CHAPTER VI
The Portion of the Scientist
The principles of business enterprise touch the life and work
of the academic staff at divers points and with various effect. Under their rule, and in so far as they rule, the remuneration shifts from the basis of a stipend designed to further the pursuit of knowledge, to that of a wage bargain, partaking of the nature of a piece-work scheme, designed to procure class-room instruction at the lowest practicable cost. A businesslike system of accountancy standardizes and measures this instruction by mechanically gauged units of duration and number, amplitude and frequency, and so discountenances work that rises above a staple grade of mediocrity. Usage and the urgent need of a reputable notoriety impose on university men an extraneous and excessively high standard of living expenses, which constrains them to take on supernumerary work in excess of what they can carry in an efficient manner. The need of university prestige enforces this high scale of expenses, and also pushes the members of the staff into a routine of polite dissipation, ceremonial display, exhibitions of quasi-scholarly proficiency and propagandist intrigue.
If these business principles were quite free to work out
their logical consequences, untroubled by any disturbing factors
of an unbusinesslike nature, the outcome should be to put the
pursuit of knowledge definitively in abeyance within the
university, and to substitute for that objective something for
which the language hitherto lacks a designation.
For divers reasons of an unbusinesslike kind, such a
consummate ("sweat-shop") scheme has never fully been achieved, particularly not in establishments that are, properly speaking, of anything like university grade. This perfect scheme of low-cost perfunctory instruction, high-cost stage properties and press-agents, public song and dance, expensive banquets, speech-making and processions, is never fully rounded out. This amounts to admitting a partial defeat for the gild of businesslike "educators." While, as a matter of speculative predilection, they may not aim to leave the higher learning out of the university, the rule of competitive business principles consistently pushes their administration toward that end; which they are continually prevented from attaining, by the necessary conditions under which their competitive enterprise is carried on.
For better or worse, there are always and necessarily present
among the academic corps a certain number of men whose sense of
the genteel properties is too vague and meagre, whose grasp of
the principles of official preferment is too weak and
inconsequential, whose addiction to the pursuit of knowledge is
too ingrained, to permit their conforming wholly to the
competitive exigencies of the case. By force of the exigencies of
competitive prestige there is, of course, a limit of tolerance
that sets decent bounds both to the number of such supererogatory
scholars harboured by the university, and the latitude allowed
them in their intemperate pursuit of knowledge; but their
presence in the academic body is, after all, neither an
irrelevant accident nor a transient embarrassment. It is, in one
sense of the expression, for the use of such men, and for the use
which such men find for it, that the university exists at all; in
some such sense, indeed, as a government, a political machine, a
railway corporation or a toll-road, may be said to exist for the
use of the community from which they get their living. It is true
in the sense that this ostensible use can not be left out of
account in the long run. But even from day to day this scholarly
purpose is never quite lost sight of. The habit of counting it
in, as a matter of course, affects all concerned, in some degree; and complacent professions of faith to that effect cross one another from all quarters. It may frequently happen that the enterprising men in whom academic discretion centres will have no clear conception of what is implied in this scholarly purpose to which they give a perfunctory matter-of-course endorsement, and much of their professions on that head may be ad captandum; but that it need be a matter of course argues that it must be counted with.