Robert Herrick would, of course, never fail in urbanity and graciousness; but fundamentally, I think he is more pessimistic about American education than I am. He said: “Universities can’t get money except by getting great numbers of students; so they dare not set any higher standards than rival institutions in the same neighborhood. So the American soul stays flabby; all that counts is show, and in every department you get by with superficiality. It is a lunch-counter system of education; read a novel and get a credit; then go out into the world, and use your college prestige to make a fortune; and then give your name to a college building. We do absolutely nothing for men and women who come to college, in the way of giving them true culture, higher standards of thought or conduct. I go to any university club and look over the alumni, and I see that we have given them no distinction—in dress, in speech, in morals, in ideas. You cannot tell them from the bathtub salesmen or the agents of barbers’ supplies you meet in the lobby of the Blackstone Hotel.”
The above is from a man who has been teaching for twenty-nine years at the University of Chicago; and you may compare it with the pungent remark of Professor Cattell, who was a teacher for twenty-six years at Columbia: “The average university club in America could more easily dispense with its library than with its bar.”
The touchiest problem with all academic authorities is that of “outside speakers.” They can handle their own professors; by care in selecting instructors, and weeding out the undesirables before they get prestige, they can keep dangerous ideas from creeping into the classrooms. But it always happens there are half a dozen students who come from Socialist homes, and these get together and call themselves some society with a college name, and start inviting labor agitators and literary self-advertisers, to disturb the dignity and calm of scholarship. This puts the university administration in a dilemma; they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they refuse to let the radical propagandist in, there is a howl that they are repressing freedom of thought; on the other hand, if they do let him in, who can figure what millionaire may be led to alter his will?