In no field of human endeavour is competitive notoriety and a painstaking conformity to extraneous standards of living and of conduct so gratuitous a burden, since learning is in no degree a competitive enterprise; and all mandatory observance of the conventions -- pecuniary or other -- is necessarily a drag on the pursuit of knowledge. In ordinary competitive business, as, e.g., merchandising, advertisement is a means of competitive selling, and is justified by the increased profits that come to the successful advertiser from the increased traffic; and on the like grounds a painstaking conformity to conventional usage, in appearances and expenditure, is there wisely cultivated with the same end in view. In the affairs of science and scholarship, simply as such and apart from the personal ambitions of the university's executive, there is nothing that corresponds to this increased traffic or these competitive profits,(3*) -- nor will the discretionary officials avow that such increased traffic is the purpose of academic publicity. Indeed, an increased enrolment of students yields no increased net income, nor is the corporation of learning engaged (avowedly, at least) in an enterprise that looks to a net income. At the same time, such increased enrolment as comes of this competitive salesmanship among the universities is made up almost wholly of wasters, accessions from the genteel and sporting classes, who seek the university as a means of respectability and dissipation, and who serve the advancement of the higher learning only as fire, flood and pestilence serve the needs of the husbandman.
Competitive publicity, therefore, and its maid-servant conventional observance, would appear in all this order of things to have no serious motive, or at least none that can freely be avowed; as witness the unwillingness of any university administration formally to avow that it seeks publicity or expends the corporate funds in competitive advertising. So that on its face this whole academic traffic in publicity and genteel conventionalities appears to be little else than a boyish imitation of the ways and means employed, with shrewd purpose, in business enterprise that has no analog with the pursuit of knowledge. But the aggregate yearly expenditure of the universities on this competitive academic publicity runs well up into the millions, and it involves also an extensive diversion of the energies of the general body of academic men to these purposes of creditable notoriety; and such an expenditure of means and activities is not lightly to be dismissed as an unadvised play of businesslike fancy on the part of the university authorities.
Unquestionably, an unreflecting imitation of methods that have been found good in retail merchandising counts for something in the case, perhaps for much; for the academic executives under whose surveillance this singularly futile traffic is carried on are commonly men of commonplace intelligence and aspiration, bound by the commonplace habits of workday intercourse in a business community. The histrionic afflatus is also by no means wanting in current university management, and when coupled with commonplace ideals in the dramatic art its outcome will necessarily be a tawdry, spectacular pageantry and a straining after showy magnitude. There is also the lower motive of unreflecting clannishness on the part of the several university establishments. This counts for something, perhaps for more than one could gracefully admit. It stands out perhaps most baldly in the sentimental rivalry -- somewhat factitious, it is true --shown at intercollegiate games and similar occasions of invidious comparison between the different schools. It is, of course, gratifying to the clannish conceit of any college man to be able to hold up convincing statistical exhibits showing the greater glory of "his own" university, whether in athletics, enrolment, alumni, material equipment, or schedules of instruction; whether he be an official, student, alumnus, or member of the academic staff; and all this array and circumstance will appeal to him the more unreservedly in proportion as he is gifted with a more vulgar sportsmanlike bent and is unmoved by any dispassionate interest in matters of science or scholarship; and in proportion, also, as his habitual outlook is that of the commonplace man of affairs. In the uncritical eyes of the commonplace men of affairs, whose experience in business has trained them into a quasi-tropismatic approval of notoriety as a means of advertising, these puerile demonstrations will, of course, have a high value simply in their own right. Sentimental chauvinism of this kind is a good and efficient motive to emulative enterprise, as far as it goes, but even when backed with the directorate's proclivity to businesslike make-believe, it can, after all, scarcely be made to cover the whole voluminous traffic that must on any consistent view go in under the head of competitive publicity.
