An essay on the essentials of an ideal college

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ON THE NEED FOR A QUIET COLLEGE

Stephen Leacock

If somebody would give me about two dozen very old elm trees and about fifty acres of wooded ground and lawn—not too near anywhere and not too far from everywhere—I think I could set up a college that would put all the big universities of to-day in the shade. I am not saying that it would be better. But it would be different.

I would need a few buildings—but it doesn't take many—stone, if possible—and a belfry, and a clock. The clock wouldn't need to go; it might be better if it didn't. I would want some books—a few thousand would do—and some apparatus. But it's amazing how little apparatus is needed for scientific work of the highest quality: in fact 'the higher the fewer.'

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Most of all I should need a set of professors. I would only need a dozen of them—but they'd have to be real ones: disinterested men of learning, who didn't even know they were disinterested. And, mind you, these professors of mine wouldn't sit in 'offices' dictating letters on 'cases' to stenographers, and only leaving their offices to go to 'committees' and 'conferences.' There would be no 'offices' in my college and no 'committees,' and my professors would have no time for conferences, because the job they were on would need all eternity and would never be finished.

My professors would never be findable at any fixed place except when they were actually giving lectures. Men of thought have no business in an office. Learning runs away from 'committees.' There would be no 'check up' on the time of the professors; there would be no 'hire and fire,' or 'judge by results' or standards or norms of work for them: nor any fixed number of hours.

But on the other hand they would, if I got the ones I want, be well worth their apparent irresponsibility: and when they lectured each one would be, though he wouldn't know it, a magician—with such an interest and absorption that those who listened would catch the infection of it, and hurry from the lecture to the library, still warm with thought.

It must be understood that the work of professors is peculiar. Few professors, real ones, ever complete their work: what they give to the world is fragments. The rest remains. Their contribution must be added up, not measured singly. Every professor has his 'life work' and sometimes does it, and sometimes dies first.

I can recall—I say it by way of digression—one such, who was working on Machiavelli. When I first met him he had worked fourteen years. He worked in a large room covered a foot deep with Machiavelli—notes, pamphlets, remains. I asked him—it seemed a simple question—what he thought of Machiavelli. He shook his head. He said it was too soon to form an opinion. Later—ten years later—he published his book, Machiavelli. One of the great continental reviews—of the really great ones; you and I never hear of them: they have a circulation of about 300—said his work was based on premature judgements. He was hurt, but he felt it was true. He had rushed into print too soon.

Another such devoted himself—he began years ago—to the history of the tariff. He began in a quiet lull of tariff changes when for three or four years public attention was elsewhere. He brought his work up to within a year or so of actual up-to-date completeness. Then the tariff began to move: two years later he was three years behind it. Presently, though he worked hard, he was five years behind it. The tariff moved quicker than he did. He has never caught it. His only hope now is that the tariff will move back towards free trade, and meet him.

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Not that I mean to imply that my professors would be a pack of nuts or freaks. Not at all: their manners might be dreamy and their clothes untidy but they'd be—they'd have to be—the most eminent men in their subjects. To get them would be the main effort of the college: to coax them, buy them, if need be, to kidnap them. Nothing counts beside that. A college is made of men—not by the size of buildings, number of students and football records. But no trustees know this, or, at best, only catch a glimmer of it and lose it. Within a generation all the greatest books on the humanities would come from my college.

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The professors bring the students. The students bring, unsought, the benefactions. The thing feeds itself like a flame in straw. But it's the men that count. A college doesn't need students: it's the students that need the college.

After twenty years my college would stand all alone. There are little colleges now but they ape bigness. There are quiet colleges but they try to be noisy. There are colleges without big games but they boom little ones. Mine would seem the only one, because the chance is there, wide open, and no one takes it. After twenty years people will drive in motor cars to see my college: and won't be let in.

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Round such a college there must be no thought of money. Money ruins life: I mean to have to think of it, to take account of it, to know that it is there. Men apart from money—men in an army, men on an expedition of exploration, emerge to a new life. Money is gone. At times and places whole classes thus lift up—or partly: as in older countries like England the class called 'gentry' that once was. These people lived on land and money from the past—stolen, perhaps, five hundred years ago—and so thought no more of it. They couldn't earn more, they didn't know how. They kept what they had, or dropped out, fell through a trestle bridge of social structure and were gone in the stream. This class, in America, we never had. They grow rare everywhere. Perhaps we don't want them. But they had the good luck that in their lives money in the sense here meant, didn't enter. Certain money limits circumscribed their life, but from day to day they never thought of it. A cow in a pasture, a fairly generous pasture, doesn't know it's in. It thinks it's outside. So did they.

So I would have it in my college: students not rich and not poor—or not using their wealth and not feeling their poverty, an equality as unconscious as that where Evangeline lived....

Nor would their studies lead to, or aim at, or connect with wealth. The so-called practical studies are all astray. Real study, real learning must, for the individual, be quite valueless or it loses its value. The proper studies for my college are history and literature, and philosophy, and thought and poetry and speculation, in the pursuit of which each shall repeat the eager search, the unending quest, of the past. Looking for one thing he shall find another. Looking for ultimate truth, which is unfindable, they will learn at least to repudiate all that is false.

I leave out at one sweep great masses of stuff usually taught: all that goes under such a name as a university faculty of commerce. There is no such thing. The faculty of commerce is down at the docks, at Wall Street, in the steel mills. A 'degree' in commerce is a salary of ten thousand a year. Those who fail to pass, go to Atlanta—and stay there. Certain things in commerce are teachable—accountancy, corporate organization, and the principles of embezzlement. But that's not a university.

Out goes economics—except as speculation: not a thing to teach in instalments and propositions like geometry. You can't teach it. No one knows it. It's the riddle of the Sphinx. My graduates will be just nicely fitted to think about it when they come out. A first-year girl studying economics is as wide of the mark as an old man studying cosmetics. The philosophical speculative analysis of our economic life is the highest study of all—next to the riddle of our existence. But to cut it into classes and credits is a parody. Out it goes.

Out—but to come back again—goes medicine. Medicine is a great reality: it belongs in a school not a college. My college fits people to study medicine—study it in crowded cities among gas-lights and ambulances and hospitals and human suffering—and keeps their souls alive while they do it. Then later, as trained men in the noblest profession in the world, the atmosphere of the college which they imbibed among my elm trees, grows about them again. The last word in cultivation is, and always has been, the cultivated 'medicine man.'

The engineers?—that's different. Theirs is the most 'manly' of all the professions—among water power and gold mines and throwing bridges half a mile at a throw. But it's aschool that trains them, not a college. They go to my college but they don't like it. They say it's too damn dreamy. So they kick out of it into engineering. For a time they remember the Latin third declension. Presently they forget it. Doctors grow cultivated as they grow older. Engineers get rougher and rougher.

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What I mean is that our studies have drifted away, away from the single-minded absorption of learning. Our students of to-day live in a whirl and clatter of 'student activities.' They have, in any large college, at least a hundred organizations and societies. They are 'all up!' for this to-day and 'all out!' for that to-morrow. Life is a continuous rally! a rah, rah! a parade! They play no games: they use teams for that. But exercise, and air, is their life. They root, in an organized hysteria—a code of signals telling them what to feel. They root, they rush, they organize, they play politics, run newspapers—and when they step from college into life, they fit it absolutely, having lived already.

No one is denying here what fine men and women college makes, physically and mentally alert. Any one of them could operate a lift the day he steps out of college.

But there's something wanting—do they think, or is there anything after all to think about?—and yet, surely, in the long run the world has lived on its speculative minds—or hasn't it?

Some who think, or course, there must be. You can't submerge humanity in two generations. But mostly, I believe, the little poets fade out on their first-year benches, and the wistful intelligence learns to say 'Rah! Rah!' and is lost.

Not so in my college. There will be no newspaper, except a last week's paper from the back counties of New England. There will be no politics because there will be no offices to run for. My students will control nothing. The whole movement of student control is a mistake. They're so busy controlling that they're not students.

They shall play games all they want to, but as games, not as a profession, not as college advertising—and no gate receipts. Till only a few years ago the country that taught the world its games played them as apart from money—as far apart as sheer necessity allowed. If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton (it wasn't really: it was won in Belgium), there was at least no stadium at two dollars a seat.

One asks, perhaps, about the endowments, about the benefactors of my ideal college. The benefactors are all dead: or at least they must act as if they were. Years ago on the prairies many authorities claimed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. It may not have been true. But it is certainly true that the best college benefactor is a dead one. After all, the reward in the long run is his—those sculptured letters graven in the stone, 'To the greater glory of God and in memory of Johannes Smith'—that, in a college among elm trees—that's worth a lifetime of gifts—given and given gladly. Such things should best be graven in Latin. In my college they will be—Latin and lots of it, all over the place, with the mystic conspiracy of pretence, the wholesome humbug, that those who see it know what it means. Latin lasts. English seems to alter every thousand years or so. It's like the tariff that I named above—too mobile for academic use.

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As with the benefactors, so with the managing trustees who look after the money and never lose it. Not dead, these, but very silent: solid men who don't need to talk and don't, but who can invest a million dollars over three depressions, and there it still is, like gold in a pot in the pyramids. You find them chiefly in New England—at least I seem to have seen them there more than anywhere else. They are at the head of huge investment businesses, so big that you never hear of them. Mostly, if they don't talk, it means that they are thinking where to place fifty million dollars. You see, they hate to break it.

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And women? The arrangements in my college for the women students, and the women's dormitories? Oh no—no, thank you. There aren't any women. Co-education is a wonderful thing for women: college girls under co-education leave college more fit to leave college than any others. College girls are better companions, better wives (as your own or as someone else's) than any others. It's the women who have made our college life the bright happy thing it is—too bright, too happy.

But men can't study when women are around. And it's not only the students. If I let the women in, they get round some of my dusty old professors, and marry them—and good-bye to Machiavelli, and the higher thought.

Courtesy - http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/leacock-model/leacock-model-00-h.html#chap07