Thorstein Veblen

“ The work of the College of Commerce, accordingly, is a peculiarly futile line of endeavour for any public institution, in that it serves neither the intellectual advancement nor the material welfare of the community.
The greater the number and the higher the proficiency of the community's businessmen, other things equal, the worse must the rest of the community come off in that game of skilled bargaining and shrewd management by which the businessmen get their gains. Gratuitous or partly gratuitous training for business will presumably increase the number of highly proficient businessmen. ”

“ The barbarian animus, habitual to the quest of gain, reverts, and the deliberation turns on the gainfulness of this education, which has in all sobriety been acknowledged the due end of culture and endeavour. So that, in working out the details, this end of living is made a means, and the means is made an end.
No doubt, what chiefly urges men to the pursuit of knowledge is their native bent of curiosity, -- an impulsive proclivity to master the logic of facts; just as the chief incentive to the achievement of children has, no doubt, always been the parental bent. ”

“ But there once was a time, in the high days of barbarism, when thoughtful men were ready to canvass that question with as naive a gravity as this other question, of the use of learning, is canvassed by the substantial citizens of the present day. At the period covered by that chapter in ancient history, a child was, in a way, an article of equipment for the up-keep of the family and its prestige, and more remotely for the support of the sovereign and his prestige. So that a male child would be rated as indubitably worth while if he gave promise of growing into a robust and contentious man. ”

“ But such is not the case with the training designed to give proficiency in business. No gain comes to the community at large from increasing the business proficiency of any number of its young men. There are already much too many of these businessmen, much too astute and proficient in their calling, for the common good. A higher average business efficiency simply raises activity and avidity in business to a higher average pitch of skill and fervour, with very little other material result than a redistribution of ownership ”

“ What profiteth it a man? and the answer is, just as uncritically, sought in terms of pecuniary gain. And the men to whom has been entrusted the custody of that cultural heritage of mankind that can not be bought with a price, make haste to play up to this snap judgment of the vulgar, and so keep them from calling to mind, on second thought, what it is that they, after all, value more highly than the means of competitive spending. ”

“ While the great proportion of training for the other professions draws largely on the results of modern science for ways and means, and therefore includes or presumes a degree of familiarity with the work, aims and methods of the sciences, so that these schools have so much of a bond of community with the higher learning, the school of commerce on the other hand need scarcely take cognizance of the achievements of science, nor need it presume any degree of acquaintance on the part of its students or adepts with the matter or logic of the sciences ”

“ But very much as the boorish element in the present and recent generations will let the pecuniary use of children come in as a large subsidiary ground of decision, and as they have even avowed this to be their chief concern in the matter; so, in a like spirit, men trained to the business system of competitive gain and competitive spending will not be content to find that they can afford the quest of that knowledge which their human propensity incites them to cultivate, but they must back this propensity with a shamefaced apology for education on the plea of its gainfulness. ”

“ Yet such inroads have pecuniary habits of valuation made even within the precincts of the corporation of learning, that university men, -- and even the scholarly ones among them, -- are no more than half ashamed of such a parcel of fatuity. And relatively few among university executives have not, within the past few years, taken occasion to plead the merits of academic training as a business proposition. The man of the world -- that is to say, of the business world puts the question, What is the use of this learning? ”

“ It should suffice to call to mind the large fact, as notorious as it is discreditable, that the American business community has, with unexampled freedom, had at its disposal the largest and best body of resources that has yet become available to modern industry, in men, materials and geographical situation, and that with these means they have achieved something doubtfully second-rate, as compared with the industrial achievements of other countries less fortunately placed in all material respects. ”

“ The besetting infirmity of the American business community, as witness the many and circumstantial disclosures of the "efficiency engineers," and of others who have had occasion to speak of the matter, is a notable indifference to the economical and mechanically efficient use, exploitation and conservation of equipment and resources, coupled with an equally notable want of insight into the technological needs and possibilities of the industries which they control. ”

“ Not that these substantial citizens, whose word counts for so much in commendation of practical education, need be greatly moved by selfish consideration of this increased ease in procuring skilled labour for use in their own pursuit of gain; but the increased and cheaper supply of such skilled workmen is "good for business," and, in the common sense estimation of these conservative businessmen, what is good for business is good, without reservation. ”

“ Judged by the example of the law schools, then, the college of commerce, if it is to live and thrive, may be counted on to divert a much larger body of funds from legitimate university uses, and to create more of a bias hostile to scholarly and scientific work in the academic body, than the mere numerical showing of its staff would suggest. ”

“ Concomitant with this growing insistence on vocational training in the schools, and with this restless endeavour of the academic authorities to gratify the demand, there has also come an increasing habitual inclination of the same uncritical character among academic men to value all academic work in terms of livelihood or of earning capacity. ”

“ With the main exception of Law (and, some would add, of Divinity?) the professional schools train men for work that is of some substantial use to the community at large. This is particularly true of the technological schools. But while the technological schools may be occupied with work that is of substantial use, and while they may draw more or less extensively on the sciences for their materials and even for their methods, they can not, for all that, claim standing in the university on the ground of that disinterested intellectual enterprise which is the university's peculiar domain. ”

“ So, a man eminent as a scholar and in the social sciences has said, not so long ago: "The first question I would ask is, has not this learning a large part to play in supplementing those practical powers, instincts and sympathies which can be developed only in action, only through experience?... ”

“ The schools of commerce, even more than the other vocational schools, have been managed somewhat parsimoniously, and the effectual results have habitually fallen far short of the clever promises held out in the prospectus. The professed purpose of these schools is the training of young men to a high proficiency in the larger and more responsible affairs of business, but for the present this purpose must apparently remain a speculative, and very temperately ingenuous, aspiration, rather than a practicable working programme. ”

“ Such a pecuniary rating of the parental relation, which values children as a speculative means of gain, may still be met with. But wherever modern civilization has made its way at all effectually, such a provident rating of offspring is not met with in good company. Latterday common sense does not countenance it.
Not that a question of expediency is no longer entertained, touching this matter of children, but it is no longer the patriarchal-barbarian question as to eventual gains that may be expected to accrue to the parent or the family. ”

“ It is not that the College of Commerce stands alone as the exponent of worldly wisdom in the modern universities; nor is its position in this respect singular, except in the degree of its remoteness from all properly academic interests. Other training schools, as in engineering and in the other professions, belong under the same general category of practical aims, as contrasted with the aims of the higher learning. ”

“ The creation and maintenance of such a College of Commerce, on such a scale as will make it anything more than a dubious make-believe, would manifestly appear to be beyond the powers of any existing university. ”

“ The establishment in question, it may be added, has in the course of years run a somewhat inglorious career, regard being had to its unexampled opportunities, and has in the event come to much the same footing of compromise between learning and vocational training, routine and electives, as its contemporaries that have approached their present ambiguous position from the contrary direction; except that, possibly, scholarship as such is still held in slightly lower esteem among the men of this faculty -- selected on grounds of their practical bias -- than among the generality of academic men. ”

“ As has already been remarked, these directive boards, committees, and chiefs of bureau are chosen, in great part, for their businesslike efficiency, because they are good office-men, with "executive ability"; and the animus of these academic businessmen, by so much, becomes the guiding spirit of the corporation of learning, and through their control it acts intimately and pervasively to order the scope and method of academic instruction. ”

“ It is only by a euphemistic metaphor that we are accustomed to speak of the businessmen as producers of goods. Gains due to such efficiency are differential gains only. They are a differential as against other businessmen on the one hand, and as against the rest of the community on the other hand. ”

“ They are, indeed, commonly men of moderate rating in the academic community, and are vested with a moderate rank and authority; and the emoluments of these offices are also such as attach to positions of a middling grade in academic work, instead of being comparable with the gains that come to capable men engaged in the large business outside. Yet it is from among these higher grades of expert businessmen outside that the schools of commerce must draw their staff of instructors and their administrative officers if they are to accomplish the task proposed to them. ”

“ The training that leads up to the several other professions, of course, varies greatly in respect of its draught on scientific information, as well as in the degree of its serviceability to the community; some of the professions, as, e. g., Law, approach very close to the character of business training, both in the unscientific and unscholarly nature of the required training and in their uselessness to the community; while others, as, e. g., Medicine and the various lines of engineering, differ widely from commercial training in both of these respects. ”

“ And as has already been remarked above, there is also a wide-sweeping movement afoot to bend the ordinary curriculum of the higher schools to the service of this cult of business principles, and so to make the ordinary instruction converge to the advancement of business enterprise, very much as it was once dutifully arranged that the higher instruction should be subservient to religious teaching and consonant with the demands of devout observances and creeds. ”

“ Those who have spoken for an extensive range of electives have in a very appreciable measure made use of that expedient as a means of displacing what they have regarded as obsolete or dispensable items in the traditional college curriculum. In so advocating a wider range and freedom of choice, they have spoken for the new courses of instruction as being equally competent with the old in point of discipline and cultural value ”

“ The function of the college is an all-around development, as a basis for university specializations. Eliot never grasped that fundamental fact, and so he undertook to turn Harvard college into a German university -- specializing the student at 18. He instituted a system of one-sided contact in place of a system based on no contact at all. It is devoutly to be hoped that, some day, a glimmer of true light will effect an entrance into the professional educator's head. ”

“ A decisive voice in the ordering of the affairs of the higher learning has so been given to the novices, or rather to the untutored probationers of the undergraduate schools, whose entrance on a career of scholarship is yet a matter of speculative probability at the best. ”

“ Indeed, the scale of pay which their services will command in the open market is the chief and ordinary test of their fitness for the work of instruction. The salaries paid these men of affairs, who have so been diverted to the service of the schools, is commonly some multiple of the salary assigned to men of a comparable ability and attainments in the academic work proper. ”