Universities, Research and Brain Waste 19 



usually for the academic year of 30 weeks though some of the professors 

 in Paris are only required to lecture 15 weeks. In Germany it is stipu- 

 lated that the professor lecture at least 2 hours a week throughout the 

 academic year. He, usually of his own volition, gives more than the 

 stipulated number of hours. He is not troubled by the limitations of c 

 fixed curriculum, it may be noted. He lectures on subjects of his owr 

 choosing and rarely on more than two at a time. 



In America it is nothing out of the ordinary for a professor to give 

 from 300 to 500 lectures in the course of a year. The layman may fanc> 

 that this is not too much and he is likely enough to jump to the conclusioi 

 that the European professor has a very easy time of it. Let us see; 

 however, how it works out. The European professor is in a position to 

 concentrate on one subject at a time. It may be that the literature on 

 the subject is not organized up to date. For the purpose of his course 

 of lectures it will be necessary to organize it. To digest and collate the 

 scattered material is likely enough to be a task of some magnitude. It 

 will probably be as much as he can handle. It may be that it will take 

 him several years to do the work. Here and there, by the way, he may 

 delay over a point which needs to be cleared up or a problem whose 

 solution would be useful. However that may be one result of his labours 

 will, as likely as not, be a treatise which will be of service to many more 

 individuals than he could reach by word of mouth in the class room. 

 These individuals would be located in different countries and distributed 

 over the surface of the civilized earth, including among them seasoned 

 research workers as well as immature students. Occasionally, too, the 

 lectures of a creative thinker will consist largely in the exposition of 

 successive discoveries which he is making in the course of the develop- 

 ment of a subject. 



The lectures of an American university professor will rarely be of 

 the character of the lectures to which we have just referred. They 

 cannot have such character if they are to run into the hundreds annually. 

 As a matter of fact many of the so-called lectures in universities on this 

 continent consist entirely of text-book work and are purely tutorial in 

 their character. This is necessarily the case in institutions which are 

 half high school and half university. 



The typical American professor who lectures on a multiplicity of 

 subjects simultaneously can hardly concentrate on any one of them. He 

 certainly cannot concentrate on all. He has to be perpetually changing 

 interest as he jumps from one subject to another. He has to be content 

 with placing himself in position from day to day with regard to the 

 successive parts of the several subjects, and the position in which he 

 places himself is pretty much the same from one year to another so 



