The causes of this relative inefficiency that seems to attach unavoidably to the excessively large undergraduate establishments can not be gone into here; in part they are obvious, in part quite obscure. But in any case the matter can not be gone into here, except so far as it has an immediate bearing on the advanced work of the university, through the inclusion of these collegiate schools in the university corporation and under the same government. As has already been remarked, by force of the competitive need of a large statistical showing and a wide sweep of popular prestige and notoriety, and by reason of other incentives of a nature more intimate to the person of the executive, it is in effect a matter of course that the undergraduate school and its growth becomes the chief object of solicitude and management with a businesslike executive; and that so its shaping of the foundations of the establishment as a whole acts irresistibly to fashion the rest of the university administration and instruction in the image of the undergraduate policy. Under the same compulsion it follows also that whatever elements in the advanced work of the university will not lend themselves to the scheme of accountancy, statistics, standardization and coercive control enforced in and through the undergraduate division, will tend to be lost by disuse and neglect, as being selectively unfit to survive under that system.
The advanced work falls under the same stress of competition in magnitude and visible success; and the same scheme of enforced statistical credits will gradually insinuate itself into the work for the advanced degrees; so that these as well as the lower degrees will come to be conferred on the piece-work plan.
Throughout the American universities there is apparent such a movement in the direction of a closer and more mechanical specification of the terms on which the higher degrees are to be conferred, -- a specification in terms of stipulated courses of class-room work and aggregate quantity of standard credits and length of residence. So that his need of conformity to the standard credit requirements will therefore constrain the candidate for an advanced degree to make the substantial pursuit of knowledge subordinate to the present pursuit of credits, to be attended to, if at all, in the scant interstitial intervals allowed by a strictly drawn accountancy. The effect of it all on their animus, and on the effective prosecution of the higher learnings by the instructors, should be sufficiently plain; but in case of doubt any curious person may easily assure himself of it by looking over the current state of things as they run in any one of the universities that grant degrees.
Nothing but continued workday familiarity with this system of academic grading and credit, as it takes effect in the conduct and control of instruction, and as its further elaboration continues to employ the talents and deliberation of college men, can enable any observer to appreciate the extraordinary lengths to which this matter is carried in practice, and the pervasive way in which it resistlessly bends more and more of current instruction to its mechanical tests and progressively sterilizes all personal initiative and ambition that comes within its sweep.
And nothing but the same continued contact with the relevant facts could persuade any outsider that all this skilfully devised death of the spirit is brought about by well-advised efforts of improvement on the part of men who are intimately conversant with the facts, and who are moved by a disinterested solicitude for the best academic good of the students under their charge. Yet such, unmistakably, are the facts of the case.
While the initial move in this sterilization of the academic intellect is necessarily taken by the statistically-minded superior officers of the corporation of learning, the detail of schedules and administrative routine involved is largely left in the discretion of the faculty. Indeed, it is work of this character that occupies nearly the whole of the attention of the faculty as a deliberative body, as well as of its many and various committees. In these matters of administrative routine and punctilio the faculty, collectively and severally, can exercise a degree of initiative and discretion. And these duties are taken as seriously as well may be, and the matters that so come within the faculty's discretion are handled in the most unambiguous spirit of responsible deliberation. Each added move of elaboration is taken only after the deliberative body has assured itself that it embodies a needed enhancement of the efficiency of the system of control. But each improvement and amplification also unavoidably brings the need of further specification and apparatus, desired to take care of further refinements of doubt and detail that arise out of the last previous extensions of the mechanism. The remedy sought in all such conjunctures is to bring in further specifications and definitions, with the effect of continually making two specifications grow where one grew before, each of which in its turn will necessarily have to be hedged about on both sides by like specifications, with like effect;(12*) with the consequence that the grading and credit system is subject to a ceaseless proliferation of ever more meticulous detail. The underlying difficulty appears to be not that the collective wisdom of the faculty is bent on its own stultification, as an unsympathetic outsider might hastily conclude, but that there is in all the deliberations of such a body a total disregard of common sense.
