Judged by the example of the law schools, then, the college of commerce, if it is to live and thrive, may be counted on to divert a much larger body of funds from legitimate university uses, and to create more of a bias hostile to scholarly and scientific work in the academic body, than the mere numerical showing of its staff would suggest. It is fairly to be expected that capable men of affairs, drawn from the traffic of successful business for this service, will require even a higher rate of pay, at the same time that they will be even more cordially out of sympathy with the ideals of scholarship, than the personnel of the law schools. Such will necessarily be the outcome, if these schools are at all effectually to serve the purpose for which they are created.
But for the present, as matters stand now, near the inception of this enterprise in training masters of gain, such an outcome has not been reached. Neither have the schools of commerce yet been placed on such a footing of expensiveness and authoritative discretion as the high sanction of the quest of gain would seem properly to assign them; nor are they, as at present organized and equipped, at all eminently fit to carry out the work entrusted to their care. Commonly, it is to be admitted, the men selected for the staff are men of some academic training, rather than men of affairs who have shown evidence of fitness to give counsel and instruction, by eminently gainful success in business. They are, indeed, commonly men of moderate rating in the academic community, and are vested with a moderate rank and authority; and the emoluments of these offices are also such as attach to positions of a middling grade in academic work, instead of being comparable with the gains that come to capable men engaged in the large business outside. Yet it is from among these higher grades of expert businessmen outside that the schools of commerce must draw their staff of instructors and their administrative officers if they are to accomplish the task proposed to them. A movement in this direction is already visibly setting in.
It is reasonably to be expected that one or the other result should follow: either the college of commerce must remain, somewhat as in practice it now is, something in the way of an academic division, with an academic routine and standards, and with an unfulfilled ambition to serve the higher needs of business training; with a poorly paid staff of nondescript academic men, not peculiarly fitted to lead their students into the straight and narrow way of business success, nor yet eminently equipped for a theoretical inquiry into the phenomena of business traffic and their underlying causes so that the school will continue to stand, in effect, as a more or less pedantic and equivocal adjunct of a department of economics; or the schools must be endowed and organized with a larger and stricter regard to the needs of the higher business traffic; with a personnel composed of men of the highest business talent and attainments, tempted from such successful business traffic by the offer of salaries comparable with those paid the responsible officials of large corporations engaged in banking, railroading, and industrial enterprises, -- and they must also be fitted out with an equipment of a corresponding magnitude and liberality.
Apart from a large and costly material equipment, such a college would also, under current conditions, have to be provided with a virtually unlimited fund for travelling expenses, to carry its staff and its students to the several typical seats and centres of business traffic and maintain them there for that requisite personal contact with affairs that alone can contribute to a practical comprehension of business strategy. In short, the schools would have to meet those requirements of training and information which men who today aim to prepare themselves for the larger business will commonly spend expensive years of apprenticeship to acquire. It is eminently true in business training, very much as it is in military strategy, that nothing will take the place of first-hand observation and personal contact with the processes and procedure involved; and such first-hand contact is to be had only at the cost of a more or less protracted stay where the various lines of business are carried on.
The creation and maintenance of such a College of Commerce, on such a scale as will make it anything more than a dubious make-believe, would manifestly appear to be beyond the powers of any existing university. So that the best that can be compassed in this way, or that has been achieved, by the means at the disposal of any university hitherto, is a cross between a secondary school for bank-clerks and travelling salesmen and a subsidiary department of economics.
