Our success in holding ourselves and our students to this great task will be determined largely by the set of life values we carry into the class room, and by our ability to differentiate that which is important in Greek and Roman civilization from that which is negligible and unessential. I sometimes fear that we have forgotten that only the higher elements of any civilization are worthy to be transmitted to posterity, and that forgetting this we have permitted many of our courses to be denaturized, dehumanized, and Germanized.
In seven out of ten of the text-books of the classics edited for college use, the notes are written, not for freshmen and sophomores, but for those who have already attained or are going to attain the degree of doctor of philosophy, a degree that was first made in Germany. This blight of the doctor's degree has invaded not only our courses in the classics, but every course in the university curriculum that can in any sense be called a humanistic course. It is high time that we form a solemn procession and make an offering on the altar of Robigo, god or goddess of the rust.
In the natural and physical sciences we do not resent or criticize futile experimentation. We are willing that that six hundred and five futile experiments may be made that the six hundred and sixth may be successful. We expect this work of experimentation to be more or less dehumanizing, in its drudgery, that in the end the fruit of the successful experiment may confer some blessing upon the human family. We do not protest against a doctor's dissertation in science in which the results are wholly negative. But we do protest against a doctor's dissertation in literature or history, which has compelled the _doctor designatus_ to spend months of his time on some inconsequential subject, giving him a false perspective and a false sense of proportion that it will take him years to get rid of in his teaching.
Let it be understood that this protest against the doctor's degree is not a protest against the length of time that is given to graduate studies in preparation for teaching. This should be increased rather than diminished. It is a protest against some of the objects to which years of graduate study have been devoted under the shadow of the doctor's degree. It is "a place in the sun" that we are demanding. In using this phrase "a place in the sun," I am not plagiarizing that one whom Henry Van Dyke has christened "the damned vulture of Potsdam," but a far better man, Diogenes of Sinope, who once requested Alexander the Great to get out of his daylight and give him his place in the sun.