THE SCHOLAR UNCELLED

In his annual report to the trustees of Columbia University, besides a startling appeal to the people to discharge their debt for the services of the colleges by a clause in their wills, President Nicholas Murray Butler attacked the narrow specialization of graduate students. "The insistence that a teacher . . . must be able to produce a degree of Master of Arts or even Doctor of Philosophy," he said, "can only result in multiplying many times over the number of graduate students at American universities, while bringing them to look upon their university residence and work as a penance to be endured. Such artificial rules . . . . . tend to destroy . . . that joy in learning and that zeal for inquiry which are the making of a university spirit. . . . Then, too, there is that tendency . . . to specialize so severely, as to make the student blind and deaf to the wonderful appeal of intellectual color and form which surrounds him on every side."

Dr. Butler is right in his contention that the best teacher is the scholar of widest knowledge and appreciation, but it is disconcerting to have the president of a university which stands foremost in graduate enrollment so deprecate specialization. For he based his plea for endowments upon the great service to complex civilization that university trained men are doing. And certainly it is not the dilettante, however interesting he may be, who is making possible the refinement of living, but the specialist impervious to every other interest who burrows until he unearth his treasure. His importance to society, his conception of his own raison d'etre, hang on his search. And while his undergraduate, training can not have left him bare of all general knowledge, the necessity of keeping apace or in advance of the rush of discovery grants no opportunity for attention, however desirable, to other learning. But the faculty of being perfectly dull is an luborn talent, and not the result of training.

It is true that if specialization is not modulated by the philosophy of business, or science, or whatever the field may be, the exponent may be a useless cog, or even dangerous as a theoretical bigot. This was the blight, in the form of a superiority complex, to which Dr. Butler ascribes the death of interest in the classics. No doubt a society of the widely informed, not soporific with erudition, would be the cultural utopia. But as long as civilization goes ploughing ahead in the present direction, moles seem indispensable as ground breakers. There is no reason for salvaging persons who are perfectly, if esoterically, happy, and what is more, an excellent protection against snags.