Humphreys Complains of Harvard's "Numerical Accounting for Culture"

The following is the second article written for the Crimson by Arthur R. Humphreys, Commonwealth Fellow at Harvard from Cambridge University. The final article will appear tomorrow.

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I have heard Harvard's juvenile three centuries mentioned with apology. That is absurd. Three centuries in America look like ten in Europe; beyond a certain point historical foreshortening plays havoc with time, besides which the foundation of a college three hundred years ago in New England was a more creditable achievement than that of an English university six hundred years back. One feels a certain nakedness at first, in the absence of the accepted minutiae,--even of gowns, bicycles and turbans, which contribute to the peculiar flavor of Cambridge life. But then one creates new clothes of tradition and atmosphere, for no university that gives its professor of rhetoric the right to graze a cow in its courts need envy the anachronisms of Europe, and the sense that one's dinner companion may hail from Augusta, or Miami, or Oshkosh, not to mention Gunsight or Broken Bow or Eagle Butte, gives one spatial contacts that are as cherished as the chronological ones of Europe.

Educational Drawback

Educationally I think that the draw-backs of the numerical system of accounting for culture are not entirely overcome. I myself have to account for four courses, though my work cannot be parcelled into four parts, and all I can do is to pursue it without a thought for mathematics, and leave my instructors to settle the arithmetic with their consciences. Were I working for a, Ph.D. I should feel the rigidity more acutely still: and I believe the graduate school should put more trust in a man's ambition to all his true profitably, independently of the quantitative method. I am fully grateful to my tutors for the flexibility which they show in interpreting the demands of the Department. The demands, however, are there, and militate against the qualitative, in favor of quantitative, work, so that the ratio of effort to profit is appallingly large.

Catholicity, Not Specialization

Graduate schools, of course, inevitably, accompany an undergraduate system which aims at catholicity rather than specialization, which in turn accompanies a half-hearted attempt to compromise with the practical. With that attempt I sympathize, in theory. Cambridge has outgrown its unconcern with the contemporary, but American universities have had two centuries of modernity. Nevertheless the question of purpose needs to be reconsidered in relation to university training everywhere, and in this particular I prefer the English practice. Ostensibly the English system is run to produce bishops, judges, members of Parliament, Higher Civil Servants, and Pure Scientists. As these are assumed not to need any practical qualification, it is natural to train them--except, of course for the scientists--on the classics, history, literature or philosophy. One specializes therefore from the start in one's chosen subject. This does not result in narrowness: it means an extensive training in one, or two subjects themselves of an inclusive nature. The English graduate therefore has not the versatility of the American, and is more limited in his prospects of positions. Men who go up vague, and remain vague, as to their ultimate aims are at a loss when they graduate for employment: but the knowledge that the university is orientated towards the learned professions to a large extent has a selective function. The high, school boy to make a rash generalization only turns to the university for the specialized purposes for which it is known to exist; if they do not suit him he goes straight into business or to a business school instead, for only for a small minority does college follow the high school in England. The result for the university is a type of broad specialization from the beginning, which renders graduate schools except in technical studies, unnecessary.