Thorstein Veblen

“ It appears to be a question of how wide a deviation from scholarly singleness of purpose the long-term common sense of the community will tolerate. The cult of the idle curiosity sticks too deep in the instinctive endowment of the race, and it has in modern civilization been too thoroughly ground into the shape of a quest of matter-of-fact knowledge, to allow this pursuit to be definitively set aside or to fall into abeyance. ”

“ Like other workmen, under pressure of competition the members of the academic staff will endeavour to keep up their necessary income by cheapening their product and increasing their marketable output. And by consequence of this pressure of bread-winning and genteel expenditure, these university men are so barred out from the serious pursuit of those scientific and scholarly inquiries which alone can, academically speaking, justify their retention on the university faculty, and for the sake of which, in great part at least, they have chosen this vocation. ”

“ The growth, in the number of such observances, in their pecuniary magnitude, in their ritualistic circumstance, and in the importance attached to them, is greater in the immediate present than at any period in the past; and it is, significantly, greater in those larger new establishments that have started out with few restraints of tradition. But the move so made by these younger, freer, more enterprising seats of learning falls closely in with that spirit of competitive enterprise that animates all alike though unequally. ”

“ A university is an endowed institution of culture; whether the endowment take the form of assigned income, as in the state establishments, or of funded wealth, as with most other universities. Such fraction of the income as is assigned to the salary roll, and which therefore comes in question here, is apportioned among the staff for work which has no determinate market value. ”

“ The staff is the university, or it should so be if the university is to deserve the place assigned it in the scheme of civilization. Therefore the central and gravest question touching current academic policy is the question of its bearing on the personnel and the work which there is for them to do. In the apprehension of many critics the whole question of university control is comprised in the dealings of the executive with the staff. ”

“ No infirmity more commonly besets university men than this going to seed in routine work and extra-scholastic duties. They have entered on the academic career to find time, place, facilities and congenial environment for the pursuit of knowledge, and under pressure they presently settle down to a round of perfunctory labour by means of which to simulate the life of gentlemen. ”

“ University men are conventionally required to live on a scale of expenditure comparable with that in vogue among the well-to-do businessmen, while their university incomes compare more nearly with the lower grades of clerks and salesmen. The rate of pay varies quite materially, as is well known. For the higher grades of the staff, whose scale of pay is likely to be publicly divulged, it is, perhaps, adequate to the average demands made on university incomes by polite usage; but the large majority of university men belong on the lower levels of grade and pay ”

“ This places them under an insidious temptation to a more parsimonious manner of life than the best (prestige) interests of the seat of learning would dictate. By undue saving out of their current wages they may easily give the academic establishment an untoward air of indigence, such as would be likely to depreciate its prestige in those well-to-do circles where such prestige might come to have a commercial value, in the way of donations, and it might at the same time deter possible customers of the same desirable class from sending their young men to the university as students. ”

“ Yet the inclusion of men of scientific gifts and attainments among its faculty is indispensable to the university, if it is to avoid instant and palpable stultification.
So that the most that can practically be accomplished by a businesslike selection and surveillance of the academic personnel will be a compromise; whereby a goodly number of the faculty will be selected on grounds of businesslike fitness, more or less pronounced, while a working minority must continue to be made up of men without much business proficiency and without pronounced loyalty to commercial principles. ”

“ As a measure of expediency, particularly the expediency of publicity, it is desirable that the incumbents of the higher stations on the staff should be able to live on such a scale of conspicuous expensiveness as to make a favourable impression on those men of pecuniary refinement and expensive tastes with whom they are designed to come in contact. The university should be worthily represented in its personnel, particularly in such of its personnel as occupy a conspicuous place in the academic hierarchy ”

“ While the businesslike ideal may be a faculty wholly made up of men highly gifted with business sense, it is not practicable to assemble such a faculty which shall at the same time be plausibly competent in science and scholarship. Scientists and scholars given over to the pursuit of knowledge are conventionally indispensable to a university, and such are commonly not largely gifted with business sense, either by habit or by native gift. The two lines of interest -- business and science -- do not pull together ”

“ An impeccable respectability, authentic in the pecuniary respect, therefore, affords the only ground on which such a seminary of learning can reasonably claim the sympathetic attention of the only class whose attentions are seriously worth engaging in these premises; and respectability is inseparable from an expensive scale of living, in any community whose scheme of life is conventionally regulated by pecuniary standards. ”

“ There is no trades-union among university teachers, and no collective bargaining. There appears to be a feeling prevalent among them that their salaries are not of the nature of wages, and that there would be a species of moral obliquity implied in overtly so dealing with the matter. And in the individual bargaining by which the rate of pay is determined the directorate may easily be tempted to seek an economical way out, by offering a low rate of pay coupled with a higher academic rank. ”

“ Large gifts of this kind are creditable both to him that gives and him that takes, and it is the part of wise foresight so to arrange that those to whom it falls to represent the university, as potential beneficiary, at this juncture should do so with propitiously creditable circumstance. To meet and convince the opulent patrons of learning, as well as the parents and guardians of possible opulent students, it is, by and large, necessary to meet them on their own ground, and to bring into view such evidence of culture and intelligence as will readily be appreciated by them. ”

“ In short, it is well that those who may be called to stand spokesmen for the seat of learning in its contact with men and women of substantial means, should be accustomed to, and should be pecuniarily competent for, a scale of living somewhat above that which the ordinary remuneration for academic work will support. An independent income, therefore, is a meritorious quality in an official scholar. ”

“ With no such uniformity as to give evidence of an advised rule of precedence or a standarized schedule of correlation, but with sufficient consistency to merit, and indeed to claim, the thoughtful attention of the members of the craft, a scholar who is in a position to plead personal wealth or a wealthy connection has a perceptibly better chance of appointment on the academic staff, and on a more advantageous scale of remuneration, than men without pecuniary antecedents. ”

“ The introduction of these delegates from the well-to-do among the academic personnel has a further, secondary effect that is worth noting. Their ability freely to meet any required pecuniary strain, coupled with that degree of social ambition that commonly comes with the ability to pay, will have a salutary effect in raising the standard of living among the rest of the staff, -- salutary as seen from the point of view of the bureau of publicity. In the absence of outside resources, the livelihood of academic men is somewhat scant and precarious. ”

“ And it may not be out of place to enter the caution that the nominal rank of a given member of the staff is no secure index of his income, even where the salary "normally" attached to the given academic rank is known. Not unusually a "normal" scale of salaries is formally adopted by the governing board and spread upon their records, and such a scale will then be surreptitiously made public. But departures from the scale habitually occur, whereby the salaries actually paid come to fall short of the "normal" perhaps as frequently as they conform to it. ”

“ Indeed, it is a fairly safe test; work that has a commercial value does not belong in the university. Such services of the academic staff as have a business value are those portions of their work that serve other ends than the higher learning; as, e.g., the prestige and pecuniary gain of the institution at large, the pecuniary advantage of a given clique or faction within the university, or the profit and renown of the directive head. ”

“ Whether the power of appointment vests formally in one man or in a board, in American practice it commonly vests, in effect, in the academic executive. In practice, the power of removal, as well as that of advancement, rests in the same hands. ”

“ The popular approval of business principles and businesslike thrift is profound, disinterested, alert and insistent; but it does not, at least not yet, go the length of unreservedly placing a businesslike exploitation of office above a faithful discharge of trust. ”

“ Hence also the moral obligation incumbent on all members of the staff -- and their households -- to take hands and help in an endless chain of conspicuously expensive social amenities, where their social proficiency and their ostensible ability to pay may effectually be placed on view. An effectual furtherance to this desirable end is the active presence among the staff of an appreciable number who are ready to take the lead at a pace slightly above the competency of the common run of university men. Their presence insures that the general body will live up to their limit ”

“ For certain of the younger and more exuberant seats of learning today, as compared with what may be most nearly comparable in the academic situation of the eighties, the proportion is perhaps twice as large as the larger figure named above. ”

“ The academic instruction necessarily suffers by this diversion of forces to extra-scholastic objects; and the work of inquiry, which may have primarily engaged their interest and which is indispensable to their continued efficiency as teachers, is, in the common run of cases, crowded to one side and presently drops out of mind. ”

“ For the purposes of a reputable notoriety the everyday work of the classroom and laboratory is also not so effective as lectures to popular audiences outside; especially, perhaps, addresses before an audience of devout and well-to-do women. ”

“ The American university is not an eleemosynary institution; it does not plead indigence, except in that Pickwickian sense in which indigence may without shame be avowed in polite circles; nor does it put its trust in donations of that sparseness and modesty which the gifts of charity commonly have. ”

“ In a certain large and enterprising university, e.g., the pay of the lowest, and numerous, rank regularly employed to do full work as teachers, is proportioned to that of the highest -- much less numerous -- rank about as one to twelve at the most, perhaps even as low as one to twenty. ”

“ As men have latterly been at pains to show, the current average of children in academic households is not high; whereas the percentage of celibates is. There appears, indeed, to be little room for additional economy on this head, or in the matter of household thrift, beyond what is embodied in the family budgets already in force in academic circles. ”

“ Such should be the meaning of the fact that a continued commercialization of the academic staff appears still to be in progress, in the sense that businesslike fitness counts progressively for more in appointments and promotions. These businesslike qualifications do not comprise merely facility in the conduct of pecuniary affairs, even if such facility be conceived to include the special aptitudes and proficiency that go to the making of a successful advertiser. In academic circles as elsewhere businesslike fitness includes solvency as well as commercial genius. ”

“ Instead of being allowed in any degree to fall into abeyance by neglect, the range and magnitude of such observances have progressively grown appreciably greater since the principles of competitive business have come to rule the counsels of the universities. ”

“ None but the precarious class of schools made up of the lower grade and smaller of these colleges, such as are content to save their souls alive without exerting any effect on the current of civilization, are able to get along with faculties made up exclusively of God-fearing men. ”