MYOPIA HUNTS KNOWLEDGE

One wonders a little whether Dean McConn of Lehigh is not trying a little too hard to see exclusively out of the rose colored half of his bifocals. In a recent article in the North American Review he vigorously applauds the decision among hosts of undergraduates to devote only a compulsory minimum of time to their studies and lavish the remainder upon outside activities. He makes the plausible statement that the prepondering majority of college students have not the capacity to pursue bookish knowledge. Certainly there is support for this view, but there is also an increasing body of evidence that the development of such a capacity is not beyond a very large proportion of those who now prefer a life of stereotyped activity.

Here at Harvard there is a peculiar opportunity to study the unfolding of this thought, for there is an ever greater flow of students to the graduate schools who are trying to make up for the time wasted at some college conducted on Dean McConn's principles of nihilism. Time and again from these people is heard the statement "I never knew what study was until I came here". Obviously one cannot like study if he doesn't know what it really is; and an acquaintance with the vitality of knowledge is not possible to those whose pursuit of it has been but a lifeless travesty.

Dean McConn ignores the fact that some bodies of undergraduates are demonstrably activated by a desire for study and plunges headlong into an explanation of its impossibility. He is convinced that the exclusive purpose of an education for nine out of ten undergraduates is to prepare them for business. This absolute neglect of the value of study for its own sake and for the appreciation of human knowledge attendant on it hardly needs comment. Its glaring fallacy will be too familiar to anyone acquainted with the already large literature inspired by the spiritless existence of the retired business man.

Assuming none the less that vocational training is the sole function of most American colleges, he hastily concludes that the best preparation for an active business life is frenzied outside activity in college. Granting that some few undergraduate organizations approximate the conditions found in actual business life, it is difficult to see how the usual ad-getting sweatshirt gathering competition shapes one for the executive chair of a large corporation. It is much easier to believe the figures of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company on the value of a sound background of collegiate study for success in the business world. As the problems of manufacture and distribution grow, they increasingly demand for their administration minds capable of grasping the delicate abstractions and involved theory upon which they depend. Business success no longer involves a mere doing of the right thing by intuition or experience but is only obtained by those whose minds are trained to recognize the entire implication of the affairs with which they deal.