Some War-time Lessons Part 3

We know now that men and women can be measured by impersonal tests and that it is practicable to put aside the material which it is either impossible to fashion in the academic mould, or for which, even if the job is possible, the expense in wear and tear is entirely beyond the value of the result to be obtained. To be specific, why shouldn't we have an intelligence test of candidates for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, just as we had a physical and psychological examination for candidates for the flying schools?

I don't mean that we should leap from one illogical position clear across the road into another. Mental measurements are not yet an exact science, and a man of moderate ability, with a will to succeed, may be a better academic investment than his more brilliant brother who lacks that quality; but, by pruning very sparingly (one does not have to chop down a tree to prune it) the saving in time and energy will be enormous.

Fundamentally the human relationships are what count, the qualities leading to team play and cooperation, and away from isolation and its ills. This means that if a faculty is to exercise its leadership, it must know the student body, it must maintain and develop points of human touch. Impersonal tests, impersonal records, all that modern practice and modern science can teach us we must have, but these must be used only as the framework for what is after all the fundamental thing, direct human contact between teacher and teacher, teacher and student, and student and student.

Now as to leadership, and in a university we can identify the leaders with the teachers, there is no doubt, I think, that the teachers'

profession comes out of the war in a higher place than it went in, and the scholar goes back to his work with a feeling of confidence in himself in view of his record in compet.i.tion and comparison with men in other callings. I venture to predict that we shall hear a good deal less frequently in the future the old gibe that the man who could do things did them and the man who couldn't, taught them. The teachers made good, not only because of their scholarship, but because of their personality.

I think this experience of the last two years is going to accelerate greatly the movement which had already started of turning to the academic world for the man who can do things and do them with other people. Entirely apart from the contrasts in income, the sheer fun of executive work, with plenty of money to spend on what you want to get done, is a pretty strong temptation for a man with a heavy teaching schedule and an annual department appropriation of say $75. Both the regular army officers who have made conspicuously good, and the scholars of the cooperative type who have made conspicuously good, are being actively bidden for by bankers and manufacturers and all sorts of people. Neither profession can compete on the purely financial side with these tempters and, in order to hold their first-rate men, they will each have to make some greater contribution in the things that money alone can't buy.

Both in the nation and in our republics of letters and science, we must learn to distinguish more clearly between the power that comes with knowledge, and the ability to talk about things. It was very interesting to watch in Washington the gradual subst.i.tution of the man with the latter quality by the man with the former in positions of responsibility, and I am going to confess that, in the early days, some of the conferences which it was my privilege or my duty to attend, reminded me for all the world of certain faculty meetings, in which gentlemen without definite knowledge of the matter in hand were discussing at considerable length what they were pleased to call principles, but which were really off-hand impressions.

I think that in their service to the university and to the nation, the scholars may well profit by the demonstration that it was not only the man who knew his subject, but the man who knew how to deal with his fellow men, who was likely to make his impression. Isn't there such a thing as academic provincialism, even within the walls of a man's own university, certainly as between inst.i.tution and inst.i.tution, which can be remedied by the encouragement of these social and cooperative sides of the scholar's character? It seems to me that we all should face a fundamental extension in the definition of a scholar, away from the individual, the selfish, out to the social and constructive.

In our educational inst.i.tutions scholarship has three functions: To broaden the field of existing knowledge, and the war has shown us that every field has its valuable practical applications; to train the coming generation of experts, and any country needs not only a handful of distinguished leaders but a great body of well-trained men and women who, when the emergency arises, stand ready to meet it; and last but not least, to inspire a recognition of what scholarship is and a respect for it in the minds of the general students, few of whom, by the most generous stretch of the imagination, can be regarded as scholars themselves, but whose influence in their generation throughout the country is a very important factor. Our nation needs a respect for expert knowledge and it needs a respect for intelligence, and our college graduates can do more than any other group to develop this respect.

We have taken up three of our four lessons as these affect the university: the emphasis on youth, the need of mobilization and team play, and the need of leadership. There remains the fourth factor, a high, clear-cut aim.

The most serious charge against the American undergraduate in the past has been the lack of a sense of responsibility. We now know from their war records that the sense of responsibility lay latent in thousands of these boys and was only awaiting an impulse sufficiently strong to arouse it.

President Hibben of Princeton, who ought to know the American undergraduate if anybody does, said recently: "Young men are capable of far greater amounts of intensive work day in and day out than we had dreamed of; capable of greater concentration of mind upon their tasks.

They respond more quickly than we have conceived to the call of duty.

The sense of responsibility is there latent, and we teachers must endeavor to quicken and to appeal to it. We have seen that when the occasion comes these young men rise to meet it."

We can't very well stage a world war for the purpose, and I don't think we need wait for any such crisis to bring it out. There is in every normal, wholesome-minded student some motor nerve that can be touched in such a way as to release that type of coordinated energy which we call a sense of responsibility. This all goes back to knowing our men and women and establishing human contacts and human confidences.

In spite of individual disappointments, and as a college dean, I have had my share, I am confident that the normal young American either already possesses as a motive force some worth-while aim or that he can be guided toward such an aim if approached in the right way.

Let me quote a paragraph or so from the report of the War Department Committee on Education:

"Because the war did completely organize the nation for a united drive and thus did expose a magnificent national morale, many are inclined to believe that war is necessary to call forth such consecration and self-forgetful service. a.n.a.lysis of the war training, however, reveals a point of view and a method of procedure that is definitely designed to develop team-play and to enhance morale whether there be war or not. If these methods are applied to education in times of peace, they certainly will produce some effect even though the result is not as profoundly striking as it was during the war. Among the many significant features of war training, the following are mentioned as worthy of particular consideration for transfer to school practice:

"As a primary policy, a nation at war is obliged to recognize that every individual is an a.s.set capable of useful service in some particular line of work of direct benefit to the country. In order to make the most efficient use of all its resources, it is necessary to make strenuous exertions to discover what each individual is best qualified to do and to train each to use his abilities in the most effective manner. Applied to education this fundamental att.i.tude produces two results that are of importance in the development of morale. The teacher's point of view shifts from a critical one, with attention focused on discovering whether the individual measures up to the academic standards fixed by school authorities, to one of friendly, not to say eager interest to discover what each individual really can do well. The student's spirit also changes from one of discouragement and doubt of his ability ever to make good, to one of interest and desire for achievement. Both of these results are of large importance in releasing energy for both the teacher and the student. They also have an immediate bearing on the enhancement of morale."

In any place of campaign to this end within a college or university, the first thing to do is to build around that vague but very real emotion called college spirit, to supplement this by guiding our young people to enlist in worth-while, nation-wide or world-wide causes (we are singularly provincial about this in America), and by ensuring better teaching and supervision and better coordination of work.

There is no question that we have underestimated both the American undergraduate's capacity for intellectual work and his real pleasure in it when he feels it worth while. One of my friends was telling me of his experiences as commanding officer of one of the ground schools for aviators, where a large proportion of the candidates were college undergraduates, and I asked him if he had had any troubles as to discipline. "Yes indeed," he replied, "night after night we'd catch some fellows studying with a peep-light under their blankets, after taps had sounded."

Any doubts as to the instinctive reaction of the normal, healthy young American toward educational opportunities were dispelled by the experiences of the army in France after the armistice. The let-down, after the terrific physical and emotional strain, the impatience regarding any delay as to return home, combined to make a pretty serious situation as to the morale of our troops. After some misguided and nearly disastrous experiments as to the curative properties of heavy drill and strict discipline, the A.E.F. recognized the necessity for a prompt and thorough stimulation of all the welfare activities, and a real educational program; and it was straight, old-fashioned book-work more than it was the movies, or athletics, more even than Miss Elsie Janis, which turned the corner for us. In all, more than 200,000 men volunteered for the privilege of studying. The military order was often reversed and majors sat at the feet of the corporals or privates who had been selected as teachers. The reports as to the intensity of the work of teachers and students alike should put any of us professionals to shame.

Just now we are hearing a great deal about the benefits of discipline. I think what the speakers are really talking about, though they don't recognize it themselves, is the benefit of the state of mind which accepts and welcomes discipline. We are not, even as the result of the war, a disciplined people in the sense that Germany is, or was, and we can thank G.o.d for it. We shall never want in this country a general subordination of the individual will and initiative to external control.

Discipline is a means and not an end. If discipline, as such, externally imposed, were so important a factor in success as many people seem to think to-day, we could look through a list of ex-enlisted men in the army and navy--I mean the men enlisted and discharged during peace time--and find a relatively large number who made conspicuously good records after returning to civil life. As a matter of fact, we find nothing of the kind.

What we do find is that not a few enlisted men who chose the army or the navy as their permanent career have won commissions and made fine records. There were no better general officers in the war than men like Harbord of our army and Robertson of the British, both of whom rose from the ranks. But isn't it fair to say that the discipline imposed on these men was accepted gladly and accepted in the terms of their fundamental interest, and that these men are not really exceptions to what I have said?

I venture to predict that there will be a very different record to tell as to the success in civil life of those men now leaving the Army, who, because they believed in the cause and wished to partic.i.p.ate to the full in the great enterprise, gladly submitted themselves to the discipline for the purpose of increasing their efficiency.

In a month or so you can teach an enthusiastic man, who is fired by a big idea, all the discipline he needs for carrying out his duties and profiting by his opportunities, but you can't reverse the process and incite enthusiasms as a result of the application of discipline.

Don't think that I want to minimize the merits of military discipline for military purposes. Of course, coordination and subordination are absolutely necessary in the handling of large bodies of men. Even the men in France who deserted to the front, as many of them did, no matter how much we may sympathize with their desire to get into the game, had to be disciplined. Someone had to stay behind and see to the supplies.

The point we are discussing is the carrying over of this principle of military discipline intact into civilian life. So far as discipline brings about regularity of life, of exercise, so long as it ministers to alertness, we can use it, but as between discipline on the one hand, and initiative and team play on the other, to meet our academic or our national needs, I am for initiative and team play.

Please don't misunderstand me. By reducing the present emphasis on external discipline, after childhood has been pa.s.sed, I don't mean a lowering of standards. External discipline, it seems to me, is often really imposed as a subst.i.tute for high standards; something supposed to be just as good and more easy to keep in stock. The standards of the worth-while organization, and these are the outward expression of its aims, its ideals, ought to be high enough and intelligently enough administered to make sure that the men and women who are unable to provide their own discipline, should in the general interest be painlessly but promptly removed from the group.

Here is a _credo_ for the American people, from the pen of a regular army officer. It's a pretty good one for an American University: "To foster individual talent, imagination and initiative, to couple with this a high degree of cooperation, and to subject these to a not too minute direction; the whole vitalized by a supreme purpose, which serves as the magic key to unlock the upper strata of the energies of men."

Finally, let me try to apply these lessons to you young men and women of the graduating cla.s.s.

Keep in good physical shape. Overwork is usually a combination of bad air, bad feeding, and lack of exercise and sleep. See that you don't go stale. If you lack the zest of life, find out what the trouble is; whether it is your teeth or your liver or your soul. Picture to yourself what Theodore Roosevelt got out of life.

Be honest with yourself. Do your own thinking and do it straight. This, strangely enough, is perhaps the thing which you will find hardest to do after the undergraduate atmosphere. A student body is, or at any rate was before the war, the most convention ridden group of which I have any knowledge. I am all for conventions, because they save a great deal of time and worry, but only so far as we recognize them as conventions and do not exalt them into principles or philosophical truths. Remember that the public opinion of America is an infinitely more important thing to the world than ever before, and that you are each to be a part of it.

Keep your intellectual interests and your interest in your _alma mater_, not in her athletics and her fraternities alone. Remember that as alumni of this University you are citizens of no mean city. Recruit men and women whom she ought to have and who ought to have her, remembering that the danger to this country from the inside, and it is no inconsiderable danger, is mainly due to the misdirected zeal of sincere people who lack knowledge and background. Take for example the employer who can't see beyond the point of telling his men to "take it or leave it," and the workman whose sense of real or fancied injustice has brought him to what with our children we know as the kicking and biting stage. It is too late to do much with the present adult generation except by main strength and awkwardness, but a recruit for higher education from either of these groups is a good national investment.

Keep your human contacts. Don't be a "glad-hander" but do at least your share. It takes two to make and keep alive a friendship, just as it does a quarrel. There is something worth while in everyone. Give yourself a chance to find what it is. Practice following and, as the chance comes to you, practice leading, but above all, practice team play. Keep yourself ready to take the next step, whatever it may be. There is a story of Marshal Joffre, of which I can at least say that it is good enough to be true. After the first battle of the Marne some enthusiast was proclaiming him as a second Napoleon and laying it on pretty thick.

The old gentleman stood it as long as he could and then said: "No, Napoleon would have known what to do next, and I don't."

Keep your enthusiasms and your ideals. In other words, keep your youth.

In choosing your life work, get into something in which the policy and practice are such that you can throw your whole soul into the job. Don't take yourself seriously, but take your opportunities for usefulness seriously. Find out the callings in which America is short. There are plenty of them, as the war has shown. Think over whether it isn't possible for you to be one of the men or one of the women who, from your training and momentum and vision, will be selected ten or fifteen or twenty years hence, to take on some important job, with the nation as your client, as the one person best qualified to fill it.

We no longer have to prove that it pays to know, to really know almost anything that is worth while. It pays in money, if that is what one wants; it pays in the more enduring satisfactions of life, in the pleasure that comes from exact knowledge and intellectual pioneering, in the almost unique joy of creation without the responsibilities of possession, and in the feeling of individual readiness to be of use in meeting the problems which the years allotted to your generation will surely bring forth.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: Commencement address delivered at the University of Michigan, June 26, 1919.]