Crane Brinton Calls Article of Alston Chase Brave, Fearless Bombshell in Critic Review

The following review of the "Harvard Critic" was written for the Crimson by Crane Brinton, Assistant Professor of History.

The "Critic" is still the mugwump of Harvard journalism, still does not quite fit in with the established bi-party system. In its brief career it has shown its willingness to be independent, which will perhaps appear to the routine-minded as a willingness to be inconsistent. Mr. George Haskins in a very able introductory editorial does make an effort to knit together the "Critic's" past and its present, even to the point of not altogether repudiating last year's famous questionnaire; but on the whole this number of the "Critic" strikes out for itself unfettered by tradition.

Mr. Alston Chase's article on "The World and the Faculty" is a brave bombshell. It was aimed, perhaps, at too many separate marks for a single bombshell, and will seem, to some bystanders at least, to have exploded without major damage to anyone. In the preamble, Mr. Conant is accused of leading, in the name of what seems to Mr. Chase piffling scholarship, an "Albigensian crusade" against good teaching. A good deal of this is surely pure misunderstanding. There are as yet few signs that the present administration really means to fill the Harvard faculty with men who devote their lives to the adverb in Tacitus or to the importation of bananas into Brittany during the sixteenth century, and none that it wishes to get rid of teachers who might follow in the footsteps of James, Norton, Babbitt, and their peers.

In the body of his article, Mr. Chase deals with two subjects. The first is the problem of promotion and recruiting in the faculty. Broadly speaking, there are in American practice three methods (not always mutually exclusive) of choosing a college faculty. The president may do it despotically; the head of each department may do it despotically; each department may do it democratically (or if you prefer, oligarchically) in much the way a club elects, its members. Mr. Chase feels that Harvard on the whole uses the club method, and that this method militates against the election of striking and original personalities. Unwilling to trust a single benevolent despot, he invents machinery of his own, a standing committee of the wisest, best, and broadcast of the faculty, transcending departmental lines, who will be very, very patient and sympathetic with the young men, and choose only the wisest, best, and broadest among them. This of course is also the club method--only Mr. Chase is happily founding his own club. The present reviewer is inclined to feel that the more practical way out (assuming you want a way out) is that of the benevolent despot. The trouble is that, though most men will agree on what is despotism, they differ greatly as to what is benevolence.

Attacks Science

Secondly, Mr. Chase writes an attack on science and a defense of humanism. This portion of his article will provide abundant material for what in simpler circles than those of Harvard undergraduates are called "bull sessions." "For after all," he writes, "facts, especially scientific facts, are the most untruthful things there are." That is going a bit further than Kant, though like Kant, Mr. Chase does find truths at last in moral judgments. Lord Bacon went wrong because, though he had a scientific education, he had no moral education. It is difficult here to avoid making a debater's point, and suggesting to Mr. Chase that Alcibiades had a very humanistic, moral education.

Mrs. Gertrude Slaughter's "Shelley and the NRA" is certainly untainted with the scientific attitude. Shelley, as has often been pointed out, believed apparently in the wholesale regeneration of the race by a miracle. Mrs. Slaughter does not quite persuade us that the NRA is a miracle--or at any rate that kind of miracle.

Mr. Strauss in "Education and the Flesh" asks very reasonably, if a bit redundantly, for a Harvard that will train its sons to get out into a world full of Hitlers and Brain Trusters and run that world much better than these men are now running it. The central problem of his essay, which may be out roughly as that of "theory" and "practice," of "pure learning" and "applied learning," is, like those Mr. Chase treats, of perennial and inexhaustible interest, and if Mr. Strauss has not solved it (I expect he would hardly claim to have done so), he has put it clearly before his audience --and that is exactly the kind of thing the "Critic" can do.

Mr. Russell Olsen's "Mr. Eliot and the Jesuits" alone of the essays in this number bears some slight trace of that preciousness so carefully cultivated in certain Harvard circles of the 1920's. He makes the neat point that Mr. Eliot's flight to the Church has resemblances with Mr. Malcolm Cowley's flight to Communism; but on the whole his epigrams fail to hang together.

Mr. Cherington's "Aid for the Poor Student" makes excellent sense. There are many obstacles in the way of Harvard's adopting his principle of charging what the traffic will bear--in other words, charging those who can pay it with the full cost of tuition, and using all surplus funds to pay, if necessary, up to the full cost of the education of genuinely brilliant students. None the less some such solution is on the way. Few nowadays will defend the old-fashioned belief that a young man gains enough from the moral discipline of "working his way through" by dull manual labor to compensate for what he loses in opportunity for profitable, leisurely reading talking, and listening.

The number as a whole does leave one pretty clear impression. The writers are, in various degrees of intensity, all espousing a Cause, all embracing a Truth, all anxious to rescue their fellows from aimlessness and unbelief. They would probably all agree that Liberalism Is Bankrupt (though here I may be doing them too much injustice). At any rate, what Mr. Chase calls "yesterday's scientific truth" rouses them to no enthusiasm. Whether this yearning for humanism, salvation, discipline, the Perfect State, social duty, practical reason, a faith that can move mountains, Wisdom, and the rest is a sign of youth, or of the times, or just plain accident, is a matter of opinion. Without giving the "Critic" more cosmic importance than it would wish to have, this reviews is inclined to see in it a sign of the times