For establishments that are substantially of secondary school character, including colleges and undergraduate departments, such a result may not be of extremely serious consequence; since much of the instruction in these schools is of a perfunctory kind anyway. But since the university and the college are, in point of formal status and of administrative machinery, divisions of the same establishment and subject to the same executive control; and since, under competitive business principles, the collegiate division is held to be of greater importance, and requires the greater share of attention; it comes about that the college in great measure sets the pace for the whole, and that the undergraduate scheme of credits, detailed accountancy, and mechanical segmentation of the work, is carried over into the university work proper. Such a result follows more consistently and decisively, of course, in those establishments where the line of demarkation between undergraduate and graduate instruction is advisedly blurred or disregarded. It is not altogether unusual latterly, advisedly to efface the distinction between the undergraduate and the graduate division and endeavour to make a gradual transition from the one to the other.(5*) This is done in the less conspicuous fashion of scheduling certain courses as Graduate and Senior, and allowing scholastic credits acquired in certain courses of the upper-class undergraduate curriculum to count toward the complement of graduate credits required of candidates for advanced degrees. More conspicuously and with fuller effect the same end is sought at other universities by classifying the two later years of the undergraduate curriculum as "Senior College"; with the avowed intention that these two concluding years of the usual four are scholastically to lie between the stricter undergraduate domain, now reduced to the freshman and sophomore years, on the one hand, and the graduate division as such on the other hand. This "Senior College"division so comes to be accounted in some sort a halfway graduate school; with the result that it is assimilated to the graduate work in the fashion of its accountancy and control; or rather, the essentially undergraduate methods that still continue to rule unabated in the machinery and management of this "senior college"are carried over by easy sophistication of expediency into the graduate work; which so takes on the usual, conventionally perfunctory, character that belongs by tradition and necessity to the undergraduate division; whereby in effect the instruction scheduled as "graduate" is, in so far, taken out of the domain of the higher learning and thrown back into the hands of the schoolmasters. The rest of the current undergraduate standards and discipline tends strongly to follow the lead so given and to work over by insensible precession into the graduate school;until in the consummate end the free pursuit of learning should no longer find a standing-place in the university except by subreption and dissimulation; much after the fashion in which, in the days of ecclesiastical control and scholastic lore, the pursuit of disinterested knowledge was constrained to a shifty simulation of interest in theological speculations and a disingenuous formal conformity to the standards and methods that were approved for indoctrination in divinity.
Perfunctory work and mechanical accountancy may be sufficiently detrimental in the undergraduate curriculum, but it seems altogether and increasingly a matter of course in that section; but it is in the graduate division that it has its gravest consequences. Yet even in undergraduate work it remains true, as it does in all education in a degree, that the instruction can be carried on with best effect only on the ground of an absorbing interest on the part of the instructor; and he can do the work of a teacher as it should be done only so long as he continues to take an investigator's interest in the subject in which he is called on to teach. He must be actively engaged in an endeavour to extend the bounds of knowledge at the point where his work as teacher falls. He must be a specialist offering instruction in the specialty with which he is occupied; and the instruction offered can reach its best efficiency only in so far as it is incidental to an aggressive campaign of inquiry on the teacher's part.
But no one is a competent specialist in many lines; nor is any one competent to carry on an assorted parcel of special inquiries, cut to a standard unit of time and volume. One line, somewhat narrowly bounded as a specialty, measures the capacity of the common run of talented scientists and scholars for first-class work, whatever side-lines of subsidiary interest they may have in hand and may carry out with passably creditable results. The alternative is schoolmaster's task-work; or if the pretense of advanced learning must be kept up, the alternative which not unusually goes into effect is amateurish pedantry, with the charlatan ever in the near background. By and large, if the number of distinct lines of instruction offered by a given departmental corps appreciably exceeds the number of men on the staff, some of these lines or courses will of necessity be carried in a perfunctory fashion and can only give mediocre results, at the best. What practically happens at the worst is better left under the cover of a decent reticence.
