Frederick P. Keppel

“ The scholar must descend from his tower; he must, if he is to serve effectively, learn to think to order and to do it rapidly, to deal with all sorts and conditions of men; he must bear with their amazing ignorances and profit by their equally amazing knowledge of things of which he is ignorant. He must know the art of team play. The war has brought out a new type of scholarship, or at any rate has developed it to such an extent that its implications are new, and that is the unselfish coöperation of experts to meet a given and usually an immediately pressing need. ”

“ Our heterogeneous immigration, our enormous national resources, which have tempted us to live on capital rather than on interest, our prosperity, have made us neither fat nor flabby. We now know that as a people we don't really care about money or the money game if we are shown some other game better worth playing; that selfishness and luxury drop away as if by magic when they interfere with the keener satisfactions of giving one's self. Even for us stay-at-homes, the Liberty Loan people, Mr. Hoover, the Red Cross and other welfare workers were on hand to show us how to play the better game. ”

“ The fourth lesson of which I wish to speak is that a high aim and ideal is what counts most of all, what lifts the individual up from selfishness and sloth. To bind the country together and to make the transformation which still seems miraculous, we had a noble national aim, a complete dedication to the task before us, an utter absence of any selfish or self-seeking factor in the whole enterprise. The conduct of our soldiers, their submission to a discipline to which most of them were completely unused was, I think, in a very large measure due to the recognition of this aim. ”

“ It seems to me that the most important single lesson which our scholars can learn from the experience of the two past years is the importance of this team play in scholarship, and not only team play with other scholars, but team play with those who have the equally valuable and perhaps even rarer gift of getting things done, who perhaps deserve the title of scholars in the control of time and space. The scholars who made good were those who had had not only the training and temperament for research, but the training and temperament for working with other people. ”

“ In the first place, we have learned that as a nation we possess the power to see a big job through, and we possess it because we have the qualities of youth—enthusiasm, learning capacity, energy, elasticity, initiative—the pioneering spirit. We have the shortcomings of youth also—impatience, superficiality, improvidence, cock-sureness—but when the test came we managed to strengthen our virtues and to a large extent to overcome our failings. ”

“ Excellent work has been done by individual philosophers, economists, and sociologists in labor questions, in welfare work, on the war-time trade and industrial boards; but as a whole our scholars in these fields did not dominate the situation as did the men of science in theirs. Of course, their task was infinitely harder. For one thing, though we may be ready to confess our ignorance of calculus or colloidal chemistry or thermo-dynamics, we all believe in the validity of our off-hand judgments in politics and morals, and indeed in all the springs of human conduct. ”

“ The teacher's point of view shifts from a critical one, with attention focused on discovering whether the individual measures up to the academic standards fixed by school authorities, to one of friendly, not to say eager interest to discover what each individual really can do well. The student's spirit also changes from one of discouragement and doubt of his ability ever to make good, to one of interest and desire for achievement. ”

“ A student body is, or at any rate was before the war, the most convention ridden group of which I have any knowledge. I am all for conventions, because they save a great deal of time and worry, but only so far as we recognize them as conventions and do not exalt them into principles or philosophical truths. Remember that the public opinion of America is an infinitely more important thing to the world than ever before, and that you are each to be a part of it. ”

“ THE WAR AS A PRACTICAL TEST OF AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP [2]
It is a difficult task to attempt to define the American scholar of to-day. If any of you doubt it, let him try it as I have tried. Scholarship, like many another broad term, has no sharply marked edges. It is hard to define anything that lacks definiteness; and, after all, the task is relatively profitless, because we all of us recognize what is at the center of the concept. I think we all recognize that the scholar is an expert in some particular field or fields ”

“ Now I realize that a university can't do all these things with its army in just the way the government can. It can't casually transfer a man from engineering to psychology, nor a girl from philosophy to cookery—or vice versa—no matter how desirable such a transfer might be for the individual and the community. ”

“ During the war the effectiveness of our scholar teachers was well tested by an entirely new set of pupils, pupils sometimes with eagles or stars on their shoulders, or in the civil field, captains of industry, clad in the glittering armor of a big business reputation.
Nowadays one cannot be a scholar in general. One has to have some specialty. As to what that specialty shall be in terms of usefulness to the community, I think I have given you examples enough to show that the range is almost unlimited. ”

“ First, that we are a real nation, potentially strong with the strength of youth. Second, that to fulfill our mission, every man and woman and all of every such individual is an object of national concern; that we must be mobilized and we must continue our lessons in team play. We have still plenty to learn in this field. Third, that we must have and must recognize the leadership of those who know, which, after all, is the great test of a democracy. Fourth, that to bring out the best that is in us, as individuals and as a nation, we must have an aim, high, clear-cut and clearly understood. ”

“ In other words, the virtues which the soldier most admires and regarding which he had evidently learned the most valuable lessons, are courage, unselfishness or coöperativeness, and modesty.
The record of our soldiers has proved beyond a doubt that once you get men into groups with a common and a worth-while purpose, courage—both the reckless courage that comes by instinct and that higher type, the courage of the man who recognizes his danger—can no longer be assumed to be a rare virtue. ”

“ We should never again face a great national crisis with nearly one-third of our men of military age unfit for hard physical work. We need campaigns of physical education and social hygiene, and we need to apply the lessons in human salvage which the army has learned during the war. But we need more than each individual and all of him. We must see to it that the individual star, of whatever magnitude, is subordinated to the team play of the group. ”

“ It must not be forgotten that our scholar in war worked under two powerful stimuli, neither of them operative under ordinary conditions. Although he was out of his accustomed setting, working with strange people and at strange tasks, nevertheless the realization of the national need and the joy of feeling an identification with the forces facing the adversary tended to produce that fine frenzy which enables a man to do better than he knows how. ”

“ So far as discipline brings about regularity of life, of exercise, so long as it ministers to alertness, we can use it, but as between discipline on the one hand, and initiative and team play on the other, to meet our academic or our national needs, I am for initiative and team play. ”

“ Through the centuries men had come to the belief that if their soldiers were only valiant and disciplined in arms, it would not do to inquire too curiously into their personal standards of conduct in other matters—that a considerable wastage in military strength from drunkenness and disease was inevitable. And as we all know, this wastage has in the past sapped, not only the strength of the Army, but afterwards the very life of the nation to which the soldier must sooner or later return. ”

“ Now as to leadership, and in a university we can identify the leaders with the teachers, there is no doubt, I think, that the teachers' profession comes out of the war in a higher place than it went in, and the scholar goes back to his work with a feeling of confidence in himself in view of his record in competition and comparison with men in other callings. I venture to predict that we shall hear a good deal less frequently in the future the old gibe that the man who could do things did them and the man who couldn't, taught them. ”

“ Being a scholar and not merely an [Pg 46] expert, he saw the broad human aspect of his specialty; that the first thing to do with the man who is blinded, or otherwise maimed, is to make him realize that it is worth while to get well; that he can have a life which is worth living; that if his old job is no longer possible, there are others for which he can be trained. One of America's most distinguished philosophical chemists settled down to the humble but very essential problem of making mixed flours rise and bake with a crust—and solved it. ”

“ A university, it seems to me, should be a place where the primary object is not the repression of [Pg 77] youthful exuberance nor the correction of youthful failings (though both may be necessary on occasion) , but rather, a place for the encouragement of the great and vital qualities of youth—enthusiasm, energy, power of acquisition, sensitiveness of impression. It is the place where the older members of the community have the best chance to stay young. The university should be essentially a company of enthusiasts, of pioneers. ”

“ It is a very common virtue. Cowardice is infinitely rarer. The citations and the casualty records, for instance, have completely rehabilitated the Jew as a fighting man, and the faithful need no longer go back to Josephus for their war legends.
Not all the courage and fortitude was shown on the field of battle. We must not forget that last fall we suffered from by far the most serious epidemic in the history of America, and, in the dark days in our training camps, opportunities were offered, and gladly accepted, for a display of heroism and devotion of the highest type. ”

“ It remained for a scholar in perhaps the purest branch of pure science, astronomy, to recognize the well known fact that it is the shape of the tail of any and every moving object, motor car or boat or what you will, and not the shape of the head, which is the factor of chief importance in design, and to apply this recognition to artillery problems. ”

“ There is in every normal, wholesome-minded student some motor nerve that can be touched in such a way as to release that type of coördinated energy which we call a sense of responsibility. This all goes back to knowing our men and women and establishing human contacts and human confidences.
In spite of individual disappointments, and as a college dean, I have had my share, I am confident that the normal young American either already possesses as a motive force some worth-while aim or that he can be guided toward such an aim if approached in the right way. ”

“ In practically every case the instances that I have given of the successful tests of our scholarship involve the work of a member of Phi Beta Kappa or of the sister society, Sigma Xi; and I therefore may be permitted to say a word more directly to our younger members of the society of those seeking the philosophy of life, to our Columbia scholars in the making. In my time, which, by the way, was just twenty-one years ago, a man who wanted to live the life of a scholar was practically limited to teaching as the means of making his living. ”

“ A single division of the National Research Council, in its report for 1918, showed work of national significance by the scholars in physics, mathematics, and allied fields toward the solution [Pg 41] of no fewer than sixty-eight different problems, every one of which needed for its solution men with training and knowledge and vision. At the outset, who among us had the slightest conception of the complexity of the adaptations to warfare of what was known to modern scholarship? We knew that the war was mounting into the air, but who had any realization of the adjustments which this involved? ”

“ The War Department has learned so much in this great laboratory experiment in human conduct that the impious wish sometimes arises in one's mind that we might promptly try it all over again for the chance of profiting by our mistakes. Thank God we can't do that, but in our daily contact with these same men restored to their communities we can to a certain degree carry on the work, and in so doing we can learn much from the successes and failures of the Army. ”

“ I have spoken of the work of prevention, of the more important work of substitution, and I now come to the most important of all—the spirit of confidence which extended from top to bottom of the huge organization that the great mass of our men would go straight for the sake of going straight. ”

“ We shall never want in this country a general subordination of the individual will and initiative to external control. Discipline is a means and not an end. If discipline, as such, externally imposed, were so important a factor in success as many people seem to think to-day, we could look through a list of ex-enlisted men in the army and navy—I mean the men enlisted and discharged during peace time—and find a relatively large number who made [Pg 94] conspicuously good records after returning to civil life. As a matter of fact, we find nothing of the kind. ”

“ We must learn the lessons which the soldiers have to teach us in the large just as we must grasp their accomplishments in the large. There is a morning after for nations as well as for individuals, and we seem just now to be in danger of losing our conception of the greatness of the enterprise, and its essential soundness, through the intrusion of the instances, relatively very few, where things did not go right; where human nature did not reach the heights, or having reached them, failed to remain upon them. ”

“ One thing that mankind should have learned long since is that, broadly speaking, selfishness as a guiding motive is essentially negative—the absence of something better—the man is a rare exception who does not lose himself and his self-interest in the conception or the ambition of the group, the squad or battalion or regiment, the division, the army or the nation. ”

“ Don't take yourself seriously, but take your opportunities for usefulness seriously. Find out the callings in which America is short. There are plenty of them, as the war has shown. Think over whether it isn't possible for you to be one of the men or one of the women who, from your training and momentum and vision, will be selected ten or fifteen or twenty years hence, to take on some important job, with the nation as your client, as the one person best qualified to fill it. ”

“ This may be because the scholar has been trained in a form of competition which the so-called practical man lacked. He is used to having his work wiped out by some discovery of a rival, and having to begin afresh. He is used to a checking of his work by his fellows [Pg 54] which, if of a different nature, is no less relentless than the war-time check in the toll of human lives. The man of high reputation in business often failed because he had learned to measure success and his own competence only in terms of dividends, and in the new test he found his measuring-rod worse than useless. ”