So it is that, with a sanguine hope born of academic defeat, there have latterly been founded certain large establishments, of the nature of retreats or shelters for the prosecution of scientific and scholarly inquiry in some sort of academic quarantine, detached from all academic affiliation and renouncing all share in the work of instruction. In point of form the movement is not altogether new. Foundations of a similar aim have been had before. But the magnitude and comprehensive aims of the new establishments are such as to take them out of the category of auxiliaries and throw them into the lead. They are assuming to take over the advance in science and scholarship, which has by tradition belonged under the tutelage of the academic community.
This move looks like a desperate surrender of the university ideal. The reason for it appears to be the proven inability of the schools, under competitive management, to take care of the pursuit of knowledge.
Seen from the point of view of the higher learning, this new departure, as well as the apparent need of it, is to be rated as untoward; and it reflects gravely enough on the untoward condition into which the rule of business principles is leading the American schools. Such establishments of research are capable, in any competent manner, of serving only one of the two joint purposes necessary to be served by any effective seminary of the higher learning; nor can they at all adequately serve this one purpose to the best advantage when so disjoined from its indispensable correlate. By and large, these new establishments are good for research only, not for instruction; or at the best they can serve this latter purpose only as a more or less Surreptitious or supererogatory side interest. Should they, under pressure of instant need, turn their forces to instruction as well as to inquiry, they would incontinently find themselves drifting into the same equivocal position as the universities, and the dry-rot of business principles and competitive gentility would presently consume their tissues after the same fashion.
It is, to all appearance, impracticable and inadvisable to let these institutions of research take over any appreciable share of that work of scientific and scholarly instruction that is slipping out of the palsied hands of the universities, so as to include some consistent application to teaching within the scope of their everyday work. And this cuts out of their complement of ways and means one of the chief aids to an effectual pursuit of scientific inquiry. Only in the most exceptional, not to say erratic, cases will good, consistent, sane and alert scientific work be carried forward through a course of years by any scientist without students, without loss or blunting of that intellectual initiative that makes the creative scientist. The work that can be done well in the absence of that stimulus and safe-guarding that comes of the give and take between teacher and student is commonly such only as can without deterioration be reduced to a mechanically systematized task-work, -- that is to say, such as can, without loss or gain, be carried on under the auspices of a businesslike academic government.
This, imperatively unavoidable, absence of provision for systematic instruction in these new-found establishments of research means also that they and the work which they have in hand are not self-perpetuating, whether individually and in detail or taken in the large; since their work breeds no generation of successors to the current body of scientists on which they draw. As the matter stands now, they depend for their personnel on the past output of scholars and scientists from the schools, and so they pick up and turn to account what there is ready to hand in that way -- not infrequently men for whom the universities find little use, as being refractory material not altogether suitable for the academic purposes of notoriety. When this academic source fails, as it presently must, with the increasingly efficient application of business principles in the universities, there should seem to be small recourse for establishments of this class except to run into the sands of intellectual quietism where the universities have gone before.
In this connection it will be interesting to note, by way of parenthesis, that even now a large proportion of the names that appear among the staff of these institutions of research are not American, and that even the American-born among them are frequently not American-bred in respect of their scientific training. For this work, recourse is necessarily had to the output of men trained elsewhere than in the vocational and athletic establishments of the American universities, or to that tapering file of academic men who are still imbued with traditions so alien to the current scheme of conventions as to leave them not amenable to the dictates of business principles.
