FLEXNER REFLECTS

Last year, Dr. Abraham Flexner, philosophical critic of educational systems, made a thorough survey of American, English, and German Universities, concentrating in large measure on the undergraduate college. In the present Atlantic Monthly he turns his attention specifically to the graduate schools of American Universities and with his usual trenchant insight finds them not even "within hailing distance of the university standard". For his criterion of the university Dr. Flexner turns back to the Johns Hopkins graduate school founded in 1876 by Daniel Coit Gilman. President Gilman's educational principles were few but sound. A graduate school should place its emphasis on securing the finest possible brains for its faculty and student body: buildings and facilities should be secondary. An atmosphere of serious love of study should characterize the surroundings. Finally, men should be taught to comprehend broad, general principles, and not be crammed with technical routine.

Judging these still to be the principles by which a university should be guided, Dr. Flexner examines American graduate schools. In every instance there has been departure from the ideal. The undergraduate has become predominant, taking to himself most of the attention and revenue of the university. To be sure, physical facilities for graduate work have increased phenomenally, but the intellectual side has not gone hand in hand. The huge influx of men seeking "gilt-edge certificates" insuring well paid positions has necessitated expensive educational leviathans. The overcrowding of schools has made impossible the establishment of any cultural environment, and led institutions to make their curricula ever more technically vocational.

Dr. Flexner's criticism is essentially correct, and well founded on fact; his proposed remedy, that universities should free themselves from the shackles of commercialization by the route of endowment, is sound. A transformation of emphasis there must be and it can come only from a determined and unceasing effort on the part of universities to break the spell of monetary success and attract brilliant men into cultural rather than lucrative pursuits.