Education, Inc.

Professor Yandell Henderson of Yale, in raising his voice against the "industrialization" of the universities' teaching staffs, is warning against tendencies which are increasingly apparent in our higher educational institutions, but for which no obvious remedy has yet been discovered. The great increase in the size of the undergraduate body, the proliferation of all kinds of different courses and subjects to meet the restless needs of the time, the appearance of vast and expensive educational "plant," the semi-industrialization of athletics, the development of great endowment funds and the necessity for endowment "drives" to maintain and expand them, and, finally, the replacement of the nineteenth-century college president by the business executive competent to care for these elaborate and pressing interests--all this has the appearance of a natural process, as unconscious and as difficult to control as such processes usually are.

That education is not always the gainer by it has been pointed out often enough. Dr. Henderson touches upon one danger in the process. The teacher can have only a remote interest in many of the preoccupations that relentlessly press upon the university executive officer today, and it is a natural result that the teacher should tend to be depressed into the status of a salaried "employee" of the undertaking of which he should be the center. The type of learned society which the English universities have been able to maintain and which seventy-five years ago characterized the faculties of the best American universities is dissolving under the rush of other matters and interests. "The teaching staff," says Dr. Henderson, "should be partners in a noble enterprise, not employees in an industry. A university should be a self-governing fellowship of scholars." The "autocratic organization typical of a business corporation" is hardly the ideal one for an institution of learning.

But agreement with the protest cannot conceal the fact that it is still a protest against the whole spirit of the time, which can express itself only through the instrumentalities that are natural to it. Anachronisms cannot be maintained even by universities, and the Yale, say, of 1850, when a paternal president gathered his little group of faculty and scholars about him under the New Haven elms and discoursed wisdom, is beyond recovery. What, of course, can be done is to adjust the best that was in the old to the conditions of the new. In this particular question it seems to rest primarily upon the teachers to maintain their independence and influence to the best of their ability. Dr. Henderson finds the teachers themselves "notoriously weak" in resisting industrialization; and indeed, it is to them that his report is made. --New York Herald Tribune.