SPECIALIST BLIGHT ON AMERICAN EDUCATION 341 



which dries up the soul, with real wisdom, which expands man into 

 almost the very image of the All-Wise. Yet this hall-mark of erudi- 

 tion is to-day practically essential as a key to a faculty position ; and it 

 is so, not because there seems any valid educational reason for it, but 

 largely because it is required in Germany and looks well in the pros- 

 pectus. As a result, hundreds of young fellows are starving themselves 

 and impoverishing their parents in order to secure this decoration. 

 To get it they are pursuing so-called special investigations, by counting 

 the number of adverbial clauses in Shakespeare, or by sending out 

 questionnaires regarding the proportion of children who twiddle their 

 thumbs. Having scraped together this fatuous information, they are 

 spending much time and money in having it printed, in order that 

 another doctorial dissertation may be added to the dustiest shelves of 

 the college library. And these most precious years of a man's life, 

 these years in which the youth ought to be learning how to broaden 

 his mind and capacities, how to deal with men, how to handle his 

 faculties, his tongue and himself — these the poor fellow is selling for 

 this mess of pottage with which to feed the trustees of some lesser or 

 greater university. 



Having been admitted to the teaching staff of the university, the 

 fledgling Ph.D., if he is to hold his place, must produce something, and 

 that quickly. But since his days, as a subordinate teacher, are mainly 

 taken up in such intellect-killing work as correcting thousands of 

 themes or counting the apparatus in the laboratory, how is he to get 

 that breadth, experience and wisdom which alone can make what he 

 is expected to produce of any value to the world? Half-starved phys- 

 ically and wholly starved intellectually and socially, his only alter- 

 native is to specialize still more, digging, like a woodpecker, into some 

 wormhole of erudition in the hope of extracting from it a maggot 

 large enough to placate the learned university public accustomed thus 

 to be fed by young doctors of philosophy. This digging is politely 

 called research; but it is the sorriest counterfeit of the genuine thing, 

 being but perfunctory and profitless grubbing. True research must be 

 founded upon wide scholarship, upon profound knowledge of men, and 

 upon extensive acquaintance with the world of letters and of things. 

 To compel such callow men as these to specialize is to condemn them 

 to intellectual suicide and, in so doing, to kill true scholarship. 



In this hard-hearted world it would not very much matter that 

 these poor aspirants should waste their intellectual powers in this way, 

 did it affect only them and their long-suffering wives. But it is these 

 men, as a rule, who become professors and heads of departments, it is 

 they who determine the atmosphere and the trend of the colleges, it 

 is this type of specialist who is setting the standards of learning and 

 of scholarship for America. As a result we have our college popula- 



