The Dean Donham Wrong

In the current "Harpers," Dean Wallace Brett Donham of the Business School surveys "The College in a Changing World" and finds only one thing to commend--the fact that the war has cut the college period to three years. Most students will agree that shortening their training period without lowering standards and requirements is to the good. As Dean Donham points out, even the student who must earn his expenses will gain since he can now hold a year-round job.

When the Dean insists that more "common sense, teamwork, and leadership" should be taught, students will nod to the familiar platitudes. But when Dean Donham demands vocational training in the colleges, his failure to comprehend the true function of a liberal arts college in a modern democracy is revealed.

Dean Donham praises President Conant's heavy concentration in chemistry as an undergraduate. As a result, President Conant passed his Ph.D. in two years. Agreed, this was excellent training for a professional chemist. But the reason that James B. Conant devoted several years to the study of poison gas rather than something more productive can be blamed on the many men throughout the world with the same idea as Dean Donham--the idea that it is not the duty of colleges to help men think their way through a difficult world by a process of mental development and broad acquaintanceship with the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. Many seem to believe that the colleges' duty is rather to prepare men for the garnering of shekels by intensive study of Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends" and Joe Wheeler's "Sizzlemanship."

When Dean Donham declares that "the collapse of the old Germany was hastened by the inability of university-trained men to fit themselves into the economic life of the community," he forgets that the chief reason most Germans couldn't find work and finally took to the swastika is that the rest of the world was so blinded by nationalism as to turn central Europe into an impossible mess, and so stupid as to bring their own countries to the verge of revolt in the Great Depression.

Dean Donham's "practical skills" have an important place in preparing a man for making his living anywhere in the world--here or in Nazi Europe. But mere technical skill and ability to cooperate with other technicians is scarcely sufficient intellectual background for the average men, let alone potential leaders, in a modern democracy.

When he berates the colleges for being "too narrowly intellectual, too critical, too debunking, too skeptical," one senses that the Dean's attitude arises from a fundamental belief not in democracy but in the status quo. The reason America's colleges must overdo their task is that their raw product is too unintellectual, too uncritical, too gullible, and too full of bunk. The high schools and to a lesser extent the prep schools provide merely a superficial pot-pourri of facts and so send to college men and women lacking sufficient intellectual maturity to be given the finishing touches of a liberal education in a few months. Because the colleges must teach the students how to study and how to think before they can start teaching things to think about, some of the Dean's criticism is fired above his rightful target.

Democracy's citizens must have an intellectual background sweeping enough for them to understand the world which they rule. They must have the critical faculty of assembling facts and doing their own thinking. And they must be able to recognize buncombe at fifty paces. True, Harvard and other American colleges have fallen far short of this goal of preparing their graduates for intelligent participation in a democratic community. Like almost every one, they have taken what little democracy we have had without enough inspection and too much for granted. But there is a vast difference between their goal of a firmly based democracy and Dean Donham's goal of technical efficiency--a difference so vast that the world is at war because of it.