Point Counter Point

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To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

My attention was called to Mr. Alston Chases's letter in your columns of last Wednesday by some readers who admired it. But I found so much to disagree with in it that I would like the privilege of also extending my remarks in the record.

I feel that Mr. Chase has probably taken a more clear cut stand than he really meant to take. In order to make perfectly clear the nature of the discomfort of mind he felt over the President's report, he has placed upon the report the most unfavorable construction possible. For the purpose of his own argument he assumes practically that when the President, says scholar he means clerk. This seems to me somewhat ungrounded. We all know the types in question. We have at Harvard some real scholars and teachers, whom we all recognize and admire. In the graduate school and younger faculty we have also some who give some promise of becoming such. We have also many masqueraders. On the one hand there are the fugitives from the hard world to the sweetness of academic society, that is to say dilettantes, for whom the policy of the University has been growing more adverse for some years past. Another kind is the student whose scarcity of imagination is compensated for by plenitude of elbow grease, who may fairly be recognized as a clerk rather than a scholar. These are those who in Mr. Chase's words have "filled Widener with their petty lucubrations upon dead themes." There is no disagreement about them.

Mr. Chase assumes that the latter type is within the meaning of the President when the President says "scholar." I think Mr. Chase has raised a straw man. In opposition he offers a picture which I must say seems to me an ideal secondary school master leading youth to great books by the example of his own love of them.

Mr. Chase's preference for this type of teacher relates to the second point he makes, that the President is a scientist, and therefore a little at sea among humane studies. Of this one must say that there might be a grain of truth in it, but probably is not. A scientist could be in error on the matter, but the error would not be the one Mr. Chase thinks he sees. It is not that research is valuable to a teacher in science and unnecessary to a teacher in the humanities, but that it should be pursued in a different way, with a different mental armament. Mr. Chase sees only the differences and misses the common element, that research is a necessary element in the creation of a scholar and teacher, either in chemistry or classics, though very different in procedure and method in the two cases.

Mr. Chase fears that teaching is to be made a sideline and productive scholarship a final end. The President emphasizes the importance of scholarship only because he considers it a prime necessity, for the making of a good teacher for the University, and for the function of the University as a source of teaching for the whole country, as outlined in his address to the Harvard club of New York.

The emphasis upon duties against privileges which Mr. Chase makes is his really essential point, and while I wish to criticize it in the matter of contents I wish to applaud its spirit. The spectre of our failure which he raises is a spectre which has proved fatal to societies in the past. We think it has proved fatal partly because education has been inadequate. Mr. Chase makes the mistake of supposing that the teacher he pleads for can fulfill his duties adequately. Neither the good clerks nor Mr. Chase's good teachers have or can have any answers or teaching on our conspicuous social failures, such as war and depression. The general inadequacy of all the teaching yet offered to the world on such subjects illustrates painfully how much vigour and originality and labour must be brought to bear.

Harvard is neither a fact finding bureau nor a finishing school, but a University. The antagonism Mr. Chase writes so well about happens to be fictitious. The best teachers we have, and the ones I believe the President is thinking of, are neither the kind Mr. Chase condemns nor the kind he praises. It is only necessary to call attention to the fact that there are such men in order to show that the two types Mr. Chase discusses are not necessary alternatives. The type to be aimed at is a better type than either of them, and I see no reason to think that the President meant any other. George Pettee.