Thorstein Veblen

“ The Governing Boards
In the working theory of the modern civilized community, -- that is to say in the current common-sense apprehension of what is right and good, as it works out in the long run, -- the university is a corporation of learning, disinterested and dispassionate. To its keeping is entrusted the community's joint interest in esoteric knowledge. It is given over to the single-minded pursuit of science and scholarship, without afterthought and without a view to interests subsidiary or extraneous to the higher learning. ”

“ The final discretion in the affairs of the seats of learning is entrusted to men who have proved their capacity for work that has nothing in common with the higher learning. (3*)
As bearing on the case of the American universities, it should be called to mind that the businessmen of this country, as a class, are of a notably conservative habit of mind. In a degree scarcely equalled in any community that can lay claim to a modicum of intelligence and enterprise, the spirit of American business is a spirit of quietism, caution, compromise, collusion, and chicane. ”

“ Business enterprise proceeds on ulterior purposes and calculations of expediency; it depends on shrewd expedients and lives on the margin of error, on the fluctuating margin of human miscalculation. The training given by these two lines of endeavour -- science and business -- is wholly divergent; with the notorious result that for the purposes of business enterprise the scientists are the most ignorant, gullible and incompetent class in the community. ”

“ As elsewhere, but in a higher degree and a more cogent sense than elsewhere, success in business affairs, in such measure as to command the requisite deference, comes only by getting something for nothing. ”

“ The American business community is well enough as it is, without the higher learning, and it is fully sensible that the higher learning is not a business proposition.
But a good rule works both ways. If scholarly and scientific training, such as may without shame be included under the caption of the higher learning, unfits men for business efficiency, then the training that comes of experience in business must also be held to unfit men for scholarly and scientific pursuits, and even more pronouncedly for the surveillance of such pursuits. ”

“ Business success is by common consent, and quite uncritically, taken to be conclusive evidence of wisdom even in matters that have no relation to business affairs. So that it stands as a matter of course that businessmen must be preferred for the guardianship and control of that intellectual enterprise for the pursuit of which the university is established, as well as to take care of the pecuniary welfare of the university corporation. ”

“ It is a common saying that the modern taste has been unduly commercialized by the unremitting attention necessarily given to matters of price and of profit and loss in an industrial community organized on business principles; that pecuniary standards of excellence are habitually accepted and applied with undue freedom and finality. But what is scarcely appreciated at its full value is the fact that these pecuniary standards of merit and efficiency are habitually applied to men as well as to things, and with little less freedom and finality. ”

“ All this does not promise well for the future of science and scholarship in the universities, but the current effects of this method of university control are sufficiently patent to all academic men, -- and the whole situation should perhaps trouble the mind of no one who will be at pains to free himself from the (possibly transient) preconception that "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men" is, in the end, more to be desired than the acquisition and expenditure of riches by the astuter men in the community. ”

“ It is, indeed, the one great institution of modern times that works to no ulterior end and is controlled by no consideration of expediency beyond its own work. Typically, normally, in point of popular theory, the university is moved by no consideration other than "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." ”

“ There is no similar bond of consanguinity between the business occupations and the scientific spirit; except so far as regards those clerical and subaltern employments that lie wholly within the mechanical routine of business traffic; and even as regards these employments and the persons so occupied it is, at the most, doubtful whether their training does not after all partake more of that astute and invidious character of cunning that belongs to the conduct of business affairs than of the dispassionate animus of scientific inquiry. ”

“ But unremitting habituation to the competitive pursuit of ways and means has determined that "practical" interests of this complexion rule workday life in the modern community throughout, and they are therefore so intimately and ubiquitously bound up with current habits of thought, and have so strong and immediate a hold on current workday sentiment, that, hitherto, in no case have the seats of learning been able to pursue their quest of knowledge with anything like that single-mindedness which academic men are moved to profess in their moments of academic elation. ”

“ The older American universities have grown out of underlying colleges, -- undergraduate schools. Within the memory of men still living it was a nearly unbroken rule that the governing boards of these higher American schools were drawn largely from the clergy and were also guided mainly by ecclesiastical, or at least by devotional, notions of what was right and needful in matters of learning. This state of things reflected the ingrained devoutness of that portion of the American community to which the higher schools then were of much significance. ”

“ It is, indeed, a safe generalization that in point of fact the average of university presidents fall short of the average of their academic staff in scholarly or scientific attainments, even when all persons employed as instructors are counted as members of the staff. It may also be remarked by the way that when, as may happen, a scholar or scientist takes office as directive head of a university, he is commonly lost to the republic of learning; he has in effect passed from the ranks of learning to those of business enterprise. ”

“ Now it happens that American conditions during the past one hundred years have been peculiarly favourable to the patient and circumspect man who will rather wait than work; and it is also during these hundred years that the current traditions and standards of business conduct and of businesslike talent have taken shape and been incorporated in the community's common sense. America has been a land of free and abounding resources ”

“ It follows as an inevitable consequence of the current state of popular sentiment that the successful businessmen among the alumni will have the deciding voice, in so far as the matter rests with the alumni; for the successful men of affairs assert themselves with easy confidence, and they are looked up to, in any community whose standards of esteem are business standards, so that their word carries weight beyond that of any other class or order of men. ”

“ So far as regards its pecuniary affairs and their due administration, the typical modern university is in a position, without loss or detriment, to dispense with the services of any board of trustees, regents, curators, or what not. Except for the insuperable difficulty of getting a hearing for such an extraordinary proposal, it should be no difficult matter to show that these governing boards of businessmen commonly are quite useless to the university for any businesslike purpose. ”

“ Putting aside the illusions of public spirit and diligent serviceability, sedulously cultivated by the apologists of business, it will readily be seen that the great mass of reputably large fortunes in this country are of such an origin; nor will it cost anything beyond a similar lesion to the affections to confirm the view that such is the origin and line of derivation of the American propertied business community and its canons of right and honest living. ”

“ The choice may not always fall on a competent business man, but that is not due to its inclining too far to the side of scholarship. It is not an easy matter even for the most astute body of businessmen to select a candidate who shall measure up to their standard of businesslike efficiency in a field of activity that has substantially nothing in common with that business traffic in which their preconceptions of efficiency have been formed. ”

“ And, full of the same naive faith that business success "answereth all things," these businessmen into whose hands this trust falls are content to accept the responsibility and confident to exercise full discretion in these matters with which they have no special familiarity. Such is the outcome, to the present date, of the recent and current secularization of the governing boards. ”

“ But it is only on its mechanical side that the industrial organization so comes in touch with modern science and the pursuit of matter-of-fact knowledge; and it is only in so far as their habits of thought are shaped by the discipline of the mechanical industries that there is induced in the industrial population the same bent as goes to further or to appreciate the work of modern science. But it would be quite nugatory to suggest that the governing boards of the universities should be made up of, or should comprise, impecunious technologists and engineers. ”

“ In point of notorious fact, the academic head of the university is selected chiefly on grounds of his business qualifications, taking that expression in a somewhat special sense. There is at present an increasingly broad and strenuous insistence on such qualifications in the men selected as heads of the universities; and the common sense of the community at large bears out the predilections of the businesslike board of control in this respect. The new incumbents are selected primarily with a view to give the direction of academic policy and administration more of a businesslike character. ”

“ A subsidiary reason of some weight should not be overlooked in seeking the cause of this secularization of the boards, and of the peculiar colour which the secularization has given them. In any community where wealth and business enterprise are held in such high esteem, men of wealth and of affairs are not only deferred to, but their countenance is sought from one motive and another. ”

“ While it holds true, by and large, that modern Christendom has outlived the fear of God, -- that is to say of "the Pope, the Turk, and the Devil," -- it does not therefore follow that men take a less instant interest in the affairs of life, or carry on the traffic of their lives with a less alert eye to the main chance, than they once did under the habitual shadow of that barbarian fear. ”

“ American engineers and technologists are as good and efficient as their kind in other countries. but they do not as a class accumulate wealth enough to entitle them to sit on the directive board of any self-respecting university, nor can they claim even a moderate rank as "safe and sane" men of business. American explorers, prospectors and pioneers can not be said to fall short of the common measure in hardihood, insight, temerity or tenacity ”

“ In all directions, wherever enterprise and industry have gone, the opportunity was wide and large for such as had the patience or astuteness to place themselves in the way of this multifarious flow of the unearned increment, and were endowed with the retentive grasp. ”

“ It is true, men whose construction of the facts is coloured by their wish to commend the schools to the good will of the business community profess to find ground for the belief that university training, or rather the training of the undergraduate school, gives added fitness for a business career, particularly for the larger business enterprise. ”

“ It is not that the spirit of enterprise or of unrest is wanting in this community, but only that, by selective effect of the conditioning circumstances, persons affected with that spirit are excluded from the management of business, and so do not come into the class of successful businessmen from which the governing boards are drawn. American inventors are bold and resourceful, perhaps beyond the common run of their class elsewhere, but it has become a commonplace that American inventors habitually die poor ”

“ So that, while the higher learning still remains as the enduring purpose and substantial interest of the university establishment, the dominant practical interests of the day will, transiently but effectually, govern the detail lines of academic policy, the range of instruction offered, and the character of the personnel; and more particularly and immediately will the character of the governing boards and the academic administration so be determined by the current run of popular sentiment touching the community's practical needs and aims ”

“ But while such is the dispassionate working theory, the long-term drift of modern common sense as touches the work of the university, it is also a matter of course that this ideally single-minded course of action has never been realized in any concrete case. ”