Memories and Studies

W >> William James >> Memories and Studies

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Human nature is once for all so childish that every reality becomes a
sham somewhere, and in the minds of Presidents and Trustees the Ph.D.
degree is in point of fact already looked upon as a mere advertising
resource, a manner of throwing dust in the Public's eyes. "No
instructor who is not a Doctor" has become a maxim in the smaller
institutions which represent demand; and in each of the larger ones
which represent supply, the same belief in decorated scholarship
expresses itself in two antagonistic passions, one for multiplying as
much as possible the annual output of doctors, the other for raising
the standard of difficulty in passing, so that the Ph.D. of the special
institution shall carry a higher blaze of distinction than it does
elsewhere. Thus we at Harvard are proud of the number of candidates
whom we reject, and of the inability of men who are not _distingues_ in
intellect to pass our tests.

America is thus as a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things
in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable
unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which
bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate. It seems to me high
time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye
upon this decidedly grotesque tendency. Other nations suffer terribly
from the Mandarin disease. Are we doomed to suffer like the rest?

Our higher degrees were instituted for the laudable purpose of
stimulating scholarship, especially in the form of "original research."
Experience has proved that great as the love of truth may be among men,
it can be made still greater by adventitious rewards. The winning of a
diploma certifying mastery and marking a barrier successfully passed,
acts as a challenge to the ambitious; and if the diploma will help to
gain bread-winning positions also, its power as a stimulus to work is
tremendously increased. So far, we are on innocent ground; it is well
for a country to have research in abundance, and our graduate schools
do but apply a normal psychological spur. But the institutionizing on
a large scale of any natural combination of need and motive always
tends to run into technicality and to develop a tyrannical Machine with
unforeseen powers of exclusion and corruption. Observation of the
workings of our Harvard system for twenty years past has brought some
of these drawbacks home to my consciousness, and I should like to call
the attention of my readers to this disadvantageous aspect of the
picture, and to make a couple of remedial suggestions, if I may.

In the first place, it would seem that to stimulate study, and to
increase the _gelehrtes Publikum_, the class of highly educated men in
our country, is the only positive good, and consequently the sole
direct end at which our graduate schools, with their diploma-giving
powers, should aim. If other results have developed they should be
deemed secondary incidents, and if not desirable in themselves, they
should be carefully guarded against.

To interfere with the free development of talent, to obstruct the
natural play of supply and demand in the teaching profession, to foster
academic snobbery by the prestige of certain privileged institutions,
to transfer accredited value from essential manhood to an outward
badge, to blight hopes and promote invidious sentiments, to divert the
attention of aspiring youth from direct dealings with truth to the
passing of examinations,--such consequences, if they exist, ought
surely to be regarded as drawbacks to the system, and an enlightened
public consciousness ought to be keenly alive to the importance of
reducing their amount. Candidates themselves do seem to be keenly
conscious of some of these evils, but outside of their ranks or in the
general public no such consciousness, so far as I can see, exists; or
if it does exist, it fails to express itself aloud. Schools, Colleges,
and Universities, appear enthusiastic over the entire system, just as
it stands, and unanimously applaud all its developments.

I beg the reader to consider some of the secondary evils which I have
enumerated. First of all, is not our growing tendency to appoint no
instructors who are not also doctors an instance of pure sham? Will
any one pretend for a moment that the doctor's degree is a guarantee
that its possessor will be successful as a teacher? Notoriously his
moral, social and personal characteristics may utterly disqualify him
for success in the class-room; and of these characteristics his
doctor's examination is unable to take any account whatever. Certain
bare human beings will always be better candidates for a given place
than all the doctor-applicants on hand; and to exclude the former by a
rigid rule, and in the end to have to sift the latter by private
inquiry into their personal peculiarities among those who know them,
just as if they were not doctors at all, is to stultify one's own
procedure. You may say that at least you guard against ignorance of
the subject by considering only the candidates who are doctors; but how
then about making doctors in one subject teach a different subject?
This happened in the instance by which I introduced this article, and
it happens daily and hourly in all our colleges? The truth is that the
Doctor-Monopoly in teaching, which is becoming so rooted an American
custom, can show no serious grounds whatsoever for itself in reason.
As it actually prevails and grows in vogue among us, it is due to
childish motives exclusively. In reality it is but a sham, a bauble, a
dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges.

Next, let us turn from the general promotion of a spirit of academic
snobbery to the particular damage done to individuals by the system.

There are plenty of individuals so well endowed by nature that they
pass with ease all the ordeals with which life confronts them. Such
persons are born for professional success. Examinations have no
terrors for them, and interfere in no way with their spiritual or
worldly interests. There are others, not so gifted who nevertheless
rise to the challenge, get a stimulus from the difficulty, and become
doctors, not without some baleful nervous wear and tear and retardation
of their purely inner life, but on the whole successfully, and with
advantage. These two classes form the natural Ph.D.'s for whom the
degree is legitimately instituted. To be sure, the degree is of no
consequence one way or the other for the first sort of man, for in him
the personal worth obviously outshines the title. To the second set of
persons, however, the doctor ordeal may contribute a touch of energy
and solidity of scholarship which otherwise they might have lacked, and
were our candidates all drawn from these classes, no oppression would
result from the institution.

But there is a third class of persons who are genuinely, and in the
most pathetic sense, the institution's victims. For this type of
character the academic life may become, after a certain point, a
virulent poison. Men without marked originality or native force, but
fond of truth and especially of books and study, ambitious of reward
and recognition, poor often, and needing a degree to get a teaching
position, weak in the eyes of their examiners,--among these we find the
veritable _chair a canon_ of the wars of learning, the unfit in the
academic struggle for existence. There are individuals of this sort
for whom to pass one degree after another seems the limit of earthly
aspiration. Your private advice does not discourage them. They will
fail, and go away to recuperate, and then present themselves for
another ordeal, and sometimes prolong the process into middle life. Or
else, if they are less heroic morally they will accept the failure as a
sentence of doom that they are not fit, and are broken-spirited men
thereafter.

We of the university faculties are responsible for deliberately
creating this new class of American social failures, and heavy is the
responsibility. We advertise our "schools" and send out our
degree-requirements, knowing well that aspirants of all sorts will be
attracted, and at the same time we set a standard which intends to pass
no man who has not native intellectual distinction. We know that there
is no test, however absurd, by which, if a title or decoration, a
public badge or mark, were to be won by it, some weakly suggestible or
hauntable persons would not feel challenged, and remain unhappy if they
went without it. We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of
these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an
electric light. They come at a time when failure can no longer be
repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent; and we say
deliberately that mere work faithfully performed, as they perform it,
will not by itself save them, they must in addition put in evidence the
one thing they have not got, namely this quality of intellectual
distinction. Occasionally, out of sheer human pity, we ignore our high
and mighty standard and pass them. Usually, however, the standard, and
not the candidate, commands our fidelity. The result is caprice,
majorities of one on the jury, and on the whole a confession that our
pretensions about the degree cannot be lived up to consistently. Thus,
partiality in the favored cases; in the unfavored, blood on our hands;
and in both a bad conscience,--are the results of our administration.

The more widespread becomes the popular belief that our diplomas are
indispensable hall-marks to show the sterling metal of their holders,
the more widespread these corruptions will become. We ought to look to
the future carefully, for it takes generations for a national custom,
once rooted, to be grown away from. All the European countries are
seeking to diminish the check upon individual spontaneity which state
examinations with their tyrannous growth have brought in their train.
We have had to institute state examinations too; and it will perhaps be
fortunate if some day hereafter our descendants, comparing machine with
machine, do not sigh with regret for old times and American freedom,
and wish that the _regime_ of the dear old bosses might be reinstalled,
with plain human nature, the glad hand and the marble heart, liking and
disliking, and man-to-man relations grown possible again. Meanwhile,
whatever evolution our state-examinations are destined to undergo, our
universities at least should never cease to regard themselves as the
jealous custodians of personal and spiritual spontaneity. They are
indeed its only organized and recognized custodians in America to-day.
They ought to guard against contributing to the increase of officialism
and snobbery and insincerity as against a pestilence; they ought to
keep truth and disinterested labor always in the foreground, treat
degrees as secondary incidents, and in season and out of season make it
plain that what they live for is to help men's souls, and not to
decorate their persons with diplomas.

There seem to be three obvious ways in which the increasing hold of the
Ph.D. Octopus upon American life can be kept in check.

The first way lies with the universities. They can lower their
fantastic standards (which here at Harvard we are so proud of) and give
the doctorate as a matter of course, just as they give the bachelor's
degree, for a due amount of time spent in patient labor in a special
department of learning, whether the man be a brilliantly gifted
individual or not. Surely native distinction needs no official stamp,
and should disdain to ask for one. On the other hand, faithful labor,
however commonplace, and years devoted to a subject, always deserve to
be acknowledged and requited.

The second way lies with both the universities and colleges. Let them
give up their unspeakably silly ambition to bespangle their lists of
officers with these doctorial titles. Let them look more to substance
and less to vanity and sham.

The third way lies with the individual student, and with his personal
advisers in the faculties. Every man of native power, who might take a
higher degree, and refuses to do so, because examinations interfere
with the free following out of his more immediate intellectual aims,
deserves well of his country, and in a rightly organized community,
would not be made to suffer for his independence. With many men the
passing of these extraneous tests is a very grievous interference
indeed. Private letters of recommendation from their instructors,
which in any event are ultimately needful, ought, in these cases,
completely to offset the lack of the breadwinning degree; and
instructors ought to be ready to advise students against it upon
occasion, and to pledge themselves to back them later personally, in
the market-struggle which they have to face.

It is indeed odd to see this love of titles--and such titles--growing
up in a country or which the recognition of individuality and bare
manhood have so long been supposed to be the very soul. The
independence of the State, in which most of our colleges stand,
relieves us of those more odious forms of academic politics which
continental European countries present. Anything like the elaborate
university machine of France, with its throttling influences upon
individuals is unknown here. The spectacle of the "Rath" distinction
in its innumerable spheres and grades, with which all Germany is
crawling to-day, is displeasing to American eyes; and displeasing also
in some respects is the institution of knighthood in England, which,
aping as it does an aristocratic title, enables one's wife as well as
one's self so easily to dazzle the servants at the house of one's
friends. But are we Americans ourselves destined after all to hunger
after similar vanities on an infinitely more contemptible scale? And
is individuality with us also going to count for nothing unless stamped
and licensed and authenticated by some title-giving machine? Let us
pray that our ancient national genius may long preserve vitality enough
to guard us from a future so unmanly and so unbeautiful!

[1] Published in the _Harvard Monthly_, March, 1903.

II. THE TRUE HARVARD[1]

When a man gets a decoration from a foreign institution, he may take it
as an honor. Coming as mine has come to-day, I prefer to take it for
that far more valuable thing, a token of personal good will from
friends. Recognizing the good will and the friendliness, I am going to
respond to the chairman's call by speaking exactly as I feel.

I am not an alumnus of the College. I have not even a degree from the
Scientific School, in which I did some study forty years ago. I have
no right to vote for Overseers, and I have never felt until to-day as
if I were a child of the house of Harvard in the fullest sense.
Harvard is many things in one--a school, a forcing house for thought,
and also a social club; and the club aspect is so strong, the family
tie so close and subtle among our Bachelors of Arts that all of us here
who are in my plight, no matter how long we may have lived here, always
feel a little like outsiders on Commencement day. We have no class to
walk with, and we often stay away from the procession. It may be
foolish, but it is a fact. I don't believe that my dear friends
Shaler, Hollis, Lanman, or Royce ever have felt quite as happy or as
much at home as my friend Barrett Wendell feels upon a day like this.

I wish to use my present privilege to say a word for these outsiders
with whom I belong. Many years ago there was one of them from Canada
here--a man with a high-pitched voice, who could n't fully agree with
all the points of my philosophy. At a lecture one day, when I was in
the full flood of my eloquence, his voice rose above mine, exclaiming:
"But, doctor, doctor! to be serious for a moment . . . ," in so sincere
a tone that the whole room burst out laughing. I want you now to be
serious for a moment while I say my little say. We are glorifying
ourselves to-day, and whenever the name of Harvard is emphatically
uttered on such days, frantic cheers go up. There are days for
affection, when pure sentiment and loyalty come rightly to the fore.
But behind our mere animal feeling for old schoolmates and the Yard and
the bell, and Memorial and the clubs and the river and the Soldiers'
Field, there must be something deeper and more rational. There ought
at any rate to be some possible ground in reason for one's boiling over
with joy that one is a son of Harvard, and was not, by some unspeakably
horrible accident of birth, predestined to graduate at Yale or at
Cornell.

Any college can foster club loyalty of that sort. The only rational
ground for pre-eminent admiration of any single college would be its
pre-eminent spiritual tone. But to be a college man in the mere
clubhouse sense--I care not of what college--affords no guarantee of
real superiority in spiritual tone.

The old notion that book learning can be a panacea for the vices of
society lies pretty well shattered to-day. I say this in spite of
certain utterances of the President of this University to the teachers
last year. That sanguine-hearted man seemed then to think that if the
schools would only do their duty better, social vice might cease. But
vice will never cease. Every level of culture breeds its own peculiar
brand of it as surely as one soil breeds sugar-cane, and another soil
breeds cranberries. If we were asked that disagreeable question, "What
are the bosom-vices of the level of culture which our land and day have
reached?" we should be forced, I think, to give the still more
disagreeable answer that they are swindling and adroitness, and the
indulgence of swindling and adroitness, and cant, and sympathy with
cant--natural fruits of that extraordinary idealization of "success" in
the mere outward sense of "getting there," and getting there on as big
a scale as we can, which characterizes our present generation. What
was Reason given to man for, some satirist has said, except to enable
him to invent reasons for what he wants to do. We might say the same
of education. We see college graduates on every side of every public
question. Some of Tammany's stanchest supporters are Harvard men.
Harvard men defend our treatment of our Filipino allies as a
masterpiece of policy and morals. Harvard men, as journalists, pride
themselves on producing copy for any side that may enlist them. There
is not a public abuse for which some Harvard advocate may not be found.

In the successful sense, then, in the worldly sense, in the club sense,
to be a college man, even a Harvard man, affords no sure guarantee for
anything but a more educated cleverness in the service of popular idols
and vulgar ends. Is there no inner Harvard within the outer Harvard
which means definitively more than this--for which the outside men who
come here in such numbers, come? They come from the remotest outskirts
of our country, without introductions, without school affiliations;
special students, scientific students, graduate students, poor students
of the College, who make their living as they go. They seldom or never
darken the doors of the Pudding or the Porcellian; they hover in the
background on days when the crimson color is most in evidence, but they
nevertheless are intoxicated and exultant with the nourishment they
find here; and their loyalty is deeper and subtler and more a matter of
the inmost soul than the gregarious loyalty of the clubhouse pattern
often is.

Indeed, there is such an inner spiritual Harvard; and the men I speak
of, and for whom I speak to-day, are its true missionaries and carry
its gospel into infidel parts. When they come to Harvard, it is not
primarily because she is a club. It is because they have heard of her
persistently atomistic constitution, of her tolerance of exceptionality
and eccentricity, of her devotion to the principles of individual
vocation and choice. It is because you cannot make single one-ideaed
regiments of her classes. It is because she cherishes so many vital
ideals, yet makes a scale of value among them; so that even her
apparently incurable second-rateness (or only occasional
first-rateness) in intercollegiate athletics comes from her seeing so
well that sport is but sport, that victory over Yale is not the whole
of the law and the prophets, and that a popgun is not the crack of doom.

The true Church was always the invisible Church. The true Harvard is
the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and
independent and often very solitary sons. _Thoughts_ are the precious
seeds of which our universities should be the botanical gardens.
Beware when God lets loose a thinker on the world--either Carlyle or
Emerson said that--for all things then have to rearrange themselves.
But the thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely
creatures. "Alone the great sun rises and alone spring the great
streams." The university most worthy of rational admiration is that
one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most
positively furthered, and most richly fed. On an occasion like this it
would be poor taste to draw comparisons between the colleges, and in
their mere clubhouse quality they cannot differ widely:--all must be
worthy of the loyalties and affections they arouse. But as a nursery
for independent and lonely thinkers I do believe that Harvard still is
in the van. Here they find the climate so propitious that they can be
happy in their very solitude. The day when Harvard shall stamp a
single hard and fast type of character upon her children, will be that
of her downfall. Our undisciplinables are our proudest product. Let
us agree together in hoping that the output of them will never cease.

[1] Speech at the Harvard Commencement Dinner, June 24, 1903, after
receiving an LL.D. degree. Printed in the _Graduates' Magazine_ for
September, 1903.

III. STANFORD'S IDEAL DESTINY[1]

Foreigners, commenting on our civilization, have with great unanimity
remarked the privileged position that institutions of learning occupy
in America as receivers of benefactions. Our typical men of wealth, if
they do not found a college, will at least single out some college or
university on which to lavish legacies or gifts. All the more so,
perhaps, if they are not college-bred men themselves. Johns Hopkins
University, the University of Chicago, Clark University, are splendid
examples of this rule. Steadily, year by year, my own university,
Harvard, receives from one to two and a half millions.

There is something almost pathetic in the way in which our successful
business men seem to idealize the higher learning and to believe in its
efficacy for salvation. Never having shared in its blessings, they do
their utmost to make the youth of coming generations more fortunate.
Usually there is little originality of thought in their generous
foundations. The donors follow the beaten track. Their good will has
to be vague, for they lack the inside knowledge. What they usually
think of is a new college like all the older colleges; or they give new
buildings to a university or help to make it larger, without any
definite idea as to the improvement of its inner form. Improvements in
the character of our institutions always come from the genius of the
various presidents and faculties. The donors furnish means of
propulsion, the experts within the pale lay out the course and steer
the vessel. You all think of the names of Eliot, Gilman, Hall and
Harper as I utter these words--I mention no name nearer home.

This is founders' day here at Stanford--the day set apart each year to
quicken and reanimate in all of us the consciousness of the deeper
significance of this little university to which we permanently or
temporarily belong. I am asked to use my voice to contribute to this
effect. How can I do so better than by uttering quite simply and
directly the impressions that I personally receive? I am one among our
innumerable American teachers, reared on the Atlantic coast but
admitted for this year to be one of the family at Stanford. I see
things not wholly from without, as the casual visitor does, but partly
from within. I am probably a typical observer. As my impressions are,
so will be the impressions of others. And those impressions, taken
together, will probably be the verdict of history on the institution
which Leland and Jane Stanford founded.

"Where there is no vision, the people perish." Mr. and Mrs. Stanford
evidently had a vision of the most prophetic sort. They saw the
opportunity for an absolutely unique creation, they seized upon it with
the boldness of great minds; and the passionate energy with which Mrs.
Stanford after her husband's death, drove the original plans through in
the face of every dismaying obstacle, forms a chapter in the biography
of heroism. Heroic also the loyalty with which in those dark years the
president and faculty made the university's cause, their cause, and
shared the uncertainties and privations.

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