EFFICIENCY AND UTILITY

When Charles Francis Adams in 1913 characterized the democratizing of higher education in America as a materializing and commercializing influence, he recognized a development which in the intervening ten years has become even more clear. College education in America originally monopolized by the rich and the scholarly has become the heritage of an ever-increasing class.

With the eyes of a prophet Mr. Adams saw that the tendency carried with it grave defects and argued from the condition in America and the gradual spread of democracy in England that Oxford and Cambridge themselves must in time bow their heads to the "gods of efficiency and utility".

It is, of course, no final refutation of Mr. Adams' prophecy that, despite the very apparent spread of democracy in England since 1913, opinion in Oxford, in the words of Mr. Leys, "has never encouraged the narrower kind of professional training". The great English universities seem to have withstood unmoved that pressure which has converted so many of the colleges of America into great department stores of specialized and professional education.

Traditionally Oxford is the "home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs", but in the case of liberal education there are signs that perhaps the reverse of tradition is nearer the truth. In 1913 Mr. Adams could see for American education nothing but a future of continued democratization with its attendant evils. In 1923, after ten intensive years of such a process, there are signs of a natural reaction and of a growing sentiment in favor of at least a few colleges which, in opposition to the mammoth institutions of our generation, shall maintain for those who wish it and can benefit by it the tradition and ideal of liberal education.

If such a sentiment prevail and the gods of efficiency and utility fall not merely in their onslaught on the English universities but in maintaining their sway over American education, it may be due, paradoxically, to their finding themselves better served in the end by the traditional liberal education. Mr. Leys has pointed out that in England among the better business men there is a preference for a man of liberal education. Efficiency and Utility, it must be admitted, are ugly words, but they are so largely because of their connotation of mechanical precision and mass production. In their broader sense they are as much qualities of the liberally educated man as a capacity for leadership and breadth of culture.