but also for the enrichment of their lives as people; because college students need the advice and direction of mature and experienced adults who understand their problems; because the fundamental problem of every student is to understand himself; because such self-knowledge is physical and emotional and social and spiritual as well as intellectual; because not only the student’s mind comes to college but also his body and his prejudices and his loyalties; because the lessons in human relations learned from his fellow students complement those learned from books and professors; because the college is not only an intellectual enterprise but also a full human environment; because society expects of college graduates not only trained minds but also civilized attitudes, matured emotions, and cultivated character.
In support of this broad conception of education the men who would protect the college from dissolution cite the limitations of intellectualism which the depression and the war have so tragically spotlighted. And liberal-arts educators need not quote their own statements since commentators on American life in general have eloquently stated their case for them. Walter Lippmann described the results of intellectualistic education in this powerful statement:—
There is no common faith, no common body of principle, no common body of knowledge, no common moral and intellectual discipline. Yet the graduates of these modern schools are expected to form a civilized community. They are expected to govern themselves. They are expected to have a social conscience. They are expected to arrive by discussion at common purposes. When one realizes that they have no common culture is it astounding that they have no common purpose? That they worship false gods? That only in war do they unite? That in the fierce struggle for existence they are tearing Western society to pieces?
In much the same vein Lewis Mumford has recently written a telling essay on the limitations of intellectualism and has therein defined education as ‘ the harmonious culture of the entire personality.’ The following brief passages from Mr. Mumford’s essay indicate his development of his broad definition of education: —
We have to frame a whole new set of objectives in terms of balance, equilibrium, coördination, and cultivation, a many-sided organic development: above all, in terms of human balance, human coördination, human development.
Man is born into a world of human values, human purposes, and human instruments: these values, purposes, and instruments condition all his other experiences; indeed without them he would live only on the level of brute sense and appetite.
Our feelings, our passions, our evaluations, our fantasies, our ideals are no less concerned in the effort for unity than our scientific and practical procedures. For an objective order that attempts to exclude subjective elements as unreal or irrelevant inevitably ends, as ours has in fact done, by leaving the field open to an addled subjectivity.
One more quotation is perhaps sufficient to clinch the point that many of the keenest commentators on American life assert that intellectualism has run its course and has indeed been largely responsible for the sorry state of the world. In an address delivered in February, Henry R. Luce, editor of Time, Life, and Fortune, spoke fervently as follows: —
Reason has been the Maginot Line behind which Western civilization retired. The rampart has been breached — and not only by naked force. Simple childish lies, cleverly told, have been enough to dissolve our vaunted Reason into confusion and nonsense.
Science, in these years, gentlemen, has indeed marched on — not only your physics and chemistry but also your economics and sociology and psychiatry - Science has marched right on, helpless and ignorant, right on to chaos.
And now if Science will kindly get out of the driver’s seat and under the hood where it belongs, Man will take over — Man, as Man.
The educators who oppose German intellectualism recognize, of course, the nation’s need of scientists, scholars, and professional men not only to advance knowledge but also to man our complex social structure. They insist, however, that such men should be broadly educated in the sense in which Mumford has defined education — ‘the harmonious culture of the entire personality.’ They have said repeatedly what James Russell Lowell said in 1886 at the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard: the ideal of the college should be ‘a man of culture, a man of intellectual resources, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, with that good taste which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of the soul.’
The acceptance of the second premise — that general education can be completed at a point comparable to the end of the sophomore year of the four-year college — requires the adoption not only of intellectualism but also of an undemocratic class system of education. If the American people would assent to intellectualistic education and if at the same time they would agree to the early and rigid selection of those who are to be permitted to undertake advance studies, general education could probably be completed as soon in the United States as it is in Europe. But the American people have consistently opposed both intellectualism and class education, and there is no reason to believe that these deeply rooted convictions will soon be discarded. Thus Mr. Hutchins’s second premise is without validity for the United States.
Moreover, during recent years, the demand for a longer rather than a shorter period of general education has been growing steadily. Spokesmen for professional schools, for example, have been urging more rather than less general education before the beginning of professional specialization. In his capacity as president of the Association of American Law Schools, Judge Herschel W. Arant of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in 1938:—
Many law schools now require for admission more than two years of academic study; a considerable number require three years, and a few require an academic degree. If, however, they felt altogether free to prescribe an ideal requirement, most schools would probably require four years of general education, and admitting authorities in the various states would doubtless also prescribe higher standards.
The medical educators have been even more outspoken in expressing their conviction that men preparing for medicine should be broadly educated, and many of them have explicitly gone on record as in favor of the four-year college. Dr. Fred C. Zapffe, secretary of the Association of American Medical Colleges, has recently reported, for example, that ‘the ranking group of students in medical school are bachelors of arts.’ Because of this fact he stressed ‘the need for more college work; for a broader, less intense, course of study . . . for more culture.’ ‘What is expected,’ he queried, ‘of the future physician?’ He answered his own question: —
He must be an educated man in every sense of the word. Why do medical educators now insist on economics, sociology, genetics, philosophy, mathematics rather than on more science? Because the future physician must be familiar with these subjects if he is to be a true physician. He must know people; understand them; be able to solve all of their problems. Treating a patient for his physical ailment is not solving all his problems. There is much more to treat. The man must be treated. To do that calls for a very high type of fundamental education.
For years medical educators have been putting their emphasis upon broad general education before the beginning of medical training. As a result, of the 5961 freshmen who entered medical schools in the fall of 1940, only 199, or 3.3 per cent, had as little as two years of college work, in comparison with 4182, or 70.2 per cent, who had finished a four-year college course.
The sturdiness of the four-year college is demonstrated by its success in defeating the eleven attempts made upon its fife during the past ninety years: the five attempts to establish the three-year curriculum and the six to divide it in half and apportion the parts to other educational units. Such strength against adversity grows from the broad human objectives of the college. Contrasting the collegial and university functions of Harvard, James Russell Lowell exclaimed in 1886: ‘It is the college that we love and of which we are proud!’ A few years later George Santayana wrote in the same vein; and applauding Harvard as ‘a mother of men’ rather than as a ‘school of doctors’ he went on to observe:—
It is Harvard College that has a history and enlists the sympathies of the community; it alone has a spiritual existence and touches the hearts and the pockets of the great body of alumni. To Harvard College they wish to send their sons. The Harvard graduate school is useful and excellent; as a place of study I should not hesitate, to judge from my own experience, to prefer it to those German universities to which American students flock in search of the last words of science. But with all its merits the graduate school has necessarily no intellectual, moral, or social unity. The majority of the students are forlorn atoms, and their concourse is too fortuitous ever to make a world. It is impossible to have any affection or loyalty for such an aggregation, however excellent the instruction supplied to its constituent parts.
These are still the sentiments of Harvard men toward Harvard. Other alumni share the same sentiments toward their colleges, because they know the college to have been infinitely more important to their development, as human beings than their graduate and professional schools. They and Americans in general regard the college as more than a mind factory for the production of specialists. They know it to be the chief humanizing agency in American life, that it not only instructs but often inspires its students, that it develops their capacities as individuals and as citizens, and that it has been and continues to be the door through which young men and young women can most readily stride to greater usefulness both in their local communities and in the broad life of the nation.
IV
Despite the warm place which the college holds in the hearts of the American people, it has repeatedly been under attack for almost a century. The present assault has a better chance to succeed than any previous attempt because the war has diverted the attention of almost everyone from even such an important question as the stability of the college. Nonetheless, Mr. Hutchins’s effort seems likely to fail — and because educators are refusing to follow his leadership.
In his January announcement of the Chicago change, Mr. Hutchins remarked that he had discussed the sophomore degree with the presidents of fourteen other universities and that he was ‘trusting to the rationality of American educators’ to support him. At the present writing, however, the ‘rationality of American educators’ has not come up to Mr. Hutchins’s expectations. No other university has announced concurrence with Chicago; on the contrary, six leading national educational associations have deplored the Chicago action. It seems probable that other educational associations will soon join these six and that in particular the American Association of Junior Colleges will snub Mr. Hutchins’s proffered leadership. In March, Walter C. Eells, executive secretary of the junior-college association, published a report of junior-college sentiment concerning the sophomore degree. ‘Of replies received from about 500,’ wrote Mr. Eells, ‘only 8 per cent favored the bachelor’s degree at the end of the junior college course [that is, at the end of the sophomore year of the four-year college], and many of this small minority qualified their approval in some way. Only one junior college in the Middle States was favorable.’
Since junior colleges would acquire considerable prestige by taking possession of the bachelor’s degree, Mr. Eells’s interpretation of these statistics is of great significance. ‘The junior colleges,’ he writes, ‘are not attempting to usurp the use of the baccalaureate degree to which the four-year American college has had proprietary rights for more than 300 years.’ Of even greater significance is his statement: ‘I cannot conceive of any procedure more likely to develop greater antagonism, rivalry, hostility, misunderstanding, and academic hairpulling.’
‘Antagonism, rivalry, hostility, misunderstanding, and academic hair-pulling’ have intermittently drained off a large proportion of the energies of American educators. Men who should be giving their time and thought to the insistent educational problems of the college have been forced to become warriors fighting against its destruction. Such warfare is an exhaustive and unprofitable business to the men involved, to the institutions they represent, to educational progress, and to the nation.
In the present struggle, the probabilities are that the four-year college will once more be able to maintain itself. But a victory will not resolve the conflict. Other assaults will be made, and inconclusive struggles will again result. The conflict can be intelligently concluded only through an impartial and thoroughgoing study of all the issues involved. Meanwhile a truce should be called, and qualified students of education and of American life should be put to work on the investigations which a sound solution demands.
Such an undertaking need not be costly. It is sincerely to be hoped, therefore, that one of the philanthropic foundations will become interested in financing it. No contribution to the development of American education seems more timely and more urgent. The only alternative to this procedure is the continuance of the war of attrition which has embroiled our higher education for almost a century.