The Higher Learning in America. Thorstein Veblen

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ in the ways and means of salvation, spiritual and temporal, individual and collective, -- in some sort a school of engineering, primarily in divinity, secondarily in law and politics, and presently in medicine and also in the other professions that serve a recognized utilitarian interest. After that fashion of a university that answered to this manner of ideals and aspirations had once been installed and gained a secure footing, its pattern acquired a degree of authenticity and prescription, so that later seminaries of learning came unquestioningly to be organized on the same lines; and further changes of academic policy and practice, such as are demanded by the later growth of cultural interests and ideals, have been made only reluctantly and with a suspicious reserve, gradually and by a circuitous sophistication; so that much of the non-utilitarian scientific and scholarly work indispensable to the university's survival under modern conditions is still scheduled under the faculties of law or medicine, or even of divinity.

      But the human propensity for inquiry into things, irrespective of use or expediency, insinuated itself among the expositors of worldly wisdom from the outset; and from the first this quest of idle learning has sought shelter in the university as the only establishment in which it could find a domicile, even on sufferance, and so could achieve that footing of consecutive intellectual enterprise running through successive generations of scholars which is above all else indispensable to the advancement of knowledge. Under the régime of unmitigated pragmatic aims that ruled the earlier days of the European universities, this pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was carried on as a work of scholarly supererogation by men whose ostensibly sole occupation was the promulgation of some accredited line of salutary information. Frequently it had to be carried on under some colourable masquerade of practicality. And yet so persistent has the spirit of idle curiosity proved to be, and so consonant with the long-term demands even of the laity, that the dissimulation and smuggling-in of disinterested learning has gone on ever more openly and at an ever increasing rate of gain; until in the end, the attention given to scholarship and the non-utilitarian sciences in these establishments has come far to exceed that given to the practical disciplines for which the several faculties were originally installed. As time has passed and as successive cultural mutations have passed over the community, shifting the centre of interest and bringing new ideals of scholarship, and bringing the whole cultural fabric nearer to its modern complexion, those purposes of crass expediency that were of such great moment and were so much a matter of course in earlier academic policy, have insensibly fallen to the rank of incidentals. And what had once been incidental, or even an object of surreptitious tolerance in the university, remains today as the only unequivocal duty of the corporation of learning, and stands out as the one characteristic trait without which no establishment can claim rank as a university.

      Philosophy -- the avowed body of theoretical science in the late medieval time -- had grown out of the schoolmen's speculations in theology, being in point of derivation a body of refinements on the divine scheme of salvation; and with a view to quiet title, and to make manifest their devotion to the greater good of eschatological expediency, those ingenious speculators were content to proclaim that their philosophy is the handmaid of theology -- Philosophia theologiae ancillans. But their philosophy has fallen into the alembic of the idle curiosity and has given rise to a body of modern science, godless and unpractical, that has no intended or even ostensible bearing on the religious fortunes of mankind; and their sanctimonious maxim would today be better accepted as the subject of a limerick than of a homily. Except in degree, the fortunes of the temporal pragmatic disciplines, in Law and Medicine, have been much the same as that of their elder sister, Theology. Professionalism and practical serviceability have been gradually crowded into the background of academic interests and overlaid with quasi-utilitarian research -- such as the history of jurisprudence, comparative physiology, and the like. They have in fact largely been eliminated.⁸

      And changes running to this effect have gone farthest and have taken most consistent effect in those communities that are most fully imbued with the spirit of the modern peaceable civilization. It is in the more backward communities and schools that the barbarian animus of utilitarianism still maintains itself most nearly intact, whether it touches matters of temporal or of spiritual interest. With the later advance of culture, as the intellectual interest has gradually displaced the older ideals in men's esteem, and barring a reactionary episode here and there, the university has progressively come to take its place as a seat of the higher learning, a corporation for the pursuit of knowledge; and barring accidental reversions, it has increasingly asserted itself as an imperative necessity, more and more consistently, that the spirit of disinterested inquiry must have free play in these seminaries of the higher learning, without afterthought as to the practical or utilitarian consequences which this free inquiry may conceivably have for the professional training or for the social, civil or religious temper of the students or the rest of the community. Nothing is felt to be so irremediably vicious in academic policy as a coercive bias, religious, political, conventional or professional, in so far as it touches that quest of knowledge that constitutes the main interest of the university.

      Professional training and technological work at large have of course not lost ground, either in the volume and the rigour of their requirements or in the application bestowed in their pursuit; but as within the circle of academic interests, these utilitarian disciplines have lost their preferential place and have been pushed to one side; so that the professional and technical schools are now in fact rated as adjuncts rather than as integral constituents of the university corporation. Such is the unmistakable sense of this matter among academic men. At the same time these vocational schools have, one with another, progressively taken on more of a distinctive, independent and close-knit structure; an individual corporate existence, autonomous and academically self-sufficient, even in those cases where they most tenaciously hold to their formal connection with the university corporation. They have reached a mature phase of organization, developed a type of personnel and control peculiar to themselves and their special needs, and have in effect come out from under the tutelage of the comprehensive academic organization of which they once in their early days were the substantial core. These schools have more in common among themselves as a class than their class have with the academic aims and methods that characterize the university proper. They are in fact ready and competent to go on their own recognizances, -- indeed they commonly resent any effective interference or surveillance from the side of the academic corporation of which they nominally continue to be members, and insist on going their own way and arranging their own affairs as they know best. Their connection with the university is superficial and formal at the best, so far as regards any substantial control of their affairs and policy by the university authorities at large; it is only in their interference with academic policy, and in injecting their own peculiar bias into university affairs, that they count substantially as corporate members of the academic body. And in these respects, what is said of the professional and technical schools holds true also of the undergraduate departments.

      It is quite feasible to have a university without professional schools and without an undergraduate department; but it is not possible to have one without due provision for that non-utilitarian higher learning about which as a nucleus these utilitarian disciplines cluster. And this in spite of the solicitous endeavours of the professional schools to make good their footing as the substantial core of the corporation.

      V

       Table of Contents

      As intimated above, there are two main reasons for the continued and tenacious connection between these schools and the universities: (a) ancient tradition, fortified by the solicitous ambition of the university directorate to make a brave show of magnitude, and (b) the anxiety of these schools to secure some degree of scholarly authentication through such a formal connection with a seat of learning. These two motives have now and again pushed matters fairly to an extreme in the reactionary direction. So, for instance, the chances of intrigue and extra-academic clamour have latterly thrown up certain men of untempered "practicality" as directive heads of certain universities, and some of these have gone so far as to avow a reactionary intention to make the modern СКАЧАТЬ