DAYS OF OUR YEARS

The supply of ivory towers--traditional symbol of academic isolation from current events--is going to be a lot greater than the demand this year. Many a Harvard faculty member who has in the past cultivated an "objective" approach will in 1940 do an about-face. Emphasis will be placed on "integrating scholarship with the problems of life today," and on "relating education to society."

In concrete terms this means that classics professors will lecture on "Virgil and the Present World Crisis," chemists and physicists on "Science and the War," and so on; even the most remote of the ivory-tower dwellers will indulge in a daily, dish of "realism." Insofar as educators give up their customary profound preoccupation with the meaningless and esoteric, such a change can only be accounted a gain. The quest for knowledge, as Robert S. Lynd asserted in "Knowledge for What?", ought to be motivated by some social need, which stimulates an action toward its solution, and in turn encourages the acquisition of knowledge as a guide for that action. That is precisely the effect which this war seems likely to have on scholarship at Harvard, and in this we may rejoice.

But in another respect, the new educational emphasis on the war may prove unfortunate. To the student who is assailed on every side by unccasing if well-meant admonitions about his "duty," his "opportunity to serve," and so forth, the deside to escape will become well-nigh overwhelming. A "tonight be merry for tomorrow we die" spirit, never wholly absent in the college community, will feed on just such a desire, until it rises to fever pitch.

It is against this sort of attitude that we ought to steel ourselves. We must not look upon the war as a "sea at the end of time," as a today for which there is no tomorrow. If we do, we ourselves and the nation as a whole become psychologically unprepared both for the combat and for the peace and social reconstruction which must be made to follow it. Whatever the economic and political reasons driving us to war, if to war we go, the foremost consideration will be, for many, the belief that this is a struggle to continue civilization and humanistic values. For us to begin that struggle by scuttling the chance for a liberal-arts education, and by pursuing instead a "tonight he merry" philosophy, is to denominate ourselves cowards and fools. There is a tomorrow.