Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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af- HE humanities were under fire in our universities for several years before the war. At Harvard, as the Dean has announced, the nineteen twenties were the last period when the humanities had the largest group of concentrators. In the thirties the trend was to the social sciencesg and the forties have already been promulgated as the decade of the exact sciences. It cannot quite be claimed that we planned it that way, although the Tercentenary, with its overwhelming preponderance of honorary degrees in the sciences, symbolized a marked break with what Harvard had traditionally been. Nothing could be more futile at this point than stirring up again the rear guard action of the formerly entrenched humani- ties against the inroads of newer disciplines. And nothing could be more obscurantistic than to deny that the charac- terizing productions of our age have been owing to those disciplines. But the most perceptive scientists now grant, as they did not do in the eta dominated by simple mechanistic views of progress, that there are limitations to their kind of knowledge, that there are modes of truth which the arts and philosophy and religion alone can articulate. It is the role of the student of the humanities to recognize those limitations and to raise questions of value. A magnificent concrete instance ofjust such discrimination is furnished by one of the great achievements in modern painting, Frederick G.White flepj, instructor in English, chortles with Professorsjames B. Munn, Howard M.jones, and H. E. Rollins Rivera's frescoes in Detroit. Their main subject is the building of the Ford car, and as a modern man the painter was fascinated with studying every technical aspect of that process. But as a humanist he was also concerned with scrutinizing the ends to which our industrial age was moving, and in two companion panels he contrasted beneficent science, finding its expression in the hospital laboratory, with male- volent science, producing poison gas. It is these very discriminations that war tends to oblit- erate, and that thereby compels the humanities to re-examine their role. We have not yet begun to comprehend what the war is doing to our educational system, or how drastically that system may be transformed as the war goes on. What we can be aware of on every hand is the upsurge of a narrowly pragmatic frame of mind that has been part of the American character since pioneering days. Everything not immediately useful tends to be lopped off, and in so far as this curtailment is required for winning the war, there can be no quarrel with it. Nor is it necessary to deplore the further extension of vocational training in our schools, since one lesson that the years of the depression taught us was that the education of millions of our citizens had not fitted them at all for the world in which they had to live. The long-run solution is to break down any rigid divisions in our high schools between in aWarren House office. jones, Conant appointee, is prolific magazine contributor. Munn and Rollins are Elizabethan scholars , uv- 'W F-I -I :-

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and the W HE participation of Harvard experts and scholars in government planning under the New Deal became of greater size and importance after September 1939, and in- creasingly so since December 7th. Our entry into the war did not create an original condition, but intensihed the in- tegration of faculty activities in national efforts as it had effected a reorientation of university policy. Financial and legal experts, political scientists and historians, had been known to visit Washington prior to the war, but neither in such numbers nor with such frequency as later. As the needs of the National Defense Program increased, younger men, especially, had the opportunity to make considerable contributions in research and administration. Pre-war work done by Faculty men has often fitted into the trend of events, and they have adopted themselves to war conditions. john D. Black, author of the AAA pro- grams, has turned to work on Allied food problems, Rupert Emerson is an adviser on foreign and colonial arfairsg and Alvin Hansen's dehcit hnance plans have been adapted to war time needs. james M. Landis, William Y. Elliott,-lohn H. Williams, and other experienced men are devoting all or part of their time in civilian war capacities. Many men have almost entirely removed themselves from Cambridge to do war work, including Arthur N. Holcombe, special adviser in the WPB, Lincoln Gordon and Merle Fainsod in the OPA. William Langer, Donald McKay, and Edward S. Mason pro- vide the Office of Strategic Services with vital information. The amount of secrecy that has come over their work is indicated more by the removal of scientific research in Cambridge from the public view. Details which are now necessarily obscured will provide an illuminating record of Harvard's contribution to victory. The amount of special consultative and research work that is being carried on by Harvard scientists is of great diversity and magnitude, and anticipating the minutest needs of total war. Many commissioned faculty men are already close to the nerve points of action. Perry Miller, Charles Taylor, james Casner, Mason Hammond, and Myron Gilmore are in such positions. Crane Brinton and Bruce Hopper are among others on secret missions of a civilian nature. In these four wartime capacities-Military, Civilian, Scientific, and Consultativeh-over 400 Faculty men are now engaged. As Harvard further adjusts herself to final victory, increasing numbers of trained men will turn to the vital and varied tasks which the government has already indicated it demands of our universities. Prof. Alvin H. Hansen describes his views on economic post-war President Conant, on the day after Pearl Harbor, speaks to a planning in a nationwide Town Meeting of the Air broadcast. huge Sanders Theater audience on the role of Harvard in the war. fail

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Uma X Q I Kenneth Murdock, critic of 17th Century English and American literature, and Leverett's first Master, is we ' the vocational curriculum and the arts curriculum, and thereby enable our students to master skills both with their heads and their hands, as Thoreau and john Dewey would be united in urging. But what must be deplored and fought-and this brings us specifically to the function of the humanities in a university -is the tone that is currently rife towards all non-practical d or non-technical study. When the newspapers commende the Yard last summer for being hardly distinguishable from f satisfaction in their report that Greek and Latin and philosophy were in the doghouse for the duration, and that there would be no honors essays this year on the experimental novel. When wn into some of the elements that an see what the bias towards the humanities now tends to be. In the first place, the naked utilitarianism of industrial America has often clothed itself in odd vestiges of misapplied Puritanism, and has asserted a moral superiority to any more complex culture that it failed to understand. Furthermore, this peculiar blend of business ethics avails itself, in times of crisis, of all the slogans of humanitarian service, and then produces that special blossom of American idealism, which European observers have often noted: the e for the sake of sacrificing, to sacriiice what is held important by someone else. When you add to this . . . . h trait the anti-intellectualism that grew so fiercely during t e years of disillusion after the last war, you do not get only the fantastic travesty of traditional values I have been sketching. You may get something much more s a military camp, there seemed a definite strain o that tone is broken do condition it, we c desire to sacrific inister. If it becomes ll known for a dry Wlt. ature and the other arts are the standard assumption that liter luxury products, permissible in peace time, but to be cut down d if the war goes on for several on now just like excess sugar, an years, our universities will gradually be reduced to tech- nological schools. Our students will be well instructed in all . . . . bl the techniques they need for War, but it is not inconceiva e that ignorant of philosophy and cultural history, they will 3 be as limited and hard and anti-intellectual as the Fascists they go out to exterminate. What you think of such a situation and how you meet it naturally depend on whether you can conceive the humani- ties as a dynamic force in creating an anti-Fascist culture. Here again are many false assumptions, for which the prac- titioners of our education are directly responsible. Henry . . d Adams wrote one of the classic descriptions of Harvar College when he said that young Brookses and Gorhams and Adamses had always been sent here by their families, since any other education would have requ ired a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. So far as Harvard is a rich man's college, providing the right veneer for entrance into the Racquet Club and the serious business of life, Adams' definition still holds. That phase of college education is one ' ll d of the distinguishing consequences of what Santayana ca e the enteel tradition. In that tradition the humanities were 8 Qand arej conceived by their professors as polish and refine- ment. They are conceived by their students as being OK when not interfering with more pressing engagements. To recall the freshman who told me him to concentrate in history and litera- keep it in that vein, I vividly that his father wanted Us I