Undergraduates on Apron Strings

by HOWARD MUMFORD JONES

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I WISH to argue an unpopular cause: the cause of the old, free elective system in the academic world, or the untrammeled right of the undergraduate to make his own mistakes. Doubtless my case is one-sided and prejudiced, though it seems to me the case for controlled education is equally one-sided; nor does the fact that controlled education is just now in the ascendant make the present system eternal. Doubtless also there was a vast deal of waste in the old system. But as I have seen no study of waste under the present controlled system, I am prepared to hazard the guess that the present philosophy, though it produces bright, interchangeable students in quantity with almost no pain, is not inevitably the philosophy of education that will preserve this republic unto the latest generation.

I take it everybody knows what is meant by the old, free elective system. It was common in American colleges and universities in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and it lasted into the twentieth. In its time it was heralded as a tremendous advance over an older form of educational control. Theoretically everything was wrong with it, if you are to believe the twentieth-century diagnosticians. It was, they pontificate, the quintessence of laissezfaire. It encouraged individualism — rugged or otherwise. It let the student choose his courses and his instructors, something that he had come to college to do. It permitted the lazy man to be lazy and it permitted the student who had found, or thought he had found, his vocation, to concentrate on that vocation — that is, in the jargon of the present hour, to “narrow” his education by electing courses that seemed to him to fit his own particular case. The theory of the old, free elective system was a function of an obsolescent notion of the college and of the university, a notion advanced by Ezra Cornell, who wanted to found a university in which anybody could study anything. Nobody has ever made it clear to me why this idea is a product of the Old Nick himself.

Manifold objections were raised to the old, free elective system as practiced, for example, at Harvard under President Charles W. Eliot. It was argued that when an undergraduate could choose chemistry for fourteen out of his sixteen courses required for the bachelor’s degree, he was not receiving a proper education. Whether the youth in question was merely eccentric I do not know — he may have been a genius, though I do not see how the authorities could tell; and alt I can say is that, if you put college credits aside and look at the thing in terms of self-development, he was following the path originally trodden by persons like Thomas A. Edison, Henry Ford, John Stuart Mill, and Napoleon. The last was so bored by ordinary courses he showed no ability at Brienne except in matters that had to do with his genius for war. I have sometimes speculated what another Napoleon or Edison would do in our carefully calculated courses in general education. Is it at all conceivable that in setting up these required patterns of instruction we are either postponing or obliterating the expression of talent? This is, of course, the century of the common man. But I wonder what Leonardo da Vinci would do in the century of the common man.

It is also argued that the old, free elective system was, as I have indicated, a godsend to the lazy. I do not dispute it. I only want; to know what the lazy are doing in the present well-regulated systems of general education. Have they disappeared from the college campus? Are these courses — overviews of the history of Western Man, for the most part — so exciting that the lazy now automatically catch fire and kindle to intellectual challenge? Am I to infer that pedagogical skill has so vastly increased, the lazy have ceased to be? I have lately been rereading Vincent Sheean’s Personal History, including the wonderful passage in which he narrates how and why the University of Chicago taught him nothing in particular and taught it very well. But nobody later than Mr. Sheean seems to have confessed. All I know has to do with the complaints of English teachers about the indifference of students to ordinary requirements in prose.

Another customary charge against the old, free elective system is that it overcompensated the “popular" teacher and ignored the specialist who really knew. Perhaps it did. But has the situation altered under the present controlled system? As I watch the ebb and flow of enrollment in various courses nowadays, I wonder whether the world of the campus has changed. I seem to see, cynical fellow that I am, the same fashions at work — a surge into psychology or social anthropology, a surge into Russian, a surge into modern poetry. I see, or dream I see, the idols of the campus drawing their usual full house’s while the classrooms of essential scholars have their modest quotas where the real work of the university is done. I venture to doubt that the “popular” teacher has somehow miraculously dissolved into the smooth, impersonal fabric, of required course’s in general education.

Products of the free elective system, graduating any year between 1895 and 1915 (my dates are approximate, or, as the New Critics would say, symbolical only), came into social or economic or cultural or political power in ibis republic some ten or twenty years after being graduated. They fought World War I. They carried forward the technological revolution that accompanied or followed that catastrophe. They were in the saddle during the administrations of Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge, and you can, if you like, say they are responsible for the twenties, for the stock-market crash of 1929, and for a variety of other sins. Perhaps I have no defense. All I can murmur is that American literature, American art, American music, American science, and American technology came of age during this quarter-century; and though I am as ready as the next historian to admit that 1929 was a catastrophic year, I am not persuaded that the world-wide depression setting in at the end of the twenties was the direct result of the old, free elective system.

It is also argued that the free elective system did not produce an informed citizenry, aware of the glorious history of the United States, alert to the significance of Western culture, and alive to the philosophic values of democracy. I dare say some part of the charge is true. But as I think of the careers of Robert M. La Follette, Frederick Jackson Turner, Robert Morss Lovett, Edward A. Ross, Charles E. Merriam, Frank Norris, Albert Bushnell Hart, and a variety of other persons associated with education in those years, I wonder where these characters and others like them picked up their singular dedication to civic virtue, and I speculate also on the immaculate morality of American public life when, some twenty or twenty-five years from now, graduates of the present controlled theories of education shall have completed their labors in the way of loyalty oaths and filled all the key posts of the republic with pure and righteous men. I seem to recall that teachers such as Royce with his doctrine of loyally to the Great Community, James with his philosophy of the average man trying it on, and Dewey with his notion that if you want democracy you begin with the young — I seem to recall, I say, that these gentlemen had a particular knowledge of the democratic process. It would be vulgar of me to say that a crisp version of this philosophy may be found on the postcard which said: “Live every day so that you can look any man in the face and tell him to go to hell.” On this assumption Mr. Lincoln Steffens seemed to think that there was something to be said even for the corrupt political boss, and Rev. Walter Rauschenbusch seemed to believe there might be something that Christian ethics had to offer society. Nowadays we have the disciples of Freud and the neo-Calvinists.

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WELL, it may be asked, what have we substituted for the old, free elective system? The substitution is not altogether bad. We have many, many more undergraduates in our colleges than we had in 1880 or 1900, and we have to do something with them; otherwise they will be disappointed of a degree, and the consequences may be disastrous for college financing. And inasmuch as ours is an excessively mobile population, we have invented for education what we invented for industry — a beautiful system of interchangeable parts. You may start your education in California and finish it in North Carolina, but it will not be much of a jar as you move, say, from Stanford to Duke. If Harvard has courses in general education, so do several hundred other colleges. If Wisconsin has a student radio, so do scores of other universities. If Iowa has a student theater, so do Michigan, Yale, Texas, and, for all I know. The Greater Southwest Teachers College State University. The philosophy of rugged individualism, which in its time gave a unique flavor to the new Johns Hopkins University, has now so far passed from favor that when they instituted Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, they ignored the opportunity to make an institution dedicated to intellectual excitement and created a school as much like the other schools around it as they could.

Putting intellectual matters aside, I submit that the motto of our present prevailing system of interchangeable parts is “adjustment.” The freshman “adjusts" to his college. The sophomore “adjusts” to his professors, and by and by the senior is supposed to “adjust" to the outside world, nobody asks why. I doubt that “adjustment” would have made much sense to Emerson or Thorstein Veblen or Edgar Allan Poe or John Sloan or Jonathan Edwards or Frank Lloyd Wright or Carlson of Chicago or Einstein of Princeton. In my observation the world adjusts to the genius, not the genius to the world; and if Woodrow Wilson was right in saying that the principal purpose of a liberal education is to enable you to know a good man when you see him, I doubt that psychological testing is a proper telescope. Of course it can be argued that the thousands who annually pass through the American college are not geniuses, and this is true. But what about the genius who would like to be trained in his calling? Are we keeping paths open for the lonely talents who really shape culture and who are not content to imitate culture in others? Or are we so universally bent on “adjustment,”all in the interests of a smoothly running society, we propose to break or smother the John Reeds and the Thorstein Veblens before they develop into dangerous reds?

Adjustment operates, in the jargon of the day, on two levels: the intellectual and the personal. Intellectual adjustment begins as required courses for freshmen (and sometimes sophomores) who have commonly just escaped from a good many required courses in the secondary school. And these required courses are the products of the kindest thoughts and a considerable administrative skill. Their instructors are hand-picked and, being selected, brood conscientiously over Great Books, The Development of Western Man, Humanism, and other well-meant exercises supposed to replace the old, pernicious survey course in English literature or the history of Europe. Commonly, however, inspection shows that the new required courses are simply the old courses blown up out of all manageable size. I may call them processing courses; and like all processing, they are directed at the average, the medium, the median, or the mean, whatever one’s statistical philosophy devises. The difficulty is that in these enormous surveys instruction, like the radius vector of the planets, sweeps over equal areas in equal times. Meanwhile those who are not average are bored.

But the precious ointment in our sight is not intellectual adjustment but personal adjustment, and this is a sacred cause — so sacred that we have invented a weird and unique hierarchy of secular priests to see that the student forever “adjusts.”There is on the face of the civilized globe no other group like it. We have deans, tutors, counselors, vocational guides, counselors on marriage, alumni advisers, medical men, and psychiatrists. We have orientation week, campus week, the reading period, religious retreats, and summer camps. I am not prepared to argue down the validity of any one of these inventions taken singly; all I am prepared to say is that, taken as a whole, they befog the idea that higher education is an intellectual exercise. Higher education becomes adjustment. And what these well-meant therapeutic devices do is to postpone decision-making. The symbol of this refusal to face the fact that in life as in war there are final occasions is the make-up examination.

Under the old, free elective system, when a youth went off to college, he went off to a mysterious place where he had to learn the rules by himself or suffer the consequences of not knowing them. This situation, however naïve in terms of “adjustment,”had one big advantage: he was at last Away From Home. Going to college was like Bar Mitzvah in Hebrew tradition: once past it, you not only entered upon man’s estate, but, moreover, there was no return. You had cut the leading strings; and the fiction of the nineties that pictures the Yale undergraduate with his bulldog and his pipe was true to the facts. Today we do not cut the leading strings, we merely lengthen them. It is not true that an American lad cannot make a significant mistake as a young collegian, but it is true to say that an entire battery of adjusters is happily at work to see that his mistakes shall never, never harm him. Mistakes should not be harmless. Experience, said Oscar Wilde, is the name we give to our mistakes. Take away the mistakes, and what good is the experience?

American college life is, or has become, a wan attempt to prolong adolescence as far as it can be stretched. If this seems excessive, look at any alumni reunion. To the intent of keeping the young idea in “adjustment” this regiment of supervisors dedicates a zealous professional activity. And their intent could not be more laudable. The intent is to promote the unalienable right to happiness. The intent is to do away with waste. The intent is, in the name of democracy, to see that the son or daughter of any or every taxpayer shall not fail. In order not to fail, the offspring must “get something" out of a college education. This, of course, puts an excessive strain upon the advisory staff, which forever demands more recruits, just as it puts an excessive strain upon the intellectual staff, and partly as a means of reducing this strain it has proved easier to channel young America into true and tried educational courses, usually set forth as required work in general education.

General education proves in fact to be a reduction in the classroom for average consumption of a certain average quantum of information about the behavior of Western Man. Why does this sort of thing represent an advance on my zealous scientific undergraduate who, inspired with enthusiasm for chemistry, took seven eighths of his work in what he came to college to find out? I cheerfully grant that, however superior as a chemist, he may have been a poor citizen, but are we turning out better citizens? The hope of the republic rests upon an informed citizenry. All the investigations into the book-reading habits of Americans, college graduates included, reveal that the reading of books drops sharply at the school-leaving age, and that we read fewer books in proportion to our population than does any other nation of the West.

The ancient fable of Mark Hopkins on a log is only a fable, and I do not favor the log. But I do favor Mark Hopkins. That is to say, I think there is a good deal to be said for the lopsided zealot, on fire with fanatical enthusiasm for the first crusade, aerodynamics, quaternions, the Federal Reserve system, or the superiority of William Butler Yeats to all other recent poets. I do not expect him to transmit this enthusiasm to the sad average, but I should like to give him the opportunity to collogue with his younger kind. In Blake’s words, the way to the palace of wisdom leads through excess. I suggest that our wellmeant hope that waste may be reduced may mean that excellence is reduced also. I suggest that the purpose of an academic institution is, or ought to be, to produce men of singular and exceptional talent, not merely conformable citizens. I am not quite clear, and never have been, why everybody has to be exposed to equal parts of Euripides and Beethoven, the Middle Ages and modern times, biology and mathematics. Like Mr. James Thurber, all I could ever see in the microscope they gave me in botany was a reflection of my own eye.

But of course this is merely an exercise in dissent.