THE PRINCE AND THE PROFESSOR

The most sensational, and the most reckless, of recent attacks on the relation of the university economist to the depression has come from Mr. Frederick Prince, Boston capitalist, who brands the professor as either a meddler or a coward, and asks, "Why should a man ever run away from the world except through cowardice? Professors are our curse--they talk too much." For his part, he recommends in a very definite fashion that the nation "chuck its professors," and draw its economic enlightenment from more practical sources.

From Mr. Prince's particular point of view, the conclusion that the college teacher represents a fair weather claque may well seem irresistible. He has probably grown a little weary of complacent rationalizations after 1929 from those who were once very prone to accept the new era without a second thought. But this does not change, although it may modify the fact that his own position is similarly untenable. For he does not distinguish with sufficient precision the real and fundamental position of the college professor.

Endowments notwithstanding, the teacher is in no sense a lucky to impervious magnates. His duty is primarily one of instruction, to those who come to him for the purpose, and there is no evidence to substantiate the claim that the science of economics is not ably and disinterestedly taught in our colleges. No medical lecturer is condemned for the methods of quacks with whom he has had no contact. Nor can the teacher of economics be fairly attacked when those who in greedy confidence seized into their hands the control and the sweets of financial domination, ignored the rules of their own game. His was, and remains, the task of teaching economic laws and theories, alive to their conflicts and mutations n practice; but in himself usually withdrawn from their direct, everyday application on the exchanges and in the factories.

It may well be that the trained economist did not fulfill what is, from a corollary standpoint, a very real duty; that he did not perceive the fatal anomalies of the actual business structure of the world and prescribe for them. But this constitutes no adequate basis for such an attack as this on the integrity and usefulness of the economic scholar. And one feels an ironic inconsistency in Mr. Prince's simultaneous dicta that college chairs attract only these whom the world refuses, and that the incumbents of those chairs did not save the world from disaster. The harassed capitalist's desire to pass the buck is, however, not too difficult to understand.