Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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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

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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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Ralph Barton Perry, philosopher, was among the first to realize threat of Nazism. He heads American Defense, Harvard Group. ture so that he would know how to make the right kind of cultured conversation when he met business contacts for cocktails at the Ritz. The genteel tradition is not wholly a recent phenomenon. It can be traced back to certain of the softer elements in the education of the Renaissance gentle- man, who often thought of the arts in terms of ornament and display, as a badge of class. But the vital tradition in the humanities has been a lighting faith. To cite instances from the three centuries that have formed our American past, this is the tradition of Milton, ofjefferson, of Emerson, who, no matter how widely divergent in frame of mind, were at one in their belief that the thought and expression of the great writers of all countries provided the most organic means for comprehending human experience. In this functional conception, the humanities would be even more important in time of crisis, and the real treason of our intellectuals would consist in any defiection from that truth. One of the most disturbing weaknesses shown up by the present war has been the lack of conviction on the part of too many of our educators as to the importance of their own work. Too many administrators and professors alike have acted as though the cultural life of the country was something you could lay away in mothballs for the duration, while you turned to more pressing duties. It comes down to the question of putting first things first. At the point when a man is needed by the government, either in the army or because of some special skills, no issue exists unless the man is a conscientious objector. But what our naked utilitarianism fails to perceive is that the first things for a thinker or an artist must remain, in war no less than peace, the life of the mind, the life of the spirit, the creative resources of the whole com- munity. We do not cease to exist as sentient and reflective beings, no matter what our role in the war, and to the degree that our educators are blind to that fact, to that degree will they fail to provide the continuing bases for a rich democratic H41 Theodore Spencer, critic of drama and fiction, is well-known poet. Appointed by Cambridge Univ., he lectured here in 1940. culture. And without those bases we are reduced to the posi- tion of fighting against fascism instead of fighting for values in which we profoundly believe. The right sense of proportion between duties could be symbolized by Shostakovitch's continuing to work on his Seventh Symphony in the time not required of him as a fire hghtet during the siege of Leningrad. Or by the Hungarian Arthur Koestler who has preserved through a decade of anti- Fascist activity, through one of Franco's prisons and a concen- tration camp in France, the unwavering conviction that, no matter what the hazards, it was his responsibility as a thinker to record what he had experienced, since that record was it- self a weapon. Or by Eisenstein's recent rededication of his art of the film as one of the strongest of mass weapons for a healthy culture. Or by the young Chinese novelist T'ien Chun, whose Village in Azzgzut, a simple narrative of the start of the resistance to the japanese, has dramatized for millions of readers the issues involved in that struggle. Or by the increas- ing awareness in Britain after three years of war that education too is one of the arsenals of democracy, and that unless teach- ing is regarded as indispensable as other defense work, the whole cultural fabric can collapse. These various examples from our allies should indicate that the important thing is what you take with you to war, not what you leave behind. What Harvard graduates take depends in large part on what opportunities Harvard has afforded them. Since some years before this war we have been witness- ing an interesting situation wherein the students have been demanding a more organic system of education than the faculty has been willing to accede. Again and again the student council reports have pointed out how far the curriculum has drifted from the time when educated men, regardless of their fields of special study, shared in a common core of knowledge. The remarkable opportunities for concentration provided by a big university have tended to produce such