The Higher Learning in America. Thorstein Veblen

past, nor its accepted place and use in the educational system of today and yesterday,. that the universities of Christendom have from their first foundation been occupied with professional training and useful knowledge; that they have been founded for utilitarian purposes and their work has been guided mainly or altogether by utilitarian considerations; -- all of which is conceded without argument. The historical argument amounts to saying that the universities were founded before modern civilization took on its modern character, before the disinterested pursuit of knowledge had come to take the first place among the ideals of civilized mankind, and that they were established to take care of those interests which were then accounted of first importance, and that this intellectual enterprise in pursuit of disinterested knowledge consequently was not at that time confided to the care of any special establishment or freely avowed as a legitimate interest in its own right.

      It is true that, by historical accident, the university at large has grown out of professional training-schools, primarily schools for training in theology, secondarily in law and medicine. It is also true, in like wise and in like degree, that modern science and scholarship have grown out of the technology of handicraft and the theological philosophy of the schoolmen.⁷ But just as it would be a bootless enterprise to cut modern science back into handicraft technology, so would it be a gratuitous imbecility to prune back the modern university to that inchoate phase of its life-history and make it again a corporation for the training of theologians, jurists and doctors of medicine. The historical argument does not enjoin a return to the beginning of things, but rather an intelligent appreciation of what things are coming to.

      The genesis of the university at large, taken as an institution of civilized life, is an incident of the transition from the barbarian culture of the middle ages to modern times, and its later growth and acquirement of character is an incident of the further growth of modern civilization; and the character of this later growth of the university reflects the bent of modern civilization, as contrasted with the barbarian spirit of things in the mediaeval spiritual world.

      In a general way, the place of the university in the culture of Christendom is still substantially the same as it has been from the beginning. Ideally, and in the popular apprehension, it is, as it has always been, a corporation for the cultivation and care of the community's highest aspirations and ideals. But these ideals and aspirations have changed somewhat with the changing scheme of the Western civilization; and so the university has also concomitantly so changed in character, aims and ideals as to leave it still the corporate organ of the community's dominant intellectual interest. At the same time, it is true, these changes in the purpose and spirit of the university have always been, and are always being, made only tardily, reluctantly, concessively, against the protests of those who are zealous for the commonplaces of the day before yesterday. Such is the character of institutional growth and change; and in its adaptation to the altered requirements of an altered scheme of culture the university has in this matter been subject to the conditions of institutional growth at large. An institution is, after all, a prevalent habit of thought, and as such it is subject to the conditions and limitations that surround any change in the habitual frame of mind prevalent in the community.

      The university of medieval and early modern times, that is to say the barbarian university, was necessarily given over to the pragmatic, utilitarian disciplines, since that is the nature of barbarism; and the barbarian university is but another, somewhat sublimated, expression of the same barbarian frame of mind. The barbarian culture is pragmatic, utilitarian, worldly wise, and its learning partakes of the same complexion. The barbarian, late or early, is typically an unmitigated pragmatist; that is the spiritual trait that most profoundly marks him off from the savage on the one hand and from the civilized man on the other hand. "He turns a keen, untroubled face home to the instant need of things."

      The high era of barbarism in Europe, the Dark and Middle Ages, is marked off from what went before and from what has followed in the cultural sequence, by a hard and fast utilitarian animus. The all-dominating spiritual trait of those times is that men then made the means of life its end. It is perhaps needless to call to mind that much of this animus still survives in later civilized life, especially in so far as the scheme of civilized life is embodied in the competitive system. In that earlier time, practical sagacity and the serviceability of any knowledge acquired, its bearing on individual advantage, spiritual or temporal, was the ruling consideration, as never before or since. The best of men in that world were not ashamed to avow that a boundless solicitude for their own salvation was their worthiest motive of conduct, and it is plain in all their speculations that they were unable to accept any other motive or sanction as final in any bearing. Saint and sinner alike knew no higher rule than expediency, for this world and the next. And, for that matter, so it still stands with the saint and the sinner, -- who make up much of the commonplace human material in the modern community; although both the saint and the sinner in the modern community carry, largely by shamefaced subreption, an ever increasing side-line of other and more genial interests that have no merit in point of expediency whether for this world or the next.

      Under the rule of such a cultural ideal the corporation of learning could not well take any avowed stand except as an establishment for utilitarian instruction, the practical expediency of whose work was the sole overt test of its competency. And such it still should continue to be according to the avowed aspirations of the staler commonplace elements in the community today. By subreption, and by a sophisticated subsumption under some ostensibly practical line of interest and inquiry, it is true, the university men of the earlier time spent much of their best endeavour on matters of disinterested scholarship that had no bearing on any human want more to the point than an idle curiosity; and by a similar turn of subreption and sophistication the later spokesmen of the barbarian ideal take much complacent credit for the "triumphs of modern science" that have nothing but an ostensible bearing on any matter of practical expediency, and they look to the universities to continue this work of the idle curiosity under some plausible pretext of practicality.

      So the university of that era unavoidably came to be organized as a more or less comprehensive federation of professional schools or faculties devoted to such branches of practical knowledge as the ruling utilitarian interests of the time demanded. Under this overshadowing barbarian tradition the universities of early modern times started out as an avowed contrivance for indoctrination 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