Late Dean Briggs: A 1934 Chat

"I'd rather be expelled by him than be praised by anyone else," a nineteenth century undergraduate once commented. His testament, sincere if overstated, was a tribute to the greatness of the late LeBarron Russell Briggs '75, confidant of "Copey" and "Kitty" in the days of "too much teaching and too little studying" in Harvard College.

Briggs, appointed College Dean after a faculty reshuffle in 1890 and elected Radcliffe president in 1902, where he remained for 23 years, "first tried to help offenders and then disciplined them", according to one biographer. Samuel Eliot Morison '08 writes: "He is the only teacher to be mentioned in the same breath with Copey. Briggs operated on the moral, Copey on the intellectual and aesthetic natures of young men."

Tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the birth of Dean Briggs. To commemorate the occasion, Antonios P. Savides, retired professor of Psychology and Education at Russell Sage College, has made available the text of a 1934 interview with Dean Briggs. Their conversation reads in part, as follows:

Q. What would be your advice to one who aspires to be a writer?

A. Everybody has his own method. Some write very slowly and some in great haste. I think it is rather a good plan to get underway as quickly as you can. Fill your mind with the subject and write rapidly, then set aside what you have written and go over it later very carefully, sentence by sentence; thus you may got accuracy without stiffness. Writing sentence by sentence with minute care makes your work lose life.

Q. Outside of the writers of the Bible, whom would you consider the two or three greatest writers of all time?

A. Shakespeare, Homer, if we would include both the Iliad and the Odyessey, and Dante. I shall not be sorry tomorrow for mentioning them. I have not necessarily given them in the order of their importance.

Q. Who, in your present judgment, are the three greatest American writers?

A. Emerson for one, and William James for another. As for the third, I don't know.

Q. Whom do you consider the greatest American educator?

A. I should not dare say. Charles W. Eliot would be the dominant figure, the greatest man in American education.

Q. Which book do you think is the greatest world book next to the Bible?

A. I don't really know, I can't tell you. I have already mentioned Shakespeare; and the Book of Job would be included in the Bible.

Q. What are the greatest lessons you have derived in life?

A. One of the greatest problems is, as William James says, "to make your nervous system your ally and not your enemy." Getting strength out of sensitiveness that might make you weak--not that I have succeeded in it--that is one of the greatest fights of life.

Q. What are the greatest needs of our age?

A. It seems to need a little check on speed; the mutual understanding of nations also.

Q. What is America's greatest strength and greatest weakness?

A. I am not prepared to answer the first. I should want several months. As to her weakness, she has too high an opinion of herself, a feeling of superiority over other nations, a superiority complex; a tendency to believe that America leads in civilization; a tendency to look down upon nations she cannot understand. An American woman, after twenty years in Europe, once remarked to a fellow country-woman, "your idea of civilization is plumbing."

Q. What should you expect education to be in the next 25 years?

A. Pretty complicated question, too. Education ought to stop war. Milton's definition would be appropriate, with some modifications of course. "I call therefore, a complete and generous education that which fits men to perform justly, skillfully and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war." That is one of the best definitions of education I know. One of the best things that education should do is to educate people out of war.