The Higher Learning in America. Thorstein Veblen

       Table of Contents

      Since the paragraphs that make up the foregoing chapter were written the American academic community has been thrown into a new and peculiar position by the fortunes of war. The progress and the further promise of the war hold in prospect new and untried responsibilities, as well as an unexampled opportunity. So that the outlook now (June 1918) would seem to be that the Americans are to be brought into a central place in the republic of learning; to take a position, not so much of dominance as of trust and guardianship; not so much by virtue of their own superior merit as by force of the insolvency of the European academic community.

      Again, it is not that the war is expected to leave the lines of European scholars and scientists extinct; although there is no denying the serious inroads made by the war, both in the way of a high mortality among European men of learning, and in the way of a decimation of the new men on whom the hopes of the higher learning for the incoming generation should have rested. There is also a serious diversion of the young forces from learning to transiently urgent matters of a more material, and more ephemeral nature. But possibly more sinister than all these losses that are in a way amenable to statistical record and estimate, is the current and prospective loss of morale.

      Naturally, it would be difficult and hazardous to offer an appraisal of this prospective loss of morale, with which it is to be expected that the disintegrated European community of learned men will come through the troubled times. But that there is much to be looked for on this score, that there is much to be written off in the way of lowered aggregate efficiency and loss of the spirit of team-work, -- that much there is no denying, and it is useless to blink the fact.

      There has already a good deal of disillusionment taken effect throughout the nations of Christendom in respect of the temper and trustworthiness of German scholarship these past three or four years, and it is fairly beyond computation what further shift of sentiment in this respect is to be looked for in the course of a further Possible period of years given over to the same line of experience. Doubtless, the German scholars, and therefore the German seats of learning whose creatures and whose custodians these German scholars are, have earned much of the distrust and dispraise that is falling to their share. There is no overlooking the fact that they have proved the frailty of their hold on those elementary principles of sobriety and single mind that underlie all sound work in the field of learning. To any one who has the interest of the higher learning at heart, the spectacle of maudlin chauvinism and inflated scurrility unremittingly placed on view by the putative leaders of German science and scholarship can not but be exceedingly disheartening.

      It may be argued, and it may be true, of course, that much of this failure of intelligence and spiritual force among Germany's men of learning is of the nature of a transient eclipse of their powers; that with the return of settled conditions there is due to come a return of poise and insight. But when all due argument has been heard, it remains true that the distrust set afoot in the mind of their neighbours, by this highly remarkable exhibition of their personal equation, will long inure to the disability of Germany's men of learning as a force to be counted on in that teamwork that is of the essence of things for the advancement of learning. In effect, Germany, and Germany's associates in this warlike enterprise, will presumably be found bankrupt in this respect on the return of peace, even beyond the other nations.

      These others have also not escaped the touch of the angel of decay, but the visible corruption of spiritual and intellectual values does not go the same length among them. Nor have these others suffered so heavy a toll on their prospective scholarly man power. It is all a matter of degree and of differential decline, coupled with a failure of corporate organization and of the usages and channels of communion and co-operation. Chauvinistic self-sufficiency and disesteem of their neighbours have apparently also not gone so deep and far among the other nations; although here again it is only a relative degree of immunity that they enjoy.

      And all this holds true of the Americans in much the same way as of the rest; except that the Americans have, at least hitherto, not been exposed to the blight in anything like the same degree as any one of those other peoples with whom they come in comparison here. It is, of course, not easy to surmise what may yet overtake them, and the others with them; but judged on the course of things hitherto, and on the apparent promise of the calculable future, it is scarcely to be presumed that the Americans are due to suffer so extreme a degree of dilapidation as the European peoples, -- even apart from the accentuated evil case of the Germans. The strain has hitherto been lighter here, and it promises so to continue, whether the further duration of the war shall turn out to be longer or shorter. The Americans are, after all, somewhat sheltered from the impact; and so soon as the hysterical anxiety induced by the shock has had time to spend itself, it should reasonably be expected that this people will be able soberly to take stock of its assets and to find that its holdings in the domain of science and scholarship are, in the main, still intact.

      Not that no loss has been incurred, nor that no material degree of derangement is to be looked for, but in comparison with what the experience of the war is bringing to the Europeans, the case of the Americans should still be the best there is to be looked for and the best is always good enough, perforce. So it becomes a question, what the Americans will do with the best opportunity which the circumstances offer. And on their conduct of their affairs in this bearing turns not only their own fortune in respect of the interests of science and scholarship, but in great measure the fortunes of their overseas friends and co-partners in the republic of learning as well.

      The fortunes of war promise to leave the American men of learning in a strategic position, in the position of a strategic reserve, of a force to be held in readiness, equipped and organized to meet the emergency that so arises, and to retrieve so much as may be of those assets of scholarly equipment and personnel that make the substantial code of Western civilization. And so it becomes a question of what the Americans are minded to do about it. It is their opportunity, and at the same time it carries the gravest responsibility that has yet fallen on the nation; for the spiritual fortunes of Christendom are bound up with the line of policy which this surviving contingent of American men of learning shall see fit to pursue. They are not all that is to be left over when the powers of decay shall begin to retire, nor are they, perhaps, to be the best and most valuable contingent among these prospective survivors; but they occupy a strategic position, in that they are today justly to be credited with disinterested motives, beyond the rest, at the same time that they command those material resources without which the quest of knowledge can hope to achieve little along the modern lines of inquiry. By force of circumstances they are thrown into the position of keepers of the ways and means whereby the republic of learning is to retrieve its fortunes. By force of circumstances they are in a position, if they so choose, to shelter many of those masters of free inquiry whom the one-eyed forces of reaction and partisanship overseas will seek to suppress and undo; and they are also in a position, if they so choose, to install something in the way of an international clearing house and provisional headquarters for the academic community throughout that range of civilized peoples whose goodwill they now enjoy -- a place of refuge and a place of meeting, confluence and dissemination for those views and ideas that live and move and have their being in the higher learning.

      There is, therefore, a work of reconstruction to be taken care of in the realm of learning, no less than in the working scheme of economic and civil institutions. And as in this other work of reconstruction, so here; if it is to be done without undue confusion and blundering it is due to be set afoot before the final emergency is at hand. But there is the difference that, whereas the framework of civil institutions may still, with passable success, be drawn on national lines and confined within the national frontiers; and while the economic organization can also, without fatal loss, be confined in a similar fashion, in response to short-sighted patriotic preconceptions; the interests of science, and therefore of the academic community, do not run on national lines and can not similarly be confined within geographical or political boundaries. In the nature of the case these interests are of an international character and can not be taken care of except by unrestricted collusion and collaboration among the learned men of all those peoples whom it may concern. Yet there is no mistaking the fact that the spirit of invidious patriotism has invaded these