SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT 549 



fallibility of human effort. The habit of looking for permanent values 

 is inbred in him, of disregarding the external and the temporary. To 

 him, " the eternal verities " is no idle phrase. He has a natural distrust 

 of new and over-facile schemes. He is given to contemplation rather 

 than action. He is a brake, a balance wheel, a governor, a partial cor- 

 rection to the shouting optimism of enthusiastic ignorance. 



He is a force for idealism. He is exceptionally free from contact 

 with the sordidness of life. His converse in letters, art and history is 

 with the beautiful and the noble in human thought and conduct. His 

 duty involves the constant effort to reintroduce into human life the 

 emotional experience of the past. Imagine the idealism of the liberal 

 arts entirely removed from higher education ; you will see life appreci- 

 ably harder and more sordid. 



V 



The duty of the liberal arts professor is thus best described as a duty 

 of Being. He must Be master of his subject. He must Be familiar 

 with the general field of knowledge. He must Be intelligent in his 

 thinking and in his feeling — which means that he must Be cul- 

 tivated. He must Be inspired. He must Be an irradiator of inspira- 

 tion. He must Be pure in his living. 



All he has to Do, according to the standards of worldly business, is 

 to instruct young men and women at certain hours of the day. Accord- 

 ing to worldly business, too, he should be scientifically managed. He 

 should be made to Do as much as other men, and the effects of his 

 Doing should be concrete and measurable. 



But whatever this Doing accomplishes must be conditioned upon the 

 thoroughness of the Being, and Being is not susceptible of measurement. 

 In the same way, the most important result of his instruction, and its 

 greatest value to the student and the state, lies in the Being which is 

 the source of all best Doing in the individual citizen; land this, too, is 

 not susceptible of measurement. 



Scientific management applied to the liberal arts — or to any other 

 teaching — is the most unintelligent of self-contradictions. To insist on 

 the college professor's Doing more is to compel his Being less. If 

 society does not want him and his influence, let it abolish his office. If 

 it does want him, it should remember that the application to him and 

 his work of rules from the industrial world would be equivalent to 

 abolition. 



The professor who is a failure is taken care of. He is discovered and 

 put in his place — not by regents or trustees, and least of all by a pro- 

 fessional investigator, but by his fellows. He is not the real thing. In 

 the case of the professor who is the real thing, the more the talk of 

 Efficiency, the less the Service. 



