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in them are in themselves educationally most advantageous. The space so used and applied is not space wasted. On the contrary, it is space most profitably employed.

Mr. Stephen Leacock, himself a university professor, not long ago wrote this significant passage:

As a college teacher I have long since realized that the most that the teacher, as such, can do for the student is a very limited matter. The real thing for the student is the life and environment that surrounds him. All that he really learns he learns, in a sense, by the active operation of his own intellect and not as the passive recipient of lectures. And for this active operation what he needs most is the continued and intimate contact with his fellows. Students must live together and eat together, talk and smoke together. Experience shows that that is how their minds really grow. And they must live together in a rational and comfortable way. They must eat in a big dining room or hall, with oak beams across the ceiling and the stained glass in the windows and with a shield or tablet here and there upon the wall, to remind them between times of the men who went before them and left a name worthy of the memory of the college. If a student is to get from his college what it ought to give him, a college dormitory, with the life in common that it brings, is his absolute right. A university that fails to give it to him is cheating him.

If I were founding a university--and I say it with all the seriousness of which I am capable-I would found first a smoking room; then when I had a little more money in hand I would found a dormitory; then after that, or more properly with that, a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had money over that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books.1

Abelard, who both started and best typified the intellectual movement out of which the true university

If Abelard came back!

eventually sprang, died in 1142. His heretical teachings and his novelties of thought, bitterly resisted as they were by the orthodoxy of their age, became the accepted teachings of the genera

The London Times Educational Supplement, November 18, 1920.

tions that shortly followed. Were Abelard to come back, his curiosity would certainly be excited and his sense of humor roused by much that he would see and hear in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. He might well wonder whether, despite his amazing intellectual conquests made so long ago, he had not lived and taught in vain. Having insisted again and again that the use of reason precedes faith and leads up to it with the aid of revelation and grace, he would be confronted with the spectacle of countless numbers of men and women, all hugely pleased with the brightness of their own intellectual illumination, whose minds are blocked to the progress of reason by the barriers of prejudice and of fanatical prepossession, neither of which could hope for a moment to rise to the dignity of that faith which St. Bernard so stoutly upheld and extolled. Abelard would quickly discover that to overcome these prejudices and these fanatical prepossessions is a task far more severe than was that of routing the scholastic realists. Presently he would also discover that this very scholastic realism was back again and in control of the thought and action of men who do not know of its existence and to whom the language in which it was expounded is veritably a sealed book. Abelard would find men everywhere speaking of a common good, a common interest, a common advantage, as if this were something which had a real existence of its own quite apart from the good, the interest, the advantage of the individuals who make up a given community. He would find a whole scheme of social and political philosophy and an elaborate program of social and political action based upon this ancient fallacy which he thought himself to have laid safely to rest eight hundred years ago.

These are the ironies of progress in the intellectual life, and remind us once again of the stupendous waste

in the life and achievements of men due to colossal and steadily increasing ignorance. There is no waste in the material world which compares with this. The endeavor of education to keep pace with the rapidly growing ignorance appears to be quite hopeless, since there are year by year so many new things of which to be ignorant. Mankind is confronted by the alternative of choosing to be content with an ignorance which is universal or of endeavoring to acquire an ignorance which is selective. If one is to give his voice for a selective ignorance, then he must have or be given a standard of value by which to measure his judgments of worth. This brings us back again to the time-old question, what knowledge is of most worth? Surely the answer must be that that knowledge is of most worth which assists man to establish the undisputed primacy of thought in order that it may interpret the data of sense, and to accept life as a great adventure toward intellectual and moral perfection which no artificial process can control and no mechanical formula explain.

It is a far cry from Mont Sainte Geneviève to Morningside Heights, and the materials of knowledge, like the subjects of academic debate, are widely different now from what they were then; but, as Horace reminds us, Coelum, non animum mutant, qui

trans mare currunt.

The academic skies have changed with the centuries, but not the essential characteristics of human nature. What was once a battle between reason and faith, fought with the weapons of theology and philosophy, is now a battle between reason and prejudice, fought with the new weapons forged in the modern furnace of economic, social and political discipline and interest. The costly, ineffective, and even demoralizing character of much contemporary school and college work is due to

the fact that so many of those who conduct it can neither look back down the road over which mankind has come nor forward along the road over which mankind is moving. They live in a state of unstable intellectual equilibrium, without cognizance or appreciation of those ideas, those institutions, and those ideals which silently and unconsciously shape and guide the action or the inaction of men. The free-mindedness and the richmindedness of Abelard are a precious possession and no true scholar is without them. His ideal of education was a sound one. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will cultivate and civilize the teachers?

The present-day mocking appeal to an infant that he give expression to himself represents the abdication of education. This appeal might just as well be directed to a physical vacuum. To starve youth by depriving it of intellectual and moral nourishment, and to cripple and disable it by depriving it of the discipline of experience, are among the newest and most popular forms of cruelty that have been devised to make education impossible. The results are apparent on every hand. Much of the spoken English of both teachers and taught would assuredly affright even the Venerable Bede who was accustomed to simple beginnings. The ability to read has well nigh disappeared if the reading be serious, instructive, or ennobling; the ability to write, so far as it exists at all, delights to manifest itself in forms of exceptional crudeness and vulgarity; the ability to perform the simplest mathematical operations is, to all intents and purposes, confined to teachers of mathematics or to specialists in that subject. Algebra and geometry, whether plane or solid, are as unfamiliar as the Laws of Manu. The state of good manners, which are the instinctive mark of good breeding and sound discipline, may be observed and estimated in any public place.

The extensive and intensive study of natural science, now carried on over more than a full generation, has made no impression whatever upon the public mind. That mind continues to come to its conclusions and to formulate its choices with serene unconcern as to whether any such thing as scientific method exists. Views as to all sorts of things have displaced accurate knowledge of fundamental things. If these be thought hard words, let him who so thinks look about him. Perhaps Abelard should come back and begin his task all over again.

on Excellence

With increasing frequency the suggestion is heard that Columbia University would perform a distinct public service were it substantially to The War of Mediocrity abandon the policies of the past 170 years and hereafter devote itself solely and exclusively to the promotion of excellence and to the training of the superlatively excellent. This would mean the turning away of the vast majority of the thousands of students who now flock to Morningside Heights in order to concentrate all the resources of the University upon a group of great scholars and leaders of research who would be surrounded by a relatively small company of carefully chosen students whose previous formal training and accomplishment furnished ground for the belief that they too, in their time, would become scholars of exceptional excellence. The result of this policy would be to bring into being an institution with some of the characteristics of the Collège de France, with some of the characteristics of All Souls' College, Oxford, and with some characteristics peculiar to itself and to twentieth century America.

"It is still a debated question whether mankind does not, after all, gain more by the intensive cultivation of a select few at the expense of the many than by the almost imperceptible elevation of the mass and the concurrent

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