Universities, Research and Brain Waste 13 



work of a very high order have, because of defective educational faciHties, 

 failed to achieve their destiny, there can be no doubt. Because of 

 this America in particular and the world in general are so much 

 the poorer. 



A generation ago American university conditions were something 

 appalling. In my own department students were everywhere misled. 

 The only way in which one could get an adequate grounding in the 

 calculus was by going to Europe. This subject, which we have already 

 referred to as the basis for most of the higher mathematical analysis, 

 was practically everywhere mistaught. The result was that the potential 

 mathematicians in America were sterilized. One of them, who after 

 his American training had the corrective of a European experience and 

 who now holds an honourable place among American mathematicians, 

 told me ruefully that he would never recover from his early training. 

 I have in mind another and younger man from whom his friends and 

 teachers expected great things. His undergraduate training was of 

 the kind referred to above. On top of it he completed a course in one 

 of the best graduate schools on the continent. He has failed to make 

 good, however. His graduate teachers attribute his failure to the 

 false start given by his undergraduate training. I am inclined to accept 

 this explanation for I know the man and I am convinced that he had 

 the material in him to make a research worker. I have had my own 

 experience in this connection. Fifteen years after I had received my 

 grounding in the calculus I discovered, I am ashamed to say, in a German 

 University, the University of Berlin, that it had been taught to me 

 falsely, irremediably, and fundamentally falsely. A dislocation of fifteen 

 years in one's scientific life can hardly fail to leave its impress. 



There are other subjects, I am informed, in which instruction in 

 American universities was almost as bad as that in mathematics a 

 generation ago. Conditions, however, have greatly improved in the 

 interval. A student would be tolerably safe now in accepting the 

 guidance in mathematics offered in any of the larger universities. The 

 like will, no doubt, be true of other subjects also. There is no longer 

 the same urgency as formerly for a student to go abroad. Too much 

 inbreeding, however, is not to be encouraged. A certain amount of 

 circulation is healthful. A university, too, should avoid isolation. It 

 should be in touch with other universities at home and abroad and ought 

 to be familiar with what is going on in the outside world. 



The change in conditions in American universities, the improvement 

 in instruction which has taken place during the last twenty-five to thirty 

 years, is due primarily to the initiative and self-sacrifice of hundreds of 

 young men who, from time to time, crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of 



